While many of the most read anarchist influencers of the last two centuries have had Jewish backgrounds, such as Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Murray Bookchin and of course Noam Chomsky, there was also anarchist influence in the Zionist movements before and at the time of the foundation of the modern state of Israel, and many religious scholars argue there is a lot of anti-authoritarianism and antinomianism in the very foundations of Judaism itself. Rabbi Hayyim Rothman as a scholar has a background in Jewish political theology and the philosophy of Baruch Spinoza among other things, and he is the right person with whom to discuss this extremely fascinating topic of Jewish anarchism.
Shalom Hayyim! How are you feeling at the moment, in this January of 2022 (Shevat of 5782)? Are you currently writing this in Israel?
Hi Antti, I’m feeling good. I’m glad that you reached out; one of the most interesting parts of this research project I’ve taken up is that I’ve started hearing from people all over the world. You are actually the second person to contact me from Scandinavia, which really surprised me. I’m sure that is largely due to my ignorance about the Jewish community and interest in things Jewish there, but due to my ignorance or not, this connection was a pleasant surprise. I am writing from Israel; I have lived in Jerusalem for three years now. I am a resident of the historical Nahlaot neighborhood (really, an amalgamation of neighborhoods), which is in the city center.
You have an academic background from Boston College and Bar-Ilan University (Ramat Gan, Israel), mostly focusing in political theology. How did you become interested in these two academic fields, politics (anarchism in particular) and theology?
I’ve been involved in theological study for the majority of my life at this point and, in part, my engagement with it probably speaks to my work on anarchism in particular. I always had a religious sensibility. Going back to my high school years, I wrote on religious topics in my school newspaper (I probably still have clippings somewhere). Near the end of my high school career, these religious tendencies began to assume a more definite shape as I began to seriously explore my Jewish heritage.
I had a very intense intellectual and spiritual relationship with a rabbinic mentor with whom I remain close, though at this point as dear friends, not as teacher and student. I think that a good student is a person who absorbs his teacher’s spirit and then carries it on in a unique direction. I think that to do this in a serious way, one has to be able to engage the tradition independently and directly, to read Jewish texts in the original without relying on others to translate or to explain them. Other than helping you to develop basic skills, the best a teacher can do is tell you what matters to them and inspire you to take hold of the matter yourself and discover what matters to you. So I did, and over the following few years taught myself Hebrew and Aramaic so that I could read the classics on my own; Talmud, Kabbalah, Philosophy, Hasidism, and so on.
I did a few short stints in various yeshivot, but never stayed because all I really wanted to do was read on my own and that is just not how these institutions work. Eventually, though, I went on to enter the MA program in Jewish philosophy at Yeshiva University in NYC and it was at this point that my private intellectual journey came to intersect with academia.
My time at YU coincided with the Bernie Madoff scandal, which hit that institution very hard. Partially out of concerns related to funding, and also because I was looking for opportunities to integrate my Jewish studies into a broader sphere of intellectual discourse, I ended up deciding to leave, and this brought me to Boston College, where I did my doctoral work. Ultimately, I wrote my dissertation on Spinoza, whose writings spoke to me personally and also represented a sort of liminal space between Jewish thought and general philosophy that I was interested in exploring. Reading him through the lens of contemporary post-marxist appropriations of his thought — people like Negri and Hardt, Balibar, Deleuze, and so on — I essentially argued that both for historical reasons and also following the direction of his thinking itself, it makes more sense — if one is going to put Spinoza to use for radical political theory — to adopt an anarchist frame.
My interest in anarchism also goes back many years. Like many rebellious teens, I avidly read Emma Goldman and Peter Kropotkin. However, I sort of let that interest slide into the background of my thinking until this period. I think it began to bubble up again at this time for two reasons, one having directly to do with my research and one more to do with things I observed happening in the world that I found troubling. My efforts to frame Spinoza in anarchist terms ended up revealing to me a whole tradition of radical Spinoza-interpretation. Jonathan Israel’s "Radical Enlightenment" was obviously part of that. But Israel was mainly writing an intellectual history of Europe at large; as I dug deeper I came across a whole treasury of radical Jewish texts profoundly influenced by Spinoza — many of them written by radicals trying in some way to recapture a sense of spiritual grounding for their political views. This discovery is what led me to explore the intersection of Jewish theology and radical Jewish thought, anarchism especially, in greater detail, ultimately leading to my book, "No Masters".
