Well... long after I was expecting this "chapter" to be due I'm returning to it without many fresh ideas though, but I think it's very important for me to complete it. Last time I just made a very confusing introduction to certain pre-topics in social science and I'm certainly not pretending to write a book on the subject for I totally lack of enough knowledge to do so or probably I'm just being extremely Descartesian, nothing but a good thing.
Today I had an urge to write about different things and the ideas are still revolting in my mind altogether with the hangover for the missing chapters of my journal, which I should nonetheless attempt to complete. In the end of the day this is just a blog, and regardless of the highly humanist and intellectualloid context of the same, it is just a blog. The journal, the non sense and the weltschmerz should be the cutting edges of these pages, but with me... you never know. I might shift from incandescent to Antarctic, some Kunderian thought crossed my mind now.. but let's not flow on it.
Once again we've stepped into the core of my writing, the Gay Jew. Let's make an attempt to define both things, difficult huh? But in general terms we might say that the gay is simply someone who has a natural (or acquired) attraction to individuals of the same sex, emotional attraction which translates in feelings, physical contact, romantic desire, etc. In this definition we probably despise all the developments of the recently born queer theory (as usual... undefined within the scope of the social sciences to the same extent of socio-biology or our friend ethnography). Our tragedy doesn't end up there... we're also neglecting a whole super-evolved pop culture that grew among the thema and anathema of gay life, a sub-culture or rather a subdued culture? Can it be called a culture by definition? A hundred anthropologists would disagree with me and other hundred would agree. That's what I love about social scientists, they're just like Jews. Very knowledgeable, irrefutable and unique. Probably this culture kind of thing is only unique to the Western countries (or the stem of it if at all) and in particular to the United States, where gays basically imposed the ghetto system, as ironic as it sounds for the context of this blog itself.
I don't know how different has been the experience of the European homosexuals, maybe not talking about Germany or the Netherlands, where the rise of the feminist movements in since the 60's has given place also not only to an homosexual revolution, but a whole sexual revolution which (excuse the redundance) is not unique to homosexuals. I'm talking about more passive societies, call them Icelanders, call them Danes, Call them Swedes for example (hummm yeah the Nordic countries are an odd example I know)where no one ever gave a damn about anything, homosexuals for an example but we also have testimonies of other phenomena highly overlooked such as pedophilia, single motherhood, chronic depression and the like. This does not leave much to comment on the matter, some little article on the Nordic countries would probably clarify this issue, but this is not the place to discuss salmon, smogarsbord and berrys confitures.
Something makes me think that the American model of the emancipated gay is truthfully different from the Dutch model, just to mention one example (probably a big one, the biggest right after the astonishing British example of the 2000's). Somehow I'm inclined to think the American model is based in its own counterpart itself, homophobia. Is the gay American model useful only by means of counterfeating the American homophobia? American history (and historical definitions by default) somehow prove my point, but again... I'm no sociologist nor an expert in American culture (huh? Yeah I'm a Dutchman, what can I do? My guts revolt a little bit when I say American culture). The European gay model was built probably on different premises, not sure if tolerance would be the right word, but apathy might work out just fine. Still the apathy would describe Geneva and Paris, Stockholm and Berlin, Amsterdam and Bruxelles. Would it so accurately describe Sankt Gallen or Oosterwolde? I'm not sure actually. The example of my friend Antoni and his boer husband prove it otherwise, still I'm granted the privilege of the doubt. Tel Aviv is a completely different story, and the fascination to this difference is probably one of the main issues to be dealt with in here.
That's about the gay, now let's see what's with the Jew? Well this is a far more complicated definition for there's not really such a definition. The bible lacks of the accuracy to differ between what is "my people" and what really constitutes a Jew or even better, contemporary *secular* Jewry. Since the bible, the "opera prima" of the Jewish beliefs (and of Western religions in general) lacks of the truthful definition for the Jew, who could ever produce such a definition? In some kind of way anti-semitism provided a more remarkable definition of anyone's Jewishness. Probably anti-semitism also presented us with the term "Jew", because who is the Jew anyway? The Israelite? The Israeli? The Hebrew? hummm... I couldn't give a proper answer to this question and I don't think any Rabbi could help me.
From a superficial stand point the Jew is simply that individual that bears the Jewish religion, who was born into it mostly... and hardly encompasses the convert although biblical Judaism claims for equality. Talmudic and essentially Rabbinical Judaism prove it otherwise, if there's any doubt one can just read a few pages of the Shulchan Aruch or any other Halachic text of the time or of any time, we might not really want to stop in Rabbi Greenberg but with this only exception I can't find anything relevant to my purpose (if any at all). It's worthwhile mentioning I should have specified beforehand the Greenberg example related only to our homosexual thematic and does not exemplify the issue of conversion which we do not need to deal with at the moment. It is a juncture between homosexuality, Reform judaism, conversion and religion from a liberal streampoint.
