Niklau

My first impression on hearing him lecture was that he had been transported to our planet from an alien civilization in some distant solar system in order to speed up our intellectual evolution,”

In complicated ways, after the destruction of the Second Temple (hurban) in 70 CE, the rabbinic sages reconceived the biblical covenant by radically reconceptualizing it, placing exile at its center. In some way, the radicalism of Zionism was an attempt to subvert that rabbinic innovation by, as Scholem framed it, ending exile.

The only direct, unadulterated consequence of nineteenth-century antisemitic movements was not Nazism but, on the contrary, Zionism, which … was a kind of counterideology, the ‘answer’ to antisemitism.”