‘My Mother Tongue Is a Foreign Language’On Edmond Jabès’s Writing in ExileFederico Dal Bo

‘All Poets Are Жиды’

On the other hand, Jabès devotes the complex Book of Questions to a specific purpose: claiming his own identity by force of being a Jew and a writer. Is claiming to be a Jewish writer something peculiar, then?

This is the same question that haunted the Romanian-born Jewish poet and translator Paul Celan, who decided to write exclusively in German after experimenting with Romanian in his early poetry.2424In his youth, Celan also experimented with writing poems in Romanian. See Federico Dal Bo, Qabbalah e traduzione. Un saggio su Paul Celan traduttore (Salerno: Orthotes, 2019), pp. 25–28. See also Barbara Wiedemann, Antschel Paul — Paul Celan. Studien zum Frühwerk (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985) and the recent monograph by Petre Solomon, Paul Celan: The Romanian Dimension (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2019). In an epigraph to one of his poems, Celan seems to want to communicate a secret truth about being a Jewish poet who has decided to write poetry in his own mother tongue — German. The ethical and poetic conundrum obviously is that German is the same language that the perpetrators of the Shoah spoke, a language, hence, that contributed to carrying out this unspeakable task, and that was manipulated to hide it from the public. Manipulation was achieved, indeed, by literally altering the nature of the German language.2525The most obvious reference is to Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich: LTI — Lingua Tertii Imperii; A Philologist’s Notebook, trans. by Martin Brady (London: Continuum, 2007). In one epigraph to his poem ‘Und mit dem Buch aus Tarussa’, from his seminal poetical collection Niemandsrose, Celan quotes (and slightly modifies) a verse from the Russian symbolist poet Marina Tsvetaeva’s lyric Poema Kontza (Poem of the End). The epigraph is in Russian and written in Cyrillic, and therefore impenetrable to whoever is unfamiliar with Russian: ‘все поеты жиды.’2626Paul Celan, ‘Und mit dem Buch aus Tarussa’, in Celan, Werke. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. i. Abteilung: Lyrik und Prosa, ed. by Beda Allemann and others, 16 vols (Frankfurt a.M.; Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1990–2017), vi: Niemandsrose, ed. by Axel Gellhaus, Holger Gehle, Andreas Lohr, and Rolf Bücher (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2001), pp. 89–91 (p. 89). Cf. also Kommentar zu Paul Celans ‘Die Niemandsrose’, ed. by Jürgen Lehmann and Christine Ivanovic (Heidelberg: Winter, 1997), pp. 353–67. Tsvetaeva’s verse originally was: ‘Поэты — жиды!’, or ‘Poets — Jews!’ (Marina Tsvetaeva, Poema Kantza (Moscow: Directmedia, 2012), p. 149). For a more accurate translation of this verse, see below. This typographical choice makes the verse particularly enigmatic, since neither transliteration nor translation are provided. Celan’s choice to repeat the Russian poet’s verse in Cyrillic alphabet is in no way naive. On the contrary, Celan had a precise reason for doing so: relaunching the enigma of Jewish existence even on a linguistic level. Celan was apparently asking himself what the connection between Judaism and poetry actually was. Does one necessarily follow the other?

The question itself was already challenging, but apparently not challenging enough: Celan elaborated on it and made it even more radical — encrypted in the Cyrillic alphabet, which, like the Russian language, would have been impenetrable to most of Celan’s West German readership at the time. Hence, Celan chose to keep the epigraph in Cyrillic for a profound poetic reason: to encode a message that his German readers would never be able to comprehend, unless they had departed from their own Germanness and had questioned their own identity.2727On these topics, see Dal Bo, Qabbalah e traduzione, pp. 63–64.

Digression: An Ontology of Ethnic Slurs

Perhaps it is necessary to interpret Celan’s choice in yet another direction, such that it is not simply a matter of rendering the verse of the poet Tsvetaeva almost illegible to his German readers. Indeed, the use of the Cyrillic alphabet seems to obey an additional poetic task: it indicates, in a metalinguistic way, the most authentic content of the verse that says something about the connection between Judaism and poetry. After all, the Russian epigraph — ‘все поеты жиды’ — can be translated, at first, in quite ordinary terms as: ‘all poets are Jews.’

Tsvetaeva wrote this verse while the Nazi armies were relentlessly pushing into Russia. The verse suggests that she identified with the fate of the Jewish people and with that of her Jewish husband, the Russian poet Sergei Jakowlewitsch Efron, who was a former officer of White Army during the Russian civil war and then agent for the Soviet secret services, and who had been executed by Soviet authorities under the false accusation of being an agent of Trotsky. One should not ignore the fact that this accusation truly was the Soviet ‘translation’ of anti-Semitism and that it mobilized the catastrophic prejudice against the Jews as ‘agents of internationalism’.2828On this, see Paul Lendevai, Anti-Semitism Without Jews: Communist Eastern Europe (New York: Doubleday, 1971), and especially Cathy Gelbin and Sander Gilman, Cosmopolitanisms and the Jews (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), pp. 189–90. In this respect, his wife Tsvetaeva was also tapping into this internationalist charge in her verse: she was claiming a universal — and, therefore, transcultural if not ‘international’ — stigmatization of ‘all poets’. As Celan decides to mobilize this assumption in Cyrillic, a quite similar allegiance about a sort of spiritual ‘internationalism’ connecting all poets is at work. Yet, there is a subtle but decisive difference: this claim has been made untransparent and further encrypted within an alphabet that is impenetrable to most Western readers.

