All Abstracts

Galit Hasan-Rokem

Carl Schmitt and Ahasver. The Idea of the State and the Wandering Jew, 4-25

In this article the cultural effects and the specific reverberations in Carl Schmitt’s work of two literary figures emerging in vastly different cultural contexts in the 16th century, Leviathan and the Wandering Jew, are analyzed using a pair of discursive concepts – political theology and Midrash. My aim is to show that whereas Schmitt was informed by the kind of stereotypical thinking embodied in the legendary and very popular figure of Ahasver, the figure itself was suppressed and replaced by a seemingly rational political discourse addressing Leviathan.

Paul Mendes-Flohr

The Kingdom of God. Martin Buber's Critique of Messianic Politics, 26-38

Through a textual and contextual analysis of Martin Buber’s scholarly disquisition, Königtum Gottes (1932), the article focuses on his critique of political Messianism. This critique is addressed to his friends who participated in the Bavarian Revolution of 1918/19, the political theology of Friedrich Gogarten and Carl Schmitt, and given trends in Zionism. This article discusses the affinities of Buber’s critique of political Messianism with that of Max Weber who like Buber called for a political and ethical re-valorization of the everyday. This call is contrasted with Walter Benjamin’s political Messianism, whose dialectic in effect endorses a similar ethos.

Yotam Hotam

Nationalized Judaism and Diasporic Existence. Jakob Klatzkin and Hans Jonas, 67-78

This article characterizes the modern Jewish debate around Zionism as a profound political theological controversy by juxtaposing the works of two significant twentieth-century Jewish scholars, Jakob Klatzkin (1882–1948) and Hans Jonas (1903–1993). While Klatzkin campaigned for Zionism as Gnosticism, Jonas critically challenged this link in his writings from the 1950s and 1960s. In presenting a theological reading of modern Jewish secular thought, the article transcends the political controversy between Zionists and Post-Zionists of the recent decades and proposes a new horizon in the study of Jewish modern-secular thought.

Martin D. Yaffe

“Exile” as a Theologico-Political Principle in Leo Strauss’s Jewish Thought, 79-94

I consider the recent attempt by Professor Eugene Sheppard to follow the development of Strauss’s thought within the parameters of Strauss’s biographical circumstance as a German-Jewish “exile.” I sketch Sheppard’s approach to Strauss in a preliminary way so as to bring out something of its historicist character. After that, I test the soundness of Sheppard’s approach by looking at a statement of Strauss’s on “exile” which is found in his most autobiographical writing. My purpose in doing so is to discover whether Strauss’s statement when understood in its own terms warrants being placed within Sheppard’s historicist parameters.

Reviews

95-107

Pat O’Malley (Hg.): Governing Risks. Aldershot: Ashgate2005. (Robert Feustel/Mathias Rodatz)

Sally Engle Merry: Human Rights and Gender Violence.Translating International Law into Local Justice. Chicago:The University of Chicago Press 2006. (Ulrike Froböse/Connie Stitz)

Jonathan Simon: Governing Through Crime: How the War onCrime Transformed American Democracy and Created a Cultureof Fear. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007. (Rebecca Pates)

Jennifer Wood/Clifford Shearing: Imagining Security. Collompton,UK: Willan Publishing 2007. (Anne Dölemeyer)

Sylvie Anne Goldberg

Common Law and Jewish Law. The Diasporic Principle of dina de-malkhuta dina, 39-53

Medieval rabbis conceived of a legal framework for the relations between Jews and non-Jews according to a principle: dina de-malkhuta dina, ‘the Law of the Kingdom is Law.’ Thus, the notion of Diaspora, which in the last century came to be used to refer to the fate of migrants in general, bears a dual legal connotation in Judaism. This article tries, by tracing back the origin of the word “galut” or “golah” (translated as “exile”) in Antiquity, to demonstrate how “Diaspora” is related to the core of Jewish definitions of the “present” and questions the purely theological and particularly Jewish evolution of this concept.

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Régine Azria

Exile and Diaspora. Jewish Concepts of Dispersion, 54-66

The Jewish experience of Diaspora can be seen as a condensation of the diasporic condition. The present paper intends to illustrate this paradigmatic (albeit atypical) imprint of Diaspora, in processes subject to dynamic change, using two examples: (1) the place of the exile/return topic in religious and modern representations, moving from a center/periphery paradigm to one of circulation and mobility; (2) the confrontation between the Jewish traditional lexicon of Diaspora, which retained a traditional diasporic geography (Ashkenaz, Sefarad, Mizrah), dissociated from its territorial substratum, and real geography.