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Contra the Logic of History

by Christos Yannaras

(in "H Kathimerini,” an Athens daily newspaper, on August 20, 2006)

Translated by George Gabriel & Anastasia Byrou

The methodical and outrageous crimes of the State of Israel, from its
establishment (1948) to the present day, evoke abhorrence in the informed observers. The crimes raise an admitted matter of conscience also among the Jews who maintain a consciousness of the unique role or significance of their nation in the history of humanity. The ancient conflict of the prophets with the kings and the priesthood of the Jewish kingdom continues today with an intense rift between the state of Israel and a major party of the Diaspora (by inference, the most cultured and eminent Jews).

I wish to recommend to my reader the fascinating book by George Steiner, who is a conscientious Jew, and a leader in Syncretic Literature and Critical Theory. The book’s title is “ERRATA: an examined life” (Greek edition by Scripta, unfortunately in a mediocre translation, in my opinion). The reader will find in Chapter Five, dedicated to the Jewish issue, the thoroughly formulated view that today’s State of Israel, “armed to the teeth,” is “scandalous (a word with a theological provenance)” for a tradition that begins with Abraham and comes down to Auschwitz.

Steiner sees the "scandal" not just in Israel’s politics, in the horrific
slaughter of innocent civilians, in the violent uprooting and expatriation of
hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and homeland, or in the butchery of them with phosphorus bombs inside their refugee camps for fifty-eight entire years. For these are but consequences of the fundamental scandal: the establishment of the State of Israel. Steiner says, “«Normalcy» for the Jew would be just another mode of disappearance”: the abrogation of the critical role the Jewish people can play in human history, being homeless, wandering, world citizens, on the run, but still bearing the significance of its being cast “into the mystery of existence.” A people unforgivable through the centuries, “not as killer but as "begetter" of God.”

Like any coherent empiricist, Steiner affirms the heavy metaphysical
character of the “mission” that the historical presence of a wandering Diaspora fulfills. Only the metaphysical is an acceptable meaning of the Diaspora’s preservation, for 20 centuries now, from the integration and assimilation —while they are incorporating among the miscellaneous nations. “Jews insist on existing in contradiction to the norm and logic of history, which, even barring genocide, are those of gradual melting, assimilation, cross-breeding and the effacement of their original identity.”

The verification is certified by contrast with the case of the Greeks living
abroad —there is no way for the Hellenic identity to survive after the second
or, at most, the third generation of emigration. “Modern Athens is a travesty
of an unredeemable past,” Steiner adds, probably unaware of the fact that the
renunciation of the character of the Hellenic diaspora is a symptom that
appeared after the establishment of the contemporary Greek State. What Steiner fears for Jews happened to Greeks in a literally lamentable way: the presence of Greeks and their role in human’s History ended once the Greek State was established.

Jews, according to Steiner, have bound a covenant with God. A covenant that
is always valid “be it for exceptional suffering or intimacy with the God of
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob —where suffering and intimacy are as inseparable as voices in a dialogue... Auschwitz is ephemeral as compared with the Covenant, with God’s re-insurance of His hunted people”. Steiner abstains from questioning (or expounding) the content that the tradition of Jew attributes to that Covenant, the commitments that it lays on the people of Israel. Following the same reasoning of the Israelic State, a reasoning arising from pride of being the people “chosen and branded for eternity,” Steiner outlines the rationally inexplicable lead of the Diaspora, of Jews without land in human history:

Marx, Freud, Einstein, Darwin determine today the life of people on a global level. Kafka is a name-symbol for the neurotic dead ends of modernity to be proclaimed. “Music has been provoked to radical rebirth by Schoenberg; anthropology by Levi-Strauss; philosophy by Wittgenstein; economic theory by Kenneth Arrow.” Proust seals literature, Woody Allen globalizes the Jewish humor, Nobel prizes are awarded all the time to Jews. “The mass media... the fiscal and mercantile sinews of global enterprise,” are all fields of Jewish dominance, even the invention of the supermarkets.

The Jews prevailed all over the world, in every region of human life, as long
as they were in dispersion. Today’s State of Israel is “just another mode of
disappearance” for Jews; this is Steiner’s view. And the logic of this view
”can never be completely divorced from theological-metaphysical sources.” The mission of the Jews is to hang around, wandering in the wilderness of the world and conveying their witness for the One true God, ineffable, imageless,
unthinkable, unsayable but also present in “an unbearable nearness.”

No doubt, the liveliness of George Steiner’s “theology” seems rudimentary in
comparison with that of another pioneer of the same spiritual tradition —the
surprisingly mature testimony of Isaac Bashevis Singer, whose writings are
available to the Greek reader.

Nevertheless, what presently evokes universal concern and sensitivity is the fact that there continues to exist among the leading lights of the Jewish presence in the international arena a condemnation of the mentality and criterion in the policies of the State of Israel and the Zionist movement.

The universal dominion by this minority population of Jews is indeed an event
of metaphysical character. They dictate the policy of the superpower,
international constitutions, and powerful States censor their own statements and resolutions for fear of dissatisfying Israel. The Jews managed to convert the horrific "holocaust" they suffered into a vehicle of universal, authoritative dominion. The international community trembles before the tiny State and overlooks its apparent responsibility for terrorism.

This rationally inexplicable omnipotence, however, seems a rejection rather
than an observance of the "Covenant." It is impossible for us to know the
eventual consequences of this defiant apostasy. They are not predictable within the logic of history.

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