This identification, however, was not ethnic, but rather poetic. It was not a matter of circumcision — from which she would anyway be excluded as a woman — but rather a matter of understanding that poetry is necessarily condemned to persecution and rejection. Again, Tsvetaeva was not Jewish but married to a Jew. Consequently, a metaphorical interpretation of her verse, used as an epigraph by Celan, is inevitable: Tsvetaeva was not literally Jewish but was a poet, and therefore understood herself as metaphorically Jewish. The choice to report the epigraph in Cyrillic then is metalinguistic: Celan apparently used the Cyrillic alphabet to reinstitute a linguistic difference between himself and his readers. In so doing, he intended to underline a difference he took to be not only cultural but also ethnic.

The choice to rely not only on the Russian language but also on the Cyrillic alphabet seems to follow the desire to highlight a constitutive difference between languages — especially between the persecutors’ German language and a language that is spoken by the persecuted. Only to those who can read Russian will the connotation of the epigraph be clear. Only those who know Russian well enough can understand the violence intrinsic to this verse and the derogatory use of the noun жид (žid), which can only euphemistically be translated as ‘Jew’ and actually is strongly pejorative in a Russian context, although it was reappropriated and used in a neutral, non-derogatory way by Ukrainian Jews.2929Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 60–61. Hence, Tsvetaeva’s verse should rather be translated as follows: ‘all poets are kikes.’3030This harsh translation is uncommon among commentators, who usually read this verse euphemistically as ‘all poets are Jews’ or ‘all poets are Yids’. I am following here Michael Eskin’s suggestion in Eskin, Poetic Affairs: Celan, Grünbein, Brodsky (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), p. 192n6. See also the German translation Alle Dichter sind Jidden, as suggested in Wolfgang Emmerich, Nahe Fremde: Paul Celan und die Deutschen (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2020), p. 21.

Yet, this is not all. Translation can be deceiving. Slurs and profanities are usually excommunicated from poetic language but they have an intrinsic ontology that is only expressed more harshly and unforgivingly. Derogatory terms for Jews often hide a deeper quantum of violence, and this becomes particularly apparent when they are addressed from an etymological point of view. For instance, English derogatory terms for Germans and Italians might point to alimentary habits or fashion that are perceived as odd or ridiculous, as is the case with the offensive terms kraut or greaseball. As offensive as they might be, these terms imply that the lack of uniformity with ‘the majority of people’ mostly depends on specific habits that are stigmatized: eating too much sauerkraut or using too much hair wax. Such offensive terms might even be taken to imply that, once these obstacles have been removed, assimilation would then be possible.3131On these themes, see Federico Dal Bo, Il linguaggio della violenza. Estremismo e ideologia nella filosofia contemporanea (Bologna: Biblioteca Clueb, 2021), pp. 21–58.

On the contrary, the derogatory terms for Jews blatantly point to ethnicity itself — the sheer fact of being Jewish. This is what clearly appears in many pejorative terms for ‘Jew’ in several European languages. For instance, the English term kike has an obscure etymology but was apparently used by educated American Jews to stigmatize illiterate East European Jews and was then generalized as an insult for all Jewish people.3232Karen Stollznow, On the Offensive: Prejudice in Language Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), pp. 128–29. Cf. also Joachim Prinz, ‘Amerika — hast Du es besser? Notizen von einer Reise’, Der Morgen. Monatsschrift der Juden in Deutschland, 13.3 (1937/38), pp. 104–11 (p. 110). Another folk etymology suggests that the term might come from the Yiddish קיקעלע (kikele), ‘little circle’, possible designating the sign ‘O’, which was used by illiterate Jews who could not properly write their own name but wanted to avoid using the conventional ‘X’ as it would resemble a Cross. Cf. Leo Rosten, The New Joys of Yiddish: Completely Updated (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010), p. 177. On the other hand, just like the Russian жид (žid), the deeply offensive French term youpin as well as its variants youp or youd point directly to Jewish ethnicity and are a deformation of an abbreviated form from the Arabic-Algerian derogatory term يهودي (yahūdiyy).3333More specifically, the French-Argot term youpin consists of two discrete linguistic elements: the abridgement you from the Arabic derogatory term يهودي (yahūdiyy) — also reflecting the neutral Hebrew term יהודי (yehudi) or the Aramaic יהודיא (yehudaya’) — and the Argot suffix -pin. Cf. Napoléon Hayard, Dictionnaire Argot-Français (Paris: Dentu, 1907), p. 40; cf. also Graciela Christ, Arabismen im Argot: ein Beitrag zur französischen Lexikographie ab der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Peter Lang, 1991), p. 551. Each and all of these terms only denigrate a Jew for an ontological condition — being a Jew.