It was at this time that I taught myself Yiddish, which is the language most of this material is written in and, therefore, the language I mainly use in my research. I don’t consider myself a Yiddishist, and I don’t actually like Yiddish aesthetically (for this reason I am only marginally connected with Yiddish studies circles), but I consider the intellectual wealth it contains to be a largely untapped treasure.
More broadly, I became interested in this synthesis as a way of cutting across ideological lines. For many reasons, some more obvious than others, Jewish communities in the United States are divided not only along religious lines but also political ones, liberal Judaisms and secular Jews being associated with the left, orthodoxy being associated with the right. This is generally understood as perfectly obvious outgrowth of their religious views. But I think that wherever something is so painfully obvious that it doesn’t even seem worthwhile examining, there and precisely there the most powerful suppression is at work. It is obvious because it is made to be obvious. If you dig deeper, you see that things are quite a bit more complicated.
My work, here, is basically an effort on my part to show that the lines are a lot more blurry than they are made out to be. One hand, an orthodox Jewish left is not only conceivable, but actually existed. On the other hand, the story of modern Jewish radicalism isn’t complete when it tells only of secularism, anti-clericalism, and aggressive cosmopolitanism without taking into consideration the religious resonance of justice writ large and the ways that modern Jews tried to respond to this resonance outside of normative institutional frameworks — that is, in ways that did not fit neatly into any denomination of liberal Judaism which, for many, simply constituted alternate orthodoxies.
You are also an ordained rabbi. Can you shed some light on your past and present when it comes to religion itself?
I addressed some major aspects of my personal journey above, but to respond to the specific question of being a rabbi, I would say it is part of my do-it-yourself attitude toward spirituality. I never had the intention of serving in a formal rabbinic position. I was mainly interested in deeply engaging the sources of Jewish law and feeling that I had the ability to research questions on my own and come to a halakhic conclusion that felt authentic and well-grounded. Rabbinic ordination in the “orthodox” world in which I move is a process that mainly involves familiarity with the legal tradition. It is about knowledge of and commitment to Jewish practice.
Considered from this perspective, I suppose I would respond to the question as follows: I think that reaching out for God, or to the divine, is universal and that various groups have developed different techniques for doing it. Jewish practice is the way that Jews reach out. I put the word “orthodox” in quotation marks for a few reasons. I believe in the importance and saliency of Jewish traditional practice and the orthodox Jewish world is, in my opinion, the only one in which the rank and file take it seriously on a day-to-day basis. In this respect, I move comfortably within this world. However, I have serious reservations about orthodoxy as a movement largely because I believe it has rendered the tradition far more rigid and centralized than it was less than a century ago — both in practical and ideological terms.
My present from a religious perspective? I have found the past year very challenging personally, for many many reasons. In the past, I would say that my primary mode of spiritual work has been intellectual in character; I read deeply and felt deeply as mediated through what I read. In terms of Spinoza’s or Maimonides’ “intellectual love of God,” I put emphasis on the intellectual part. In response to my personal challenges, I’m now trying to put more emphasis on the love part.
People today usually associate anarchism with thinkers and activists like Mikhail Bakunin, but tend to brush off his anti-Jewish views when confronted with them. Why do you think there is so-called antisemitism in the first place in some of the anarchism of the last two centuries? Has this been a part of socialist and labor-culture in general, because of apparent misinformation and finger pointing?
