**1. Introduction**

German Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss, in the preface to the English translation of his *Spinoza's Critique of Religion*, wrote:

The establishment of the state of Israel is the most profound modification of the Galut [the Diaspora, or Exile] ... , but it is not the end of the Galut: in the religious sense, and perhaps not only in the religious sense, the state of Israel is a part of the Galut. Finite, relative problems can be solved; infinite, absolute problems cannot be solved ... it looks as if the Jewish people were the chosen people in the sense, at least, that the Jewish problem is the most manifest symbol of the human problem as a social or political problem. (Strauss 1965, p. 6)

While Strauss and his contemporaries remarked on Zionism and Israel in terms of the challenges that Jewish di fference posed for the political frameworks of European liberalism, present-day debates about Israel rarely address the question of Jewish di fference. References to the political histories out of which Israel emerged draw on the principles of European Enlightenment, rather than calling them into question. Whether a pariah in the world's "family of nations" or an exceptional model to be emulated, Israel is debated, criticized, and defended within the terms of European liberalism. Critics argue that Israel should fall in line with the ideals of European liberal democracy; defenders insist that Israel already does (Pappe 2014; Shafir and Peled 2002; Yakobson and Rubinstein 2010; Yiftachel 2006). In a significant departure from the two lines of analysis that dominate the literature about Israel, this article argues neither for an understanding of Israel as the latest form of settler-colonialism, nor for an understanding of Israel as a European liberal democracy that is the latest stage of Jewish presence in the region. Rather, it shows how an analysis of the conjunction "Israeli Jew" and its political and

material effects challenge European modernity's binaries of East and West, Jew and non-Jew, gues<sup>t</sup> and host, madness and reason, and feminine and masculine on which humanism's concept of the human is founded. In so doing, an analysis of the category "Israeli Jew" reveals how what Strauss termed a human problem can be understood instead as a problem of how the human itself has been defined in the context of European modernity.

This article considers the political and philosophical genealogies of the category "Israeli Jew" in terms of Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk's *Adam Resurrected*, which I situate within the wider context of contemporary Israel. Israel is defined as a liberal democracy founded on the narrative of modern nationalism, but also on the messianic Abrahamic narrative of 2000 years of Jewish exile. The category "Israeli Jew" thus brings together the figure of the diasporic Jew as not fully sovereign, with Zionism's figure of the "New Jew" based on European modernity's ideal of a sovereign, autonomous, citizen subject. By bringing them together, rather than replacing one with the other, the category "Israeli Jew" brings together the specificity of the different genealogies that these terms carry. In this regard, Israel can be understood as an instantiation of the historical legacy of the philosophical binary between the Athenian and the Hebraic, which, as Leonard (2012), Derrida (1999), and others have pointed out, informs the long durée of Western political philosophy.

If the figure of the Israeli Jew makes explicit the co-existence of European and non-European—or Greek and Jew—within the production of the postcolonial masculine subject, then the reproduction of a polity defined in the name of this figure brings this genealogical line of origin as it is configured between two differently marked men into an encounter with the difference of woman. By posing a question about how to understand sexual difference, a consideration of Israeli Jewish sovereignty not only reanimates the "Jewish Question" but also—beyond Israel—calls into question notions of the liberal, universal sovereign subject. Such an analysis, I suggest, has profound implications for how we understand the consequences of European humanism's concept of the human, as well as the politics through which Europe and its colonial legacies took shape.

There has been increasing attention to the fact that there are aspects of Israeli society that do not fall neatly into binaries such as religious and secular (Boyarin 1996; Engelberg 2015), Arab and Jew (Shohat 2017), colonizer and colonized (Kalmar and Penslar 2005; Penslar 1991), and Hebrew and Arabic (Levy 2014). I build on these insights by suggesting that these are not anomalies, coincidental, or exceptions to Israel and its political framework as a Jewish liberal democracy. Rather, I argue, they are at the core of what defines Zionism and Israeli society. Arab Jews or *Mizrahim*, the overlap between "secular" and religious," and the "soldiers who shoot and cry," along with a multitude of other compositions of what are otherwise understood as binary oppositions, contradictions, or hypocrisy, are all products of the same histories that bring "Jewish singularity" and "European universalism" into the single figure of the Israeli Jew (see also Bartal 2010).

