The Jew After Otherness

A Metacritique of Modern Judaism

There is no more sacred category in the postmodern moral imagination than that of the Other. It is invoked with reverence, defended with zeal, and guarded as the guarantor of all ethical meaning. To be Other is not merely to be different, but to be invested with a kind of secular sanctity, the unassailable dignity of the marginal, the displaced, the wounded. Since the mid-twentieth century, “Otherness” has become not just a conceptual tool, but a liturgical core of liberal self-understanding: a moral totem through which the modern subject flatters himself as just, inclusive, and cosmopolitan. So charged is the occult power of Otherness that the modern atheist professor may come to honor ancient religious texts only when he discovers that God was merely a cipher for “the Other.” But like all such totems of the modern soul, this too is a post-Christian idol, a theological substitute of Christ born of Christian guilt and Enlightenment abstraction. It is a conceptual Golden Calf: immobile, static, lifeless. A representation emptied of all that is real. It flatters the ego while demanding nothing from it. It does not bind us to the Real; it shields us from it.

It is important to remember that what we call “the Other” today is not a timeless moral category, but a philosophical artifact with a specific origin, trajectory, and set of mutations that trace back to Hegel. The very word “Other” is itself a modern invention. It did not exist in this form before Hegel, who transformed it from a mere designation of difference into a dialectical engine of consciousness, history, and Spirit. From there, two things happened: the term fractured into multiple philosophical lineages, essentialist, functionalist, existential, and political, each layering its own metaphysical ambition onto it, and the Jewish figure came to be the incarnation of this philosophical artifice.

Thus, this essay begins with a simple, if heretical, proposition: the dominant cultural conception of Judaism today, canonized in academic, political, and communal discourse alike, is not a retrieval of something ancient but the fabrication of something modern. It is not the Judaism of Sinai or Babylon, nor even of Cordoba or Vilna, but of Berlin, Paris, and New York. It is the Judaism of Hegelian philosophy, Enlightenment ambivalence, liberal sanctimony, and post-Christian longing. It is a Juda-ism: an -ism in the modern sense, constructed in the hurricanes of nineteenth-century European thought and codified through the traumas of the twentieth. Like all modern -isms, it is a symbolic technology—a hollow abstraction fashioned in the aftermath of metaphysical collapse, seeking to fill the void left by the retreat of transcendence. And at its core lies a single, all-encompassing predicate: the Jew as Other.

This version of modern Jewish identity, recast within the semantic field of Otherness, is structured around a constellation of derivative tropes: the Jew as exile, the Jew as diasporic, the Jew as victim, the Jew as prophetic conscience. The Jew as countercultural herald, as a critique of power, as a therapist of Christian repression, as a feminine foil, as the homosexual antithesis to the white, Christian, heterosexual philistine. These tropes did not emerge from Jewish thought or halakhic tradition; contrary to the hallucinations of antisemite and his mirror image, the Jewish Studies’ professor, they weren't born in the Beit Midrash but from European elite anxiety, revolutionary fantasy, and post-Enlightenment neurosis.

The romanticization of exile, the idealization of diaspora, the worship of critique, the sanctification of victimhood—these were not indigenous affirmations of Jewish selfhood, but Western post-Christian, often anti-Christian, projections: symbolic overlays imposed upon the Jew by a society desperate not to understand the Jew, but to, once again, narcissistically narrate itself. Or more precisely, to invent itself, to find an excuse to murder its parents, and stage its own secular redemption. In the modern post-Enlightenment order, the Jew was elevated not as a bearer of covenant, law, or a great culture and tradition, but as the exemplary figure of suffering without sovereignty, the displaced universal. He was the victim for whose sake the parents had to be murdered or, at minimum, banished. In short, the Jew was recast as the ideal Other: a secularized Christ-figure through whom culture might seek moral absolution, symbolic reconstitution, and ethical redemption, all pre-scripted in advance, a conception that has become the ultimate philosemitic trap, threatening to succeed where antisemitism failed. (This trap worked particularly for Jews interested in self-worship, a human tragedy, but not knowing that their self-worship idol is actually a deceptive surface covering the self-worship idol of others. A falsehood masquerading as another falsehood, all portals to hell.)