I agree with you that people tend to brush off the “sins” of their role models. Anarchists just as much as others. I think that the other side of this tendency is to brush off the figure because of his or her sins. An intellectually engaged Jew realizes at a certain point that most thinkers in the West and East (excluding the far East) alike were, until very recently, anti-Jewish to one degree or another. You simply cannot read widely without stumbling upon antisemitic sentiments, veiled or blatant, scattered in all directions. One must learn to read both critically and generously. That is to say, one must both acknowledge the prejudices of the author without apologizing for them while, at the same time, allowing the author the leeway to convey whatever insight they may have. There simply isn’t any other way forward.
In this sense, I think that people like Bakunin and Proudhon, among many other lesser lights, were antisemitic largely because they were raised in a world in which holding Jews and Judaism in disdain was practically akin to breathing. It wasn’t something you thought much about; it was just a natural part of thinking in general. In one respect though, I think that the existence of the Jews raised uncomfortable questions for radicals in particular because of the cosmopolitan nature of these movements. I think that the cosmopolitan ideal has always been fraught because its universalism naturally becomes oppressive; we can speak of “humanity” in general, but the reality is that there never was such a thing.
Humanity has developed in the form of a large number of unique and non interchangeable cultures. To create “humanity” in general, you have to destroy these particular humanities, which turns a beautiful ideal like cosmopolitanism into a brutal ideological force.
I think that when radicals spoke of “humanity” what they really meant, though without realizing it, was a secularized Christian Europe; from this perspective, Jews were a stumbling block; they were not secularized Christians but something else, they didn’t seem to fit what “humanity” was supposed to be like.
In sum, I see radical and anarchist antisemitism, insofar as it arises from this ideological source, as a reaction to the way that Jews exposed the ethnocentric core of classical cosmopolitanism. And, by the way, it was largely radical Jews who innovated the correction to this problem. Namely, a view of human solidarity based on a pluralistic view of humanness. In the language of the time, it was expressed in “national” terms, but I think that the core insight was that it was necessary to develop a cosmopolitan ideal which could accommodate and celebrate many different equally valid ways of being human.
I do not think that antisemitism in socialist and labor-culture in general is mainly because of misinformation and finger pointing. When it comes to Israel, yes, I think that there is a lot of misinformation, or better put, ideologically skewed information that does not adequately address the real complexity of what has happened and is happening here. The conflict is turned into a black and white story, and that just isn’t real. It never has been and it still isn’t. I strongly believe that Jewish Palestinian coexistence is both possible and desirable, and also that this is conditioned on mutual recognition of national rights to a shared homeland. I do not think that most radical groups share this vision but — dismissing Jewish tradition going back thousands of years and also conveniently ignoring the fact that Jews were treated as aliens everywhere else — instead, cast Jews as intruders in a land not their own with no fundamentally legitimate claim to it.
I think that this failure is not about misinformation, but rather that it comes from a longstanding inability to come to terms with Jewish particularity as described above. Instead of recognizing Jews as Jews see themselves, not just as adherents of a religion but as a people from a place called Judea, Jews are reduced to something else — Europeans, or Berbers, or Arabs or what-have-you of Jewish faith — because representing Jews in this way is now convenient. But let it be recalled that convenience once dictated otherwise and that within living memory Europeans widely regarded Jews as oriental interlopers. Kant, for instance (obviously not in living memory, but certainly an organic part of Western intellectual culture) referred to the Jews as “the Palestinians living among us” and a “nation of cheaters” constituting no legitimate or organic part of European society.
On the other hand people like Peter Kropotkin and Leo Tolstoy (an anarcho-Christian himself) had clearly more positive views of the Jewish people, which most likely influenced the translations of the most prominent anarchist writings into Yiddish?
