Carl Schmitt, Amalek, and the Jewish State

On Politics and Enemies

Schmitt, Kahn, and “The Autonomy of the Political”

Carl Schmitt, Nazi Kronjurist and legal philosopher who launched a thousand books of political theory in the early 00’s, argued for “the political” as a realm of life independent from other areas such as morality and beauty. So while some might say that politics—as the realm of life dedicated to questions of how we work together as a group to promote individual and collective flourishing—is just an extension of morality, Schmitt insists that the two are unrelated. Schmitt’s definition of “the political” appears in an aptly named book, The Concept of the Political: “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (The Concept of the Political, 26).

For Schmitt, the friend/enemy distinction is the fundamental political principle. We can imagine an “us”—we can say “we”—because there’s a “them.” It doesn’t even matter who the “them” is or why they’re our enemy, all that matters is that they are our enemy. In fact, having a reason might be a problem, because then the friend/enemy distinction would be secondary to some other concern. If “they” were the enemy because they wanted “our” money, then they could stop being our enemy if they found some other source of money, or we would even find a monetary arrangement where the differences between our two groups could blur and fade away (this is both the dream and nightmare of international politics in the Post-War and Cold War eras, for what it’s worth). In practice, the distinction would always be fleshed out and explained somehow, but in the pure Schmittian vision, the enemy is the enemy simply because the state—or the sovereign—decided it so. Should be clear why he was a Nazi, yeah?

Paul Kahn, a legal philosopher, political theologian, and prolific author working at Yale University has spent a lot of ink rehearsing Schmitt’s arguments for a democratic, liberal context, particularly that of the USA. His Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (2011) does that most literally, retracing the footsteps of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922; in German). In a slightly earlier work with a slightly broader aim, Putting Liberalism in Its Place (2005), Kahn returns Schmitt’s “autonomy of the political” and restates Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction with a slightly different emphasis. Contrasting his neo-Schmittian conception of politics with liberal political philosophy’s idea of the state as promoting life, he says

Rather, the political begins when I can imagine myself sacrificing myself and killing others to maintain the state. The modern state has fully arrived not when it defends me against violence, but when it conscripts me into its armed force. It fully reached the limits of its own self-conception with the appearance of nuclear weapons of mass destruction. In the age of mutual assured destruction, we are effectively all conscripted from the moment of birth. (240–241)

“Killing others to maintain the state” certainly sounds like Schmitt, but the lion’s share of the Kahn’s definition is dedicated to self-sacrifice, not killing. Self-sacrifice is a key theme for Kahn, appearing throughout this and other works. In this context, what matters is how it twists Schmitt’s idea: Instead of being about the decision to kill for the state, politics is about readiness to be killed for the state. It’s about being willing to die—and to die by virtue of being a citizen. If a citizen gets killed because of a tragic accident, or even a violent but purely personal confrontation, that’s not political sacrifice. But if someone dies anonymously as their entire state is vaporized, then they died as a citizen much more than they died as an individual. This is what Kahn has in mind when he references the threat of nuclear war. Similarly, if someone is killed because of their apparent citizenship, they have died as a citizen as much or even more than they died as an individual.

“Threat” is a key word here too. Kahn doesn’t think a citizen actually has to sacrifice their life in order to be a citizen or to participate in the political, much as loving relationships don’t require actually sacrifice at every moment—only the willingness to sacrifice—and Avraham didn’t actually have to sacrifice Isaac (the book has a great discussion of this theme in Bereshit, and Kahn’s Out of Eden is next on my reading list). The Cold War was an era when many people imagined themselves under constant threat of nuclear attack—an attack directed at them by virtue of their citizenship, rather than by virtue of anything about them as individuals. So while Schmitt put a premium on the state as threatening others, for Kahn there’s much more significance to being threatened by others. The “us” needs a “them” who threatens the “us”—and thereby makes us “us.”

Amalek as The Enemy

So what does all of this have to do with Amalek? Well, Amalek is just such an enemy. There are a variety of metaphorical explanations of Amalek that have developed over the centuries, but the basic description of the attack by Amalek in Shemot 17 is a simple, violent attack against one people, by another, with no explanation given for why. This theme of pure enmity gets picked up in a variety of texts, but perhaps the most famous in this day and age is that of R. Soloveitchik (citing his father). Most people are familiar with it from a note in Kol Dodi Dofek (more on that below), but here it is in the version from Days of Deliverance:

Who is Amalek? He… is man-Satan—man who personifies total evil, to whom immorality becomes a norm. The Almighty has declared an eternal war on Amalek, throughout the generations (Ex. 17:16). The final defeat of Amalek will take place only when the King Messiah arrives. Amalek is not a race, nor is it a people, a nationality. I once heard from my father, of blessed memory, in the name of my grandfather, that any people or any group committed to destroy the Jewish people is to be classified as Amalek… Something else was discovered by the Jew. Of course, Amalek or man-Satan hates everybody. He is the enemy of man, and enjoys causing misery and injury to all people. Yet, man-Satan or Amalek is particularly preoccupied with the Jew. He hates the Jew more than anybody else. In hating the Jew, in causing suffering and pain to the Jew and inflicting harm on him, Amalek finds his greatest delight. No matter what economic-sociopolitical program man-Satan adopts—socialist, capitalist, fascist, progressive, reactionary, agnostic-secular, or religious-clerical—the hatred of the Jew is his central preoccupation. (15–16)

