This panel examines the ways Jewish and antisemitic mystical writing engages with politics, apocalypticism, and theology. The papers explore how the threat of Judeo-Bolshevism was used to shore up a mystico-fascist apocalypticism in Romania, the complexity of Gershom Scholem's anti-ideological turn in Jewish mysticism, and how Sabbatian kabbalists deployed shock and abjection as a theological method.
Apocalyptic themes formed a central part of the rhetoric of The Legion of the Archangel Michael (1927-1941), Romania’s interwar mystico-fascist movement. Key to the Legion’s propaganda was the Satanically conceived threat of “Judeo-Bolshevism” from the East. Although the Legion’s founder and Căpitan, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, was executed by King Carol II in 1938 and the Legion was ultimately crushed at the hands of Marshal Ion Antonescu in 1941, the notion that the apocalypse was at the gates and that only an ultranationalist government with a supreme leader at its head could save the nation continued to be mobilized by Antonescu’s genocidal personal dictatorship. I argue that the success of this apocalyptic propagandizing to the Romanian people heavily relied on mythical ideation. In addition to the self-evidently operative myth of “Judeo-Bolshevism” itself, I specifically analyze the workings of the politico-theological myth of divine kingship within this context of mystico-fascist apocalypticism.
This paper investigates Gershom Scholem's positing of an “anti-ideological turn in Jewish mysticism”. I illuminate Scholem’s thoughts on the matter by way of an appraisal of the relationship between nominalism and antinomianism in his work. Scholem assessed the mystical function of nomoi (laws) having sought to peel off and separate an ideological, discursive, temporal, and providential (nominalist) structure from the bare bones of law. By seating law below language, despite Scholem’s best attempts to argue that there is “no such thing as mysticism in the abstract”, he essentially permitted a messianic and apocalyptic isolation of the mystical law from any temporal and providential context.
This paper historicizes the power of feelings of shock at the center of antinomian expressions of sacred eros from Sabbatian to modern New Age kabbalistic sex magic. Donovan Schaefer argues that feeling functions as “a mode of creating, transferring, and consolidating space, community, and power.”[1] Medieval kabbalistic myths and rituals of sacred sexuality cultivated an oceanic feeling, unifying the practitioner with the ten sefirot and divinity itself, in the contex of a particularistic society. However, the myths obscure the homoerotic and even incestuous relationships required to make them work. Early Modern Sabbatian kabbalists engage in a sort of emotional-theological edgeplay, creating a sense of sacred shock as they expose and expand these undercurrents with explicit images of homoeroticism and incestuous, necrotic, no-future models of generation. These new emotional repertoires of sacred shock powerfully enact new theologies of self, cosmology, and universalist models of kinship incorporating religious others.
| Tyson Herberger | tyson.herberger@usn.no | View |