The Political Infrastructure of Judaism: The Inscription of the Reality and Vanity of Empire

This post is a further development of my Cybernetics of Judaism, and drawing out further implications of the hypothesis of Judaism as the longest, most convoluted, revised and thickly imagined title deed possible (and therefore, interestingly, a highly idiosyncratic social contract theory which, while scandalous, is no less implausible than any of the others). I am clearly taking a very directly political approach to Judaism, disregarding the more familiar theological and moral questions usually involved in such discussion—questions I consider far downstream of Judaism’s unique relation to empire. I still maintain the position articulated in Anthropomorphics and quite a bit prior to that that we need to see Judaism (and Christianity—I’m more cautious about Islam) as a kind of anti-imperial imperialism, positing a locus of judgment and punishment above while modeled on the divine king, and a locus of judgment asserted to be as universal as that of the most ambitious worldly emperor: here is where I see the origin of what at any point I might resume calling “super-sovereignties.” All of my political thinking takes as its point of departure the Big Man revolution, the occupation of the center, which transformed humanity in ways second in significance only to the originary event itself—while being just as irreversible. I’ll round out these introductory remarks by referring to the figure of this new locus of judgment: the member of the elite subjected to or taking on an injustice so grievous and incommensurable with any existing remedy as to place the entire system on trial, albeit with a delayed, indirect and intangible judgment that takes shape in the peoples formed through the revelation constituted by such an event. This figure has deep roots in Jewish scripture, starting with Moses (if not earlier with Joseph and maybe Abraham) and oscillates constantly between more and less successful versions (there remains a “precarity” even to the successful figures) extending to elites like Mordechai in the Book of Esther—I think Jesus could be shown to fit the model, if less obviously, which is then pervasive in Western culture (and probably elsewhere as well). All political discourse and problems in the post-imperial world (i.e., a world predicated on a kind of automated rotation at the center) can be reduced to this constellation, and this is part of the reason things very often come back to the Jews: “antisemitism” is really about giving a name to hidden sources of power, which in the West always involves some kind of “prosecution” of “tyrants.”

My title here encapsulates what seems to me specific about the Jews within this constellation. Acknowledging the reality of empire probably doesn’t seem very exceptional—who doesn’t? Anyone, I would say, who grounds political legitimacy on the governed rather than conquest and control over a territory—if you think individual rights, collective rights or the consent of the “people,” however imagined, is the basis for owing obedience to the government, then you see empire as of secondary reality, which ultimately means seeing it as not real. But does Judaism “believe” what I have just presented as the basis of imperatives to be obeyed? No doubt many political theories have been and can be extracted from the texts and traditions comprising Judaism, but when I say “acknowledgment” I don’t mean “belief”—rather, I mean something like “takes as an immovable, irresistible predicate of any mode of community.” Judaism is “founded” on the Jews as a minority community within, dependent upon, and covenanted with, some imperial power, and this is reflected thoroughly in its ritual and legal order, most powerfully in the “title deed” (with specific conditions to be met) to the Land of Israel, even if that deed inscribes memories and anticipations of Jewish or Hebrew independence in those orders. Nietzsche was right to counterpose Judea to Rome—the creators of Judaism, first of all the rabbis and other “archivists” who composed the Mishnah did precisely that, viewing Rome as model, rival, and unalterable horizon of political thought and activity.

To speak of the “vanity” along with the “reality” of empire adds a degree of complexity and distinctiveness to Judaism, especially with regard to Christianity, which both unconditionally embraced empire and converted itself into a kind of empire. Empire is inevitable—and it will never be “ours”—but each particular empire is doomed to fall and be replaced by an equally doomed empire, making it, ultimately not as serious as… what, exactly? Part of the acknowledgment of the vanity of empire is the recognition that one’s own place in that empire is fundamentally precarious—one might get tossed at any time from one empire to another. What lasts is what transcends and ultimately determines the fate of any empire, and that is what “God” is in Judaism (such is my hypothesis). God is he who will be with us as empires fall and we are removed from one and brought into another. Jews are, paradoxically, an eternal sign of precarity. Jewish political memories are of times when Judea or Israel was squeezed between competing empires, tossed and turned between them, making what invariably (and maybe unavoidably) seem to have been unfortunate alliances with one or the other. And projections of the Messianic future have God, not Jews, as king of the world, while Jews are just restored to their national existence within its old boundaries. This articulation of the reality and vanity of empire produces an oscillation between obsequiousness and irreverence toward the governing powers—one can’t avoid or evade them but should never take them too seriously either. This oscillation takes the form of a divide within the Jewish community between the upper levels which have always worked with the rulers in “keeping accounts” in one manner or another, and the lower levels which see the operations of power in its less “presentable” forms.

