Lament in Jewish Thought

Ilit Ferber, Paula Schwebel, Ilit Ferber, Paula Schwebel

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9783110395310
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Jewish Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Lament, mourning, and the transmissibility of a tradition in the aftermath of destruction are prominent themes in Jewish thought. The corpus of lament literature, building upon and transforming the biblical Book of Lamentations, provides a unique lens for thinking about the relationships between destruction and renewal, mourning and remembrance, loss and redemption, expression and the inexpressible.

This anthology features four texts by Gershom Scholem on lament, translated here for the first time into English. The volume also includes original essays by leading scholars, which interpret Scholem's texts and situate them in relation to other Weimar-era Jewish thinkers, including Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Franz Kafka, and Paul Celan, who drew on the textual traditions of lament to respond to the destruction and upheavals of the early twentieth century. Also included are studies on the textual tradition of lament in Judaism, from biblical, rabbinic, and medieval lamentations to contemporary Yemenite women's laments.

This collection, unified by its strong thematic focus on lament, shows the fruitfulness of studying contemporary and modern texts alongside the traditional textual sources that informed them.

Notes on Contributors

Lina Barouch received her PhD from Oxford University in 2012. Since 2013 she has been a post-doctoral fellow of the Franz Rosenzweig Minerva Research Institute (the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and the Deutsche Literatur Archiv (Marbach), where she is cataloguing the papers of Heinrich Loewe. Her book Between German and Hebrew: The Counterlanguages of Gershom Scholem, Werner Kraft and Ludwig Strauss is forthcoming in the joint Jewish Studies Series of De Gruyter and Magnes University Press.

Leora Batnitzky is Ronald O. Perelman Professor of Jewish Studies and Professor and Chair of Religion at Princeton University. She is the author of three books: Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Franz Rosenzweig Reconsidered (Princeton University Press, 2000); Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge University Press, 2006) and How Judaism Became a Religion (Princeton University Press, 2011).

Agata Bielik-Robson received her PhD in philosophy in 1995. She works as a Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. She has published articles in Polish, English, and German on philosophical aspects of psychoanalysis, romantic subjectivity, and the philosophy of religion. Her latest book, Philosophical Marranos: Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity, will be published by Routledge in September 2014.

Rebecca Comay teaches in the Department of Philosophy and the Center for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, where she also directs the Program in Literature and Critical Theory. She has published widely on continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, and contemporary art. Her recent work includes Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford University Press, 2011), and she is currently working on a project on testamentary issues from Hamlet to Proust.

Ilit Ferber is Assistant Professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University. Her research focuses on the relationship between philosophy and psychoanalysis and the correspondence between language and the passions. Her monograph Philosophy and Melancholy: Benjamin’s Early Reflections on Theater and Language (Stanford University Press, 2013) explores the role of melancholy in Benjamin’s early writings and discusses the relationship of Benjamin, Freud, and Leibniz. She has published on Leibniz, Herder, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger and Scholem, and co-edited Philosophy’s Moods: The Affective Grounds of Thinking (Springer, 2001).

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Moshe Halbertal is Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Gruss Professor of Law at New York University. His latest books are On Sacrifice (2012) and Maimonides: Life and Thought (2013), both published by Princeton University Press.

Werner Hamacher is Emmanuel Levinas Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School. Until 2013, he was Professor für Allgemeine und Vergleichende Literaturwissenschaft at Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt. His publications include Premises: Essays on Philosophy and Literature from Kant to Celan (Stanford University Press, 1996); Pleroma: Reading in Hegel (Stanford University Press, 1998); and Entferntes Verstehen: Studien zu Philosophie und Literatur von Kant bis Celan (Suhrkamp, 1997).

Galit Hasan-Rokem is Max and Margarethe Grunwald Professor of Folklore and Professor (emerita) of Hebrew Literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her books include: Web of Life: Folklore and Midrash in Rabbinic Literature (2000) and Tales of the Neighborhood: Jewish Narrative Dialogues in Late Antiquity (2003). She has served as Head of the Mandel Institute of Jewish Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and as President of the International Society for Folk Narrative Research.

