06/04/2026
“To understand what is now coming apart, we first need to name the paradigm within which Jewishness was shaped for so long. That paradigm had two poles: an ethics of the Name, and a politics of deferral…
Today, parts of the Jewish world — especially in certain religious-nationalist circles — increasingly recast this entire paradigm as a diasporic sickness. To care about how one is seen by the non-Jew is treated as submission. By contrast, to despise the non-Jew, to brutalize him, to show that one no longer feels bound by restraint in his presence, becomes a kind of emancipation. Here one hears a disturbing echo of Frantz Fanon’s defense of the colonized subject’s “therapeutic” violence: violence, he argued, “detoxifies” the individual, freeing him from his inferiority complex and from habits of passivity and despair. Something similar is at work in the most nationalist fringe of Israeli Jewish society. Violence against “the goyim” — especially Christians cast as representatives of the persecuting West, and Muslims cast as the political enemy of the moment — becomes a way of breaking free from the “exilic mentality” it despises….
It is precisely this double paradigm that is now collapsing in parts of the Jewish world. What long stood at the heart of rabbinic Judaism is now reread as an “exilic ethics.” For those who denounce it, the phrase means an ethics of weakness, a way of bowing before the nations — almost a “slave morality,” in Nietzsche’s sense. In this imagination, the new Jew must no longer fear desecrating the Name; he must make others fear his own name. Harshness becomes health, and the humiliation of the other presents itself as proof that the Jew has finally been cured of exile. Perhaps this is what we should call Judeolatry: the moment when Jewishness stops answering to what exceeds it and begins to worship itself in its restored power.”
Read Gabriel Abensour’s essay in full here:
Spit hurled at priests, nuns being beaten, statues of Christ smashed: Gabriel Abensour, reporting from Jerusalem, refuses to view these as mere “excesses” of the Israeli far right. He sees in them the…