Again, this scandalous verse stays veiled or even hidden from the general public of Celan’s poem. The typographical difference imposed by the Cyrillic alphabet seems to allude to a difference with respect to other Western languages. However, one should consider the subtle transformation to which Tsvetaeva’s verse is subjected, especially when it is used as an epigraph by a Jewish, German-speaking poet. On the one hand, Tsvetaeva’s verse should have only a metaphorical meaning. On the other hand, Tsvetaeva’s verse is quoted in Russian by Celan, who clearly is both Jewish and a poet — who has survived the Shoah. Hence, Tsvetaeva’s verse acquires a new meaning in this context. In this respect, the use of the Cyrillic alphabet also seems to reduce Tsvetaeva’s metaphorical understanding to a potentially literal one: as a result, there is a passage from culture to ethnicity, from the Gentiles to the Jews — the former being the persecutors and the latter being the persecuted.

Celan made a very complex poetic choice. His use of Tsvetaeva’s verse in its original Russian within a German poem raises some epistemological problems. When Tsvetaeva argued that ‘all poets are kikes’, she was alluding to a particular ethnicity that had typically suffered from epochal persecution. At the same time, she was also generalizing that very condition to every poet by assuming, in metaphorical terms, that every poet would be persecuted as if s/he were Jewish and stigmatized for the same reason. Tsvetaeva’s verse, while written in Cyrillic for Russian readers, was as transparent as it was metaphorical. The metaphorical nature of this verse — its metaphoricity — was transparent to every Russian reader. On the other hand, Celan reversed these poetical coordinates in force of his Jewish ethnicity, his personal history of persecution, and his quotation of Tsvetaeva’s verse in Cyrilic as an epigraph to a German poem. This verse was now transformed into an epigraph that only few could read. Tsvetaeva’s metaphorical truth on poetry was now distilled, encrypted, and turned into an almost literal statement — at least with respect to Paul Celan as a Jewish poet. Yet, this operation — reversing the poetic coordinates of Tsvetaeva’s verse — was not intended to be destructive. It rather complicated or, better put, deconstructed Tsvetaeva’s metaphor and distilled a new, particular truth from her generalizing verse.

When quoted by Celan with Cyrillic letters at the beginning of his German-language poem, Tsvetaeva’s verse is essentially raw and impenetrable. There is a sort of a hardness to the palate that implicitly alludes to the need for maintaining a distance between the language that hosts this verse (Russian) and the language into which it could eventually be translated (German). This complexity creates an enigma: the epigraph can be read only by those who can read Russian and understand the biographical and poetic presuppositions in both Tsvetaeva and Celan. This enigma is offered to the reader and retracted from them: German is the language of the persecutors, but the content of persecution — ‘all poets are kikes’ — can be revealed and simultaneously hidden only in another language. Yet this other language, coming to the rescue, is also the language of the persecutor, and therefore seems, once again, to impair the persecuted: the Jew is not only a ‘Jew’, but above all a ‘kike’. The consequences are dire: literature can only encrypt a destiny of persecution but cannot save from it.

‘All Poets Are Kikes’

This long digression is instrumental in understanding the proportions of Jabès’s poetics of writing and finding an implicit if not covert angle for shedding light on his implicit theology of identity as it emerges from his main character: Yukel. Despite its biblical sound, the name Yukel is never to be found in traditional Jewish sources. And yet, the name is not a simple invention but rather a complex wordplay on the question of Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, and poetics.

Understanding the deep theological nature of this invention also requires appreciating an intricate wordplay that has escaped the attention of many commentators on Jabès’s work. Unlike Tsvetaeva, who claims that ‘all poets are kikes’, Jabès has never made such a bold statement and never used the equivalent derogatory French youpin. Yet, as a commentator suggested, the name Yukel would bear a small linguistic secret within it:

this name of a foreigner opens on a rare syllable in French, Yu, which makes think of Youpin or Yid, a syllable that astonishes by its rarity as that which has fallen into disuse, like an old car in the Place de la Concorde. 3434Helena Shillony, Edmond Jabès: Une rhétorique de la subversion (Paris: Lettres modernes, 1991), pp. 20–21. The same notion is also repeated in Emmanuel Godo, La prière de l’écrivain (Paris: Imago, 2000), p. 23; my translation.

And yet, the suggestion that the name Yukel should be understood against the background of the French derogatory term youpin is not enough. This fictional name is much more than that. Indeed, Yukel carries a strange, provocative theophoric meaning due to its composite nature. This name joins together two different linguistic segments: the ordinary Hebrew name of ‘God’ (El) and the French derogatory term youpin, reduced to the unusual French syllable yu-. The name that emerges from this transcultural wordplay would then conflate Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, and poetics into a single entity — the name Yukel — and carry a deep theological meaning with it.

In Jabès’s fiction, Yukel is a writer. One should also pay attention to Yukel’s similarity to another name: Yechiel (God shall live). More precisely, the name Yukel sounds like a deformation of Yechiel. This old theophoric biblical name is grafted — or inscribed — with the French pejorative youpin and finally transformed into Yukel. The resulting name calls into question the nature of writing itself. Should the main character have been called after the traditional name Yechiel, one could easily have concluded that his profession as a writer — writing on the Book of Life and perpetuating the goodness of Creation — is quite noble. Alas, this writer is not called Yechiel but rather Yukel. So, he is called after a deformed theophoric name that has removed the original vitality of God from the act of writing. More radically, this deformation carries the stigma, humiliation, and denigration that come from the French derogatory term youpin, since this term has been grafted within the old theophoric name Yechiel, deforming it into Yukel. It is as if Jabès, while inventing this para-biblical name, wanted God to truly acknowledge that His people are nothing more than youpins — ‘kikes’.