First, it is not exactly true to describe Tolstoy as having positive views about Jews. During the tide of pogroms that swept Jewish communities in Russia in his lifetime he remained silent while others spoke up. Tolstoy had Jewish acquaintances and sometimes had positive things to say about Jews, but his writings are replete with anti-Jewish statements and many other similar verbal statements are attributed to him. I do not think Tostoy’s antisemitism was virulent, but blase antisemitism is still antisemitism. While in a few instances we do find Tolstoy expressing more positive sentiments, these are not the rule and he often wavers back and forth. I think that the tendency to regard him as more warm toward Jews than he really was has more to do with the warmness with which Jews received him. That is, Jews enthusiastically embraced his views on religion and politics, which they often worked to Judaize, and so in their eyes he became “pro-Jewish.” That being said, the relative benignness of his antisemitism certainly made it much easier for Jews to engage him and his work.
Kropotkin is a different story. His relations with Jews were much more direct and intimate. First of all, when he had to flee Russia it was Jewish smugglers who transported him over the border. Second, he married a Jewish woman, Sofia Anaiev. Third, he was actively involved with the Yiddish anarchist scene in London when he lived there. I think he had genuinely positive regard for Jews and showed it.
But yes, on the whole — as I wrote in my book — I do think that positive, or at least benign, regard for Jews had an influence on the Jewish community and the figures whose writings Jewish publications sought to promote.
Some scholars like to say Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah in particular is Gnostic (a term used loosely and of much debate) in nature, which is often a synonym for anti-authoritarianism, while others say the very foundations of Judaism (according to the Tanakh) are often very anarchistic. How do you see the social structures of the religious communities of the past compared to modern notions of the state?
I think that both of these characterizations are partially correct, but only partially. First, the reduction of Kabbalah to Gnosticism, which was a prevalent supposition throughout the nineteenth century and persisted into Gershom Scholem’s research, is disputed for several reasons. For one, it was originally intended to denigrate Kabbalah, it was the equivalent of calling it primitive mumbo jumbo (although that wasn’t Scholem’s intention). More importantly, I find the general tendency to interpret all things Jewish as somehow reducible to something not-Jewish objectionable in itself. I would not say that “Kabbalah is Gnostic,” but that there is an interplay of influences and that certain Gnostic elements may have had an influence on Jewish mysticism at a certain stage of its development, but that Jewish mysticism was also something unto itself.
Second, it is a misnomer to speak of Kabbalah as if it were a monolithic entity; there are definitely common traits which make it sensible to speak of Kabbalistic literature, but there is also a lot of variation. There are trends in Kabbalistic thought which lead in antinomian directions, for example, certain layers of the Zoharic corpus, and the books of Peliya and Kanah. But almost by definition Kabbalah (which means tradition) can be extremely conservative and profoundly nomian; if, for instance, a certain precept is interpreted as having mystical and cosmic significance on which existence itself depends, it better be fulfilled!
Beyond that, I am not of the opinion that antinomianism and anti-authoritarianism necessarily go hand in hand; nor that nomianism and authoritarianism go hand in hand. I think everything depends on context and the way that things are interpreted and applied. A cult leader who maintains that the spiritual elite are beyond the law and who uses his personal charisma to take advantage of his followers is both operating on the basis of an antinomian ideal and also using that ideal for authoritarian ends. In contrast, if a rabbi rules that an employer who has withheld wages from a worker must not only pay what is owed but also a penalty, he is operating on the basis of a nomian ideal and using it for anti-authoritarian ends — in this case, penalizing exploitation with the aim of preventing its recurrence.
I think that the same ambiguity is present in the biblical text. On the one hand, there are strong anti-authoritarian trends. Arguably, Genesis and the majority of the book of Exodus constitute a commentary on a single theme, that divine sovereignty overrides human sovereignty. God favors Abel’s pastoralism over Cain’s agriculture and the urban civilizations it fed, civilizations represented by Babel, which God destroys. God chooses Abraham and his family, who wander. Reciprocally, Abraham invokes God’s name and refuses sovereignty when it is offered to him by the people of Sodom after the war of the five kings. The family’s woes begin when their wandering comes to an end in Goshen and they assimilate into a civilized nation led by a tyrant who enslaves them. The subsequent exodus is in essence a story about rebuke and restoration. God rebukes Pharaoh and the way of life he represents, destroying the ‘idols of Egypt’ and, in a desolate land where such political idols cannot grow, reinstates himself as the rightful King of Israel. This resistance to human authority is repeated throughout the period of the judges, as exemplified by the story of Jotham, and in Samuel’s rebuke. On the other hand, monarchic authority is at least legitimated if not always embraced warmly.
