The Absent Jew

Israel inherited an extraordinary archive of names it did not produce. Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Arendt, Rosenzweig, Buber and Levinas emerged elsewhere, often before Israel itself, within European and American constellations of Jewish life. Yet after 1948 something peculiar became possible: a state that appeared later acquired the power to measure their Jewishness retrospectively according to their relation to itself.

Arendt is therefore repeatedly tested through Zionism, Eichmann and her attitude toward the Jewish state. Freud can be recovered as a great Jewish mind or pushed toward the category of European assimilation. Marx remains especially inconvenient. The litmus paper appeared after the substance and then began behaving as though the pH scale had existed all along.

This is not simply appropriation. What interests me more is the museum mechanism. The absent can be classified. His place can be fixed, his name annotated, his Jewishness defined as diasporic, assimilated, universalist, Zionist, anti-Zionist or controversial. The absent does not answer the curator.

The problem becomes even more interesting when, beside the canon of Marx, Freud and Arendt, we place another canon that Western culture long refused to recognise as an equally serious production of thought. For centuries Poland, Lithuania, Galicia and the lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were sites of intense Talmudic, halakhic, mystical and Hasidic intellectual production. Kraków, Lublin and Vilna were not provincial warehouses of tradition but centres in which distinctions, interpretations, disputes and entire forms of Jewish life were created.

Moses Isserles in Kraków, the Vilna Gaon, Lublin, Przysucha, Kock and Ger belong no less to the history of thought simply because their work took place in a different textual genre. The Western canon solved this difficulty conveniently: Kant produced philosophy, a rabbi commentary; Hegel concepts, a Hasid mysticism. An institutional decision was presented as an intellectual hierarchy.

Israel inherited this world as well. It did not create Remu, Vilna, Kock or Ger any more than it created Freud or Arendt. It may preserve manuscripts, sustain yeshivot, maintain living dynasties and call all of this Jewish heritage. One elementary distinction, however, must remain intact: inheritance is not authorship.

This is where the museum becomes a particularly useful figure. A museum does not need to falsify anything. It only needs to assign a place. It can honour Arendt without allowing her questions to disturb the present self-understanding of the state. It can remember Buber while leaving his political proposals safely in the past. It can preserve Kock as heritage without admitting Kock as a claim upon the present.

The name remains while the claim disappears. The absent is preserved precisely because he can now be safely located.

Then suddenly a case appears that breaks this elegant machinery. In August 2026, The Times of Israel, citing Channel 13, reported that Rabbi Yaakov Aryeh Alter, leader of the Gur Hasidic dynasty, met Yoeli Landau from the Satmar milieu in connection with the arrests of Haredi draft evaders. The report included a comparison of Israel to North Korea and discussion of appealing to international institutions against state policy.

It hardly matters here whether the comparison is reasonable. Its very excess makes the situation philosophically revealing. Gur is not an imported foreign tradition accidentally present in Israel. It is a living continuation of one of the great lines of Polish Hasidism. A heritage that can be presented as part of Jewish history now concentrated in Israel suddenly begins to speak in its own voice and reveals that it need not recognise the state as its historical fulfilment.

This is where the convenience of the museum ends. An old manuscript from Ger can be exhibited. A living rebbe can answer the curator.

For this reason, the Haredi conscription dispute is more than a conflict over military service. It exposes a question no collection of Judaica can solve: who has the right to interpret the continuity of Jewish history? The state that has gathered an enormous part of its living heritage, or traditions that existed long before that state and do not necessarily regard sovereignty as the highest category of Jewish existence?

There is, however, a more brutal test of Jewishness than any state classification. A contemporary Jew may remain distant from Israel, critical of Zionism, secular, religious, diasporic, assimilated or indifferent to national categories, yet none of this protects him from being recognised as Jewish by an antisemite. The recognition may be instantaneous and physical: a name, a face, a synagogue, a mezuzah, a kippah, an accent, a family history or merely someone else’s decision can be enough. In that moment, Jewishness ceases to be a matter of institutional definition and becomes an imposed condition of vulnerability.

This creates an uncomfortable asymmetry. Israel may debate who properly belongs to the Jewish collective, which forms of Jewish life are central or peripheral, and which intellectual traditions count as authentically Jewish. The antisemite requires none of these distinctions. He may recognise Jewishness faster, more decisively and with more immediate consequences than the institutions claiming to protect it. The state can dispute identity; violence can impose it.

This is why Jewish existence cannot be reduced to recognition by Israel. The harshest recognition may come from precisely the opposite direction. The Jew may discover that his Jewishness has been made real for him not by a state, a rabbinical authority or a museum of national memory, but by the person who decides that he is Jewish enough to attack.

Any political order claiming to represent Jewish history should therefore confront a disturbing possibility: it may possess less authority over the lived reality of Jewishness than the hostility from which it claims to offer protection. A state may classify Jews after the fact; antisemitism can identify them in advance.

Israel has every right to remember Marx, Freud, Arendt, Remu, Kock and Ger. It may study them, argue with them and consider itself an heir to many of their worlds. The problem begins only when the heir starts behaving like the author of the will.

The final irony is almost perfect. A museum can assign the dead their place, but a living heir of Polish Hasidism can reject the label, challenge the curator and call his state North Korea. At the same time, a Jew living far beyond Israel may be recognised as Jewish with brutal certainty by an antisemite long before any Israeli institution has anything to say about his identity.

At that moment the question is no longer how Israel preserves Jewish history. It becomes much harder: can Israel endure a Jewish history that speaks in its own voice and a Jewish existence whose reality does not depend on Israel’s permission to be Jewish?

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig