Noah (Not) Grotesque (Enough)

Posted on April 30, 2014 by zjb

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I always wondered why Noah planted that vineyard, got so drunk that he incapacitated himself. I always suspected that it had to do with trauma. It’s a rotten human condition it is. The world is cursed, first by “man,” and then by God. The man is alone on a boat with his family surrounded by wild animals, adrift and at sea. In the Bible, Noah is called righteous “in his generation.” This means one of two things. Noah had to have been super-righteous to be righteous in such a corrupt and violent age. Or, no perfect saint, he was only righteous enough relative to that violent and corrupt generation. Darren Aronofsky and Ari Handel seem to go with the latter interpretation in their Hollywood blockbuster, but go nowhere near as far as they could have.

No, Noah was not a stable person, not in the Bible and not in the movie. In the movie, Noah eeks out a life on hard scrabble earth. A peacible man, he descends into cruel, rampaging madness, made mad by a God who has asked too much, convinced that it’s his command to see to and to finish the annihilation of human life on earth.

To be sure Noah is clunky in parts. But this is how you make a biblical epic. It’s creation-centered, animal and violent. In the movie, there’s a mass grave, the tearing of limbs from living creatures, and human killing. The only kind of God that can stand up to that kind of scene is a rough God, indeed. As is well known, Aronofsky and Handel made use of rabbinic midrash as well works like the books of Enoch and Jubilees. Other scenes will remind you of the “Sacrifice” of Isaac and the primal herd imagined by Freud in Totem and Taboo. Shot in Iceland with an all Caucasian cast, the movie takes its story out of its ancient Near Eastern setting and gives it a Nordic look that makes the story feel even more pagan.

On firm scriptural and traditional foundation, Aronofsky and Handel could have made the story much worse, more grotesque. The movie gets it backwards. In the Bible, Noah first enjoys rainbow covenant of peace with God, the promise not to destroy the human condition ever again, and then he plants the vineyard, gets rip-roaring drunk past the point of incapacitation. In the movie, the family remains entirely too sympathetic. In contrast, in the rabbinic commentary Genesis Rabbah Ham castrates his father Noah. Against political theology, there’s no sense in the movie that in the Bible, the whole human story does not, in fact, miraculously regenerate, that the wheels of the whole human story are going fly off the bus again at the Tower of Babel, that there are some things that even divine violence and world apocalypse can do nothing to resolve, decide, or make right.

Now that’s “biblical,” no matter what the rightwing conservative Christians say. Aronofsky and Handel went as far as they could. I would have made the film ten times more awful.

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Oranament of Empire, Pillar of the Church — Empress Flaccilla

Posted on April 29, 2014 by zjb

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Waiting around in the Byzantine gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this head caught my attention. My first thought was that she had to have been someone. I’ve since gone to look at other pictures online of this bust, but I like mine better. In these two shots, the facial features are softened in relation to the background. Perhaps it because the face seems young, even girlish. I didn’t really notice at the time standing there at the Met how tough she looks. Not someone with whom to trifle, maybe it’s the broken nose, pinched mouth, and the glare to the eye.

With nothing particular to call attention to her, she is easy enough to pass by and overlook in the museum. But certainly she was a woman of great stature. A quick google search underscores her power and piety. The first is from the wall text at the Met. The second is from Wikipedia. She was, undoubtedly, an important person in the propagation of the Christian faith, 4th century.

“The hairstyle and facial features are those of Aelia Flaccilla, wife of Theodosius I. In about 382 she was the first woman officially to be crowned empress since Constantine the Great’s mother and his wife far earlier in the century. Flaccilla was described at her death in 387 as ‘this ornament of the Empire, this zeal for the faith, this pillar of the church.’ During her husband’s reign Christianity was established as the official religion of the state.”  

“She was a fervent supporter of the Nicene Creed. Sozomen reports her preventing a conference between Theodosius and Eunomius of Cyzicus who served as figurehead of Anomoeanism, the most radical sect of Arians, who believed that Jesus was in no way similar to the Father. Ambrose and Gregory of Nyssa praise her Christian virtue and comment on her role as “a leader of justice” and “pillar of the Church”

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To Mend the World Queer Messianic (José Esteban Muñoz) (& Emil Fackenheim)

Posted on April 29, 2014 by zjb

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Just finished reading José Esteban Muñoz’s Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.  His philosophical lodestars are Bloch and Marcuse, Heidegger and Agamben, but I came to see here the kind of thinking associated with the Jewish post-Holocaust thinker Emil Fackenheim. To say the least, I found this surprising, but the more I think of the connection the more sense it makes.