Adam Lipszyc works at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Science and the Franz Kafka University of Muri. He has published four books in Polish, mostly focusing on traces of Jewish theology in twentieth-century thought and literature. His most recent publication is a study of Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of language and justice (Justice on the Tip of the Tongue, 2012). He edited and co-translated into Polish two volumes of essays, one by Gershom Scholem and one by Walter Benjamin.

Vered Madar is a researcher of folk culture. In 2011 she received her PhD from the Jewish and Comparative Folklore Program at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Currently she is a post-doctoral fellow at the Hebrew University as part of “Da’at Hamakom”: Center for the Study of Cultures of Place in the Modern Jewish World, where she is developing her study about memoirs of Jewish women from Yemen.

Caroline Sauter is a post-doc researcher at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin. Her research focuses on translation and translation theory, the notion of sacred text, and the interrelation between theology, literature and literary theory. Her recent publications include a monograph on Walter Benjamin and translation (Die virtuelle Interlinearversion, 2014) as well as co-edited volumes on the notion of the sacred in modernity (2013) and on allegories of loving (2014, forthcoming). She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from LMU Munich.

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Eli Schonfeld received his PhD in Philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a researcher at the Kogod Research Center for Contemporary Jewish Thought at the Shalom Hartman Institute. He lectures at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. His first book, The Wonder of Subjectivity: A Reading of Levinas’ Philosophy was published in 2007 by Resling editions. He is currently completing a monograph on consolation in western philosophy and Jewish thought.

Paula Schwebel is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Ryerson University. She writes and teaches on the Frankfurt School, twentieth-century continental philosophy, and German-Jewish thought. She received her PhD in Philosophy and Jewish Studies from the University of Toronto. She is currently working on a book on Benjamin and Leibniz with the provisional title, Walter Benjamin’s Monadology: Expression, Finitude and Historical Time.

Galili Shahar is Professor of Comparative Literature and the head of the Minerva Institute for German History at Tel Aviv University. His research and teaching are dedicated to German, Jewish, and Hebrew literature.

Daniel Weidner is Professor for the Study of Culture and Religion at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin and Associate Director of the Zentrum für Literatur-und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin. His main areas of research are the interrelation of religion and literature; theories of secularization; the history of philology and literary theory; and German-Jewish literature. His publications include Gershom Scholem: Politisches, esoterisches und historiographisches Schreiben (Munich 2003). He is currently editing a multi-author biography of Gershom Scholem, to be published in 2015.

Sigrid Weigel is the director of the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung (ZfL) in Berlin. She has published on various aspects of modern European literature and culture (with especial focus on Walter Benjamin, Aby Warburg, Gershom Scholem, Hannah Arendt, Heinrich Heine, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Susan Taubes) and on the cultural history of knowledge. Current research projects include those related to the history of secularisation, the figure of the martyr, and interdisciplinary images theory.

Bernd Witte is Professor Emeritus of German Literature at the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. Professor Witte has published extensively on a wide range of literary and cultural topics, ranging from Gellert and Goethe to Benjamin (Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography, 1991), Kafka, Celan, and Bachmann. His most recent book is Jüdische Tradition und literarische Moderne: Heine, Buber, Kafka, Benjamin (2007). With Paul Mendes-Flohr, he is currently editing the collected works of Martin Buber (21 volumes).

1

All translations of biblical verses are based on the Jewish Publication Society Bible, with my minor changes.

2

For documentation of this liturgical practice, see Spiegel 1996.

3

The inventory, as far as I have been able to reconstruct it, is quite short: it counts Seneca’s trilogy on consolation (De Consolatione ad Marciam, De Consolatione ad Polybium, De Consolatione ad Helviam), Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, Boethius’s classical Consolation of Philosophy, Jean Gerson’s The Consolation of Theology, and Meister Eckhart’s Book of Divine Consolation.

4

See the opening lines of Kant’s “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (Kant 1991 [1784], 54–55).

5

This reasoning can already be found in Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (Descartes 1931 [1641], 177–179), but it is Leibniz who systematically developed the idea, bringing it to full maturity in his 1710 Essais de Theodicée (full title: Essais de Theodicée sur la bonté de Dieu, la liberté de l’homme et l’origine...