The Guardian-State, State of the Other

1.

The singularity of the historical trajectory of the Jews, taken from a political angle, lies in the fact that political power is there always first conceived as the power of the Other. Exile, galut, is not a mere dispersion — otherwise it would be nothing other than an equivalent of the Greek diaspora. Diaspora is a strictly ecological notion. The Greek diaspora is composed of colonies geographically distant from the mother-City. In this restrictive sense, there have been Jewish diasporas, Jewish entities distant from Judea, such as that of Alexandria before the destruction of the Second Temple.

What distinguishes galut from the diaspora is not only that the territorial center is progressively hollowed out, until in the end only peripheries remain: the body politic, now disseminated, nonetheless continues — despite the defeat, despite the destruction of the Temple, of Jerusalem, despite the loss of its territorial base — to think and to ensure its unity. Galut, consequent upon the destruction of the First Temple by Babylon, and then of the Second by Rome, acquires its characteristics only through the meaning given by the exiles to their defeat and their dissemination. Exile proceeds from the loss of the “Kingdom of Israel” and impels the trajectory of the Jews toward its restoration.

Guilt, loss, mourning, temporary renunciation, on the one hand; expectation and hope for an end to exile, on the other: together these form the field of tension proper to the political condition of the Jews. The exilic condition has this peculiarity: political power, now lost, is henceforth the political power of the Other. The State, “the kingdom,” malkhut, came to signify, in rabbinic literature, foreign power, the power of the dominant, oppressive power.

If one holds to this observation — if all political power is for the Jews the political power of the Other — then the Jews form a collective that is defeated, dispersed and absolutely dominated. Yet, from the very first formulation of the exilic paradigm, this domination is not envisaged in a univocal manner. The prophet Jeremiah takes note of the defeat at the hands of Babylon by laying the fault for the disaster upon Israel; he then announces in advance the coming return of the exiles, and prescribes to the people, in the meantime, a roadmap conforming to the will of God: to settle peacefully in Babylon, to accept their dependence and their submission to the great imperial king, to wish for the peace and prosperity of the foreign Kingdom to which the Jews are now subjected.

Here may be read the matrix of a composition characteristic of exile — including that exile which the rabbis know to be lasting, the one proceeding from the defeat at the hands of Rome. Political power being henceforth that of the Other — of the great imperial king, and, by analogy, of any foreign king — it will have to be accepted, adjusted to, articulated with, in order to survive politically.

2.

This articulation passes by way of a compromise. The Jews must come to terms with the foreign State within which they reside. This composition admits of two angles of description. The first, explicit, is summed up in the rabbinic adage dina de-malkhuta dina (“the law of the Kingdom is the law”), formulated early on in the Mishnah. Here the foreign Kingdom is grasped through the law that prevails within it, the law of the other. For in exile the Jews are confronted with two laws: their own law, that is, the law of Moses (the Torah), the one that God, their king, has prescribed to them; and the law of the foreign kingdom, the one that imposes itself fortuitously in their country of residence, the place where they have washed up in the course of their wandering. The adage affirms that the law of the Kingdom is the law for the Jews as well — on condition that it be compatible with their own law. Here a work of conciliation is set in motion, in order to render compatible obedience to two laws.

But the manner in which the rabbis proceed to this articulation does not reduce to a simple rendering-compatible: the law of the Kingdom is not envisaged as a foreign law that imposes itself from without, by necessity. It is internalized: the Jews act “as if” the foreign law were Jewish law, so that they think the law of the Other — provided it does not contradict Jewish law, provided it meets a few minimal criteria (the existence of courts, for example) — as emanating from themselves; it imposes itself as if it were the product of their own decree. The gesture is singular: the foreign law holds for the Jews through its quasi-fictive internalization. The law of the kingdom imposes itself “as if” it were their law, as if it were their own.

This transaction admits of another angle of reading, for which rabbinic literature has forged no adage, but which one might, for simplicity, sum up by the formula “the king of the Kingdom is the king.” Here the foreign power is grasped not as the power to legislate, to declare the law, but as political authority. The foreign king is, in sum, the king of the Jews — and yet the Jews have but a single king, who is the king of the world.