Let’s start from the beginning, as it were. Writing against Lee Edelman, Muñoz has drawn a queer subject-position that in its orientation towards the future stands out as messianic. Given the influence of Bloch, in particular, this makes persfect sense. As an open horizon, the future of queer eros in its radical rejection of the present constitutes a transformative refusal of straight society and prescripted  norms. It lets out into new ways to see and to act, collective forms of becoming and pure potentiality. Writing against Lee Edelman, the present is presented by Muñoz as quagmire, as hollow, against which the future figures as hope.

None of this struck me as necessarily exceptional or necessarily persuasive, at least not on its own. The more significant glance is the one that relates the future back to the past, and the past to the future. This was the key suggested to me by a question posed to me by a graduate student, who wanted to know the basis of Muñoz’s hope, i.e. the basis upon which Muñoz allowed himself to hope.

As I understand it, the answer lies in the past, namely the heyday of queer life in Lower Manhattan represented by people like Warhol, and LeRoi Jones (Amira Barkara), John Cage, Frank O’Hara, Fred Herko, as well as by accounts of group sex in Greenwich Village and of gay bars in Ohio, all prior to Stonewall, and by personal anecdotes growing up queer in suburban Miami in a large Cuban family. The past represents that period of pure potential just before the emergence of more crystalized and less radical, less open and radical gay-identity formations.

In contrast to this image of the past, the present rejected by Muñoz refers to Stonewall and after, the mainstream and assimilationist gay activism rejected by Muñoz, and the AIDS pandemic, and how these combined into the gay sex panic pushing queer sex back into the closet of the private sphere.

The past, then, not the present, is the basis of hope in a hollow present for the future. Because something was possible then, the wow-astonishment marked out in works by Warhol such as Silver Clouds, the incandescence of Fred Herko’s final jeté out a window, the redemptive moment at the end of Jones’ The Toilet, because it all happened then, Muñoz can hope in the future, and to the re-opening of horizons.

That is what reminded me of the Jewish philosopher, even if the temporalities don’t exactly line up in the same way. Both Muñoz and Fackenheim are catastrophe-thinkers, who attempt to recoup the future on the basis of “astonishment.” Indeed, that Fackenheim was a German Jewish émigré who shared the same intellectual milieu of Bloch, including what Susan Shapiro has identified in Fackenheim as a “phenomenology of astonishment,” should make the link to Muñoz not so arbitrary (cf. p.5).

In To Mend the World, Fackenheim argued that forms of secular-humanist, Christian, and Jewish tikkun or world-mending were possible in the present because they happened in the past, during the Holocaust, by singular people, humanists, Christians, and Jews who resisted, in whatever way they could what Edith Wyschogrod has called the death-event. Because a partial tikkun, an incomplete tikkun was possible then, even then, in the past, one can put one’s hope in the future. That’s what reminded me of Muñoz.

My own reservations about Muñoz’s utopia are ones typical of me, which I’ll rehearse quickly. Understanding that by “the present” Muñoz  means something specific, especially vis-à-vis the AIDS pandemic, I would nevertheless argue that liberal order is rather more enabling than crushing of the queer theory that wants to disable it. But more problematic is the doubt that bad affects do not, as per Muñoz, generate new potentials. Utopia assumes that the something to come out of, after, and against all this will be better, not worse (p.189). But I don’t think there’s any reason to expect this to be the case. And I don’t think any of this is as “political” as Muñoz wants it to be. For Warhol, let’s remember, “Pop-art is liking things” such as mediated images, consumer objects, money, Reagan, and capitalism (cited in Mark C. Taylor, Disfiguring, pp.181-2). Who knows if he meant, but there’s no reason to think he did not.

Most of all, I had a hard time getting past the suicide of Fred Herko. In his final stage-like performance before a single unsuspecting spectator, a friend, Herko performed a nude dance to Mozart’s Coronation Mass in C Major and then threw himself out of an open apartment window in a “perfect jeté.” Failing at first to understand the incandescence that Muñoz saw in this “final queer act,” the “flamboyant” death in rejection of “straight time” and “traditional notions of finitudeI finally understood the sadness brought by Muñoz to the discussion of Herko at the end of the chapter, the sense of tragic loss, the sense that Herko was failed by the people around him who could not save him (p.149).  I have no doubt that this realization with its sense of failure is intended to haunt the utopian project outlined by Muñoz in his own final work.