When interpreted against this grim background, the enigmatic character Yukel allows one to understand that Jabès too claims that ‘all writers are kikes’ — or, at least, that ‘all writers are Jews’. This claim is maintained several times — especially when Jabès speaks about the difficulty of both being Jewish and writing:

— I told you my words. I have spoken to you about the difficulty of being Jewish, which is confounded with the difficulty of writing; for both Judaism and writing are nothing but the same waiting, the same hope, the same attrition.3535Jabès, Le Livre des questions, p. 218: ‘— Je vous ai rapporté mes paroles. Je vous ai parlé de la difficulté d’être Juif, qui se confond avec la difficulté d’écrire; car le judaïsme et l’écriture ne sont qu’une même attente, un même espoir, une même usure.’

The reasons for this identity are neither ethnic nor cultural but metaphysical. In this most Christian of worlds, both writers and Jews share a deserted solitude — a detachment from the world that simultaneously is the condition and the price of writing. Jabès does not thereby claim something particularly new; he rather rephrases a famous midrash that postulates the presence of the ‘word’ (davar) of God who ‘speaks’ (medabber) in the midst of the ‘desert’ (midbar).3636These wordplays rely on the homography between the (unvocalized) Hebrew terms davar (word) and dever (plague), on the one hand, and between the Hebrew noun midbar (desert) and the present participle medaber (literally ‘speaking’) from the Hebrew verb diber (to speak), on the other hand. For a linguistic treatment of these notions see again Dal Bo, The Lexical Field of the Substantives of ‘Word’ in Ancient Hebrew and James Barr, Semantics of Biblical Language (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). On the notion of davar from a theological-historical point of view, see, for instance, Piero Capelli, ‘La parola creatrice secondo il giudaismo della tarda antichità’, in La parola creatrice in India e nel Medio Oriente. Atti del Seminario della Facoltà di Lettere dell’Università di Pisa, 29–31 maggio 1991, ed. by Caterina Conio, 2 vols (Pisa: Giardini, 1994), i, pp. 155–72. For a theological treatment, see André Neher, The Exile of the Word: From the Silence of the Bible to the Silence of Auschwitz (Philadelphia, PA: Jewish Publishing Society, 1980). And yet there is a supplementary similarity between Jewishness and writing, which would also clarify Jabès’s previous assertion that his mother tongue is fundamentally foreign to him. Such a similarity is not explicit but only alluded to in a short, apparently occasional biographical remark:

Born on 16 April in Cairo, my father inadvertently declared to the consular authorities charged with recording the act of my birth that I was born on the 14th of the same month. Do I unconsciously owe to this miscalculation the feeling that forty-eight hours have always separated me from my life? The two days added to mine cannot be experienced except in death.3737Edmond Jabès, Elya, in Il libro delle interrogazioni, pp. 1020–1195 (p. 1145): ‘Né le 16 avril, au Caire, mon père par inadvertance, aux autorités consulaires chargées d’établir mon acte de naissance, me déclara né le 14 du même mois. Dois-je inconsciemment à cette erreur de calcul, le sentiment que quarante-huit heures m’ont toujours séparé de ma vie? Les deux jours ajoutés aux miens ne pouvaient être vécus que dans la mort.’

This curious mistake seems to provide Jabès with a subtle deconstruction of the Jewish notion of fatherhood and opens toward a complex appreciation of writing as a maternal dimension of existence and writing.

‘The Day of My Circumcision’

At first glance, the anecdote seems to convey a trivial mistake Jabès’s father made in front of an Egyptian clerk: a simple misunderstanding about his son’s date of birth. And yet this mistake seems, much more profoundly, to be a parody of circumcision and its ritual arrangements. What is circumcision if not the process of inscribing someone into the people of Israel? It is a sort of ethnic pact signed with flesh and blood. Indeed, when the father brings his son to the mohel (the circumciser), he does not simply indulge in an ancient tribal pact; more subtly, he delivers him to a very peculiar kind of writing that eventually inscribes his son’s affiliation to Judaism by removing his foreskin — by impressing into his flesh the very same Abrahamic pact that has been marked in this fashion for many generations.

