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90 kierkegaard and the self before god The Allegory of Yisra’el the struggle of exile: the unhappy consciousness “The present age is the age of despair,” Kierkegaard pronounces in his Journals, “the age of the wandering Jew (many reforming Jews)” (JP 1:737 / Pap. I A 181). According to Kierkegaard, it is the melancholic trope of Israel in exile, the Wandering Jew, that haunts the modern Western consciousness as a symbolic expression of its God-forsakenness, nihilism, and estrangement . The evocation of this sentiment resounds from the Adamic banishment from Eden, the homelessness of Cain, captivities in Egypt and later Babylon to the medieval legends and Romantic literary myths of the Jew who spurned Christ and was cursed to wander the earth as a fugitive until Judgment Day. “Even in pre-exilic times,” as Susan Handelman explains, “the Jew is a wanderer and a nomad who finds his truth in wilderness and desert, who encounters the Other as absence and alienation, who struggles with God through language, dialogue, dispute, and questioning—from Abraham to Job.”1 But this is a narrative portrait of perennial exile that has elicited stern resistance. Proliferation of this particular depiction of the Hebraic consciousness obscures the fact that the image in question does not make its entrance until the occurrence of a typically modern change in scenery. Rather than being an inherent primal archetype, the counterargument claims that the figure of the Wandering Jew is an irreducibly historical , indeed often disastrously applied, emblem of a categorically modern estrangement: five Everyone shall be remembered, but each was great in proportion to the greatness of that with which he strove. For he who strove with the world became great by overcoming the world, and he who strove with himself became great by overcoming himself, but he who strove with God became greater than all. So there was strife in the world, man against man, one against a thousand, but he who strove with God was greater than all. —Fear and Trembling the allegory of yisra’el 91 Is it so difficult for the modern consciousness to admit that the idea of the divided self, of a spirit alienated from itself, is itself a recent artefact—that the image of the Jew as congenitally alien is not itself congenital but rather a historical contrivance, nourished conscientiously in the romantic notion of alienation by volunteer poets and philosophers of the nineteenth century? . . . As Zionism was moved by the nationalism of that century, so the conception of the Jew as wanderer and alien was also nourished externally, by the same currents, at the same time; it is itself, in some good measure, alien.2 As such, the allegedly eternal narrative of Jewish wandering—from ancient Egypt to modern Europe—is motivated less by an innate Semitic anxiety than by extraneous historical and cultural exigencies. This is not to deny that there is a spirit of exile permeating Jewish thought—a spirit that is evident in the notion of the exile of the Shekinah which bears witness to the historical contingencies of diaspora.3 Thus, Kierkegaard’s own appropriation of the figure of the exilic Jew reveals him as a connoisseur of his intellectual milieu. For Kierkegaard, the folkloric image of the Wandering Jew becomes a melancholy type for the exile of spirit within the spiritlessness of modernity. Essentially , as George Pattison summarizes, “the Wandering Jew symbolizes for Kierkegaard the despair of the present age, a despair rooted in its separation from its substantial ground of religion and manifesting itself in both political reform movements and philosophical nihilism.”4 One might say, therefore , that the Wandering Jew of the nineteenth century is the illegitimate son of a tragic modern humanism. His wandering is, recalling Ralph Harper’s phrase from 1967’s The Seventh Solitude, a “metaphysical homelessness.” His despair is, in Kierkegaardian terms, an eternal sickness unto death without hope of alleviation. “The Wandering Jew,” Kierkegaard muses, “seems to have his prototype in the fig tree Christ commanded to wither away [Matthew 21:19]” (Pap. I C 65). According to this image, he is apparently forsaken by God because he has forsaken God. He is a melancholy descendent of Cain in the modern semblance of l’étranger: the wandering, lonely son of a deus otiosus who is spurned alike by men and gods. In Kierkegaard’s time, it is primarily the figure of Ahasuerus, a Romantic incarnation of the Wandering Jew, who leaves his mark on modern Western culture. Among...

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