In exile, then, the Jews are confronted not only with two laws; they are subject to two kings: their king, God, who assures them a protection reputed to be infallible, and the king of the country of residence, fallible, but on whom they effectively depend. They must therefore organize their double submission and their double allegiance, without betraying either the King of Kings (God) or the territorial king whom rabbinic literature often calls “king of flesh and blood.” God has, to be sure, driven the Jews from His domain, from the land He had promised them, and in so doing He has also destroyed the Temple, His own residence. He has thus delivered His people into the hands of foreign kings; but He too, now without a fixed abode, accompanies them in exile and watches over them. Exile is an expulsion into a hostile world, but God momentarily entrusts His people to the foreign king, who has the obligation to preserve them. The Jews therefore act “as if” the foreign king were their king, because his domination over the Jews is willed by the king of the world, who stands above all territorial kings. When and if the foreign king protects the Jews, he fulfills the function that falls in principle to God. This is why God and the foreign king share the title of king, of melekh. Here too, it is “as if” the king of the country of residence were the king of Israel. He is so in the strict measure in which he assumes the protective function that belongs in principle to God alone. The power of the Other is therefore internalized, but never immediately accepted or incorporated, since the foreign king is the king of the Jews by hypothesis, and on a supplementary basis. That the foreign king be the king of Israel must be continually verified empirically.

3.

This ambivalence toward the State, toward the power of the Other over Israel, is redoubled by an originarily ambiguous relation to the idea that Israel might acquire a power over itself, as soon as this power is not immediately that of God over His people. Witness the narrative, abundantly commented in the rabbinic tradition, of the advent of the kingdom of Israel. In the Book of Samuel, kingship emerges from the people’s distrust of God, since, seized with fear before its enemies, the people demands of the prophet Samuel a king over Israel (“that we may be like all the nations”). Now, to give oneself a king signifies ipso facto to doubt that God is one. To ensure one’s own security, to ensure the means of one’s own survival, then passes inevitably by way of betrayal. God nonetheless grants the people’s request (“hearken unto the voice of the people,” He says to Samuel), while recalling that He alone is the king of Israel (“it is I who reign over them,” “it is I whom they have rejected,” He specifies — and not you, the prophet). The narrative of the advent of kingship, of Israel’s power over itself, is therefore haloed with reprobation. The power over oneself is granted and reproved, criticized and conceded.

In his Königtum Gottes, published in 1932, Martin Buber describes the advent of kingship (of the State) as an unfortunate bureaucratization of the charisma of Moses. On the strength of this episode, Buber fixes the equation between State, nationalism and violence. Even power over oneself, in sum, is a foreign power. Israel’s power over itself, the State for itself, appears, then, always as a faulty imitation of the power of the Other.

4.

In exile, the “foreign Kingdom” — which rabbinic literature ranks under the type “Edom,” the pagan, then Christianized, Roman Empire, the warlike Empire par excellence — is indeed synonymous with malevolent foreign power, the power of the Other that dominates Israel; and yet, such is the framework within which the Jews must endure, so that the foreign power must be grasped positively, whether under the angle of the power to legislate or under the angle of the power to protect. The transaction arranges a quasi-autonomy of legislation and a quasi-heteronomy of politics, and will materialize in the Jewish community, the kehila.

The exilic condition is nonetheless stretched taut by the hope that the power of the Other over Israel will come to an end, that Israel will be restored in the future. This hope goes by the name of messianism — the hope of liberation from the foreign yoke and of ingathering under the authority of God, king of Israel, in Jerusalem. Messianic hope sketches an ideal situation in which Israel is no longer confronted with two laws nor under the yoke of two kings. There follows an ambivalence of the Jews toward the State, “the State of Caesar,” which is always the State of the Other, and a thwarted relation to the acquisition of a power over oneself — the power to dispose of oneself “like all the nations.”

In exile, the State is thus always the State of the Other, and it is a State for itself, a State of the Jews, only under the modality of the “as if”: fictive, but nonetheless real in its consequences. In the Book of Samuel, the people acts as if God were not its king — knowing that He is, but without accepting all the consequences of it, namely that He reigns over the people. Direct theocracy — or, in subversive terms, the anarchy of Israel, which is power over oneself by oneself without any mediation — is there questioned, valorized and yet fissured. And in exile, the State is by definition the State of the Other, but, here too, without accepting all the consequences of it: it is as if the foreign king were the king of the Jews, on condition that he assent to God exclusively being the king of Israel, that he be, in sum, no more than a secondary function of the divine power.