The inscription of this articulation of the reality and vanity of empire is most important—again, I am not speaking of “beliefs” but of a ritual and legal order, and a very elaborated one at that. Here is a good place to emphasize the hypothetical nature of my claim here—I have enough knowledge of Jewish history, texts, rituals, and law to say something about them but also to know how much I don’t know. My hypothesis would be a heuristic for further research and study—it might help us to notice things and find patterns that would have otherwise gone undetected—maybe it would assist in designing search terms for corpora of Jewish texts, most of which I imagine must be online at this point. Jewish law and ritual are obviously designed to maintain Jews as a separate community under conditions where all kinds of necessary interactions with surrounding communities mitigate against doing so. I’m suggesting, then, that we could look at a particular ritual, or holiday, or celebration, or legal dispute, and see it as marked by the tension between the reality and vanity of empire and the specific Jewish task of maintaining or serving as a “witness” to that tension. I continue to work with the assumption drawn from Bernard Lamborelle, mentioned most recently in Cybernetics of Judaism, that we can locate the origins of Jewish covenant making, and therefore Judaism, in a covenant between “Abram” and an “earthly lord,” binding Judaism to service of empire; but, at the same time, the story of Abraham’s defense of Sodom and Gomorrah, and his argument that the cities should be saved if even ten good men could be found within it (“for their sake”) marks empire by the “remnants” that it must always produce, and that a fellow remnant is equipped to recognize. The emperor is to be just, and we can and must demand this of him, even if futilely, perhaps ridiculously, but something in even the most pathetic witnessing to injustice outlasts the gains of the injustice itself—a record is being kept, in the books and even the bodies of scribal people—even, I hypothesize, those of its mostly non-practicing members. This mixture of complicity and “advocacy” can be infuriating to others but, I would emphasize, far more so when power is unaccountable than when we know where the imperatives are coming from and that they are mostly fulfilled. The specific dynamics of the war against the Jews are set by the opening Christian insistence that Jews should not exist and that therefore extraordinary explanations are required for the fact that they continue to do so (with the logical conclusion being that “only Jews do things,” as the new internet meme has it) but how, when, and with what intensity this dynamic is “triggered” depends upon the extent to which hidden powers seem to determine (or can be represented by those possessing sufficient media power as determining) events.

Judaism, then, is located in the imperative gap (between the issuance and enactment of the imperative), which it transformed into the possibility of the highest judge being subject to judgment by God, which eventually became “History.” This location suggests a power behind the scenes and as a result it becomes easy to identify Jews themselves with that power behind the scenes. Jews, due to their proximity to governance are always “disproportionately” represented in positions of power or subject to erasure, expulsion or extermination—there’s no “normal” in between. In this oscillation, which is really a wild swing, we can see the articulation of the reality with the vanity of empire. It is also in this imperative gap that modern liberalism or, I think more precisely, the entire desacralized world created by the British in the late 17^th century is situated—this is the site of the super-sovereignties requiring that sovereign action be supervised, regulated and certified by authority derived from the disciplines. Power is increasingly centralized while rotation at the top is normatively rotated—this is a material embedment of the reality and vanity of empire—the “most powerful man in the world” will be a somewhat ridiculous retiree in a few years’ time. In the wake of emancipation Jews were well equipped to enter the disciplines and operate them along these lines, and Anglo “soft power,” pre-existing and contributing to the French Revolution, came to take on a “Jewish” character” (thereby also producing a softer target).

