Bela TABOR (TBOR Bla)

Epilogue to The Two Ways of Jewry, 1990

1
The first edition of The Two Ways of Jewry appeared at the beginning of August 1939, four weeks before the
outbreak of the Second World War. I began its writing in January 1938, fifty days before the Anschluss and
about two months after the Gyr Speech in which Prime Minister Darnyi announced the first Jewish Law.
These chronological data outline the historical environment into which the book was born. Nobody doubted
that the announcement at Gyr foreshadowed not simply one more law restricting the rights of Jews, but
the escalation of an already long-standing offensive against Hungarian Jewry. This much, the whole Jewry
perceived; as yet, they perceived no more. The majority of Jews received it, not as the forerunner of ca-
tastrophe, but merely as the clarion call of an increased threat to their lifestyle. But even that perception was
muted; the awareness of being threatened had already been integrated into their way of life over the course
of two decades.
The Two Ways of Jewry sought to shake them out of this torpor: I hoped that its writing would contribute to
the spiritual mobilisation of Hungarian Jewry. For this, the Jews had to be made acquainted with the inner,
essentially esoteric, content of their Judaism; they had to be brought to realise their special and delicate
historical place within Western culture and the responsibilities implied by it. Their self-pity and compla-
cence; the inclination of a broad sector of Hungarian Jewry to search for the source of all their troubles
outside themselves, needed to be confronted. The high standard that demanded them to measure their own
behaviour, actions and value-options not by other peoples errors, but by their own recognised historical
responsibility, was called upon to raise up a generation of Jews who would be reliant upon self-knowledge,
self-driven and scrupulously firm with themselves. A generation which could, without weakening its commu-
nal identity, do away with everything narrowing its horizons, and, without derogating its universal sensitivity,
internalise the communal values bestowed upon it. Nobody knew the amount of time available; every judi-
cious person knew that it was not much. No one foresaw, however, that in fact it was almost nothing; that the
catastrophe was imminently looming.
The half-century of the Emancipation and subsequent two decades of anti-Semitism brought about a group
identity perplexity in Hungarian Jewry. The ages before the Emancipation, and the Jews beyond the Carpath-
ians had never struggled with such a perplexity. They lived their traditional life indiscriminately; there was no
mirror in front of them. But the vast majority of Hungarian Jews excluding, of course, the strictly traditional-
ist sector, but including those most active in Hungarian society and in Jewish communal life had too deep
a psychological interest in dating their history from the Emancipation and locating it west of the Carpathians.
This historical wish-dream, indeed, was what they meant by the term assimilation. They were brought up
in the values of modern Western culture, and the phenomenon of Judaism as more than simply a religious
denomination could not be made self-evident simply by pointing it out. While their leadership wanted to
reduce their existence to such a denomination, ceaselessly articulating that Judaism is merely a religion, the
immediate experience of Jews was in irritating conflict with this notion. Being Hungarian, on the other hand,
was a similarly immediate experience, at least for the overwhelming majority of Hungarian Jews. This inter-
wove a new contradiction with the first. The identity perplexity could be eliminated only by shedding light on
this mesh of contradictions. Nevertheless, the spiritual elite of Hungarian Jewry had not seriously attempted,
either during the half-century of the Emancipation or over the subsequent two decades, to investigate and
to illuminate what is signified, and what unity is hidden, by that obvious duality of Judaism: that it is both a
religion and a people.
Neglecting to develop self-consciousness concerning their identity had no tangible consequences as long
as Jewry was protected by the favourable circumstances of the age of Emancipation. Lacking any genuine
identity-consciousness, however, Hungarian Jews proved dependent upon circumstances, and when these
became unfavourable they were overwhelmed by a paralysing perplexity. There was no internal reserve to
guarantee spiritual autonomy; such a reserve could have been mobilised to counteract the ever more acute
external conditions. Minimalism was becoming the guiding principle of their behaviour: they always favoured
the aim, solution, interpretation, evaluation that demanded the least possible will and sensitivity. This is why
they did not realise the true significance of the Gyr Speech. They wanted to believe that only their accus-
tomed life-style was endangered, and that this danger could be averted by minor changes in their career
paths.
