Fragments and Demons: A Strong Reading

My remarks on Idel’s book are written as a gesture of admiration. I have learned much from his book, which is filled with wisdom. Idel’s book not only tells a fascinating history of reception—the reception of Jewish mysticism and its sources in twentieth-century thought—but it also reveals genealogies of misinterpretations and hints at the anxieties of influence in the world of modernist Judaism. The book shows again how ambiguous and fruitful modernist perspectives on Judaism were. Modernist interpretations of Jewish tradition, far from being merely “secular,” opened critical viewpoints into the depth of tradition and transformed theological figures and motifs into new textures of poetical and philosophical writing. To this modernist world the German Jewish project of tradition also belonged. This cultural project, whose contributors include authors such as Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Else Lasker-Schüler, Walter Benjamin, Gustav Landauer, Gershom Scholem, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig, offered new and radical interpretations of Jewish tradition that were associated with political urgency—a critique of violence and utopist views. These authors often dealt with the possibility of transforming theological tropes—revelation and redemption, messianism, and eschatological concepts of justice—into new frames of poetical and political thinking. For many of them, Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, and Gnosis served as an additional source for new thinking on the human condition and the possibilities of tikun (repair). In his book, Idel returns to examine this project of tradition and its legacies from a critical vantage point. His study reveals the wisdom and the failures, the creativity and damages, the beauty and the cost that were and still are part of this cultural heritage.

My remarks on Idel’s book are echoes of learning. But the writing of such remarks has its own logic. Remarks are inverted forms of dialogue; there is something unfaithful in writing remarks. Remarks are short, selective, and fragmented. They tear the subject matter out of its context and bring it back, upturned and distorted. Remarks are fragile and weak, and yet they often offer a “strong reading.” There is a notion of freedom, albeit a demonic one, in writing remarks. Here, nevertheless, a paradox is revealed. For Idel’s book calls for such a reading. His book demands a strong reading of fragments and demons.

The Fragment (A Metho-Theological Remark)

In the introduction to his book, Idel reminds his readers of the distortions involved in the writing of Jewish history. All scholarship, he argues, is a product of a certain “rearview mirror” or perspective of the past, and thus, as every mirror does, it creates a distorted, limited, and fragmented picture of its subject. Idel wishes to present a different, more complex set of “several mirrors” (p. 1). He calls for reading Jewish history in the plural, with multiple, “different perspectives.” This will bring us, he asserts, to a more comprehensive treatment of the Jewish past. A study of Judaism that is based on different methodologies and multiple perspectives could lead us to a less limited and less distorted scholarship than the one influenced by the traditional “theologically oriented approach” (p. 2) of Christian scholars. Idel’s methodological decision is significant. He is, however, well aware that using a new set of mirrors instead of the old set does not yet solve the problem, namely, the paradox of the image. Rather, it reproduces it. The past remains in reflection, a mirror effect. All views of the past are distorted, inverted images, fragmented representations of our own time.

This paradox is reflected also in Idel’s second, significant decision to devote his writing to what he calls “the fragmenting trend” (p. 4) in Judaism, which also includes Kabbalah. Idel is interested in the pluralistic view of the divine: the appearance of God together with several “semidivine intermediaries” (ibid.) such as angels, demons, logos, and glory. It is not the idea of one, transcendent, unrepresentable God that captures Idel’s interest but rather the representation...