A Close Reading of Weil's Israel Essay

Christendom has become totalitarian, conquering, and exterminating, because it has not developed the idea of God’s absence and non-activity here below.

It has attached itself to Jehovah no less than to Christ, and conceived of Providence in the manner of the Old Testament.

Only Israel could stand up to Rome, because it resembled it; and this is how the birth of Christianity was marked with the Roman stain before it became the official religion of the Empire.

The evil done by Rome has never been truly redressed.

Simone Weil's conception of God is a God of absence, a God which withdrew from his world to make space for creation. She is heavily influenced by Platonic thought, and in her framework a God who is absent is the precondition for him to offer pure love.

In this paragraph, she is critiquing the idea that Christendom had attached itself to Jehovah to an equal or greater proportion that it had attached itself to Christ. Jehovah is the name for God in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament.

It is important to understand that God in the Old Testament is described very much as a God of presence, an agent in his own world. In Exodus, God inflicted plagues on Egypt, parted the Red Sea, and he actively enters a covenant with the people of Israel. These are the Jewish people which Weil critiques in her essay.

Likewise, Weil was highly critical of Rome and very much saw it as a civilization of force. Indeed, the Jewish people revolted against Rome multiple times, most notably the First Jewish-Roman War between 66-73 CE where the Second Temple was a casualty destroyed in 70 CE. The Bar Kokhba Revolt between 132-135 CE resulted in the Jewish people being banned from Jerusalem; Rome hoped for erasure of the Jewish people, yet Judaism survived without land.

Here is how we can more easily understand her logic in this paragraph:

1. A God of presence and agency enables violence, because divine will can be used to justify human force
2. The Old Testament God is a God of presence and agency
3. Rome was an empire of force
4. Israel resembled Rome (both used force)
5. Christendom inherited violence through theological attachment to this conception of God

Weil claims Israel resembled Rome because both used force, yet the historical record shows asymmetry, not resemblance. Rome had legions and conquered territories; Israel had revolts and survived through diaspora. Rome sought to erase the Jewish people from Jerusalem itself; Judaism endured precisely by maintaining identity without the mechanisms of state power.

If Israel's structural similarity to Rome is based on the mirroring of force, then Weil's 4th premise fails, and with it the explanation of how Christianity inherited the "Roman stain."

She is radically overreaching and conflating the God of the Jewish people with Rome; she is trying to set up an argumentative structure where somehow Christianity's Roman stain is the fault of Judaism.

If this were the case, why would she not write, "and this is how the birth of Christianity was marked with the Israelite stain?"

Naming it the "Roman stain" while blaming Israel requires a specific theological move: Israel and Rome must be equivalent in their essential character, spiritually and metaphysically speaking. The occupied must also be the occupier; the colonized must also be the colonizer.

Her hidden claim here is that Judaism was already Roman in character, which allows her to both claim that Christianity's violence comes from Judaism and that this enabler of violence is a "Roman stain."

Her understanding of Christianity is that it emerged with a Roman stain before Constantine, before imperial adoption, before any Christian held Roman power. These early Christians got it from their Jewish heritage, which resembled Rome, which is why Christianity has a Roman contamination.

This logic only holds if we ignore power relations: who had legions and who had diaspora, who built the Colosseum and who died in it. Weil's conception of force more closely resembles a binary rather than a scale. To her, any use of force marks the user as contaminated. There is no distinction between the violence of the occupier and the violence of the occupied, no difference between Rome's legions and Israel's revolts. Both involve force, therefore both are equivalent, therefore both are Roman in character.

God’s promises to Moses and Joshua were purely temporal, made at a time when Egypt was moving towards the eternal salvation of the soul.

Having refused the Egyptian revelation, the Hebrews got the God they deserved: a carnal and collective God who, right up to the exile, did not speak (except in the Psalms?) to a single soul….

The only pure individuals in the poems of the Old Testament are Abel, Enoch, Noah, Melchisedek, Job, and Daniel.

It is not surprising that little could be expected of such a people, fugitive slaves, conquerors of a paradise which had been fashioned by civilizations in whose labour they had not shared and which they destroyed through massacres.

To speak of an ‘educational God’ in connection with this people is a cruel joke.