Those who in these critical times wanted at least to attempt to mobilise Hungarian Jewrys psychological
and spiritual strength to resist, faced the task of eliminating this minimalism and trying to stop the Hungarian
Jews regarding even themselves as an outside circumstance. To be able to react flexibly to the increas-
ing threats they required composure. Communities and individuals alike have composure if they are able
to measure up to a situation without directly mobilising the core of their existence; such an attempt almost
inevitably seizes up with panic and cramp. Rather, it is sufficient for them to direct the energies streaming in
the capillaries of their physical-psychological-spiritual organism towards the situation; the energy of the core
circulates so abundantly, freely and organically that they can measure it out according to requirements.
The prerequisite of this composure is precisely that which Hlderlin found attractive in the way of life of the
Greek polis: that energy and consistency which makes harmony with the centre manifest even at the out-
ermost point. With this, Hlderlin formulated the measure of every communal identity, not only that of the
Greek polis. The centre to which it alludes is the answer to the following question: What does the community
identify itself with at its highest level? The measure of a way of life is that energy and consistency with which
the community reflects the highest level of its self-identity even at the most peripheral points of its existence.
The degree to which this requirement is satisfied by a community is also the degree to which it will have the
composure to respond to the challenges of history. For this it needs, on the one hand, an elite that knows the
highest level of the communitys identity; and, on the other, a connection between the elite and the com-
munitys other sectors which makes it possible, even natural, that the whole community be receptive to the
value-system of the elite.
When The Two Ways of Jewry sought to make the Jewish Question a question of the Jews, it saw the key
to its solution in raising the Jewish communitys level of identification, and in free circulation of its spiritual
energies; in this reflection of the highest level of identification even at the most extreme periphery. This is
as much a consistent application of the Biblical tradition as the mode of its realisation; it is strictly in accor-
dance with the Biblical value system: the sacrificial order based on ceaseless spiritualisation of matter and
the material.
Was this a utopian conception: this application of the Biblical model that is, the spiritual value-order of the
sacrifice to the modern economically orientated society? This question doubly misses the point. Firstly, the
Biblical model knows no time that can tie it down to itself; it is never identifiable with any fixed form in time,
but only with its constant self-transformation. One who understands it differently regards the Bible as a myth
of times past; that is, instead of identifying with the Bible, he emigrates to an alien religion. Indeed, Camp-
bells statement holds here: myth is an alien religion. Secondly, the question could genuinely be answered
only by that 600,000-strong Hungarian Jewry which was immediately addressed by the sacrificial command
mediated by this conception. But this last sizeable Hungarian galut cannot be asked.
Galut is the Hebrew name for what is generally known by its Greek name, Diaspora. But unlike diaspora
meaning dispersal, the universally accepted translation of galut is exile. The term originates from the Bible:
Isaiah and Jeremiah already use it to refer to the community of Jews deported to captivity in Babylon. Later
it assumed the meaning of the Jewish Diaspora. Today, of course, it does not mean exile proper; rather it has
become a symbol through which to remember the late- and post-Biblical ages of Jewish history and to iden-
tify with them. We could call it a religio-historical symbol if the essence of Judaism were exhausted by the
term religion. Galut can thus be characterised by the same dual-unity as Judaism itself: it is a religio-his-
toric and a folk-historic symbol in one; neither one without the other. The religio-historic factor predominates,
however. This remains unchanged by the fact that since the emergence of Zionism the folk-historic signifi-
cance has regained much of its former emphasis. Only since then has this symbol again been used to refer to
the Jewry living outside the Jewish state (Israel), as distinct from those living within. The spiritual meaning
of the word does not assimilate this political meaning; it includes the Jews living in the Jewish state as well
as those living beyond its borders, and this will continue to true; that is the form in which the term will survive
in the religious consciousness of the Jews, until, with the coming of the Messiah, Israel again becomes the
Holy Land. Until such a time, galut means the Jewish destiny-community, in which, for two millennia, per-
secution and threat have indeed played a major rle, although epochs of persecution have alternated with
epochs of light.
