History, Messianism, and Zionism in the Thought of Léon Ashkénazi

• In Event: Graduate Student Lightning Session: Modern Jewish History

Abstract

Modern Jewish Thought was, in many ways, an attempt to reconstruct Jewish identity after the betrayal of the Enlightenment promise of national, secular, European citizenship. This paper examines the understudied life and work of Léon Ashkénazi (1922-1996) both as participant in this project, and as an instantiation of how French Jewry in particular rehabilitated the Jewish self after the Holocaust. By and large, the French would turn to the land of Israel as an occasion for developing forms of political and religious nationalism. Ashkenazi, who would go on to found a Yeshiva in Israel, was among the first pioneers of religious Zionism. But his own thought was undergirded by a deep messianism and teleological vision of history that allowed him to re-appropriate the Enlightenment categories of universalism and particularism. In grappling with the categories he inherits both from the Enlightenment and the kabbalisitc tradition, Ashkenazi puts forth a vision of Jewish peoplehood, wherein their suffering and triumphs reflect the universal arc of sacred human history.

Author

• Shira Eliassian