In her first sentence, she sets up the following binary:

1. God's promises were temporal and of this world, so this God was materialistic rather than spiritual
2. The Egyptian theology were eternal and not of this world, and so this theology was spiritual

In this sense, she is implicitly stating that Judaism from the beginning was culturally inferior to Egyptian culture: they were more concerned with the material world than the spiritual and eternal world. In her reading of Exodus, the Jewish people abandoned enlightenment of the spiritual realm (afterlife, etc) in favor of the temporal (land, nation). She believes that from the beginning the Jewish people, even before the covenant, were compromised.

But then she escalates: "Having refused the Egyptian revelation, the Hebrews got the God they deserved." What the Jewish people got was inferior because they 'refused' Egyptian spirituality. In her perspective, the Exodus was refusal of enlightenment rather than liberation from slavery.

This is undeniably cruel.

Much of Egyptian spirituality during the time of the Exodus was concerned with the material world: the wealthy and powerful were mummified, and the afterlife was exclusive rather than inclusive. In her eyes, slavery under a superior civilization whose spirituality was exclusive is preferable than freedom with an inferior God.

She claims that Jehovah "did not speak to a single soul", ignoring:

1. God speaking to Abraham (Genesis 12, 15, 17, 18)
2. God speaking to Moses at the burning bush (Exodus 3)
3. God speaking to Samuel (1 Samuel 3)
4. God speaking to Elijah at Horeb (1 Kings 19)
5. The prophetic tradition (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Hosea)

What is deeply frustrating is that Weil even acknowledges counter-evidence with her parenthetical, "(except in the Psalms?)", but does not interrogate her own premises against this evidence.

Of the people she claims as pure, the vast majority of them were not Israelites. Her belief is this: purity exists before the covenant with Israel, outside Israel, or after Israel's national existence is destroyed. The covenant itself, God's relationship with the people of Israel, is what contaminates: Jewishness itself is the problem.

Regarding her claims about them being "fugitive slaves", "conquerors of a paradise", she is reading the most violent parts of Joshua as literal history while dismissing everything else as contaminated, and then she uses that selective reading to indict an entire people.

The phrase "conquerors of a paradise which had been fashioned by civilizations in whose labour they had not shared" is particularly grotesque because:

1. They didn't share in the labor because they were enslaved in Egypt
2. She's criticizing slaves for not having built civilization while they were enslaved
3. Then criticizing them for seeking a land of their own after liberation

This is blaming the enslaved for the consequences of their enslavement, then blaming them again for trying to escape those consequences.

Regarding Joshua, there exists scholarly debate if the written word is literal history or rather a theological description of God's power. The prophets themselves also critique Israel for violence and injustice, and the conquest narratives contain contradictions (Joshua's "total conquest" versus Judges 1's admission that many Canaanites remained).

Moreover, she's using texts written by the Jewish people themselves to argue that the Jewish people are uniquely contaminated. The Hebrew Bible contains its own internal critiques - the prophets condemning violence, the law codes protecting the stranger, the psalms lamenting suffering. This self-critical tradition is part of what makes these texts theologically sophisticated, and this tradition continues orally in modern Judaism.

But Weil reads this entire tradition backwards: she takes the most violent conquest narratives as the essential truth, then dismisses everything else (the prophetic tradition, the psalms, the wisdom literature) as insufficient exception. The parenthetical "(except in the Psalms?)" does all the work: she acknowledges counter-evidence while treating it as negligible.

Warfare of this time was brutal, across the smallest tribes to the greatest powers of Egypt and Babylon, yet when the Jewish people engaged in this violence it was somehow indicative of their otherness in their spiritual failings. Why does she not extend the same structural critiques towards the other tribes and Egypt?

For a thinker obsessed with affliction and the struggle of man, she seems unable to extend that compassion towards the Jewish people.

It is not astonishing that there should be so much evil in a civilization—ours—contaminated to the core, in its very inspiration, by this terrible lie.

The curse of Israel rests on Christendom.

Israel meant atrocities, the Inquisition, the extermination of heretics and infidels.

Israel meant (and to a certain extent still does …) capitalism.

Israel means totalitarianism, especially with regard to its worst enemies.