Another digression is necessary to appreciate the metaphysical nature of circumcision in Jabès and its impact on literature. I will in particular consider the figure of Elisha ben Abuyah — a master from the Talmud who was revered as a great scholar and yet apostatized, and who therefore was designated as Acher, or ‘the other one’.3838On the nature of Elisha ben Abuyah’s transgression, see David M. Grossberg, Heresy and the Formation of the Rabbinic Community (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), pp. 167–92. See also Federico Dal Bo, ‘Legal and Transgressive Sex, Heresy, and Hermeneutics in the Talmud: The Cases of Bruriah, Rabbi Meir, Elisha ben Abuyah and the Prostitute’, in Jewish Law and Academic Discipline: Contributions from Europe, ed. by Elisha Ancselovits and George Wilkes (Liverpool: Deborah Charles, 2016), pp. 128–51. An impressive narrative from the Jerusalem Talmud provides a short piece of biography on Elisha that describes his father dedicating his son to Scripture for the sake of its mighty power:

[my] daddy, Abuyah (abuyah abba), was one of the great people in Jerusalem. On the day he came to have me circumcised (be-yom she-ba le-mohaleyinyi), he called all the great people in Jerusalem and made them sit in one room [with] Rabbi Eliezer and Rabbi Yehoshua in another room. After they had eaten and drunk, they [began] stamping [their feet] and dancing. Rabbi Eliezer said to Rabbi Yehoshua: while they are keeping us busy in their way, let’s keep us busy in our way, let’s sit and occupy ourselves with the words of Scripture, from the Torah to the Prophets and from the Prophets to the Writings. And fire fell down from the skies and surrounded them. Abuyah said to them: My rabbis, have you come to burn my house down around me? They said to him: God forbid! Rather, we are sitting and examining the words of Scripture from the Torah to the Prophets, and from the Prophets to the Writings, and [these] words were animated as when they were given to us from Sinai and the fire shone around us as it was shone from Sinai, and principally [Scripture] was not given to us from Sinai except in fire and on a mountain with flames [that reached] the skies. My daddy, Abuyah, said to them: My rabbis, if such is the power of Scripture, let’s consecrate him (meprisho) [my son] to Scripture.3939Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Chagigah, 2. 1, fol. 9b, my translation: ‘אבויה אבא מגדולי ירושלם היה ביום שבא למוהליני קרא לכל גדולי ירושלם והושיבן בבית אחד ולרבי אליעזר ולר' יהושע בבית אחד מן דאכלון ושתון שרון מטפחין ומרקדקין א"ר ליעזר לר' יהושע עד דאינון עסיקין בדידהון נעסוק אנן בידן וישבו ונתעסקו בדברי תורה מן התורה לנביאים ומן הנביאים לכתובים וירדה אש מן השמים והקיפה אותם אמר להן אבויה רבותיי מה באתם לשרוף את ביתי עלי אמרו לו חס ושלום אלא יושבין היינו וחוזרין בדברי תורה מן התורה לנביאים ומן הנביאים לכתובים והיו הדברים שמיחים כנתינתן מסיני והיתה האש מלחכת אותן כלחיכתן מסיני ועיקר נתינתן מסיני לא ניתנו אלא באש וההר בוער באש עד לב השמים אמר להן אבויה אבא רבותיי אם כך היא כוחה של תורה אם נתקיים לי בן הזה לתורה אני מפרישו’. This passage has parallels also in Ruth Rabbah 6. 6, Qohelet Rabbah 7. 18, and only partially in the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Chagigah foll. 15a–b.

Again, the historical reliability of this narrative is not as important as its evocative power. The narrative does not only add details to Elisha’s biography; it also reports them in the first person: ‘On the day he came to have me circumcised…’. An extreme perspective is then assumed here: Elisha reports in the first person the day of his own circumcision, and therefore the day in which he was born to the Jewish faith. Yet this event — being circumcised as an infant — cannot properly be narrated in the first-person perspective. If it is performed at the right time, on the eighth day after birth, then no one can remember the day of his own circumcision, just as no one can remember the day of their own birth. In a stringent Jewish perspective, the ritual of circumcision is to be performed shortly after birth and predates any possible experience or rather establishes the very possibility of experience of being Jewish. One’s birth and circumcision are as remote and inaccessible as one’s own death. There is no actual memory of any of these experiences. No autobiographical account — of one’s own birth, circumcision, or death — is possible.

And yet the narrative from the Jerusalem Talmud is told in the first person, just as is Jabès’s narrative about his father recording his birth certificate. The Talmud assumes here an extreme perspective, which is also a perspective of extremes. Circumcision should be narrated from an objective, external perspective, as a historical fact. For instance, compare what is said about Jesus: ‘and when eight days were accomplished for the circumcising of the child, his name was called Jesus, which was so named of the angel before he was conceived in the womb’ (Luke 2. 21). The ‘documentary effect’ is provided by the narration in the third person. The Gospel here implicitly admits that circumcision falls beyond the limits of their own experience for whoever it befalls, even when the person it befalls is Jesus. There can be no personal narration of this event. Therefore, circumcision is an extreme experience and necessarily escapes the possibilities of any autobiography.

In contradistinction, Elisha assumes an extreme perspective on himself and explicitly speaks about the day of his circumcision as if he had witnessed it himself. Yet one should not mistake this personal narrative for ordinary biography. Circumcision does not name an ordinary date in one’s life but rather posits the very ‘day’ (yom) from which one’s spiritual life begins — the eighth day. Therefore, narrating one’s own circumcision in the first person is not simply a rhetorical device; it constitutes a superhuman act, for it means taking for oneself the power over the entirety of one’s life— from one extreme to the other, from birth to death, from spiritual birth to spiritual death, and from circumcision to apostasy. Indeed, it should not be forgotten that Elisha eventually apostatized and left Judaism, possibly following a kind of religious Gnostic conversion. The nature of Elisha’s apostasy is a matter of scholarly dispute and is less relevant here than his general behaviour towards his former co-religionists, and especially towards his pupil Rabbi Meir, which is explored in yet another famous narrative from the Babylonian Talmud:

