Thursday, December 08, 2005
(10:00 PM) | Anonymous:
Bonhoeffer and "The Jew" (i)
"The Jew keeps open the question of Christ" (Bonhoeffer, Ethics, from the section entitled "Inheritance and Decay"). This statement of Bonhoeffer's is a philo-semitic statement. It declares the love of the Christian for the Jew, a possessive and auto-erotic love. The Christian loves and wants to keep the Jew, because Christ himself, the beloved Jewish Christ, remains in the keeping of the Jews. Therefore, "[a]n expusion of the Jews from the west must necessarily bring with it the expulsion of Christ. For Jesus Christ was a Jew". What is not in question is that Jesus was a Jew. What remains in question, what is kept openly in question by the Jew, is whether the Jew Jesus was the Christ.These figures, "The Jew" and "The Jews", already present a multitude of problems. "The Jew" is positioned in this passage as a stand-in, a sign: "[h]e is the sign of the free mercy-choice and of the repudiating wrath of God. 'Behold therefore the goodness and the severity of God' (Rom. 11.22)". Bonhoeffer assigns to "The Jew" without hesitation the signification given to that figure by the letter of Paul addressed to the Christians in Rome. "The Jews", in turn, are not simply the plural of "The Jew", but are "the Israelite-Jewish people", and as such have a specific role in Western and Christian history:
The historical Jesus Christ is the continuity of our history. But Jesus Christ was the promised Messiah of the Israelite-Jewish people, and for that reason the line of our forefathers goes back beyond the appearance of Jesus Christ to the people of Israel. Western history is, by God's will, indissolubly linked with the people of Israel, not only genetically but also in a genuine uninterrupted encounter. The Jew keeps open the question of Christ.
The claimed lineage passes through a dual link. Genetically, or genealogically, "The Jews" are among "the ancients" for the West (Bonhoeffer moves on, very shortly after this passage, to that other Western antiquity, the "Greco-Roman"). But it is in the "infinite and unresolvable tension" that Christ "introduces" into history, irreducible to any genetic link, that the "genuine uninterrupted encounter" between "The Jews" and "the West" occurs.
All of this, written under conditions of imprisonment and terror at a time when the "expulsion of the Jews from the West" was not only under discussion but actually in progress, can be read very plainly as a rebuke to the Nazi genocide against Jews and to Christian complicity in that genocide. It reminds Christians that their identity as Christians is conditional on the Jewish identity of Christ, that the Nazis' "Jewish question" and "the question of Christ" are intimately connected; it pleads against the foreclosure of either question. But it does so entirely within the terms of a Christian conception of "the Jew" that is demonstrably informed by a Pauline (and then perhaps Lutheran) anti-Judaism. "The Jew" that is the object of this philo-semitic Christian love is a simulacrum, a veil for the unredeemed hate-object of that anti-Judaism.
My purpose here is not to accuse Bonhoeffer of harbouring a veiled anti-semitism, understood as a hidden moral failing. Both the courage of his stance and the justice - on their own terms - of his words are irreproachable. What I would like to indicate is simply the failure of Bonhoeffer's Christian philo-semitism to entertain precisely the "genuine uninterrupted encounter" to which it appeals. What does not speak to Bonhoeffer, what Christian auto-affection seemingly cannot hear, is Judaism itself.
In my next post, I hope to examine Bonhoeffer's response to the Nuremberg laws regarding racial purity, and show how this combination of philo-semitism and anti-Judaism worked out in practice, in relation to the establishment through Nazi law-making of a state of exception for non-Aryans, a legal exclusion from the life of the German nation.
(All quotations in this post are from the same two pages, 89-90, of the Collins/Fontana edition of Bonhoeffer's Ethics, London: 1964)