And now, this construction, always fragile, always borrowed, has entered its crisis. For in the twilight of Western metaphysics, postcoloniality has risen not merely as a politics, but as a rival postmodern theology: one that no longer even attempts to gesture toward meaning but hungers for domination over the meaningful. Its highest prize is not land, nor law, nor even liberation—but moral centrality. And it demands to be the only recognized Other. Where once the Jew stood as the sanctified symbol of suffering, he is now displaced by newer sacrificial icons: the Palestinian, the postcolonial subaltern, the indigenous avatar. These figures now claim exclusive rights to victimhood, demanding not just recognition but liturgical primacy, the New Jews of the New Jerusalem. In this postmodern symbolic economy, Jews are not only decentered, they are condemned for ever having occupied the sacred space. Otherness, that already false idol in which they sought fragile refuge, now turns upon them with priestly wrath. And so collapses the symbolic architecture of the most potent and prestigious version of modern, secular Jewish identity (at least for our most educated and privileged): always external, always abstract, and now finally revoked. This essay is an attempt to get you to say with me: Good riddance!

This metacritique is not a polemic against Judaism as a lived faith. Neither Hasidut nor Chabad, nor the denominational expressions of rabbinical Judaism, Yahadut, fall within its scope. I do not possess the qualifications, nor do I presume the audacity, to pass judgment on such complex matters. What follows is not a rejection of the covenant, but of Juda-ism: the secular, elite, Western, post-Enlightenment construct that, especially since the mid-twentieth century, has supplanted covenantal life with conceptual abstraction. This is not a critique of the local rabbi, but of the professor; not of the prayer book, but of the seminar. It is not a rejection of tradition, but a rebellion against the modern false idol and pagan moral absolute of the Other. And it is, above all, a call to recover the voice that once said, not “you are the Other,” but: “If you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, you shall be My treasured possession among all peoples.” (Exodus 19:5)

What follows traces the genealogy of this modern Juda-ism through four conceptual regimes: the essentialist (German Idealism), the functionalist (Marxism), the ontological or existential (Heidegger and Sartre), and the contingent (Zionism). With the partial exception of Zionism, each reframed the Jew not as a subject of covenant, but as a mirror in which the modern West reflected, and mythologized, its own deep spiritual wounds. Parallel to this trajectory was the separate development of the highly abstract figure of ‘the Other’ itself—der Andere in German—first formulated by the architect of conceptual modernity, Hegel. In the early twentieth century, these two symbolic technologies, Juda-ism and the Other, began to collapse into one another, pouring the conceptual content each had accrued over a century into the vessel of the other. Out of that fusion emerged a new idol: an ever more abstract, fetishized, and disembodied concept of Otherness, a concept of concepts, a reification thrice removed. The task before us is to chart the genealogy and theogony of this philosophical pantheon of conceptual idols.

The Invention of Modern Idols

To understand how the idol of Otherness was forged—and how so many learned Jews came to accept and inhabit it—we must descend into the wreckage of modernity’s metaphysical collapse, into the ruins of our own Babel. It is there, amidst the shattered remains of theological certainty and the collapse of transcendence, that Juda-ism emerged: not as covenantal inheritance, but as the aestheticized residue of an orphaned Church in search of new gods. We are entering a symbolic archaeology with multiple layers and sites. There are the philosophical strata where Juda-ism was first constructed as a category, essential, alien, metaphysical. There are the separate but interwoven layers where “the Other” was abstracted and sanctified, beginning in the speculative metaphysics of Hegel. And finally, there are the postcolonial and postmodern strata, which built their own idolatries using the salvaged ruins of these earlier symbolic orders. These are not parallel developments but both sequential and recursive, mutually constitutive ones, each feeding the next, each building new altars upon the debris of the last. Together we can say they correspond to the inner logical sequence of “modernity” and its distinct phases. To help the reader with this very difficult abstract narrative, we can simplify its map into five sites:

• German Idealism (especially Hegel) understands the Other as the dialectical opposite, that which the Self must negate and sublate to become universal.

• Marx retools this into a functional opposition, the Jew as capitalism’s ideologue or mirror, not metaphysically other but historically necessary.

• Heidegger and existentialism mutate it into an ontological-existential horizon: the Other is not opposed to the Self dialectically, but reveals Being differently (or fails to).

• Postcolonialism and French theory reify the Other into a moralized static essence, fetishized difference.

• Zionism reconfigures it as historically contingent, something that can be disavowed or overcome by attaining concrete sovereignty.