This section reveals what she was building throughout her argument:

1. Israel resembled Rome (section 1)
2. Israel was contaminated before Rome (section 2)
3. Israel is everything evil in Western civilization (section 3, this section)

The Inquisition was conducted by Christians. Jews were among its primary victims. But in Weil's framework, this becomes Israel's doing: Christianity inherited the "Roman stain" from Judaism, therefore Christianity's atrocities are ultimately Jewish in origin.

The persecuted become responsible for their own persecution.

To her: Israel = atrocities, Israel = capitalism, Israel = totalitarianism.

Totalitarianism's "worst enemies" of the 1940s would include: Jews being exterminated by Nazi totalitarianism, political dissidents being murdered by Soviet totalitarianism, and various occupied people being subject to force.

Through the miracle of language, written during the Holocaust, Weil performed her own act of force: the transfiguration of the eradicated Jew from victim of Nazi totalitarianism to embodiment of totalitarianism itself.

There can be no personal contact between man and God except through the person of the Mediator.

Without the latter, God can only be present to man collectively, nationally.

Israel chose the national God and simultaneously rejected the Mediator; it may, at one time or another, have moved towards true monotheism, but it always fell back on, and was unable not to fall back on, the God of the tribe.

Here, she claims that a personal relationship to God requires Christ. This belief of God's incarnation as Christ is the absolute foundation of Christianity.

She claims that "God can only be present to man collectively, nationally" without Christ, but what about:

1. David's Psalms
2. Moses at the burning bush
3. Abraham's covenant?

A further problem: when did Israel reject the mediator? She so far has analyzed pre-Christian Judaism (Moses, Joshua, the conquest): how can they reject what hasn't happened yet?

She is retroactively punishing Judaism for rejecting Christ before Christ existed.

In her view, "true monotheism" is Christianity: the religion which accepted the mediator (modern Judaism does not accept that Christ was the incarnation of God).

It is important to understand Weil's framework regarding her distaste of collective structures; as we saw in her segment regarding Egyptian spirituality and Judaism, she believes that a collective structure is temporal and rooted in the material world, while individual connections to God are eternal and capable of pure love. Her understanding is that systems inherently corrupt what is portrayed as truly Good, therefore the spiritually superior God is that of absence, a God which exists universally without contigencies. This form of God is radically available to all and, therefore, is personal rather than collective.

Collectives require boundaries (who's in, who's out), require organization (hierarchy, power), require preservation (defense, expansion). All of this involves force. An individual soul can love God purely because it has no territorial interests, no group identity to defend, no power to exercise over others.

When God relates to Israel as a collective (a people, a nation), this relationship is inherently about temporal things (land, descendants, survival) and inherently involves force (defending the collective, maintaining boundaries). Therefore it cannot be about pure spiritual love.

This is the mechanism by which she transfers Christian violence back to Judaism:

1. Christianity became violent (historical fact)
2. Because it inherited the collective God from Judaism
3. Christianity attached to Jehovah, the God who relates to collectives, rather than purely individual spiritual relationship
4. This made Christianity into a collective identity, which inevitably involves force

Any collective concentration of power and exertion of force, like that of the Catholic church, is not Christianity's fault: Christianity, to Weil, inherited this capability of violence from Judaism.

Her frustration with Christianity is that it isn't Christian enough.

Note that modern Judaism claims that all people are descendants of God, and that God loves all people equally, without believing in Christ as the incarnation.

Anyone who has contact with the supernatural is essentially sovereign, for in the form of the infinitely small he is a presence in society which transcends the social order.

But the place he occupies in the social hierarchy is completely immaterial. As for what is great in the social order, only he is capable of it who has harnessed a large part of the Great Beast’s energy. But he can have no share in the supernatural.

In her essay The Great Beast, Weil states that the Great Beast is any collective elevated to transcendence, a false absolute that replaces God. She gives a list of examples of collectives that can become the Great Beast: money, religion, churches, political movements, science and art, etc.

In this sense, she is arguing that:

1. Spiritual authenticity is incompatible with collective identity
2. Judaism is inherently collective (people, nation, covenant)
3. Judaism cannot be spiritually authentic because it cannot transcend the social order
4. Christianity, if properly understood as individual relation with the God of absence, transcends the social order
5. Christianity properly practiced is spiritually authentic while Judaism is structurally incapable of such

Contradiction: Christianity was spread through force, instigated by collectives of power and wealth (see the Catholic church). By her own logic, this should make Christianity a Great Beast as well.