Before the Second World War, the Eastern European community was the largest of the galut. A striking
phenomenon during the age of Emancipation and the subsequent two decades was the aspiration of Hungar-
ian Jewry (or at least its dominant sectors) to distance itself from this Eastern European Jewish community,
which constituted more than half of world Jewry. This aspiration was partly a natural consequence of al-
ready living within the range of Western culture, although on its Eastern border and closest to the tradition;
partly a symptom of that identity perplexity we have already mentioned. More accurately, the same neglect
showed itself here as that which caused the identity perplexity: non-appearance of the analysis which could
have illuminated the form of unity masked by the evident duality of Jewish existence. Fulfilling this charge
would also have made it unnecessary for them to distance themselves from the Eastern European Jews. It
would have made clear the historical border-existence of the Jews which cannot be encompassed by any
form of historic existence; neither that which seeks to blur the recognisable identity of the Jews nor that
which attempts to secure their distinction by stressing particular ethnographic characteristics pertaining to a
specific historical phase.
The fantasist-conformist sector of Hungarian Jewry, which had gained continually increasing influence upon
its life, felt the need for distancing because the way of life of the Eastern European Jews ostentatiously and
provocatively embodied the antithesis of what it sought to achieve: to make its own otherness unrecognis-
able. The one-dimensionalism and sign-blindness inherited from the neophyte rationalism of the Enlighten-
ment saw this homogenising assimilation as the only viable route towards harmonising the relations between
ethnic communities. Hungarian Jewry threw its own identity as prey to the Moloch of mimicry: to avoid
others recognising its distinction it had to choose a way of life in which it could not even recognise itself. It
sought to avoid the danger of collective schizophrenia inherent in this, by distancing itself from the Jews of
Eastern Europe. Hungarian Jewry projected its aversion to its own distinctness onto them; it gave itself to
believe that it was averse to them, and not to what made itself different from its own environment. Modern
psychology is well aware of this mechanism of projection.
Of course, the truth was that Hungarian Jewry was seeking to break away from Jewish communality of fate.
The ruthless logic of history became manifest in the fact that brutal violence forced it to make recognisable
the identity it wished to cover up; and it precipitated it into the most intimate communality of fate with those it
sought to distance itself from; into the communality of death.
Galut does not only mean exile. The Hebrew word has a second meaning: uncovering the covered. In
Greek: Apocalypse.
The Greek apokalupto means to uncover; to dis-cover, open what has been hidden, whether or not it is
fearful. Exactly like the root of the Hebrew galut: gala. But the Jewish Apocalyptic Literature that sprung up
in the Hellenistic era uncovers the secrets of the end of time in truly awesome visions, and with such sugges-
tive force that in the consciousness of the long centuries the term signifying the act of uncovering the cov-
ered, the apocalyptic, has transformed itself; by now it does not express the act of uncovering the covered,
nor even general uncovering, but the indescribably awesome object itself. It acquired this meaning in the
cultures built upon the ruins of Hellenism and was adopted so into the Hungarian literary language.
This figurative meaning is not the only meaning of the word apocalyptic. Words belonging to the two mean-
ing-groups of the Hebrew gala: exile and uncovering of the covered, appear in the Bible around 250 times.
Almost half of them refer to the uncovering of the covered, certainly not confined to the dis-covering of the
end. The Septuagint, a Bible-translation originating from the early stages of Hellenism, uses the apokalup-
to-apokalupsis word group to translate these. The figurative meaning of the word took over only through the
works on eschatological themes, termed Apocalyptic Literature, which came to the fore in the latter stages
of Hellenism.
The fact that the same Hebrew word expresses both exile and the uncovering of the covered, testifies to an
underlying connection between these two meanings as discerned in one of the deeper layers of the Jewish
spiritual tradition. This connection can be discovered easily enough: they relate to one another as do home
and hiddenness. Galut is the negation of both; one meaning is homelessness, the other, unhiddenness. Or,
more precisely, making homeless and unhiding. The exile, the deportation, deprives the exiled of his home;
the apocalypse deprives the secret of its hiddenness. In Apocalyptic Literature, the secret is that which
awaits us hidden in the womb of the future. The common connotation of the two meanings of gala is: to force
into an alien environment.