There is a growing clamor, both in formal academic publications as well as in the halls and panels of academic conferences and online spaces, for Israel to be boycotted or otherwise sanctioned for violating the principles of liberal democracy. For example, Gianni Vattimo and Michael Marder, editors of the recent *Deconstructing Zionism*, describe Israel as "a state that, to this day, re-founds and legitimizes itself based on a mix of millennia-old theodicy and a frozen mold of nineteenth century European-type nationalism, which has not survived in this form anywhere in Europe" (Vattimo and Marder 2014, p. xv), as if European countries have advanced beyond the problems of how to address difference within the context of liberal democracy out of which Israel itself emerged, and that Israel needs to catch up to its European counterparts.<sup>1</sup> Similarly, calls for boycotts or divestment through analogies with South African apartheid (Butler 2012; Palumbo-Liu 2015) and those who defend Israel against such calls (Nelson and Brahm 2014) elide the differences between Israel's political framework and South Africa's apartheid regime. Whereas in apartheid South Africa, it would have been impossible to have a

<sup>1</sup> The framework of their edited volume suggests a significant misreading of deconstruction (see van Vliet 2016).

black judge sentencing a white anti-apartheid activist to community service for actions in solidarity with black anti-apartheid activists, in Israel, it is possible to have a Palestinian judge sentencing a Jewish-Israeli activist for acts of anti-occupation solidarity with Palestinians. My point here is not that such differences signify that there is justice for or equal treatment of Jews and non-Jews within Israeli society, juridically or otherwise. There is not. Nor is it to sugges<sup>t</sup> a hierarchy of suffering or of oppression. Rather, my point is that apparent contradictions in Israel reveal not a failure to abide by liberal democratic principles but, rather, the failure of liberal democracy to address the question of difference. The rest of this essay is dedicated to explaining what I mean in making this claim.

### **2. Israeli Jew: Israel and the Jewish Question Revisited**

The "Jewish Question" was defined in turn-of-the-century Europe as a question about the degree and manner to which Jewish difference was or was not compatible with the ideals of European modernity (Librett 2014), as well as with political projects that took shape with and against its geopolitical contexts (Bauer [1843] 2000; Marx [1844] 2012; Peled 1992). What defined "Jewish difference" was part of this question. Questions about whether the Jew is defined by anti-Semitism; whether the Jew is a cultural, religious, ethnic, racial, or biological identity; and whether the Jew can assimilate or not were debated by Jews and non-Jews, within and outside the Zionist movement, within and outside *Haskala*, and in *fin-de-siecle* European scientific and medical discourse (Feiner 2002; Boyarin 1997; Gilman 1991; Idelson-Shein 2014). These questions overlapped with broader discussions about race, degeneration, sexuality, aesthetics, morality, economy, and Enlightenment ideals of freedom, sovereignty, and equality. As Miriam Leonard writes, "Throughout the nineteenth century and across the whole of Europe, the issue of the treatment of the Jews was inextricably bound up, on the one hand, with the project of social and political reform, and, on the other, with the attempts to define the integrity of the nation-state" (Leonard 2012, p. 7). These attempts culminated in the expulsion and mass killing of Europe's Jewish populations and then in the efforts of Europe and its allies to reassemble in the aftermath of the war.

Zionism, in the views of its most prominent leaders, was a response to the sense that Jewish difference was inassimilable in the context of European liberal democracies. As Conforti (2006) has pointed out, this did not mean that Zionists were unified or otherwise in agreement, contrary to post-Zionist polemics about Zionist history. How Jewish difference was understood in relation to European Enlightenment's universalist ideals informed the views not only of those at the heart of the Zionist movement, but also of thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem, Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, Hermann Cohen, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, and Sigmund Freud. Their pronouncements and sometimes painful ambivalences regarding Zionism and Israel were part of wider philosophical and political debates of twentieth-century Europe, which at the time of Israel's establishment, was reeling from two world wars, the breakup of Empires, anti-colonial struggles in its colonies, and hopes and disillusionments born, in part, of the French Revolution more than a century earlier.

The establishment of the state of Israel in 1948 thus happened in the context of international tensions that were part of the political disorder of Europe and its colonies in the aftermath of WWII. When the war ended on 8 May 1945, Europe was faced with multiple challenges: how to deal with war refugees and displaced populations and how to address the questions of responsibility for the war's atrocities. As the British in Palestine sought to limit Jewish immigration, tension between the British and the Jews in Palestine intensified (Smith 2007). What came to constitute "Israeli" was thus specific not only to the situations of Jews in different national contexts but was also specific to transnational contexts shaped by Europe's relations to its colonies and to its internal others and by the Cold War. Jews thus arrived to Palestine and then Israel for very different reasons, with different cultural and political backgrounds and investments. In this context, Israel was explicitly marked as a Jewish country and refuge for Jews and as a liberal democracy and member of the world's "family of nations." However, precisely because of the diverse histories of Jewish difference and the Jew's position in relation to the

category of modern secular citizenship, the establishment of Israel as a Jewish liberal democracy has continued to pose the question of what defines Jewish difference.