I'm not personally satisfied with the definition of the Jew by means of his religion as I'm very well aware it encompasses higher and deeper meanings without being fatalists. The universality of this question might be seen in the Diary of Anne Frank or Elie Wiesel's writings. Halacha (and to the same extent the State of Israel) specifies that a Jew is defined as some who is born to a Jewish mother. This is a kind of phenomenology I wouldn't agree with, not only as a liberal thinker but also as a scientist, as a young man of the 21st century and specially as a Jew.
In that respect I'm more inclined towards the Hellenic view; in words of Goethe "Each one be a Greek in his own way, but be one" and this simplifies the Greek tradition from Homer to the days of Kavafis. A Greek is anyone who adopts the Greek way of living, specially by means of speaking the Greek language, most precious heirloom of the Greek world of yesterday and of today. A Greek was anyone who turned Greek and who paid loyalty to the Greek nation, to the Greek people. This is a Romantic concept I certainly praise... and to this same extent I think Holderin was a Greek and also Rimbaud was a Greek and even Wilde.
I reckon the difficulties of this approach in the eyes of the Jewish cosmogony and from the standpoint of their tradition which I wholeheartedly respect. The Jews unlike the Greeks were historically stateless and it turned them into the "people whose nation is a book" in words of Borges. The Greeks in their own way were also a people of the book but not to the same extent the Jewish people were, as the Greek peninsula and its islands were permanently inhabited by Greeks and pseudo-Greeks and invasors, but remained somehow Greek. The language was spoken as a continuum for thousands of years in the Greek peninsula and the national identity wasn't taken away from them in anyway. It was probably re-defined but never taken away. Jews and Greeks do share common historical constants and even plain factual chronological history would be able to prove this point, hence it's needless to curdle up into it. They have been put up to the level of the two main stems of the Western civilization, the nitch from where all our civilization sprung and in its own way shaped history for everafter.
Then we return to my definition of the Jew; in my eyes a Jew is everyone who identifies with the destiny of the Jewish people and takes upon himself that raw unmodified Jewishness. What I doubt is to which extent such a thing is possible in our world and to which extent it was ever possible. Judaism doesn't encompass a mere religious belief but also a whole system and superstructure of cultural bias and substrati which might be defined as the Jewish mind. I believe there's such a thing as Jewish mentality in accordance to Rafel Patai's book "The Jewish Mind". Patai eludicates several interesting points in the development of Jewish culture and more than an historical text, I consider him very ethnographic.
He claims that there's no such a thing as a Jewish culture by itself, as a basic substratus and then I do not agree completely as certain basic premises in Judaism and Jewish society stem from their own very origin, even today politicians and thinkers of the West claim that Israeli history fulfills (and also disappoints) several Biblical promises. I'm very reserved at this point probably out of ignorance but I somehow agree. My current readings of Guttmann's "Die Philosophie des Judentums" place a few question marks in between.
In the other hand I do grant him ethnographic accuracy when he explains that the Jewish people as a stateless entity transformed certain particular cultural values into their own and selectively forsook the origin of the value as an act by itself. The Hebrew language is the most loyal of these examples, but some others historically closer to us can be provided, such as the "Jewish" heritage of the Ashkenazi Jewry which was technically stolen from different countries and places and overtime kept and observed with almost obssesive jealousy until our days. I can again provide a linguistic example: The Yiddisch language. Yiddisch is basically an odd form of Medieval German in structure and it was enriched with an extensive lexicon stemming from many different languages or places. Go and ask and ultra-orthodox Jew and he would probably deny any connection between Yiddisch and the Germanic languages, which is an obvious post-Holocaust connotation.
All these fact only distract the reader and ravel the possibility to define if not Judaism, then the Jew. Here we're then parting from zero to several untangible definitions. Dutch or German are probably very accurate definitions or just relatively let's say. They do define a geographical space, a culture, a language and certain tighly close historical periods that over hundreds of years tied these people to the adjective of German or Dutch, regardless of the ethymological soap operas we could engage ourselves with.
Gay and Jew might be well defined in a very simplistic way, but thus it wouldn't throw any relevant information that would trigger a thematic or interdisciplinary discussion. The plain terminology is very clear but I'm not very fond of it and find it rather exclusive. That's precisely why I prefer to work on the lack of definitions rather than on the semantic definitions. I would be more satisfied with providing semiologic definitions but I'm not in the ability to do so and by doing so I would be lead astray into the world of non-verbal linguistics.
Gay and Jew or let's say Jewish Gay presents an enormous problem of definitions once again. Jewish Gay throws on us the question of an anti-historical bias, not an anti-historical bias in terms of history itself but in terms of Judaism. Jewish Gay throws on us a serious biblical question and also opens up for us the gates of a non-religious Judaism. The gates of secularism, the phenomenon that probably redefined the status in particular of the European Jewry for hundreds of years and that set Judaism as a socio-political movement, Zionism and Haskala are probably the major outcomes of this phenomenon. We shall not waste time on this subject but secularism and the re-definition of the Jew as a citizen and of the Jew as an Israeli will probably bring more light into the issues we're developing here.
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