Jew as Metaphor

Don't miss an episode! Subscribe to the Madlik podcast: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts

and Join Madlik on Clubhouse every Thursday so you can participate in our weekly live discussion of the Parsha. Link to Transcript here: https://madlik.com/2024/09/18/jew-as-metaphor/

Philo of Alexandria Phílōn; Hebrew: יְדִידְיָה, Yəḏīḏyāh; c. 20 BCE – c.  50 CE), also called Philō Judæus, was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher who lived in Alexandria, in the Roman province of Egypt.

Philo's deployment of allegory to harmonize Jewish scripture, mainly the Torah, with Greek philosophy was the first documented of its kind, and thereby often misunderstood. Many critics of Philo assumed his allegorical perspective would lend credibility to the notion of legend over historicity. Philo often advocated a literal understanding of the Torah and the historicity of such described events, while at other times favoring allegorical readings.

^{See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philo}

This treatise deals with Genesis ii. 18–iii. 1. Let us mark its mode of dealing with the Sacred Text in salient instances.

The story of the creation of Eve, we are told, is not meant to be taken literally. It is a “Myth,” showing forth the origin of Sense-perception, which becomes active when Mind is asleep (Gen. ii. 21). The bringing of Woman to Man is the introduction of Sense-perception to Mind, which hails it as its own (ii. 22 f.). (19 ff., 40 ff.)

That Adam and Eve were both naked (ii. 25) means that they were without either good or evil; for nakedness of soul can show itself as (a) freedom from passions; (b) loss of virtue; (c) neutrality. Adam and Eve were inactive both in mind and sense-perception, and were “unashamed,” i.e. without either the shamelessness of the worthless man, or the shamefastness of the man of worth. (53 ff.)

The entry of the Serpent (Gen. iii. 1) is due to the need of some means of uniting Mind and Sense-perception for their joint apprehension of objects, and of eliciting their activities. (71 if.)

See: Loeb Classical Library - Allegorical Interpretation of Genesis 2: 3

Dubno Maggid

Once upon a time, I was walking in the forest and I saw all these trees in a row with a target drawn on them, and an arrow right in the center. At the end of the row I saw a little boy with a bow in his hand I had to ask him, “Are you the one who shot all those arrows?!” “Of course!” he replied. “How did you hit all the targets right in the center?” I asked. “Simple”, said the boy, “first I shoot the arrow, and then I draw the target”.

The great Maggid would come up with the lesson of the story first, and then wrap the parable around that message.

https://theje.com/the-story-of-the-dubno-maggid/

Jean-Paul Sartre - Anit-Semite and Jew

The essay deals not with racist hatred of living Jews, but with Judaism and imaginary Jews as a category of fantasy projected in the thought of the antisemite, a phenomenon described as antijudaism by intellectual historian David Nirenberg in citing this essay and its salient observation that "if the Jew did not exist, the anti-semite would invent him."

Sartre argues that antisemitism is not an "idea" in the commonly understood sense of the word: it is not a point of view based rationally upon empirical information calmly collected and calibrated in as objective a manner as is possible.

"Far from experience producing his idea of the Jew, it was the latter (the ides) that explained his experience. If the Jew did not exist, the anti-Semite would invent him." Antisemitism is a view that arises not from experience or historical fact, but from itself. It lends new perspective to experience and historical fact. The antisemite convinces himself of beliefs that he knows to be spurious at best.

The antisemite is afraid "of himself, of his own consciousness, of his own liberty, of his instincts, of his responsibilities, of solitariness, of change, of society, and the world – of everything except the Jews." He is "a coward who does not want to admit his cowardice to himself." (p. 53.)^[2] The antisemite wallows in the depths of an extreme bad faith. "Anti-Semitism, in short, is fear of the human condition. The anti-Semite is a man who wishes to be pitiless stone, a furious torrent, a devastating thunderbolt – anything except a man." (p. 54.)^[2] This is his bad faith.

See: Wikipoedia: Anti-Semite and Jew

Philip Roth

When I speak before Jewish audiences, invariably there have been people who have come up to me afterward to ask, “Why don’t you leave us alone? Why don’t you write about the Gentiles?”—“Why must you be so critical?”—“Why do you disapprove of us so?”—this last question asked as often with incredulity as with anger;

Not always, but frequently, what readers have taken to be my disapproval of the lives lived by Jews seems to have to do more with their own moral perspective than with the one they would ascribe to me: at times they see wickedness where I myself had seen energy or courage or spontaneity; they are ashamed of what I see no reason to be ashamed of, and defensive where there is no cause for defense.

I write a story of a man who is adulterous to reveal the condition of such a man. If the adulterous man is a Jew, then I am revealing the condition of an adulterous man who is a Jew. Why tell that story? Because I seem to be interested in how—and why and when—a man acts counter to what he considers to be his “best self,” or what others assume it to be, or would like for it to be. The subject is hardly “mine”; it interested readers and writers for a long time before it became my turn to be engaged by it, too.

{in response to a Rabbi's critique of Roth's treatment of Judaism] The story of Lou Epstein [a jewish adulterer portayed by Roth] stands or falls not on how much I “know” about tradition, but on how much I know and understand about Lou Epstein. Where the history of the Jewish people comes down in time and place to become the man whom I called Epstein, that is where my knowledge must be sound. But I get the feeling that Rabbi Seligson wants to rule Lou Epstein out of Jewish history. I find him too valuable to forget or dismiss, even if he is something of a grubber yung and probably more ignorant of history and tradition than the rabbi believes me to be.

[Speaking of another less than perfect jewish character] He is presented not as the stereotype of The Jew, but as a Jew who acts like the stereotype, offering back to his enemies their vision of him, answering the punishment with the crime. Given the particular kinds of denials, humiliations, and persecutions that the nations have practiced on their Jews, it argues for far too much nobility to deny not only that Jews like Grossbart exist, but to deny that the temptations to Grossbartism exist in many who perhaps have more grace, or will, or are perhaps only more cowed, than the simple frightened soul that I imagined weeping with fear and disappointment at the end of the story. Grossbart is not The Jew; but he is a fact of Jewish experience and well within the range of its moral possibilities.

Writing About Jews, by Philip Roth Commentary December 1963