‘Would that they forsake Me but observe my Torah’*—Midrash and Political Authority

DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.1995.tb02025.x
Date01 July 1995
Published date01 July 1995
‘Would
that they forsake
Me
but observe
my
Torah’*
-
Midrash and Political Authority
Gillian
Rose
7
Preface
While this paper focuses on issues of Midrashim and Judaism as politics rather
than ethics, it offers fundamental bearings on the conceptualisation of law. It
proposes a model of doing politics as politics: ‘the risk of action arising out of the
negotiation of law,’ a revision of Hannah Arendt’s discursive and antinomian idea
of constitution-making. With the help of Pocock’s civic republicanism,
I
launch a
study of the Judaic body politic, a topic massively neglected in mainstream
scholarship, which has been promoting the Hebraic paradigm. This study draws on
the
political
experience and wisdom of the Jews as embodied in their civic
consciousness. It is
constitutional
rather than religious literacy that is here
explored.
Introduction
The argument of this paper falls into three parts. In the first part,
I
argue that
Hartman’s introduction of the idea of Midrash into literary culture does not
constitute a form of prevalent anti-Hellenic Hebraism, but is a call for what he
names ‘religious literacy,’ which would introduce
discriminations
necessary to
address the crisis of authority across the range from method in literary criticism to
ethical and political theory. This distinguishes Hartman’s
Judaica
from post-
metaphysical
emblemtisings
of Judaism as method and as ethics
-
all of which
concur in presenting Judaism as undertaking
politics
by
other means.
In the second
part of the paper I argue that Midrash in Judaism
is
not politics by other means, but
politics per se.
Drawing on Pocock’s
Machiavellian Moment
to reunify the source
of the double dilemma of republican political authority
-
coercion and
participation or
virtzi
and virtue
-
I show that rabbinic Judaism’s self-
understanding as the politics of the three Crowns
(Ketarim)
displays a doubling of
the double dilemma. For the double of Judaic polity has always been inserted
within the double of the imperial or ‘host’ polity. Midrash, the exegesis of the
three Crowns, becomes the way in which this insertion is negotiated and figured.
Biblical, Mishnaic and Talmudic Midrash may be compared in this way and their
plasticity may be contrasted with modem, post-Napoleonic Judaic responses to the
radically changed configuration of political authority.
I
begin to explore this
contrast in the third part of the paper.
I
conclude that any revival of Midrashic
address to political authority demands what Hartman originally called, in
The
~
*Jerusalem Talmud,
Haggigah
1:7.
A
brief glossary of terms appears as an appendix at p
485
below.
?Professor of Social and Political Thought, Department
of
Sociology, University of Warwick.
This paper was first presented at the Conference,
Culture and Critical
Form:
Reading
after Geofiey
Hartman,
8-
9
May
1993,
University of Warwick.
I
would like to thank Peter Larkin for the opportunity of
presenting this paper and for providing much relevant material; and Rowland Cotterill for delivering the
paper, for correcting
it
and for much support. With thanks to Vassilis Lambropoulos for helping me
formulate the Preface.
@
The Modern Law Review Limited 1995 (MLR 58:4, July). Published by Blackwell Publishers,
108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF
and
238
Main Street, Cambridge,
MA
02142,
USA.
47
1

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