The Explanatory Dictionary of Hungarian defines apocalyptic as: similar to the horrors of the last judge-
ment; terrifying.
2
Yes, this is the continuation of the story after August 1939, after the publication of the book. Apocalyptic:
similar to the horrors of the last judgement; terrifying. It has no name. It is usually circumscribed, albeit
with a single word. Some call it Holocaust, by the Greek word for a burnt offering; some call it Shoah, by the
Biblical word for destruction, catastrophe, distress; some call it Auschwitz, pars pro toto, by the name of one
of several extermination camps. In actuality it was the murder of six million Jews, mostly Eastern and Central
European, among them six hundred thousand Hungarian Jews. Men and women, old and young, children on
the threshold of their futures and babies just beyond the threshold of life, families and strangers, lovers and
loveless people, happy and unhappy, healthy and unhealthy, carefree and careworn, friends, enemies and
indifferent people, those who carry the intoxicating responsibility of the spirit in their hearts and those who
content themselves with picking the flower of every hour. How could all this belong to History? Death, irre-
placeable death, everyones own death, is on this side of history. History makes death into its own material, it
builds from death. Of course, not only from death: also from the moment, that is, from intensified life. History
is the bridge between intensified life and death. Ceaseless migration; oscillating between eternal life and
eternal death. But personal life, individual fate is still on this side of History, although each person can be a
beneficent and a victim of it.
Yes, this was to be the first among the three events that led directly to an epoch-change in Jewish history.
The second was the establishment of the new Jewish state; the third, the entropisation of the symbol.
Bidding farewell to the six million irreplaceable ones, let us hand them over to their final resting place; to
History, which knows only diagonals. Having been reduced to a historical fact, the deaths of the six million
Jews became the first trigger of the change of epoch in Jewish history. It radically changed the geographical
distribution of the remnant Jewry which in turn caused a shift in the spiritual centres of gravity of the world
Jewish population. At the same time, the traumatic psychological and spiritual impact left an indelible mark
on its relation to the world and to its own Jewishness.
Both factors are closely interwoven with the second and third epoch-changing events: with the establish-
ment of the new Jewish state, and with the entropisation of the symbol.
In Eastern and Central Europe only a tiny fraction of the Jewish community survived the devastation. But
even among those who returned to their homelands, many could not bear the thought of living in an environ-
ment where everything reminded them of their murdered loved ones and their past; where among the pedes-
trians teeming the street they might encounter the murderers accomplices. They decided to emigrate. In the
first years after the war, the world was open before them, but the main directions of their migration were,
besides Western Europe, the two gravitational centres: one the USA, the other the new Jewish state.
The real epoch-changing event from the point of view of Jewish history is certainly the loss of the Eastern
European centre (the remaining Jewish masses of the Soviet Union, inasmuch as they remained Jews, could
be disregarded in this respect, being cut off from world Jewry). This very centre had previously guaranteed
in this region, and, through radiation, elsewhere the continuity of the tradition. This was the keeper of
the symbol in Europe and in America; this, with the heat of its encircling, crystallised way of life, fostered the
ancient or at least for a few centuries ancient-lived symbols.
Now the Eastern European centre was split in two. To use a geometrical metaphor, the circle which had had
one centre became an ellipsis with two focal points. American Jewry represents the first focal point, Israel
the other. Numerically the majority of Jews live in these two countries, and if we disregard the roughly two
and a half million Jews living in the Soviet Union which is in line with reality, particularly if we note that
their emigration is at full blast, mainly to Israel and the USA then the proportions become still more heavily
weighted towards these two foci.