The bible rarely presents a systematic doctrine; it uses narrative to explore certain ideas from diverse perspectives. So I think the question of authority and its structure is pervasive, but I think it largely remains a question and a problem — and I think that is a good thing.
As for the social structures of the religious communities of the past compared to modern notions of the state, I think that strong communities are always an excellent counterbalance. I think that power is always a negotiation, not a fixed quantity that one either has or does not have. Creating and maintaining strong communities is an important tool for ensuring that negotiation continues and does not become unilateral. I think that we now live in an era in which cooperation on a scale previously inconceivable is really necessary for things as basic as the survival of our species, and I do not think that local government can simply replace that sort of high level decision making. So a retrogressive return to a simpler era is, in my opinion, out of the question. On the other hand, however, I do not think that the sort of changes that we need to make as a global community can ever be realized without the consent of local communities. So, I think there is an interplay and I also think that religion and religious bonds can be important elements in organizing this.
If we would consider that the Bereshit creation narrative contains Platonistic ideas (an idea proposed by some biblical scholars), could we divide HaShem as the creator (the well-meaning Demiurge of Plato), and the authority-figure in Gan Eden (or the Elohim, such as in the case of Plato versus the "lesser Gods" of Greece, which he considered distinct from the Monad), meaning a return to the creator would be regarded as anarchistic?
There have certainly been Jewish thinkers going all the way back to Philo who interpreted Genesis along Platonic lines, but I think that a distinction must be drawn between the text itself and its interpretation. I do not find it plausible to treat Genesis as a Platonic text in itself, even if it can be interpreted along Platonic lines. More importantly, we come back again to the tendency to reduce Jewish texts to non-Jewish sources. Why can’t the Torah be the Torah without being the Timmeaus in disguise? But bracketing this, who says that the God who wanders in Eden is authoritarian? This is the God who made Adam and Eve sovereign in the world and told them they are not subjects of the kingdom of creation but its masters. This is the God whose moral will represents a curb to human caprice so that this “mastery” doesn’t devolve into exploitation. I see the God of Genesis as a liberator and moral guide — and yes, that I do see as anarchistic.
Many Mystics and Prophets of various religions do seem to have strong anti-authoritarian tendencies, but while mysticism is often related to ideas like "ego-death", many anarchists such as Max Stirner would not want to see their egos annihilated. Where do you think the strongest similarities between mysticism and anarchism lie?
I think it depends on the mystic and on the anarchist. For instance, Abba Gordin (deeply influenced by Stirner) drew heavily on mystical sources to argue that the idea of God (in Hebrew, arguably related to the idea of being) represents the ego writ large and that mystical union with Yahweh represents the highest realization of the ego in both its particular and its cosmic aspects. Other anarchist mystics were less concerned with the dissolution of the ego and saw it as a positive thing; for instance, Yehuda Ashlag was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer and saw (like Schopenhauer) mysticism as a means to lift the proverbial veil of Maya. For Ashlag, mysticism and religious practice become ways of realizing an absolutely altruistic condition in which the ego disappears and the human soul becomes identical to and therefore one one God, who is the source of all good because it suffices in itself, needs nothing, and can therefore give without reserve. Clearly that is not an idea that Stirner would accept, but it is one that could resonate for someone like Tolstoy. Anarchism is a diverse set of ideas and Jewish religious engagement with it is equally diverse.
The most common view globally seems to be that modern day Israel is far from being left, although the state was originally founded on very socialist and secular ideas? What do you think of the state of socialist or anarchist activism over there today, and does Jewish anarchism classically divide itself strongly between secularism and religiosity?
