From Dialogue to Revelation: Alterity and the Concept of Fraternity (Fraternité) in Léon Askenazi’s Biblical Hermeneutics
In Love: Accusative and Dative, Paul Mendes-Flohr explores ancient and modern Jewish engagements with the commandment to love the Re’a (neighbor) in Leviticus 19:18. Drawing on Rosenzweig’s phenomenology of divine-human love, Mendes-Flohr seeks to delineate the possibility of a humanist ethics of co...
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
2022
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| In: |
Religions
Year: 2022, Volume: 13, Issue: 5 |
| Further subjects: | B
Dialogue
B Emmanuel Levinas B Cain and Abel B Revelation B Franz Rosenzweig B École de Pensée Juive de Paris B Fraternity B Paul Mendes-Flohr B Martin Buber B Léon Askenazi |
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| Summary: | In Love: Accusative and Dative, Paul Mendes-Flohr explores ancient and modern Jewish engagements with the commandment to love the Re’a (neighbor) in Leviticus 19:18. Drawing on Rosenzweig’s phenomenology of divine-human love, Mendes-Flohr seeks to delineate the possibility of a humanist ethics of compassion that is not dependent, as in Rosenzweig, on hearing the divine voice. Taking Mendes-Flohr as point of departure, this paper explores the concept of fraternity (fraternité) as it figures in the thought of Yehuda Léon Askenazi (1922-1996), a North African kabbalist thinker and an important spiritual leader of Francophone Jewry in the twentieth century. Looking at two interrelated moments in Askenazi’s long career as a biblical exegete, I quarry Askenazi’s notion of fraternity for an account of alterity. Based on his discussions of the Cain and Abel story, as well as other biblical episodes, I argue that, for Askenazi, the challenge of fraternity, as figuring repeatedly in the Genesis narrative, is the preferred model to think of second-person relationships. Furthermore, I suggest, in contrast to Rosenzweig’s top-down account of revelation and human love, Askenazi’s approach represents a bottom-up model of love of one’s neighbor, which, when achieved, brings about divine revelation. |
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| ISSN: | 2077-1444 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religions
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.3390/rel13050381 |