But there is another, still more important factor, this one concerning the nature of the epoch-change: from
whence and to where the centre has moved in splitting from one into two focal points. The old environment;
one which had equally low levels of economy, society and culture, which politically depreciated human
rights and which in a range of ways threatened the dignity of the human being, was replaced by a new envi-
ronment, providing the community of immigrant Jews with everything the environment of the previous centre
denied or could not grant them. This is valid, albeit in different forms, for both Israel and the US. It introduced
a new epoch in which, for the first time in the history of the galut, Jewry had equal conditions with which to
shape its fate and take its part in the division of labour of universal history. Yet an even more far-reaching
factor involved in this turn of fate is the following: while the surroundings of the old Eastern European centre,
and with them the everyday secular life of the Jew, was closely tied to the European Middle Ages (or rather
to the interim between the Middle Ages and the Modern Era), the two new focal points found themselves at
the forefront of modern society. This could, in the long-run, radically influence the way in which the relation-
ship between the sacred and secular continues to change within Judaism.
The traumatic psychological and spiritual impact of the shoah on individual survivors contained elements
that flowed into History. Generally speaking, it reinforced tendencies which already existed: the narrow-spir-
ited became narrower, the broad-spirited, broader. We need not deal with the latter here; one who is in-
terested can find them through this allusion and all that it represents: deep calls to deep, and broadness to
broadness. The book itself, incidentally, illustrates this concept from several angles. The former tendency
manifested itself above all on a broad scale of alienation. There were those who became alienated from their
environment, and this in turn was represented along a broad scale, from childish sulking to the devastating
effect of ressentiment. One illustration of the childish sulking is the group of people who became alienated
from the German language, refusing to speak German or to listen to German words. Who could take offence
at their doing so? This alienation was genuine: faultlessly deducible from the logic of passions deprived of
their space; a logic which is induced by the black myth of blind anguish just as the logic of the spirit is in-
duced by the colourful primordeal myth of suffering refracted in the prismatic medium and space of joy. But
the narrow-spirited manifested graver symptoms of this alienation. There were those who became alienated
from their non-Jewish environments in case of Hungarian Jews, from their non-Jewish Hungarianness;
those who became alienated from their Jewishness, and those who became alienated from God. This was
not restricted to those who had gone to the hell of a concentration camp. It could serve as a pretext for their
own selves to those (as a result of historic events, not so many) who wanted to seize the opportunity to pre-
vail in fields that had once been closed to them. Thus a relatively large number of Jews (proportionately, to
use this absurd and wantonly created term) gained powerful positions which made them odious. They were
not exclusively brutal careerists; we can find amongst them sensitive souls. They convinced themselves that
they served a good cause according to their convictions and that they represented the truth; as conscience
and conviction can easily be bribed, the sleeping conscience can easily be mistaken for good conscience,
and it is easy to assume by self-delusion the proud self-consciousness of representing the true cause.
Mutatis mutandis, a similar mechanism was active within those who became alienated from their Jewish-
ness. The only difference was that in this case intimidation played the rle of the greedy career-appetite in
that. And as in the former case, a narrowness of the spirit was a prerequisite of apostasy. The ground was
long prepared for the so comfortable-seeming solution of apostasy. After all, the history of the galut is frag-
mentingly permeated by the history of persecutions; what happened in this case may have been the most
severe, but was not the first. Many people decided, following this reasoning, to found their lives upon false
papers. They not only abandoned their Judaism, but kept it secret from their children. Thus evolved and
this may be an important development from the point of view of the change of epoch in Jewish history the
sector of Jewish descent which distinguishes itself quite rightly from Jews, and at the same time does not.
This no-mans-land between Jew and non-Jew creates not only a grave internal problem for a large propor-
tion of the second generation of apostates but also a serious task for the spiritual community of the Jews.
The key to everything we have dealt with here is handed to us in the final analysis by the problem of the crisis
of the symbol. I spoke of the entropisation of the symbol as the third epoch-changing event in the most recent
history of the Jews. This entropisation as the threat of heat-death, is only a tendency; not yet a completed fi-
nal stage in the history of the symbol. The process was born together with secularisation, but is not identical
to it; secularisation by itself concerns only one group among all the inherited meaning-emanating symbols,
albeit the group which, in the final analysis, gives meaning to all.
Symbols can be described by symbols only. The more desymbolised the signs we try to use the more we fail
in the description. The symbol is a sign, but a sign that hides as well as signifying; a chain of hidden layers
of meaning each of which chases beyond itself towards a more hidden layer; and a more universal one.