Her answer: Christianity's collective form came from Judaism. The problem with Christianity, in particular with institutional Christianity, is that it 'isn't Christian enough.'

Another contradiction: Weil somehow ignores the fact that someone can practice Judaism individually outside of a collective. Consider two sons: one a practicing Jew, the other American and born into a Catholic household. What is the metaphysical difference between them if they both pray privately to their God?

Moses, Joshuah—that is the share in the supernatural of those who have harnessed much social energy. Israel was an attempt at supernatural social life. No country, presumably, has suceeded better at this kind of thing. Useless to start again. The result shows just what sort of divine revelation the Great Beast is capable of.

Isaiah the first to bring pure illumination.

Israel stood up to Rome because its God, even though immaterial, was a temporal sovereign on a par with the Emperor, and thanks to this Christianity could be born. The religion of Israel was not noble enough to be fragile, and due to its solidity could protect belief in the most elevated.[23]

With this, she has made the following ideas explicit:

1. Isreal's collective form was contamination (explains Christian violence)
2. Israel's collective form was necessary (enabled Christianity's birth)

I personally find this section of hers strange. She is simulatenously:

1. Condemning Israel (Great Beast, collective)
2. Credit Israel (best at supernatural social life, protected elevated belief)
3. Blame Israel (source of Christian violence)
4. Thank Israel (enabled Christianity's birth)

For the Passion to be possible, it was necessary that Israel ignore the idea of the Incarnation. Rome, too (these were, perhaps, the only two peoples to ignore it). But it was necessary that Israel have some share in God. As great a share as possible without being spiritual or supernatural. Exclusively collective religion.

It was because of this ignorance, this darkness, that it became the chosen people. So one can understand Isaiah, ‘I have hardenend their hearts, so that they may not hear my words.’

That is why, in Israel, everything is sullied by sin, as there is no purity without participating in the divine incarnation, so that a lack of such participation should be obvious.

She claims:

1. Israel was chosen to be blind specifically for ignorance and darkness
2. This blindness was necessary so they would crucify Christ
3. This blindness makes them sinful (why is it sinful if they are simply fulfilling what God willed?)
4. The sin is their fault even though God hardened their hearts for this specific purpose

She is setting up an argument that Israel exists solely to occupy that tangential point between the material and spiritual for the sole purpose of crucifying Christ.

It is horrifying that she is writing off the Jewish people as people chosen explicitly to be sinful, blind, and ignorant under a veil of darkness so that they could execute the incarnation of God, especially the fact that this was written during the Holocaust.

Jacob’s struggle with the angel – is not this the great blemish? ‘The Eternal … will do justice to Jacob according to his works. In his mother’s womb did he already displace his brother, and, in his manliness, triumph over a God. He fought against an angel and was vanquished, and here he cries and asks for mercy …’ Isn’t this the great tragedy, to battle against God and not to be vanquished?

Israel. From Abraham onwards (including himself, but excepting some of the prophets), and as though it had been planned, everything becomes sullied and foul, as if to demonstrate quite clearly: Look! There it is, evil!

A people chosen for its blindness, chosen to be Christ’s executioner.

The culmination of her argument so far:

1. Israel was contaminated from the start
2. This contamination was planned
3. The purpose was demonstration (look, there it is, evil!)
4. The culmination was deicide
5. This is the actual Jewish people's chosenness.

The Jews, that handful of uprooted people, have caused the uprootedness of the whole terrestrial globe. Their involvement in Christianity has made of Christendom, in regard to its own past, something uprooted.

The orientation of the Enlightenment, 1789, secularism, etc. have infinitely increased this uprooting, through the lie of progress.

And uprooted Europe has uprooted the rest of the world, by colonial conquest.

Capitalism, totalitarianism, have a share in this progressive uprootedness; the antisemites, naturally, propagate the Jewish influence.

But before Assyria in the Orient and Rome in the Occident uprooted through poison, they had alreardy uprooted with the broadsword.