Amalek, is an eternal idea of a certain human collective, an identity that settles on concrete individuals and groups by virtue of their hatred of Jews. Who this is obviously changes throughout history, and the actual features of these individuals/groups may vary wildly—“ socialist, capitalist, fascist, progressive, reactionary, agnostic-secular, or religious-clerical”—but this doesn’t change the fact that they are Amalek. As he remarked in a speech a decade earlier, in 1946, “the Jewish Question will not be solved through social or political changes” (The Return to Zion, 87–88). As long as they hate the Jews for being Jews—as long as they bear enmity toward the Jews—they are Amalek.

The passage in Kol Dodi Dofek makes the same point, but takes us in an important direction.

At a meeting of Mizrachi (the Religious Zionists of America), I repeated, in the name of my father (of blessed memory), that the notion of “the Lord will have war against Amalek from generation to generation” (Exodus 17:16) is not confined to a certain race, but includes a necessary attack against any nation or group infused with mad hatred that directs its enmity against the community of Israel. When a nation emblazons on its standard, “Come, let us cut them off from being a nation so that the name of Israel shall no longer be remembered” (Psalms 83:5), it becomes Amalek. In the 1930’s and 1940’s the Nazis, with Hitler at their helm, filled this role. In this most recent period they were the Amalekites, the representatives of insane hate. Today, the throngs of Nasser and the Mufti have taken their place. (79; trans. David Gordon)

Here, in a speech from 1956, R. Soloveitchik reiterates the point, but ties it to concrete historical instances of “Amalek.” The first is Hitler and the Nazis (and Kol Dodi Dofek is many things, but perhaps chief among them is “a work of Post-Holocaust Theology”), and the second is “Nasser and the Mufti”—the president of Egypt and the clerical leader of Jerusalem at the time. In 1956, when the speech is given, they represent a threat to the Jews, but in a manner different from the Nazis. The Nazis threatened (as killed) Jews who lived in diasporic communities, while in 1956, what R. Soloveitchik called “the Arab Amalek” (The Rav Speaks, 33) threatens the Jews who are citizens of the Jewish State.

There’s a slippage here: Being threatened for being a Jewish and being threatened for being a citizen of Israel are not the same. They’re related, but the relationship between them is unclear and debated (every debate about definitions of Antisemitism and its relationship with Anti-Zionism is essentially about this). For R. Soloveitchik, this slippage isn’t an accident. The relationship between the Jewish People and the State of Israel isn’t an accident. The State of Israel is the nation state of the Jewish People and the two are inherently tied together. To hate the Jews is to hate the state, and vice versa. This slippage both enables and manifests in his discussions of Amalek, where the enemy that threatened the Jews has become the enemy that threatens the Jewish State (and this is the case in nearly all his discussions of Amalek).

This helps clarify the dynamic of self-sacrifice in many of R. Soloveitchik’s religious Zionist speeches, such as those in The Rav Speaks. Kol Dodi Dofek, more well known than the texts in The Rav Speaks, could be read as painting a picture of the State of Israel as protecting Jewish lives in a manner similar to the liberal, life-supporting political philosophy Kahn critiques. The Rav Speaks is much more celebratory when it comes to the topic of death—specifically, self-sacrifice (and this is a broader theme in R. Soloveitchik’s writings, of course). For example, of secular Zionism, he writes (and I quote at length):

all parties built altars, from the religious Zionists to the Mapai and Mapam — and they brought sacrifices upon them. (The sacrifice of the Jew is always favorably received by God, even if the one who offers the sacrifice does not admit Divine purpose.) Even in the early years, before the Arab pogroms and the War of Independence, when the watchmen stood guard in the night and when the treacherous bullet of an Arab cut off more than one blossoming life, or when malaria ravaged young bodies — all the builders of the land built sacrificial altars. During the pogroms in Tel Chai and Jaffa in the year 5681, and in Hebron and other settlements in 5689; during the period of self-restraint (Havlaga) in the 30's, when Jewish blood flowed throughout the length and breadth of the land of Israel; when the Arab bullet and the Arab knife did not distinguish between the Hebron Yeshiva students and leftwing kibbutzniks, even as Hitler's fiery furnaces did not discriminate between Hasidim and Bundists —the number of sacrificial altars increased. In the War of Independence, above all, when the youth of Israel demonstrated superhuman heroism and self- sacrifice, when graves of young boys and girls fallen in battle dotted the land, the entire Jewish settlement erected that great altar whereby the ancient possessory act of Abraham in respect of the land of Israel and the Lord of Israel was repeated.