The modern concept of Judaism, what we here call Juda-ism—did not emerge organically from within the internal life of the Jewish tradition. It was not a continuation of halakhic inheritance, nor a development rooted in the covenantal structures of Jewish spiritual practice. (Unless, of course, one counts the Enlightenment-born denominations and political hybridizations, Reform, Zionist, and others, as themselves already symptoms of the same rupture.) Rather, this Juda-ism was born of crisis: a European metaphysical crisis, marked by the collapse of Christian universals, the disintegration of sacred authority, and the exhaustion of Enlightenment rationalism. Out of this wreckage rose the modern regimes of historicism, nationalism, and secular humanism—and with them, the modern symbolic Jew. This new “Judaism” was not born in the synagogue but in the seminar, not at the feet of Rabbis but in the salons of post-Christian Europe, where intellectuals and artists, foot soldiers of the end of Hisotry, began to reimagine the Jew not as a bearer of divine election, but as a metaphysical placeholder: a figure, demonic or salvific, through whom Europe could narrate its own spiritual meltdown.

This symbolic figure, the Jew as Other, was never a product of Jewish self-description. It was a function of European and, later, American projection. The Enlightenment’s promise of emancipation came not with genuine integration, but with a condition: that the Jew become a metaphor, an abstraction. As political equality was granted in law, cultural assimilation was demanded in spirit—but that spirit was itself already in crisis and melting. The Enlightenment could not decide whether the Jew was to be euthanized or spared, absorbed or instrumentalized, dissolved or preserved. In that ambivalence was born a new ideal: the Jew not as person, but as figure, a literary signifier, infinitely interpretable, infinitely instrumentalizable. (This is one of the most definite features of post-Enlightenment language, and what, following the flawed methodology of Edward Said, David Nirenberg mistakenly projected backward as a timeless habit of mind.) As the theological regime that had structured European self-understanding for centuries gave way to a rationalist regime of abstract conceptual representations, the Jew was asked to relinquish his status as religious symbol and assume a new role: the post-religious vessel of history’s fulfillment, the cipher of Christianity’s death. This meant, inevitably, one of three symbolic fates: his erasure as Christianity’s originator, his condemnation as Christianity’s subversive enemy, or his idolization as Christianity’s repressed ethical conscience. The choice often depends on how Christianity itself is interpreted, whether as the symbol of pre-Enlightenment absolutism and superstition, the emblem of European civilizational grandeur, or the source of psychic and sexual repression in the modern Western soul. That is, like Goethe’s Faust, the Enlightenment philosopher, and his academic descendants, fell in love with, or recoiled from, conceptual figures whose very appearance he had stage-managed.

But this modern symbolic Jew—this Juda-ism abstracted into metaphor of essence—did not arise merely through a secular rehashing of Christian antisemitism. It was the product of a new discursive regime, one that deployed fragments of older symbolic material but reconstituted them within a wholly different epistemic order. The Enlightenment did not inherit antisemitic folklore so much as it aestheticized it, de-theologized it, and integrated it into its emergent secular categories: historicism, humanism, and the moralized sublime. Classical European figures like the Wandering Jew, once a symbol of divine curse, were absorbed into Romanticist literary and philosophical discourse, not to be condemned, but to mean: to carry the burdens of alienation, sublimity, pariahdom, and homelessness that modern intellectuals could no longer express through Christian categories. The figure of the Jew became a semiotic solvent: a medium for narrating Europe’s metaphysical disintegration, political anxieties, and existential self-doubt.

In this new symbolic economy, the Jew could serve almost any purpose. For Kant and Hegel, the Jew came to represent lovelessness and unfreedom, the stunted subject who clung to dead texts, ritual formalism, and a heteronomous law that prefigured Christianity’s own enslavement to tradition. To denounce the Jew was to exorcise Christianity’s own origins. For Lessing, by contrast, the Jew became a figure of religious toleration, the noble foreigner who, like Islam, could help rescue Christianity from its dogmatic slumber and reveal its deeper ethical truth. In economic thought, the Jew was recast as the face of capitalism, the embodiment of abstraction, trade, usury, calculation, everything the new order both required and reviled. In revolutionary thought, he was either the humanist messiah who would liberate mankind or the subterranean conspirator who would destroy civilization. At every point, the Jew was made to symbolize whatever the age could not resolve in itself.

What emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries was not merely a set of ideas, but an aesthetic genre with both anti- and philo-Semitic variations. Juda-ism, in the hands of modern thought, became a representational technology, infinitely plastic, endlessly applicable. (Again, it is here that Nirenberg, following Said, makes his crucial error of projecting this representational technology backward. Not only is Juda-ism a modern symbolic technology, but even its scholarly “critique” is entangled in the ideological circularity it fails to question. Said’s theory of Orientalism was itself a transference, a conceptual grafting of the structure of the Enlightenment’s antisemitism onto the West’s representation of Islam. But in doing so, Said de-Judaized and ideologically repurposed what had originally been an analysis of Christian-Jewish Enlightenment discursive relations. Nirenberg, ironically and unknowingly, attempted to smuggle this abstraction back into Jewish studies, unaware that its symbolic structure had already been severed from the very Jewish content it once aimed to explain. He innocently thought he was repurposing Said’s ‘original’ Orientalism thesis for the needs of Jewish studies and instead he compounded post-Enlightenment errors upon errors.) Juda-ism, as genre, could absorb contradiction without breaking, house ambivalence without resolution. It was not a continuation of theological antisemitism, but something epistemically new: a symbolic infrastructure into which the Jew could be inserted, not to be encountered, but to be used. The symbolic Jew was no longer a theological warning, but a metaphysical tool.

The result, especially as its philosemitic forms that will be widely adopted, including by assimilated Jews themselves, was not a Jewish thought or religion but an intellectual instrument. Juda-ism, as it emerged in modern thought, was less an evolution of Jewish tradition than a symbolic device fashioned to ritualize our own crisis. In a culture losing faith in God but still longing for moral gravity, the Jew became a surrogate for the sacred: not to be believed, but to be deployed. No longer required to convert, the Jew was reconfigured to signify, wounded, exilic, ungrounded, standing in for whatever we sense we have lost. He became useful, so long as he remained suspended in abstraction: not too near, not too real, not too sovereign. What had once marked him for exclusion—his statelessness, his dislocation, his separation from Christian teleology—was now transfigured into ethical theater. In this mode, Juda-ism did not preserve the Jewish covenant; it staged its absence. It allowed Europe to sentimentalize what it had discarded, to rehearse spiritual seriousness without obedience, and to perform ethical depth without transcendence.

This symbolic regime gave rise to a peculiar dialectic: the Jew as hated projection and the Jew as redemptive projection, antisemitism and philosemitism as mirror phenomena. Both operated within the same aesthetic grammar, shaped not by Jewish reality but by the needs of our gaze. The ideological distance between the gentile philosemite and the antisemite thus turns out to be thinner than advertised. Both imagined the Jew not as a soul before God, nor as a vessel of command, but as an instrument in the moral drama of the West.

In one register, the Jew was cast as corrosive: a destroyer of organic community, a manipulator of symbols, a parasite on Christian and national forms. In the other, he was idealized as a conscience figure: the carrier of ethical dislocation, the stranger whose very estrangement testified to universal truth. The revolutionary messiah and the revolutionary saboteur were two faces of the same fantasy. The Jew as the eternal outsider who elevates the moral imagination mirrored the Jew as the eternal alien who corrodes its foundations. The Jew as bearer of history’s redemptive arc mirrored the Jew as conspirator against all rooted order. Even chosenness itself, long theologically understood as covenantal obligation, was transmuted into a racialized metaphysics: either the burdened gift of moral genius or the fatal mark of tribal arrogance. In this structure, philo-Semitism did not oppose antisemitism; it completed it. (A distinction must be made: in the contemporary American context, philosemite is often used not as an abstract quality but as a descriptor of a general friendliness towards Jews. In that sense, I’m a philosemite, and that is not what is being discussed here.)

This dialectical projection, of the Jew as either threat or savior, did not remain external to Jewish life. Over time, it was internalized, having been secularized yet further mythologized, by those Jews most exposed to Western high culture: intellectuals, artists, reformers, and scholars whose social mobility was conditioned on their capacity to inhabit and eventually reproduce the dominant metanarrative. These were not merely Jews living in modernity; they were Jews drafted into its semiotic regime. To enter the Western canon, they had to first accept its categories. And thus, with varying degrees of discomfort or zeal, they began to inscribe themselves into the script assigned to them: as prophetic critics of power, diasporic humanists, and ethical witnesses to the failures of nationalism and religion—a lineage that runs from Heine to Hess, from Adorno, Arendt, and Steiner to Horkheimer and Judith Butler, culminating in the last Jewish intellectual: Edward Said.