I think that left and right are relative designations that depend a lot on context. More importantly, I think that the global impression of Israel is quite skewed and that people do not generally appreciate how complex things really are. That being said, this is a question which lies far outside of my arena of expertise and I do not feel qualified to answer it with the sensitivity it requires. The same goes for contemporary socialist and anarchist activism here; I am a philosopher and intellectual historian of sorts. I do hope that my work inspires, but the way I make my contribution is by trying to expand people’s horizons and helping them to see things from a broader perspective through my writing.
As far as your question about the divide in classical Jewish anarchism, I think that is more or less true, but in a limited sense. What I mean is that there really wasn’t a Jewish religious anarchist movement. There were individuals, connected sometimes strongly, sometimes loosely, and sometimes not at all, who sought to integrate anarchism and Jewish religion, but at best they were marginal figures within the broader anarchist movement. So yes, there was a divide, but it was a divide between the vast majority and a tiny minority. That being said, I think that at the street level there was always a spectrum and lines between radicalism and tradition were very very blurry. People are complex and they tend to inhabit several worlds at once without trying very hard to synthesize them in a coherent way. The figures I write about are the ones who did try to do that, and did so in a lot of really interesting and often beautiful ways. Jewish religious socialism, in contrast, really could be characterized as a distinct movement with parties like Dat ve-Avodah (Religion and Labor) and Poaley Agudat Yisrael (Workers of the Union of Israel) that had relatively large member rolls.
Considering the nature of the Kibbutzim for example, were the ideologies of Zionism and anarchism close to one another in the beginning? Weren't the Jewish nationalists actually often universalists?
It depends on the Kibbutz. Some kibbutzim were very anarchistic, others less so. James Horrox wrote an excellent book on this subject. But on the whole, yes. While a statist tendency existed from the beginning and began to prevail as the twentieth century proceeded, there was a strong anarchist thread to the pioneering Zionist groups that built collective farms far away from any effective central government. As for the universalism of the Jewish nationalists, there were always many Jewish nationalisms, not one. Some visions of Jewish nationalism were very far from universalistic. Others — and these are the forms which I sympathize with — sought to synthesize universalism and particularism. They believed that Jews and other national and cultural minorities had a right to maintain and develop their own particular identities, but they denied that this lacked universal human value.
Several of the religious anarchist nationalists I have studied, Shmuel Alexandrov for instance, understood Jewish particularity in universal terms. Drawing heavily on Fichte’s writings on nationalism, they saw the substance of Jewish particularism as being constituted by the idea of universal humanity — Jews, as they saw it, were uniquely tasked, as a particular human collective, with embodying and sharing the vision of a humanity united through mystical union with the divine. That is, they promoted a sort of mystically grounded universal nationalism.
History has many examples of efforts to change a narrative or behavior of a large group of people backfiring. Do you think the best way to make an actual social change is to start with the individual, and if so, what would be the ideal methods? Psychedelics, meditation, religion, education, communality, spirituality?
I don’t think we have to get so granular. I think that tools like social media demonstrate that you can profoundly influence the feelings and ideas of many people at once and thereby produce social and political change. But I do think that in the end any meaningful change has to come from within. You can craft a certain external environment and hope that through engaging with it people will develop the mental habits you are looking for, but in the end it is those mental habits that matter, not the external environment. If those don’t change, then as soon as the external environment falters, everything goes back to the way it was, or at least changes in ways that are not anticipated and usually not desirable. I have tried a lot of psychedelics and while I think they are fun, they did not change me in any meaningful way. I know that is different for others, but I don’t put much hope there.
I feel very strongly that religion, education, communality, and spirituality are key, and I see these as fundamentally linked.
Formal education is good for providing basic skills, but the sort of education that profoundly changes people, that has to come through mentorship, and I think that one finds mentors within a communal framework and that mentorship itself is a process of creating intellectual and spiritual community. I see religion and spirituality as ways of creating subterranean bonds between people, bonds which allow for the sort of deep relationship I’m talking about. I think about God as sort of the mycelium network that joins individual mushrooms — i.e. you and me — together beneath the surface of the earth. I think most change comes either directly or indirectly from the process of lifting these connections to the surface of consciousness and then examining them together. Incidentally, going back to your earlier question about Israel and Palestine, I strongly agree with Rabbi Menahem Frohman that religion and spirituality are part of the solution, not part of the problem.