[O]ur Rabbis taught: there was [once] a matter regarding Acher, as he was riding on a horse on Sabbath and Rabbi Meir was walking behind him to learn Torah from his mouth. [Acher] said to him: Meir, go back, because I have already measured by the paces of my horse that thus far extends the Sabbath limit. [Meir] said to him: You, too, go back! [Acher] said to him: And haven’t I already said to you that I have already heard from behind the Veil: Return you backsliding children — except for Acher? 4040Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Chagigah, fol. 15a; my translation: ‘ת"ר מעשה באחר שהיה רוכב על הסוס בשבת והיה רבי מאיר מהלך אחריו ללמוד תורה מפיו אמר לו מאיר חזור לאחריך שכבר שיערתי בעקבי סוסי עד כאן תחום שבת א"ל אף אתה חזור בך א"ל ולא כבר אמרתי לך כבר שמעתי מאחורי הפרגוד שובו בנים שובבים חוץ מאחר’.

This is an important text since it shows that the Talmud can be quite tolerant with respect to someone’s idiosyncrasies. Rabbi Meir is described as still full of reverence for Elisha and he keeps studying with Elisha, despite Elisha’s apostasy and patent transgression of the Shabbat, which involves riding a horse on this holy day and also transgressing the limits of movement prescribed by Jewish law. The details about Elisha’s last words are telling. At first, it seems that God Himself has spoken from beyond the Veil — a structure separating the material from the supernal world — and argued that Elisha could not repent. The Jerusalem Talmud too tells a very similar story but argues that this utterance ‘from behind the Veil’ (mi-acharey ha-pargod) actually is a ‘divine voice from the Holy of Holies’ (bat qol mi-qodesh qodashim) that explicitly exempts ‘Elisha ben Abuyah’ from repenting.4141Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Chagigah 2. 1, fol. 9b.

Many commentators overlook this narrative and simply reiterate the idea that Elisha has sinned to such an extent that any repentance is no longer possible. Yet a modern commentator on the Talmud — the late Hungarian-born and Shoah survivor Rabbi Yehuda Amital (1924–2010), who was the founder and director of the Yeshivat Har Etzion (Gush Etzion, Israel), a prominent public figure in Israel, and the recipient of the Israel Prize in 1991 — offers a more intriguing interpretation of the passage. Taking into account the difference between the narratives in the Babylonian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud, he elaborates on Elisha’s final words and especially on the assumption that Elisha could not repent, as Elisha tells his pupil. Rabbi Amital elaborates on the Hebrew expression ‘except for Acher’ (chutz mi-Acher) and interprets it literally as ‘except everybody else’. Rabbi Amital argues that nobody else but Acher could actually have heard this statement about his inability to repent. Accordingly, Rabbi Amital writes: ‘he alone heard this voice; he essentially convinced himself that this was his situation’ (hu mi-‘atzmam shachna‘ et ‘atzmo she-zeh matzabo).4242Rabbi Yehudah Amital, ‘Shabbat conversation’, accessible online: <http://etzion.gush.net/vbm/archive/5-sichot/48hazinu.php> [accessed 3 April 2022]. This oral interpretation was written down by Rav Matan Gliday (Yeshivat Neve Shmuel, Te‘ena, Israel). I came across this commentary in a page from the prominent website Mi Yodeya <https://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/104020/elisha-ben-abuya-and-repentance> [accessed 31 January 2021]. Cf. also Rabbi Yehuda Amital, Jewish Values in a Changing World (Jersey City, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, 2005), pp. 112, 139, and 223–24. The mythological ‘divine voice’ speaking ‘from behind the Veil’ would then be a sort of euphemistic expression for suggesting that Elisha has convinced himself not to be worthy of repentance, and therefore to be beyond forgiveness.

In this respect, the conviction of being beyond forgiveness was Elisha’s major sin. While assuming that he had heard a ‘divine voice’ admonishing him not to repent, Elisha was granting to himself a divine prerogative: forgiveness. One should treat Elisha’s conviction carefully. It was not humbleness that had persuaded him that he could never be forgiven for his sins. It was rather a sort of Nietzschean sentiment of loving his own life to the extreme — even more than God Himself. As he assumed that God could never forgive him, Elisha was withdrawing himself from a dimension of repentance and entering a dimension of total ownership — in the legal and theological senses of the expression. He had become the only master of his life. He was claiming his life — from the day of his circumcision to damnation — for himself and for himself alone. There was a sort of grim amor fati protruding from his stubborn and superb assumption that God could never forgive him. The question was not a silly one — whether there is a sin greater than God’s forgiveness — but rather a radical one: should/could one claim for oneself the entirety of one’s life — regardless of its negativity?