The symbol is a sign hiding an infinite chain of hiding signs. Being a sign, it signifies; but being a symbol it
signifies also that it hides: that it hides this infinite chain of hiding signs. So the symbol does not signify less,
but more than a conventional sign: it signifies also that it has deeper layers and these layers too, consist of
hiding signs. Its hiding signifies, and its signifying hides and both call.
They call out for thirst but this word, too is a symbol. Thirst is proof of the existence of water, states Franz
Baader. He cites this as evidence for the existence of God, but we are interested here only in the fact that the
phrase uses a symbol to prove a symbol: the hiding-sign of the existence of water is proved using the hid-
ing-sign of thirst. We mix ourselves a drink from thirst, writes Szab Lajos, extending Franz Baaders train
of thought. We can mix a drink from thirst for the same reason that thirst proves the existence of water. Thirst
is water itself, its existence assuming the form of its own lack. To stay within the dimensions of our symbol: in
thirst the primordeal ocean calls back drinks back its own existence as fragmented into rivers; and, being
present as its own absence in the rivers, transmits the call on from river to river, from thirst to thirst.
In the thirst to which the symbol calls us we are parched for existence; but for that hidden dimension of exis-
tence that chases beyond itself towards a more hidden dimension. This existence is not minimal, it is maxi-
mal: growing existence. Minimum and maximum are not states, but movements. Minimal existence is shrink-
ing existence, while maximal existence is growing. The growth of existence is also the growth of community.
Parmenides states that existence and thought are identical. But to say instead that existence and community
are identical would be to express ourselves more broadly; for the term community includes the connota-
tions of thought. This thought chases beyond itself towards a more hidden meaning. As the symbol is infinite
and thought is infinite so the community is infinite: it can be infinitely intensified and infinitely reduced. The
community is the subject and the object of the thirst likewise, the community in each individual. This I term
personality. The maximal community thirsts for the greatest thirst, the minimal community thirsts for the
smallest. In the former, the greater thirst drinks the smaller into itself; in the latter it disperses into the smaller
ones: the smaller thirst renders the larger forgotten. One mixes a drink from the greatest possible thirst, the
other, from the smallest.
The crisis of the symbol, which in its tendency is the entropisation, heat death, cooling down of the symbol,
indicates the route from the greater thirst to the smaller. This is the route of the disembodying of the spirit.
The symbol is the body of the spirit hence its decisive significance; and this is the secret of the multimilen-
nial rle of the symbol.
The mystery of the body is the mystery of life; the mystery of the living body is also that of love; the mystery of
love is, in turn, the metaphor for the thirst for the greatest thirst. When the symbol calls for thirst, the mem-
bers of the symbol-community feel it in the depth of their souls as if a young body called them for love. The
symbol fills the message of the spirit with eros, fills the significance with weight; because the warmth of the
living body of the spirit heats up every meaning which the symbol mediates.
The entropisation of the symbol, then, is the depreciation of a certain spiritual form in the midst of a certain
community. We spoke of it as triggering the change of epoch in Jewish history; this is a process, however,
which is not restricted to the Jews, but concerns all of Western culture. Still, it is reasonable to emphasise
it as an agent of recent Jewish history, not only because, through their relatively small population and in-
tensive spiritual interest the Jews may be affected to a higher degree, but primarily because Jewry is an
indissoluble unity of religion and people, and this form of existence devolves a more vital task to the symbol
for the preservation of its identity th an is the case in other communities. That identity perplexity which is ap-
parent in Eastern European Jewry today is mainly a consequence of the fact that, partly through the political
pressure of recent decades and partly through the break in continuity which took place immediately before
and during the war, it ceased to be self-evident in Eastern European countries that Jewry should manifest
itself as a symbol-community.
Today only orthodoxy is immune from this problem, and Israel is in the unique position of being able to neu-
tralise the effects of the depreciation of the symbol. But the crisis of the symbol has such vast implications
that the spiritual exertion of all trends of Jews is required to prevent it deepening into a universal crisis of
Jewish identity-awareness.

Translated by Hegeds Pl and Jessica Sacks