Judaism is not so much a claim or theory regarding the reality and vanity of empire as it deeply mimics that dynamic. Judaism is much more practice than theory—there has always been something like theory supplementing the practice but the theory comes to stand in for the practice when or among those for whom practice is declining. There is a “theoretical” distinction in Judaism between strictly ritual and moral/ethical commandments—for example, you can violate the Shabbat to save a life—but the ritual rules, as subject to legal disputation as moral and ethical ones, serve to set boundaries around the community that in turn make it possible to discuss moral and ethical issues within what can be taken as a civic or political space. Interestingly, there is very little if any enforcement built into the body of Jewish law—there’s no real punishment for, say, turning on the light on Saturday—which means that ostracism, or “herem” (which certainly has its harder and softer varieties), is presumed to be enough, but that in turn presupposes external governance to which the use of force can be outsourced. Autonomy, vulnerability and dependence are built into the Jewish community in its relations with its outside. I’m assuming or hypothesizing that Jewish ritual can be interpreted along these lines at a more granular level. It may be possible to test this hypothesis in Israel, where much of the religious community still practices its relation to the Israeli state along lines similar to those it would practice them toward any other state while demographic changes require Israel to move more vigorously towards integrating secluded orthodox communities into the military and economy. We may see how rigorous versions of Jewish law can operate through recognition of a specifically Jewish state, i.e., a Jewish mini-empire that is simultaneously a vassal state amongst global empires.

Making Jewish law in its entirety “interoperable” with the system of centralized currency issuance (the outside spread) and central intelligence (the monitoring and manipulation of the outside options) would require deploying, so to speak, resources towards the reality of empire while holding insistence on its vanity in abeyance (while allowing the latter sensibility to attune us to what might be inside options). In other words, Jews will have to own the power they obviously have, if for no other reason than to counter accusations of abusing power they don’t have. If Jewish citizenship in the US becomes qualified in more or less explicit ways (I would anticipate at least some reversion to pre-WW 2 patterns of social segregation and tension) then the Jewish community will depend upon Jewish law being made more comprehensive and inclusive, even if not necessarily less rigorous. Bringing into focus the supersovereignties and “thematizing” them within Jewish law, probably starting with the relation Jews have to the juridical order itself, would provide a real test for new ways of articulating difference and participation, and thereby perhaps modeling broader uses of kinship in intermediary ways. If a significant shift of Jewish politics, especially at its upper levels, towards the right, is in fact in the works, that would encourage a rethinking of Jewish community along lines that would enable Jewish thinking to filter out all the leftism that has entered into all but the most ultra-orthodox forms of Judaism over the past couple of centuries, and what remains might look very different and open to active intervention.

“Inscribing the reality and vanity of empire” brings out the technological foundation of Judaism—its tabernacling, we could say.  Judaism can be further built to detect and respond to any movement towards enacting fantasies of the non-reality of empire, by now entrenched within the “occupation” politics from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matters and MeToo and now Free Palestine—all aim at cutting through juridical and pedagogical circuits so as to enact a new distribution. The assumption is that empire is just a violent crust imposed on naturally benevolent “peer-to-peer” relations. Judaism is well-equipped to permanently disable all such movements by enhancing the coherence of juridical categories like fraud, incitement and slander that have frayed (and more in politicized cases) over the part 60 years or so—those legal categories are as enduring and universal, at least within an imperial frame, as anything humanists have ever wanted to inscribe as the human. This is to a great extent a data collecting and analysis enterprise and a good way of keeping yourself honest as well. A newly coherent Judaism might be able to restore the herem (~excommunication) for Jews siding with the enemy (and maybe instituting a form of atonement—a little addition to the Yom Kippur litany?—for Jewish contributions to such movements). Remembering the vanity of empire focuses attention on how dangerous these fantasies are, while also opening up the possibility of new programs for sustaining and creating forms of centered ordinality (the originary infrastructure of any order, including empire) that those given to complacency about empire could never imagine. Start-ups are proto-empires, and mediators of governance, as Jews have always been, and are needed to propose and try out start-up forms of governance—Israel itself should be completely transformed into a start-up in governance, as part of inscribing the Jewish anomaly in a new approach to Jewish law that recognizes the partial abolition of the diaspora. Bringing the complexity of inquiries into and debates over Jewish law (which reach systematically into questions of technology and commerce in very distinctive ways that ask what particular arrangements do for a very specific purpose) into the network of surveillance and buffering of “pre-violent” movements would produce conversations worthy of those instructions for building the tabernacle in the desert.

