ABSTRACT
Baruch Kurzweil (1907–1972) directed his criticism against the political theology of secular Zionism. His criticism of the culture of the Hebrew revival is linked by an internal logic to his criticism of Gershom Scholem and the Science of Judaism. According to Kurzweil, the modernistic Jewish orientation of the school of Berdichevsky and Scholem had a Nietzschean slant, an existential approach focused on myth rather than law, on perspectivism rather than a meta-narrative: “Berdichevsky followed the Wissenschaft des Judentums (Judaic studies), and in a dangerous way set the concept ‘life’ in its Nietzschean sense in opposition to Judaism. After Berdichevsky, the tendency continued with Saul Tchernikovsky, Zalman Shneur and Haim Hazzaz, and fixed the direction of our modern literature. Gershom Scholem was the chief person to express it through the scientific-historical method”. Kurzweil saw a direct line of affinity to Nietzsche stretching from the early Canaanism of Berdichevsky and the Tse’irim to the mythical and nihilistic Judaism of Gershom Scholem. Finally, the Nietzschean line of thought, according to Kurzweil led to the secular nationalism of David Ben-Gurion and the “Canaanite Messianism”, and was completely realized in the conquest of the territories in the Six-Day War (1967).
