Dreaming of Michelangelo by Biemann Asher

Author:Biemann, Asher [Biemann, Asher]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012-01-18T21:00:00+00:00

Epilogue

The story these pages set out to tell has come to its end, almost abruptly, as history sometimes does, without resolution, without adding up. We stand outside its unfinished walls, and we might wonder: What does it all mean? What did this story really tell us? Or, for the reader reading with a purpose: what can I take from it?

I have called this book a meditation, not because it elevates us to a different state of consciousness, but because it took synthetic liberties, which belong to storytelling more than to historical analysis; and because meditations can linger in the middle without foreseeing their conclusion. There is no essential novelty this book could claim, no radical argument that will alter the way we look at Michelangelo or at German Jewish history, or at modern Jewish thought. In a certain sense, its themes, tensions, and turning points have always been there, so familiar to us that we seldom stop to wonder or to meditate about them. In another sense, we scholars by profession and certificate are rarely satisfied with the familiar, because we are professionally distrustful of stories, dreams, and sentiments. And yet, it was the sentiment of sentiments—love—that wove together our meditations, and dreaming was the work of imagination that added to its story. We took seriously the theme of love to write about the history of German Jews, for this is how German Jewry wrote about itself. But we refused to accept this love as romantic passion, refusing also to depict modern Jewry under a constant state of weakness turned to power only by the efforts of all variants of Zionism and Jewish nationalism becoming, must needs, political. These efforts, I believe, need no justification and remain, despite their imperfections, justifiable for all the known reasons, but especially for their desire to restore a state of normalcy and an existence without ambiguity and shame. But the same efforts took place also in the apolitical, even in the non-Zionist, or not-yet Zionist sphere, affirming the possibility of normal, though not selfless, life outside a land of its own, the possibility, then, of diaspora as the homeland of multiple, at times contradictory, allegiances.

If we recall Erich Auerbach defining the modern human condition as the “problem of man’s self-orientation” and “task to create for himself a place to be at home without fixed points of existence,” then we can venture to understand how this affirmation constituted in effect a self-orientation that viewed itself as borderless while at the same time not without a need to be “at home.” It is here, in this process of self-orientation, in the creation of a home without fixed points, that works of love cast their tenuous web of elective affinities, whose knots and spaces are tied by imaginary, yet, as love itself, world-creating, “ands.” No syntheses, but cultural liaisons are established through the works of love. Cultural eroticism, as I hope these pages have intimated, differs, then, from the intellectual fantasy of cosmopolitanism, as it differs from

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.