Discussion

Summary

WILLI GOETSCHEL: I would like to respond briefly to a few points. I thank Abby Gillman for calling attention to some of the points I tried to make clear. One issue I wanted to make a little bit clearer is when Thomas Sparr tried to juxtapose Scholem to Goldschmidt. I thought actually that one of the points is — at least in my reading — that the whole project of his is close to Scholem’s. The problem with Scholem, if you read his letters, is that he responds nicely to people who are on the other side of the gap, and he attacks people who are actually close to his position. One name for that is the Buber complex, a rather deep running complex in Scholem. The quotation I read from Kafka is exactly saying that: Judaism consists in the life, and this is very similar to Scholem’s view that Judaism is the total sum of the traces it produces in history, that this is the only reliable way to arrive at specificity with regard to defining Judaism. According to Scholem, this means that there exist no normative criteria to determine or define Judaism. All history is willing to offer are ever better and more differentiated descriptions and interpretations of history. But this is not Scholem’s invention — this is good Spinoza; this is good Mendelssohn; this is prime Leo Baeck. That’s where Scholem is rooted. I think that it is important not to polarize Scholem, when his own position shows a profound affinity to the kind of thought from which he so emphatically wishes to distance himself.

Barbara Hahn’s questions are very interesting. I never thought about them. With regard to the first one I would like to respond with an anecdote that highlights the conflicted resistance to Goldschmidt: He tells how he goes to Frankfurt and informs his audience, “My family tree reaches back to 1523 in Frankfurt,” and then he is astonished when people don’t like him there. The point is that when and where German language is denied from the outside, the particularities of Goldschmidt’s writing stand to rebel against any attempts at cultural expropriation reclaiming his language as his own. This is why for many he is a scandal, and I think that this is an intervention we have to take seriously.