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(Byzantine) Woman Of Valor (Ktisis)

Posted on April 28, 2014 by zjb

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She’s one of my mother’s favorite people at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I like her too a lot, a woman of valor, and of rich substance, an image of female power and patronage, like the matrons described sometimes by the rabbis in the midrash and Talmud. I never quite managed to take a good picture of the entire image, which I’m posting below, but I’m pretty happy with these close-ups, which suit her, I think. Ideologically, she’s a picture of generosity and power in black, white, blue, pink, brown, and red. A round figure, her eyes are spectacular, but what I always notice are the folds in the neck and the earrings framed by her hair. I always spot her on the first floor to the right each time I go up the great staircase or through the rather modest Byzantine galleries to points elsewhere in the Metropolitan. A Byzantine woman from 500-550 CE, she’s simultaneously Christian and pagan.

The historical description is here from the Met online:

“This monumental bust of a richly bejeweled lady who wears large pearls in her ears, a necklace of delicate stones about her throat, and two brooches—one clasping her yellow mantle and another at the tie of her dress—is an example of the exceptional mosaics created throughout the Early Byzantine world in the first half of the sixth century. Both her elaborate diadem and the neckline of her dress are bordered with alternating black and white tesserae meant to suggest pearls. The addition of blue glass to represent sapphires, or “hyacinths,” among the red and green glass gemstones on the mosaic is characteristic of sixth-century Byzantine taste. The modeling of the lady’s face with small olive-green and beige tesserae highlighted in white and shades of pink and the slightly asymmetrical arrangement of her large, softly staring eyes are typical of Byzantine painting of the period, which survives in the form of icons. Women with similar faces, hairstyles, necklaces, and pearl-bordered diadems carry martyrs’ crowns in the early-sixth-century mosaics in the nave at Sant’Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna. A mosaic image of the archangel Michael, dated to 549, and in the Church of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, near Ravenna, has the same hair and eyes, as does the mid-sixth-century bust of the “Lady of Rank,” thought to be from Constantinople, also in the Museum (The Cloisters Collection, 66.25).

The rod that she holds, the measuring tool for the Roman foot, identifies her as a personification of the abstract concept of “Ktisis,” or Foundation, and symbolizes the donation, or foundation, of a building. Personifications of abstract ideas, as developed by the Stoic philosophers, remained popular in the Early Christian era. Images of Ktisis inscribed with her name, and often showing her holding the same measure, survive on the floor mosaics of bathhouses as well as churches throughout the Byzantine Empire, from Antioch and Cyprus to such African sites as Qasr-el-Lebia and Ras-el-Hilal.”

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(Breathing) Him to Her After Deconstruction (Luce Irigaray Between East and West)

Posted on April 28, 2014 by zjb

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Against the better judgment of colleagues and friends I assigned Luce Irigaray Between East and West for my graduate seminar on “Religion, Art, and Aesthetics.”This year, we were looking at bodies and images of the body, starting with Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, including along the way Buber’s Daniel, Merleau-Ponty’s “Cezanne’s Doubt” and “Eye and Hand,” Deleuze’s Francis Bacon, Butler’s Bodies That Matter, and Judy Chicago, Through The Flower, and Michael Wyschogrod, Body of Faith. Since most of the texts I taught for this course were rather odd-duck, the choice if Between East and West fit the bill.

For some reason I thought I’d like the book, despite all things on the surface of the text that bother the critics. These would be the orientalism, the gender essentialism, and the heteronormativity. But assuming all this to be the problem, I wanted to wonder otherwise. Intellectually I’ll let almost anything slip. I tend to exercise maximal charity in my own hermeneutic, except in those cases where I don’t feel it’s possible to do so morally. So assuming that Irigrary is a smart person, what was it that drew her to yoga (obviously a seriously reconstructed one) and to the writing of this book? Assuming that she’s a canny thinker, it can’t be all that stuff that is, on the surface of this text, so patently ridiculous.