The ritual labor that went into the conversion of a land title granted by a local emperor into a covenant with the God of history who transcends all empires undergirds the Jewish claim to the land of Israel. This is admittedly bizarre, because it’s absolutely unique—no other social group would attempt to press such a claim, and it is not interoperable with any other theory of legitimate governance. Obviously there’s no reason for Arabs or Muslims to accept it. The Jewish claim to Israel then gets collapsed into a more familiar right of self-defense, as all actions taken by Jewish agencies and then governance have at least a kernel of self-defense—even in the early 20^th century when there were maybe 90,000 Jews in what was to become Mandate Palestine those Jews had a right to defend themselves against violence which ramped up in 1929, if not sooner. And part of that self-defense involved bringing in more Jews, which doubled as self-protection against the Nazi-occupied continent. And then the acquisition of assets to maintain self-defense of a growing Jewish community ultimately lands Israel in the same position of a qualified autonomy via collaboration with imperial power. This is easily branded as hypocritical, and fits into longstanding accusations against the Jews for being “materialistic.” Yes, the Arab and Muslim states have always wanted to destroy Israel but also, yes the battle has always been “unfair” because Israel brought modernity to region through what must have been experienced as shock tactics deployed by more modern community against communities utterly unprepared for the challenge. The Jewish people have historically played a role analogous to Jesus—that of a sacrifice to what transcends empire (that which testifies to empire’s transience in a scene that reroutes hierarchy to degrees of renunciation of empire in the name of God)—but without offering themselves up as a willing sacrifice. So, the Jews want “credit” for being scapegoated while also possessing and deploying power to mitigate and if possible even abolish that scapegoating. Again, very hypocritical and annoying, and incommensurable with the neatness of political theories based on “consent.” Jewish power is real but it’s also interesting that no one ever really tries to measure it. Any attempt to do so would find wild fluctuations and lots of “dark matter.” All those images showing (often enough erroneously and maliciously) all the Jews in positions of power in government, the media, finance and elsewhere prove, if anything, the opposite of what they claim—why would the dictators of the world staff middle management in this way? There’s no formulation of the accusation of Jewish people that doesn’t come down to the need to eliminate them because of all the things they do to prevent us from eliminating them. AIPAC seems to be an especially effective lobby (but compared to which other lobbies?) with a laser focus and therefore especially annoying, but its effectiveness presupposes a limited range of options within a broad consensus among military and intelligence institutions—AIPAC has a “stranglehold” on pushing US policy toward one among those few options, and even there they often fail (self-promotional claims about their vast power made for fund-raising purposes again prove the opposite of anti-Israel assertions). And, yet, try and take AIPAC out of the equation without creating an entirely new free speech regime, one that would essentially ban lobbying as such (i.e., “petitioning” the government)—you won’t be able to do it, which means that complaints about AIPAC are themselves performative and serve fund-raising and other purposes (if an American citizen is not allowed to say that the US should see Israel as an asset there would be many other things we wouldn’t be allowed to say—unless you want a Jewish exception, because, after all, the Jews consider themselves an exception—but, then, aren’t you deforming the system in the way you say Jews do?). All this is the reality and vanity of empire, which is to say, the powerful urge to speak of anything other than governance, inscribed at every point in the “Jewish,” internally and in Jewish-Gentile relations. You’re owed a pound of flesh because the ledgers don’t quite balance but try and collect it without killing the body. If it weren’t for Netanyahu, if it weren’t for AIPAC, if it weren’t for Israel, if it weren’t for Jews, things would add up—we would have commensuration among the people and between the people and their representatives. Follow the language of those who merely “criticize Israeli government policies” and see whether I’m describing its logic accurately. Jews should not exist and yet all existence is held together by the insistence that they shouldn’t exist. This logic matches the gap between power and legitimacy, and the Jews serve as a meter measuring this gap.