Theodor Herzl famously referred to Zionism as a dream about the creation of a Jewish homeland, both in his fictional depiction of Zionist settlement in *Old New Land* and in his call to action in *The Jewish State*.<sup>2</sup> The establishment of the State of Israel is commonly understood within Zionism as the realization of that dream. This dream of another place for the Jew also carried with it a dream of another kind of Jew. This Jew would be a new Jew, or what leading Zionist Max Nordau called "the new muscle Jew" with a place of their own rather than wandering from place to place, with a new language taken from the old—a language of their own. The "New Jew" would be a Jew with a new character; the New Jew would shed the characteristics of the diasporic Jew and be strong, in touch with the land and physical labor, tanned by the sun rather than pale from staying indoors studying the Torah, carefree and independent rather than anxious and melancholic (Abramson 2011; Mosse 1992; Nordau 1897).<sup>3</sup> As (Abramson 2011) has importantly pointed out, Zionism's "New Jew" went through different incarnations and was shaped by diverse influences in addition to Nordau's famous "muscle Jew," including Martin Buber's "Renaissance" Jew, Michah Yosef Berdyczewski's Nietzschean "New Man," and Herzl's "authentic Jew." As Sander Gilman (1993a, 1993b) and others have pointed out (Boyarin and Boyarin 1997; Pellegrini 1997; Rolnik 2013; Slavet 2009; Yerushalmi 1993), Zionism can also be understood in tandem with psychoanalysis as a different but overlapping response to the pathologization of what was commonly understood as "degeneration" and nervous disorders of melancholia and hysteria within the context of European modernity. Indeed, Zionism's emergence as a response to anti-Semitic exclusion from European modernity's universalist ideals took shape in overlapping political and intellectual conditions with psychoanalysis.<sup>4</sup> In this sense then, in ways both similar to and different from psychoanalysis, Zionism sought to remake Jewish difference in the terms of self-possession, sovereignty, and autonomy. However, it did so precisely in the name of defending the Jew as not self-possessed or sovereign. The figure of the (new) Israeli Jew is thus haunted and undone by the diverse histories of the diasporic Jew.

The category "Israel Jew" therefore also draws attention to the implications of how Jewish difference is defined for the definition of the modern, liberal secular citizen subject of European modernity. By simultaneously declaring itself to be Jewish and not only a liberal democracy, Israel continually poses challenges to the assumptions of the possibility of the metalanguage presumed by the law and grounded in European modernity's political frameworks of a liberal humanism, or in Dipesh Chakrabarty's terms, "the concept of the universal and abstract human who bears" the Enlightenment themes of juridical freedom (Chakrabarty 2000, p. 50). To ask how the proper name "Israel" is haunted by the proper name "Jew," or how the category of the universal and abstract citizen is haunted by the Jew, requires placing the narratives of Jewish exile and return in the context of WWII and its aftermath and in the context of European nation-state formation.<sup>5</sup> I now turn to consider what might be learned from an analysis of the category "Israeli Jew" in these terms, through a reading of Israeli novelist Yoram Kaniuk's *Adam Resurrected* (Kaniuk [1969] 1971).

<sup>2</sup> See (Herzl [1902] 2009) and (Herzl [1896] 2018).

<sup>3</sup> See Almog (2000) for a vivid fictional account of the ideal of the Sabra.

<sup>4</sup> For discussions of the historical overlap between Freud and Herzl, see Loewenberg and Stone (1970); Avner (1996).

<sup>5</sup> "Jew" in this sense suggests that a proper name can never be autonomous or owned by only one (in the sense of being singular plural, see (Nancy [1996] 2000), which then presents the question of what kind of "ownership" this would be. In his rereading of the story of Babel, Derrida suggests that the text of the story can be understood as conveying a double injunction from God: "translate me, translate my name," and "don't translate me, don't translate my name, you won't be able to" (Derrida 1985, p. 77). Derrida suggests that such a double command, or in his word, "desire," is at work in every proper name.

### **3. Israelijew Jewisraeli: Greekjew Jewgreek and Yoram Kaniuk's** *Adam Resurrected*

Kaniuk's novel *Adam Resurrected,* first published in Hebrew in 1969 (with the title *Adam Ben Kelev*), tells the story of Adam Stein, a Holocaust survivor who was a clown and violinist by profession, who survives the concentration camps by clowning under the gaze of his Nazi commanders in front of the lines of camp inmates as they walk to their deaths in the gas chambers and by living as a dog with the four legged canine Rex in the apartment of his Nazi commander Herr Klein and his wife.<sup>6</sup> After the war, Stein goes to Israel, where, after he attempts to kill his German Jewish landlady with whom he is involved in an amorous relation, he is taken to an insane asylum for the rehabilitation of Holocaust survivors.

Throughout the book, Adam is visited by his twin brother, Herbert, who appears as a ghostly presence on Adam's windowsill in his room in the asylum. When Herbert is first introduced in the book, it is soon after Adam is brought back to the asylum after trying to strangle his German landlady in Tel Aviv. Soon after Adam arrives back in the asylum, he is visited by his twin,

who was a philosophy student in Heidelberg and studies under Professor Maritain and under old man Ludwig, the author of *The Lucky columns*, somebody who will never acknowledge the bitter truth that Adam Stein, his twin, was a circus clown who became the lowest of the low, namely, 'the Jew who made Klein laugh,' the Jew who performed there, twisted his nose and prestidigitated, and all this in front of his proud wife, Gretchen. (Kaniuk [1969] 1971, p. 59)