In the process of speaking about his own circumcision, Elisha stretched his self beyond his own biographical limits. He claimed the ability to fully comprehend himself as a human being, as a man of faith, and as a first-person narrator. In other words, Elisha’s entire self is stretched beyond the limits of ‘literature’ — to which both biography and autobiography famously belong. Perhaps Derrida was right when he argued, while deconstructing Augustine’s influential Confessions in his semi-autobiographical ‘Circumfession’, that biography is no longer a literary genre, although it was once the gem of classical literature.4343Jacques Derrida, ‘Circumfession’, in Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, Jacques Derrida, trans. by Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 3–315. Confessions, stories, biographies, and autobiographies assume that there is an unspoiled origin of life: a source from which it is possible to develop, sort out, and write down a narration about oneself or about others. In many respects, the Writ itself is a sort of a gigantic autobiography that God delivered both to Himself and His people. The well-known radical kabbalistic assumption that Scripture would only be a single name of God is only the most conspicuous aspect of this notion, with the more subtle implication that a confession is a perpetual, interminable work.4444See the excellent contribution Francesco Giusti, ‘An Interminable Work? The Openness of Augustine’s Confessions’, in Openness in Medieval Europe, ed. by Manuele Gragnolati and Almut Suerbaum, Cultural Inquiry, 23 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 23–43 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-23_02>.

Yet there is a paradox here: there has never been an unspoiled origin for the Self. Psychoanalysis is quite eloquent about this. It has educated us to believe that Self has never been a primary entity but rather the construct of, if not the negotiation between, two unconscious dimensions: the id and the superego. In this respect, the deep nature of the mind is unconscious and therefore unsusceptible to expression in words. Consequently, there is no primordial source for narration. Therefore, each biography is structurally uncertain. In his ‘Circumfession’, Derrida has elaborated on the connection between biography and theology:

Saint Augustine, of whom I read that ‘having returned to God, he probably never confessed, in the modern sense of the word’, never having had, any more than I, beyond even truth, ‘the opportunity to confess’, which precisely does not prevent him from working at the delivery of literary confessions, i.e. at a form of theology as autobiography.4545Derrida, ‘Circumfession’, pp. 86–87.

Derrida has shown that every biography is an art of confession to God, just as autobiography is an art of confession to oneself; he has also shown that this almost chiastic connection is not harmonious but rather interrupted by a primordial wound that is eloquently described by the homography between the Hebrew words for ‘word’ (milah) and ‘circumcision’ (milah): ‘circumcision as retrenchment, mark, determination, exclusion, whence the impossibility of writing, whence the interminable reflection, whence the infinite delay’.4646Ibid., p. 276.

When Elisha takes upon himself the narration of the day of his circumcision, he practices an extreme art of confession. If one joins together two narratives, as it is customary in Talmudic exegesis, one can even conclude that Elisha places himself within an impossible memory of his own circumcision while also heroically accepting his perdition as an apostate: ‘haven’t I already said to you that I have already heard from behind the Veil: “Return you backsliding children — except for Acher?”.’ Elisha holds in his hands both extremes of his life — his own spiritual birth as well as his own spiritual death — and in this sense his apostasy is radical: he makes an example of himself; he refuses to conform to what others would call ‘truth and tradition’; he rejects his own possibility of redemption.

Keeping in mind the Talmudic narrative of Elisha and the day of his circumcision, I can now return to Jabès and his anecdote about his father making a mistake about the day of his birth. From Elisha’s radical perspective, it is ironic if not grotesque to read that Jabès’s father made a mistake and recorded his son’s birthday in the daily register of newborns as being two days earlier than it actually was. In this sense, registering his son’s birthday — writing it down — predates the actual birth, two days later. And consider this: recording his son’s birthday two days before his actual birth is not simply a serious mistake with some serious administrative ramifications; it is also, and foremost, a deep mistake due to the complex connection between biography and writing. Besides, registering someone’s birthday is a form of an inscription that is inherently connected, in the case of Jewish male existence, once more with circumcision. Derrida eloquently wrote: ‘for want of an immediately available surface of inscription, without knowing if they were being inscribed elsewhere, nor what remains once the surface of inscription has been buried, like foreskin or moleskin’.4747Ibid., p. 158. When treated not as an ordinary mistake but rather as a Freudian slip, registering his own son with a false date or falsely ‘inscribing’ his name in the register suggests an event transcending the episodical and the individual: any kind of writing — like recording someone into a list of births — necessarily predates any kind of actual birth. In other terms, writing — like recording someone in the Book of Life — anticipates life. This constitutes then a curious inversion of two assumptions that traditionally surround the act of circumcision: that it takes place eight days after the actual birth and that writing — like the act of circumcision itself — can only follow an actual, biological birth.

Jabès’s Mother Tongue

It is then not surprising that Jabès interprets his father’s trivial mistake in metaphysical terms and possibly uses it to suggest a revolution of the ordinary notion of writing. In one of his last works, The Book of Dividing, Jabès briefly mentions the possibility that there is a ‘maternal writing’ (écriture maternelle) just like there is ‘mother tongue’ (langue maternelle):

As everybody knows, there is a mother tongue, the first language we learn that is spoken by us. With this truism in mind, can we declare that there is a ‘motherly’ writing, a common writing, pages of our early beginnings? A child’s first writings are an apprenticeship in writing and not worried about rediscovering the original text: the text that generates texts to be written, although it always escapes us, never ceases to haunt us.4848Edmond Jabès, Le Livre du partage (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), p. 46: ‘Il y a — chacun le sait — une langue maternelle, la première langue apprise, parlée par nous. Fort de ce truisme, pouvons-nous déclarer qu’il y a une écriture “maternelle”, un écrit commun, pages de nos premiers balbutiements? Les premiers écrits d’un enfant sont apprentissage d’écriture et non souci de redécouvrir le texte d’origine: le texte générateur de textes à écrire, bien que nous échappant toujours, ne cesse de nous hanter.’