She now claims:

1. The handful of the uprooted people, the Jews, are responsible the uprootededness of the whole terrestrial globe
2. This applies to Christendom
3. The Enlightenment, secularism, and 1789 take this foundational uprooting and vastly increase it (suggesting uprootedness is a scale rather than a modal state)
4. This uprooted Europe has uprooted the world through colonial conquest
5. Capitalism and totalitarianism share this uprootedness
6. Judaism itself is solely responsible for this propogation of uprootedness, and thus indirectly responsible for the harmful effects of capitalism, totalitarianism, the Enlightenment, etc

She effectively marked the Jewish people as the harbingers of all evils of the modern world.

It was primitive Christianity that fabricated the poisonous idea of progress, through the notion of a divine education that was to mould man and enable him to receive the message of Christ.

This accorded with the expectation as imminent phenomena of a universal conversion of nations and the end of the world. But as neither of these had come about, the notion of progress was, after seventeen centuries, extended beyond the moment of the Christian Revelation.

At this point, it had to turn itself against Christianity.

The other poisons mixed with the truth in Christianity are Jewish in origin. The former is specifically Christian.

The metaphor of a divine education dissolves the individual destiny, which alone matters for salvation, into the destiny of a people.

A standard framework within Christian supersessionism is divine education, or the concept that God progressively taught the people of Israel as a preparation of Christ. In this section, Weil denies it because it contradicts the individual relationship between man and the God of absence. In this section, she denies even this positive reframing of Israel because it values collective salvation over individual salvation. Ontology versus belief.

Christianity wanted to look for a harmony in history. This is the germ of Hegel and Marx. The notion of history as a directed continuity is a Christian notion.

It seems to me that few ideas could be more utterly mistaken.

Looking for harmony in the future, in what is contrary to eternity. Bad union of contraries.

Humanism and what has arisen out of it, is not a return to antiquity, but a development of poisons that are internal to Christianity.

It is supernatural love that is free. In trying to force it, one substitutes for it a natural love. Conversely, however, freedom without supernatural love—that of 1789—is entirely empty, a simple abstraction, with no possibility of ever becoming real.

With this the last section of her essay, let's now take this new content and connect it to the entire logical chain of her essay:

1. Judaism was contaminated from the start, chosen for blindness to execute Christ, the source of all problems
2. Christianity was poisoned by Judaism, and it created new problems (historicism, progress)
3. Modernity is the development of Christian poisons (Enlightenment, humanism, revolution, Marx)
4. The result of the above is capitalism, totalitarianism, all evil

The only escape, in her perspective, is a purely individual and chosen relationship to God, the reception of that supernatural love. What baffles me is that she essentially has equated individual mysticism as the only pure connection with God (which likely is true!), but somehow excludes Jews from practicing that same individual mysticism. There exists no people, population, or nation which inherently excludes its individuals from practicing a personal connection with God. Judaism itself has prayer, contemplation, scriptural study, and mystical traditions.

But in her framework, these don't count because they occur within a Jewish context. The issue, to Weil, is Jewish ontology, not the practice. She has moved from describing practices and beliefs to making claims about essence, about what Jewish people are rather than what they do or believe.

This is a cruel ironic joke, but it's also the logical endpoint of her framework: if collective identity inherently corrupts, and if Jewishness is collective identity par excellence, then Jews cannot escape contamination even through the very individual practices Weil elsewhere celebrates.

For someone who wrote deeply of force, the transformation of individual man into thing, she executed her own force: the transformation of ethnicity (Jewish people) into ontology (incapable of an individual relationship with God, fundamentally blind), or alchemical reduction of man into thing.

Her claims in this essay are inexcusable and do not hold up against scrutiny. The context of when she wrote this makes the essay more horrifying (likewise, she was born into a secular, Jewish family).

EDIT:

A few days after writing this, it became abundantly clear the following:

1. The Christian perspective is that Christ is God
2. The word of Christ is God's word
3. Christ spoke of radical love, mercy, and acceptance. Never violence.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” Matthew 5:9

Any act of violence from Christian institutions is because those institutions themselves are corrupted away from God's word.

It takes an insane level of mental gymnastics to be educated at the ENS and blame Jews for Christian institutions not listening to God's literal words.

"Look! There it is, projection!"