If I’m calling the orientalism, gender essentialism, and heteronormativity the surface of Between East and West, what caught my eye was the more simple surface of the surface, a surface that looks simple but isn’t. What drew my attention was the constitution of relation and breath as human movement, and the constitution of human movement as breath and relation. I remain open as well to the open conception of self, to the spiritualization of the body, and the lightening of corporeal being in relation to the heaviness of suffering and death. As a kind of aesthetic philosophy, what Irigaray looked for and found in yoga is a subjecting of sensibility and separation to sharing and spiritual elaborations. It’s her position that these spiritual elaborations make the body more “thoroughly and subtle sensible” (p.62).

As for what’s under the surface, I think it’s how yoga might offer a line of flight out of deconstruction, and all that might go with it.

“To deconstruct, certainly, but that already represents a luxury for whoever has not built a world. And who or what supplies the energy for such a gesture? Would it be inspired by hatred? Of whom or of what? Of all, of everyone, and of oneself? Does such an operation really go beyond the existing logic…? Does not deconstruction, including though its recourse to innumerable linguistic ruses, remain trapped in a secular manner of know-how, and does it not imprison there reason itself, to the point of leading it to a nihilistic madness as the ultimate Promethean gesture? Would it not also be too mental, too exclusively mental, wanting to ignore that the sensible-intelligible and corporeal dichotomies are one of the reasons for the disturbing character of man and of his world. And does not the technical cleverness of the deconstructor risk accelerating without possible check or alternative, a process that appears henceforth almost inevitable?” (pp.4-5).

Both overstated and understated, this passage reads like an attempt to sever bonds binding her to the linguistic tricks and games and promethean intellectualism that dominate a philosophical world dominated by men, represented for Iragaray most likely by Lacan. What she claims to want most of all in yoga, it seems, is to learn to “breathe,” to breathe by herself, free and autonomous, without the “need to invent mothers and fathers,” i.e. father figures like Lacan and everything represented by him to her (p.5).

The return to the body after language is a strong, even polemical return too to consciousness and sensibility and subjectivity after thirty years of post-structuralism and Lacanism. In a strange way, parts of the discussion reminded me of Latour and network theory. Like Latour, Irigaray is addressing the need to create new kinds of linked-up connectivities between nature and culture in tune with the world based on individuation and communion. Against what she regards to be the false and damaging decision between technicity and animal instinctiveness, hers would be a robust sense of a bordered and bounded self in community with others. This would depend upon “the possibility of everything becoming conscious” “instead of losing consciousness” (pp.6, 97).

That’s what I think Irigaray went looking for and found in yoga. It’s not really India she meant to re-present as much as the India represented by Schopenhauer, namely the “east” marked out as annihilation of self and subjectivity, an acosmic world without bodies and nature. In this flat little intervention of a text, I think Irigaray has done something remarkable and deep. To someone more expert in India, I’d ask if one could read the identification in Between East and West of a core earthy tradition prior to the Indic-Aryan overlays alongside Wendy Doniger’s much bigger, more knowing, and recently banned-in-India anti-Brahmin polemic in The Hindus: An Alternative History.

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Sovereign Power and Protection (Hindu and Buddhist Art from Lost Kingdoms of Southeast Asia)

Posted on April 27, 2014 by zjb

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Went to see “Lost Kingdoms,” the blockbuster exhibition of awesome, awesome Hindu and Buddhist mostly sculpture from now vanished and forgotten kingdoms in southeast Asia dating from the 5th through 8th centuries. Holland Cotter’s review in the NYT  describes the export-migration of religious cultures and their arts out India into Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Myanamar (Burma).

The exhibition is broken up into seven sections: imports, nature cults, the arrival of Buddhism, Vishnu and his avatars, state art, and savior cults.

Walking through the exhibition galleries, what struck me was the massive roundness of so many of the figures, the imbrication of aesthetic and political power, and the distinct smell of sandstone in a dark room. Massive things meant to impress, they must have cost fortunes to produce. Cotter situates them “[emerging] from, and no doubt [advertising], potentially rivalrous urban cultures.”

The Vishnu figures, in particular, stand up as sustaining emblems of sovereign power. Cotter writes, “They maintained a lordly identity that made them natural models for ambitious earthly counterparts. What ruler would not want to resemble the marvelous South Vietnamese Vishnu — buff, impeccably dressed, four arms strong, posture perfect — who stands enshrined on an elevated plinth in a gallery devoted to this god?”

A little disoriented, I was surprised by what seemed to be the sense that none of the figures looked you straight in the eye. Unlike the glance in modern portraiture, the look of the figures here was off to the side and downward. MK reminded me that the downcast glance was most likely meant to catch the eye of a supplicant from a position lower down looking up towards these figures of power and protection.

You can see online all of the objects online at the Met, My two favorites ones were:

–The Khin Ba Relic Chamber Cover. It’s a “sandstone slab was found in situ at the Khin Ba stupa, where it served as the cover of the brick-lined relic chamber, its relief-carved surface facing downward toward the relics. The chamber’s contents of sacred objects largely date from the sixth century. The relief depicts a tall cylindrical stupa of the type still preserved at the ancient Pyu city of Sri Ksetra. This panel is important for documenting the original form of Pyu-era stupas and their affiliations with Buddhist centers in southern India, where this cylindrical stupa type prevailed in the third and fourth centuries” (Met online). What immediately caught my eye was what for me was the unusual large bell shape the stupa hanging over the diminutive, sandy figures whose face and shape have begun to fade with the passage of time.

–The Krishna Govardhana, from the pre-Angkor period, early 7th century. southern Cambodia, also made out of sandstone. “As described in the Bhagavata Purana, the youthful Krishna miraculously raises Mount Govardhan, near Mathura in northern India, to protect the villagers and cowherds from a great rainstorm sent by Indra. The sculptor of this image, active in the Phnom Da workshops, clearly understood the essence of his subject. It is evident that this sculpture evolved from a long-standing local tradition, which, by the seventh century, had surpassed any Indian prototypes that were remembered” (Met online).  I was struck how the large surviving fragments were reassembled and hung in the exhibition. You don’t see it so much from the photograph, but in the gallery, you look up from below towards the protection of the towering figure holding over you the idea of a mountain.

Serene not gentle, these are the gods and their avatars, models of sovereign power as they flash up from the forgotten past.

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(Fast Without Motion) Felix and Moses (Mendelssohn)

Posted on April 25, 2014 by zjb

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On the drive home to New York a couple months back I caught an episode of David Dubal’s Romantic Piano on WQXR. I don’t like very much 19th C. romantic repertoire, but I stuck around to listen because Dubal is incredibly smart and interesting and that week he was talking about and playing Felix Mendelssohn. I was particularly caught by how Dubal described Mendelssohn’s style. The most mild and restrained of the romantics, his was rich, gentle, and elegant, not like Schumann and the rest. What struck me as remarkable was this description of the body and of pace in Mendelssohn’s music. Mendelssohn “played with little arm movement, curved fingers and he was sparse in using of the pedals. He also favored quick tempos. His music was as transparent as Mozart’s, each note requiring an unusual precision.” The description of the music and the style of thought reminded me immediately of his grandfather, Moses. 

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(Flowers) Moses and Fromet (Mendelssohn) (Aesthetic Judaism)

Posted on April 24, 2014 by zjb

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More beautiful than a porcelain monkey, this Torah ark curtain was donated by Moses and Fromet Mendelssohn to what I’m guessing was their local synagogue in Berlin. The embroidered delicate flowers, carnations, roses, lilies in full color are woven into the cream white of Fromet Mendelssohn’s wedding dress.

While I doubt that she made the piece itself, I would like to think that Fromet was the motivating and organizing genius behind the commission of this work of ritual art, that it shows her hand and eye at work. At the same time, the fresh floral colors recalls to the mind the opening chapter of Mendelssohn’s Kohelet Musar, in which the so-called preacher of morals is out musing in a field of blooming flowers.

I saw this thing for the first time ever in third episode of Simon Schama’s “Story of the Jews,” which you can watch in its entirety on the PBS website. Say what you want about Schama and the series, he shows you objects and things that most of us have never knew existed. A lot of minutes are spent lingering over this precious Mendelssohn artifact. As described by Schama, the Enlightenment Judaism (Jonathan Karp has called it Aesthetic Judaism) embroidered into and out of this ritual object is both saturated, alive and ablaze, as well as botanized and catalogued.

