On Getting It Right

The importance of Moshe Idel’s Old Worlds, New Mirrors can hardly be overstated. It is both a seminal and daunting intervention in the field of modern European Jewish thought that takes to task its towering figures: mainly German Jewish modernists from Kafka, Scholem, Benjamin, and Buber to Steiner, Celan, and Derrida, with occasional references to Freud, Arendt, Adorno, Jonas, Leo Strauss, and others. The book also questions the cult that developed around these figures, suggesting that it led to a disproportionate attention to a “quantitatively tiny elite culture” (p. 70) at the expense of the actual wealth of Jewish thought and writing. Idel’s critique of the ways these celebrated European Jewish figures and their followers approach Judaism and integrate elements of the kabbalistic tradition in their thinking is pertinent and profound. It is also unsettling, disconcerting, and even shocking at times.

Idel’s intervention in this field is more important than he himself concedes in his misleadingly mild introduction where he defines the objective of his book in a dry scholarly manner as “adding the Eastern European perspective to the Central European one,” an approach, he states, that “would yield a more complex and informative description” of the field (p. 12). Idel believes that this added perspective can correct “misunderstandings of the mystical texts under scrutiny” (p. 12). If these two assertions—complementing and correcting existing scholarship—covered the scope of the book, it would be little more than another scholarly revision. The book’s importance, however, lies neither with being a more complete description nor a rectification of modern understandings of Jewish mystical texts. Of course this is a key part of the book: an eminent expert sets things right and chides those who have torn kabbalistic elements out of their rich and variegated context at the price of the distortion and reduction of their original meaning. The title points to this aspect of the book: the Old are worlds, alive and manifold; the New are mirrors—a treacherous medium of representation in which the Old is reflected as a mere illusion. But the book’s scope reaches far beyond this delimitation and also beyond another assertion at the end of its introduction where Idel claims that his effort “should not be seen as a critique of the Central European [translate: essentially German Jewish] approaches to Judaism but as an interrogation of the two perspectives, the Eastern and Western one, a questioning that may serve as a corrective to each” (p. 12). It is, however, noteworthy that the shortcomings of the Eastern perspective—described by Idel essentially as a “lack of critical approach” (p. 12)—are barely addressed. Instead, the book offers an extended critique of the Western perspective from an Eastern one that is implicitly considered more authentic. Idel’s critique of the group of mainly German Jewish intellectuals mentioned above and of their impact on a widely accepted vision of Judaism in contemporary thought is his real work in this collection of essays. As a challenge to current approaches and practices in the field of German Jewish studies, it is monumental, both in what I consider to be the book’s most important and its most problematic claims.

In what follows I will sketch two examples for each of these assessments, the remarkable and the dubious, taken mostly from the chapter on George Steiner. In the first two cases, these examples will illustrate Idel’s powerful and convincing critique of the modern understanding of the “Jewish spirit” and of a liberal and cosmopolitan metaphorization of Jewish existence. In the last two examples, I question critically Idel’s perspective on the relation between the Holocaust and Israel as well as his understanding of the German Jewish legacy as a whole.

What Idel in his introduction somewhat harmlessly calls “adding the Eastern European perspective” (p. 12) to the Central European one—something he considers part of a scholarly, pluralistic, and nonessentializing approach—is actually a radical critique of what Derrida calls...