Yes, even the new secular settlement fulfilled heroically this second eternal acquisition of the land, and acquired rights not only in the land of Israel, but also in the Lord of Israel — howbeit indirectly and unconsciously. Therefore we believe that our enemies will in no way be able to undo the second acquisition, effected via altars and sacrifices, and that the land of Israel will remain ours for eternity. (21–22)

He also writes, in an oft-quoted passage, about how the very flag of Israel is consecrated through sacrifice:

If you ask me, how do I, a talmudic Jew, look upon the flag of the State of Israel, and has it any halachic value? —I would answer plainly. I do not hold at all with the magical attraction of a flag or of similar symbolic ceremonies. Judaism negates ritual connected with physical things. Nonetheless, we must not lose sight of a law in the Shulchan Aruch to the effect that: "One who has been killed by non-Jews is buried in his clothes, so that his blood may be seen and avenged, as it is written: "I will hold (the heathen) innocent, but not in regard to the blood which they have shed" (Joel 4, 21)." In other words, the clothes of the Jew acquire a certain sanctity when spattered with the blood of a martyr. How much more is this so of the blue and white flag, which has been immersed in the blood of thousands of young Jews who fell in the War of Independence defending the country and the population (religious and irreligious alike; the enemy did not differentiate between them). It has a spark of sanctity that flows from devotion and self-sacrifice. We are all enjoined to honor the flag and treat it with respect (139)

Jewish self-sacrifice, apparently, consecrates the flag of the Jewish state. But it’s not just that. As R. Soloveitchik states explicitly, it is in the attacks of enemies against the State of Israel that holiness which derives from the Jewish People begins to inhere in the State of Israel.

When we see how all those who hate our people concentrate their anger and wrath upon the State of Israel (and it is really directed against the Jewish people), which has become the target for their shafts and calumnies; and again, when we consider the fact that the very existence of the State of Israel disturbs the peace of mind of Nasser, Khrushchev, Nehru and many of the Christian spiritual leaders, there can be no better indication that the State embodies great symbolic powers and that in it, despite the layer of secular dust that covers it, inheres an inner sanctity that springs from the eternal sanctity of Knesset Yisrael. (172)

We’ve here arrived at the full Kahnian-Schmittian vision of sacrificial, friend/enemy political theology. The attacks of Israel’s enemies confirm that it is the Jewish state —the “them” generates the “us”—and therefore it is holy. R. Soloveitchik’s religious nationalism emerges in full force as national identity and sacrality turn out to be one and the same—and to inhere in the state. Notably, people often associate R. Soloveitchik with a sort of “halakhic Zionism,” where the State of Israel has a purely instrumental significance (surely one shouldn’t sacrifice for it) which derives purely from the way it enables expanded halakhic observance. The picture here is clearly much richer in terms of the significance of the State of Israel, including the way it serves as the embodiment of the Jewish people—or perhaps, rather, the People of Israel.

Israel at War

We’ve thus arrived at a conception of nation, state, and theology as inextricable ways of thinking about politics and of existing in the world (and see Putting Liberalism in Its Place, throughout)—fused by the fact of being threatened. The average citizen thinks little of the state on a day-to-day basis, but that changes when suddenly the state is attacked. The average Jew might not think much about their Jewishness (numerically, Jews with a really thick identity are in the minority, to my knowledge), but dying “al kiddush hashem” doesn’t take that into account.

One implication of this dynamic is that the Antisemitism/Anti-Zionism problem really is insolvable. While the two are clearly both conceptually related and conceptually distinct, any threat against the Jewish state will always scan as a threat against Jews, and potentially vice versa. The State of Israel projects an image of itself as protector of Jews around the world (whether they agree or not), and many diaspora Jews maintain a sense that if Antisemism were to rise to intolerable degrees in their home country, they could flee to the State of Israel.

Secular Zionist discourse doesn’t allow for it, but to Religious Zionists any threat against the Jewish state will likely scan as an attack on/affront against God as well.

The importance of being threatened for political identity is hard to ignore in Israel. Existing under threat—and even under attack—has always been an important part of Israeli political discourse. As we have seen, this sort of dynamic may be key to political identity (and to Kahn, it absolutely is). In popular Israeli discourse, one of the best examples of this may be the phrase “במותם ציוו לנו החיים”—“In their deaths, they commanded us to live.” Fallen soldiers and victims of anti-Israel violence become martyrs, but also commanders, with all the weight of their sacrifice coming to bear on continuing and protecting our way of life. Similarly, in the anti-Judicial Reform protests last year, many adapted this phrase to more narrow and contested purposes: “במותם ציוו לנו הדמוקרטיה”—“In their deaths, they commanded us [to affirm, or perhaps, defend/fight for] democracy.” Self-sacrifice, in this instance, supports not just Israeli life in general, but a specific vision of it, in opposition to another, contesting vision.

We have also seen that being threatened is only one half of a dynamic—being threatened comes along with threatening others. It’s not hard to imagine that constantly seeing ourselves as under threat will lead/leads Israel to feel it important to threaten others. While not entirely unrelated to actually being under threat or not, this sort of question would also be caught up in issues of national identity, which will affect perception independent of the reality of threats. To put it directly: Liberal political theory assumes that the ultimate end-goal of the state is to move past a state of war. The picture proposed here assumes the opposite: (the threat of) war is an important part of any state’s self-identity. If this is the case—of if only this is the case—then what hope can there be for an Israel at peace?