 

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Porcelain Ape (Moses Mendelssohn & Illiberal Enlightenment)

Posted on April 23, 2014 by zjb

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The story behind this porcelain ape has to do with the Royal Porcelain Factory owned by Frederick the Great. Unable to compete with the finer items produced by competitors. “In order to increase business, he decreed in 1769 that a tax on Jews in the form of coerced purchases from his factory would be levied on Jews in order to obtain marriage, death, business and other certificates and permits (Glueck 1998). Some accounts claim that the twenty porcelain monkeys belonging to the heirs of Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) are Judenporzellan (Hartmann 2006), although some authorities doubt the authenticity of these family stories based on chronology and provenance—at least one of the monkeys is of Meissen manufacture (Todd 2003).” This I got from the Judenporzellan Wikipage. For me what the ape perhaps makes clear is why it seems that Mendelssohn expressed more doubts about the Enlightenment than about Judaism.

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(Bitter Sweet) Moses Mendelssohn Bio (Shmuel Feiner)

Posted on April 23, 2014 by zjb

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I finally got around to reading Shmuel Feiner’s biography, Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity , a less than the brilliant title that I imagine was chosen by the series editors at Yale University Press for the Jewish Lives Series. A graceful little study, I’m recommending it, for scholars, alongside Alexander Altmann’s massive, magisterial and unsurpassable biography of Mendelssohn, and for non-scholars, instead of it. Altmann’s book in comparison to Feiner’s is an archive of a thing. Feiner’s book in comparison to Altmann’s is a book, a finite and bounded object or thing with a clear beginning, middle, and end that moves along with a brisk narrative clip to make important points about its subjects –Moses Mendelssohn, Enlightenment, and Judaism.

What Feiner does especially well is to square the circle about Enlightenment humanism and traditional Judaism at work in Mendelssohn’s thought. It should be easy to understand why Altmann, like other émigrés from Nazi Germany, should have considered this attempt at synthesis by Mendelssohn to have been a failure. With more critical distance from Germany, Feiner, like many contemporary readers of Mendelssohn, find his project to be not so incoherent. Feiner has caught the mellifluous fusion of Enlightenment and Judaism, as well as the many bitter notes and contradictions.

Reading Feiner’s work I appreciate the degree to which Mendelssohn, that most gracious of thinkers, was immersed his entire adult life in philosophical-cultural controversies that were forced upon him. These controversies included the early attempt to receive the title morenu (rabbi) or chaver (peer) from Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz, the first attempt to clear the name of Judaism by defending Spinoza from the charge of vulgar pantheism, the argument with Johann Bernhard Basedow about educational reform, the dispute with Lavater about Christianity and Judaism, the Schwerin burial controversy with Rabbi Jacob Emden, the critique of Christian Wilhelm Dohm’s contention that the Jews were a non-productive people whose social standing deserved but needed to be “improved,” the dispute in which Mendelssohn defended the new program of Jewish education proposed by Wessely, the dispute with Cranz about Enlightenment and Judaism, the argument with Lessing’s positioning of Judaism in The Education of the Human Race, the dispute with Jacobi about Lessing, Spinoza, and Enlightenment reason.

While Feiner understands the way the balance between Judaism and modernity,  meaning Judaism and Enlightenment, was not seen by Mendelssohn as a contradiction, he does note the tension in an interesting way. Meant to reduce the sense of Jewish difference, it was actually the case that the very “lens of humanism only magnified the ‘otherness’ of Jewish affiliation” (pp.15-16). While Feiner does not delve deep into the tension, my sense is that he’s arguing that that the tension had less to do with “Judaism” per se, as Mendelssohn’s many critics have contended, and more to do with restricted status of the Jews in 18th century Germany and Europe (p.81).

As much as it is argued, again against Mendelssohn, that he restricted or wanted to restrict Judaism to the private sphere, the truth of the matter is that Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment and the Judaism represented by him were tested in the public sphere. I don’t see how we can or would want to do without the values of “love of man,” “religious tolerance,” multicultural society,” “reason,” and “morality.” Writing before the return of Judaism and Jewishness to history and power politics in the late 20th century, Mendelssohn was rather sure he had these things secure in Judaism. For him, writing in the 18th century, there would have been little to disconfirm those more innocent and sweet notions regarding Judaism and Jewishness. Writing on the other side prior to Emancipation, about the fact that these values did not quite take root in Europe, were not going to take root in Europe, about this Feiner is right to note that Mendelssohn was indeed quite bitter and not “naive” (p.215).

 

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