The Invention of Jewish Identity: Bible, Philosophy, and the Art of Translation

About the Cover

about the cover Palimpsest, which is from a Greek root palimpsēstos, literally, “scraped again,” is a surface that has been used multiple times. In the writing-over, there is a trace of what has been previously inscripted; indeed, with regard to this surface, inscription and erasure cannot be separated as it is precisely the erasure that facilitates the inscripting. The painting attempts to convey this paradox of writing/erasure, a paradox that relates more generally to the flow of time as the enduring appearance of the nonapparent , the manifestation of the occluded, as it were, in the visual field where what never came to be is scraped again as what came before. The sway of temporality—and the scholarly attempt to record this historically—must be thought from the vantage point of writing as demarcating the residue of what has been removed, the withdrawal of the withdrawal, which bespeaks the presence that is absent in the absence of its presence as the absence that is present in the presence of its absence. erw The Invention of Jewish Identity ...