The Ritual of New Creation (53 page)

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Authors: Norman Finkelstein

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12. Scholem,
On Jews and Judaism In Crisis,
238.
13. Irving Howe and Eliezer Greenberg, ed.,
A Treasury of Yiddish Stories
(New York: Schocken Books, 1954), 610.
14. Steiner, "Our Homeland, the Text," 2526.
15. Ibid., 17.
 
Page 153
16. See Scholem,
On the Kabbalah,
137153.
17. Scholem,
The Messianic Idea in Judaism,
294.
18. Bloom, "Introduction,"
Musical Variations,
7.
19. Bloom,
Agon,
291.
Chapter 6. Judaism and the Rhetoric of Authority: George Steiner's Textual Homeland
1.
George Steiner: A Reader
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 2021.
2. Franz Kafka,
The Basic Kafka,
185.
3. George Steiner,
In Bluebeard's Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 81.
4. George Steiner,
Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman
(New York: Atheneum, 1967), 34.
5. Steiner,
Real Presences,
93.
6. Steiner,
In Bluebeard's Castle,
68.
7. Martin Jay,
Adorno
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 17.
8. Steiner,
A Reader,
13.
9. Benjamin,
Reflections,
302.
10. Steiner,
Bluebeard's Castle,
141.
11. Steiner,
Language and Silence,
381.
12. Steiner,
Real Presences,
40.
13. Steiner, "Our Homeland, the Text," 5.
14. Steiner,
Language and Silence,
152.
15. Steiner, "Our Homeland, the Text," 21.
16. Cf. Revault d'Allonnes in
Musical Variations On Jewish Thought:
"Western anti-Semitism, in rejecting the Jew as 'different', perceived at the same time the nomadic character of Judaism and its indifference, even its hostility, to nations and to states" (51). Like Steiner, Revault d'Allonnes believes that genuine Judaism (or at least the most culturally significant form of Judaism) is nomadic; this is why, in his consideration of biblical Judaism, he favors the nomadic form of worship (the Ark carried from place to place) as opposed to the sedentary cult (the Ark enclosed in the Temple).
 
Page 154
17. George Steiner, "A P.S.,"
Salmagundi
No. 5051 (Fall 1980Winter 1981): 252. This comment appears in the afterword to a symposium based on "The Archives of Eden" (5789), a essay in which Steiner argues that the United States is essentially a ''museum culture" which preserves but is incapable of producing the highest types of art and thought. For Steiner, American democratic and capitalistic principles are antithetical to the creative energies required of such production, energies which are born in profound social isolation and may actually be encouraged by conditions of political repression. Thus to endorse both high culture and democratic ideals amounts to the "puerile hypocrisy and opportunism" (87) demonstrated by many American intellectuals. The essay is a good example of Steiner's elitism, which itself becomes a vulgar and all-too-easy epithet for the serious thinker engaged with problems of cultural value. "I asked myself whether my entire schooling and the intellectual and formal values which it embodied had not made the cry in the poem, the desolation in the sonata, come to seem more real, more immediate to my imaginings, than the cry in the street" (
A Reader,
11). The writer of this sentence may well believe in the importance of a cultural elite, but also understands that one can never take the moral validity of such an elite for granted.
18. Steiner, "Our Homeland, the Text," 21.
19. Ibid., 19.
20. Ibid., 22.
21. Ibid., 23. "Our Homeland, the Text," which I consider to be one of Steiner's crucial essays, produced a revealing controversy, as have a number of Steiner's polemical pieces over the course of his career. In his attack on the essay, Lionel Abel insists on just the either/or situation for modern Judaism which Steiner is trying to circumvent:
either
secular Zionism
or
Orthodoxy. Abel is appalled by Steiner's use of the term
text,
associating it with a grotesque parody of deconstruction. What he fails to see are the strong links between traditional Jewish attitudes toward reading and writing and the modern "nomadic" stance which Steiner describes. Abel's position on Israel seems to be totally uncritical, an example of the "sleep of reason" which Steiner justly denounces. See Lionel Abel, "So Who Is to Have the Last Word? (On Some of the Positions Taken by George Steiner),"
Partisan Review
No. 3 (1986): 359371.
22. Anson Rabinbach, "Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse: Benjamin, Bloch and Modern German Jewish Messianism,"
New German Critique
34 (Winter 1985): 81.
23. Steiner,
In Bluebeard's Castle,
140.
24. Rabinbach, "Between Enlightenment and Apocalypse," 123.
25. Steiner,
Real Presences,
232.

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