The philosophies of Baruch Spinoza are something you are very familiar with. While his Ethics has been a favourite of people sympathetic to Schopenhauer and Kant as well, he is also often accompanied by terms like pantheism, naturalism, idealism, rationalism, and so on.. But can we consider him to be an anarchist or a mystic?
I do not think that Spinoza saw himself as a mystic, and I am very skeptical about efforts to read Kabbalah into his writings. That being said, I do think that there is a sort of rationalistic mysticism that Maimonides discusses in the closing chapters of his Guide for the Perplexed and I think that Spinoza’s “intellectual love of God” falls squarely within that tradition. So in that respect, yes, I think Spinoza can be described as a type of mystic.
I am weary about anachronism. To call Spinoza an anarchist before the word had even been coined would definitely fall into that error. So I would hesitate to call Spinoza himself an anarchist. That being said, Spinoza exerted a powerful influence on radical movements generally and anarchism in particular. I also think that his work lends itself to anarchist interpretation. My doctoral dissertation, Reason’s Rebellion, or Anarchism out of the Sources of Spinozism, represents an effort to do this. Therein, I aimed (1) to render, from Spinoza’s philosophical system, a critique of the State form or, more broadly, of political coercion and (2) to supply, on the basis of the same, a positive account of the alternative. My claim was that, in Spinoza’s work, there is a tension between force and freedom as models for political organization. While other interpreters have tended to synthesize these opposing tendencies in one manner or another, I tried to highlight their incompatibility and to show that, for Spinoza, they produce two distinct forms of political life.
One, the passive foundation of political union, which grounds the State. Two, the active foundation of political union, which grounds the rational community. Having identified this theoretical breach, I proceeded to examine the affective structure of each foundation as conceived by Spinoza. I find an inescapable contradiction in the first, which — contrary to the best intentions of the founders of State — tends not only to maintain citizens in a condition of perpetual minority, but progressively erodes their capacity for autonomy, thus inviting a parallel and equally progressive enhancement of coercive intervention. In the second, which I consider in both affective and ontological terms, I discover the opposite movement. That is, a progressive escalation of reason together with its affective modalities that enhances the human capacity for political and social harmony, rendering political coercion obsolete.
You and I have been discussing some musical tastes, and I am curious about what other fields of interest do you have besides political theology, anarchism and religion?
I like to explore obscure local history. I really enjoy knowing all sorts of arcane facts about the places I live in… it is a way of sort of mentally inhabiting the place in all of its crevices. I am also an avid people watcher. I will often walk to the old city of Jerusalem and sit at one of the gates for many hours watching people go by. Sometimes they sit with me and tell me their stories; I’ve collected so many different stories this way, from the most mundane to the most bizarre. I write poetry a lot; I have great ideas for short stories but I can never manage to write them; they take too much pre-organization, whereas a poem can sort of flow from you. I collect hippopotamus figurines too.
Your book No Masters But God was published last year by Manchester University Press, and while this is obviously a must read for anyone interested in the topics discussed in this interview, the book can be a bit expensive for some, at the moment. Any other way to find your work, besides waiting for the price of the book to drop hopefully soon?
Some of my work is on academia.edu. Unfortunately, however, No Masters in book form is still only available in hardcover, though I think there is also a digital option. Manchester should, however, be releasing a soft-cover version fairly soon that should be much cheaper.
I want to thank you very much for this extremely fascinating interview. What are your plans for this year?
My pleasure. I’m working on another book focusing mostly on religious anarchists who relocated to the Americas. I am also working on a collection of Natan Hofshi’s letters. Hofshi was a pacifist anarcho-Zionist and a forgotten pioneer of the Israeli peace movement.