5.

It follows that the advent of a State for itself, of a Jewish State, that would be a mere replica of the State of the Other but for itself, poses a problem difficult to surmount, once the exilic framework is postulated. There takes shape, then, a dilemma from which we have not emerged. If the State for itself is incompatible with the exilic condition, then the advent of a Jewish State marks the end of exile. It is perhaps not a definitive restoration, but a decisive stage on the path of redemption. But if the advent of a Jewish State does not abolish the exilic condition, it is because this State is not power over itself in the way the State of the Other is. But then, what can a State for itself possibly mean if it is not a replica of the State of the other nations?

This question arises only in the modern political context organized by the right of peoples to self-determination. It holds only within this modern configuration marked by the advent of popular sovereignty, when sovereignty no longer falls to the king but to the people. In this context, the State of the Other must be understood as the State of a people — of a people capable of governing itself. The people, set in order, then called a “nation,” possesses an instance of representation, which refracts its unity, and an instrument of action, which prolongs its will to act upon itself and outward. The State-people proceeds from the triumph of the principle of the right of peoples to self-determination, which has issued in a world composed of nation-states. In such a world, the emancipation of the Jews signified, for the first time, that the State of the Other is also, completely, the State for itself, the State of the Jews become citizens. In the age of emancipation, the Jews were, abruptly or by stages, invited to enter into the body of the nation, to consider that the State-people was their own, that they were politically indistinct from it. The State was henceforth theirs not “as if,” not fictively, in conformity with the traditional transaction, but really. The Franco-Judaism and the German-Judaism born in the nineteenth century were expressions of this revolution: the Jews, hitherto facing the State of the Other, confronted with the foreign State, now enter into the body of the nation, so that the State which refracts the unity of the people has become their own. Here we touch on the end of the exilic paradigm, which postulates the existence of a quasi-body-politic, separate, residing within the foreign country. The land of alienation becomes the land of liberation, hence the markedly messianic tonality that runs through the celebration of this modern arrangement.

6.

It is precisely within this same configuration, where the world is ideally composed of nation-states, that the State for itself, the State for the Jews, becomes synonymous with State-people, with Jewish State, the nation-state of the Jews. Political Zionism seemed to inflect a version of this general aspiration onto the particular case of the Jews. This second revolution was taking shape on the basis of the diagnosis of the failure of the first. This is why emancipation and Zionism both run counter to the exilic paradigm. Franz Rosenzweig compressed into a striking formula what he regarded as mistaken options: “The Jew is in the State because the State cannot be in the Jew.” Put otherwise: the Jews are in the State, which is always the State of the Other, because the State can never be Jewish — unless it betray what is proper to a body politic that by essence does not cast itself into a State form.

Is this to say that the historical advent of a Jewish State, named the State of Israel, is an imitation of the State of the Other? It would be so, if it were a nation-state of the Jewish people, if it were the alignment of the Jews on the European political paradigm. But it is not so if it is, as Theodor Herzl conceived it, a solution to the problem of the danger that continues to hang over the people despite emancipation. Herzl seeks not the best solution, an emancipatory solution, but the least bad — the one that places the Jews out of reach of persecution. The placing-out-of-reach of those who experience the danger is in no way equivalent to that “auto-emancipation” that Leon Pinsker called for. A State destined for political asylum is a Guardian-State.¹ It does not share the traits of the nation-state, the ideal solution forged by European political modernity. For the people here overflows the framework of this State; it therefore remains exterior to this State, which is not destined to represent it, still less to incarnate it. The State fulfills that function which, in exile, falls to the State of the Other: namely, the protection of the Jews. In this sense, the State of Israel is not an imitation of the European political paradigm: whatever the regime adopted there by those who are its citizens, it remains the State of the Other under the rubric of the protective function — a function called to be fulfilled, in exile, by some instance or other, be it a Jewish State, be it a misnamed State.