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Authors: Norman Finkelstein
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representation." 54 In effect, Bloom explains why Jews have remained the People of the Book. While it is a commonplace in the study of Judaism to observe that the Book replaces the homeland for diasporic Jewry, Bloom notes in addition how the Second Commandment
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is repeatedly circumvented, if not violated, due to the thousands of years of psychohistorical pressure imposed upon the Jewish sensibility by the conditions of exile. Scholem, in "Revelation and Tradition," posits "new historical circumstances" as the original impetus for the development of Oral Torah and the tradition of commentary, including the canon-formulating, protective injunction of the Pirke Aboth to put a hedge around the Torah. In Scholem's analysis, revelation, as encoded in Written Torah, undergoes this elaborate transformation due to what he call , perhaps disingenuously, "the spontaneous force of human productivity." 55 In Bloom, this force, filtered through Freud, becomes the anxiety of influence, a psychic condition and a condition of textual production perfectly congruent with wandering and exile. The fear of transgression cannot maintain the imagination within the confines of Holy Scripture; like Jacob wrestling the angel, the great Hebrew agon about which Bloom writes so eloquently, Jews must always struggle with precursor texts and win their blessing. This blessing, as befits Revault d'Allonnes's nomadic people, "achieves a pure temporality, and so the agon for it is wholly temporal in nature": the text, wherever it may wander, will be preserved in time. 56
When we recall that the ubiquitous revisionary ratios apply to both sacred and secular canons, we can understand why such categories as agon, exile, wandering meaning, and so forth, expand to become part of Bloom's universal, albeit Hebraic critical machine. The Yahwist and Blake, Luria and Freud, no matter how remote from each other historically and culturally, all share the same psychological and rhetorical patterns, resulting in the same stance . What they know (gnosis) is the struggle for priority and the strong self in a text that becomes davhar, holding firm against the past and imposing itself upon the future. This is the only compensation for primal loss, regardless of who partakes of it. Cynthia Ozick is thus sadly mistaken when she accuses Bloom of turning literature into an idol; as Bloom would respond, a weakening process of idealization is at work when Ozick declares that, in the Jewish view, "there is no competition with the text, no power struggle with the original, no envy of the Creator." 57 Bloom's conception of Judaism, which, as I have implied, is an extreme version of Scholem's, disdains any such narrative of continuity and faith: all modes of writing, not merely those of secular literature, are equally "idolatrous"; and any commentary, whether it is a kabbalistic reading of the Torah or a Wordsworthian reading of Milton, constitutes a violation or break as much as a simple carrying
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over. As we have observed, Bloom is no deconstructionist, but the wanderings of his revisionary system come as close to a deconstruction of Jewish tradition as one might have while still appropriating its salient features.
In Kabbalah and Criticism, Bloom makes the following comparison: "Like the Gnostics, the Kabbalists sought knowledge, but unlike the Gnostics they sought knowledge in the Book." 58 Mileur comments: "For Bloom, Kabbalism in its more orthodox aspect represents revisionism as the defense of tradition; in its more radical, Gnostic aspect, the Kabbalah represents an attempt to move beyond the tradition to envision something new, something elsewhere." 59 These two passages indicate the simultaneous attraction and repulsion in Bloom's relation to the tradition of Jewish textuality; indeed, he is so profoundly in the grip of these antithetical forces that he has made it an important part of his definition of Judaism. Bloom's Gnostic desire to be elsewhere
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is repeatedly circumvented, if not violated, due to the thousands of years of psychohistorical pressure imposed upon the Jewish sensibility by the conditions of exile. Scholem, in "Revelation and Tradition," posits "new historical circumstances" as the original impetus for the development of Oral Torah and the tradition of commentary, including the canon-formulating, protective injunction of the Pirke Aboth to put a hedge around the Torah. In Scholem's analysis, revelation, as encoded in Written Torah, undergoes this elaborate transformation due to what he call , perhaps disingenuously, "the spontaneous force of human productivity." 55 In Bloom, this force, filtered through Freud, becomes the anxiety of influence, a psychic condition and a condition of textual production perfectly congruent with wandering and exile. The fear of transgression cannot maintain the imagination within the confines of Holy Scripture; like Jacob wrestling the angel, the great Hebrew agon about which Bloom writes so eloquently, Jews must always struggle with precursor texts and win their blessing. This blessing, as befits Revault d'Allonnes's nomadic people, "achieves a pure temporality, and so the agon for it is wholly temporal in nature": the text, wherever it may wander, will be preserved in time. 56
When we recall that the ubiquitous revisionary ratios apply to both sacred and secular canons, we can understand why such categories as agon, exile, wandering meaning, and so forth, expand to become part of Bloom's universal, albeit Hebraic critical machine. The Yahwist and Blake, Luria and Freud, no matter how remote from each other historically and culturally, all share the same psychological and rhetorical patterns, resulting in the same stance . What they know (gnosis) is the struggle for priority and the strong self in a text that becomes davhar, holding firm against the past and imposing itself upon the future. This is the only compensation for primal loss, regardless of who partakes of it. Cynthia Ozick is thus sadly mistaken when she accuses Bloom of turning literature into an idol; as Bloom would respond, a weakening process of idealization is at work when Ozick declares that, in the Jewish view, "there is no competition with the text, no power struggle with the original, no envy of the Creator." 57 Bloom's conception of Judaism, which, as I have implied, is an extreme version of Scholem's, disdains any such narrative of continuity and faith: all modes of writing, not merely those of secular literature, are equally "idolatrous"; and any commentary, whether it is a kabbalistic reading of the Torah or a Wordsworthian reading of Milton, constitutes a violation or break as much as a simple carrying
Page 44
over. As we have observed, Bloom is no deconstructionist, but the wanderings of his revisionary system come as close to a deconstruction of Jewish tradition as one might have while still appropriating its salient features.
In Kabbalah and Criticism, Bloom makes the following comparison: "Like the Gnostics, the Kabbalists sought knowledge, but unlike the Gnostics they sought knowledge in the Book." 58 Mileur comments: "For Bloom, Kabbalism in its more orthodox aspect represents revisionism as the defense of tradition; in its more radical, Gnostic aspect, the Kabbalah represents an attempt to move beyond the tradition to envision something new, something elsewhere." 59 These two passages indicate the simultaneous attraction and repulsion in Bloom's relation to the tradition of Jewish textuality; indeed, he is so profoundly in the grip of these antithetical forces that he has made it an important part of his definition of Judaism. Bloom's Gnostic desire to be elsewhere
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