Again, Jabès argues here in metaphysical terms. He argues that there might be a ‘maternal writing’ (écriture maternelle) that can never be fully present to itself, that ‘haunts’ us while generating ‘text to be written’, and that is always ‘escaping’ us. At first, these are considerations that try to explore the dimension of writing in terms analogous to the dimension of language.

Yet, it is not difficult to appreciate here an echo of Julia Kristeva’s seminal notion of chora and especially the distinction — or even opposition — that she has famously established between writing and language. In many respects, Jabès’s notion of la page blanche, the ‘blank page’, owes much to Kristeva’s claim that an author — a writer! — has to become anonymous, if not an absence or ‘a blank space’, so that text as such may eventually exist.4949See Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, trans. by Leon Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), p. 75. Similarly, Jabès seems to echo her assumption that the dimensions of writing and language do not overlap, since the latter is ‘inscribed’ in the former.5050I am following here Steven Jaron, ‘Le Remaniement’, in Edmond Jabès: l’éclosion des énigmes, ed. by Daniel Lançon and Catherine Mayaux (Saint-Denis: Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, 2008), pp. 17–28. Cf. also Tsivia Wygoda Frank, Edmond Jabès and the Archaeology of the Book: Text, Pre-Texts, Contexts (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2022). The dimension of writing would precisely be a ‘maternal’ dimension — just as the dimension of language would be a ‘foreign’ one. By mistakenly recording his son’s date of birth, making it two days late, Jabès’s father committed a serious mistake: he confirmed the impossibility of belonging to Judaism solely by means of circumcision — whose Hebrew term milah is a homograph that also refers to ‘word’, as discussed above. In this respect, there is a structural difference between a ‘maternal writing’ that generates texts that still have to be written and the ‘word’ (milah) by which these texts, perpetually generated by a ‘maternal writing’, have to be written — a word, furthermore, that can be compared to the act of ‘circumcision’ (milah). This allusion to the milah as both ‘word’ and ‘circumcision’ probably is the key to the enigmatic epigraph opening The Book of Questions: ‘mark the first page of the book with a red bookmark, since in the beginning, the wound is invisible.’5151Jabès, Le Livre des questions, p. 7: ‘Marque d’un signet rouge la première page du livre, car la blessure est invisible à son commencement.’ Hence, Jabès’s father made an — unconscious — mistake that proved that one belongs to Judaism specifically by means of writing a ‘word’ (milah), just as every Jewish male also belongs to Judaism by undergoing ‘circumcision’ (milah). Nevertheless, Jabès seems to argue against his father’s mistake by claiming that there is a female, maternal writing that predates every spoken word — a writing that is inherently female, cut out from an incision into the flesh, just as circumcision actually is, a word carved as wound or a wound carved out as word.

And yet, the dimension of ‘motherhood’ should not be imagined as follows:

Yukel reported the story of that blind woman who, far away from her family, raised the son who she had delivered to the world. And he compared the destiny of this woman to that of the writer and that of the Jew, bound, by a pledge, to the land of his forefathers but separated from it by the eyes and the legs…5252Edmond Jabès, Le Livre de Yukel, in Il libro delle interrogazioni, pp. 327–590 (p. 557): ‘Yukel rapporta l’histoire de la femme aveugle qui éleva, loin de sa famille, les fils qu’elle avait donné au monde. Et il compara le destin de cette femme à celui de l’écrivain et à celui du Juif rivé, par un vœu, à la terre de ses aïeux, mais séparé d’elle par les yeux et les jambes…’.

Jabès here points to the constitutive blindness of a ‘maternal writing’ (écriture maternelle) as the dark, inaccessible source for ‘words’ — even the words for confessing to God Himself.5353I cannot explore here the intriguing suggestion that, due to the complex overlapping between the voice of God and the voice of Augustine’s mother Monica, ‘maternal writing’ may relate to the art of confession. On this, see especially Francesco Giusti, ‘The Hinge of Time: Mothers and Sons in Barthes and Augustine’, Exemplaria, 33.3 (2021), pp. 280–95 <https://doi.org/10.1080/10412573.2021.1965731>. In the unsettling metaphor, writing is a mother whose words cannot be read but only delivered and disseminated, as wounds. The metaphor does not explore the possibility that words could be written with a tactile writing system like Braille, such that the mother’s words — the words of writing — could be accessed physically by touching them.

This fascinating suggestion escapes the poetic economy of Jabès, who rather conceives the dimension of writing within a stringent metaphysics of light, which obviously resonates with Scripture: ‘on the threshold of the seventh day, God closed the envelope of the world, where the stars gleamed, and closed it with His seal, which man calls by the blinding name: sun.’5454Jabès, Le Livre des questions, p. 118: ‘au seuil du septième jour, Dieu ferma l’enveloppe de l’univers où scintillaient les étoiles et y apposa son cachet que l’homme désigna du nom aveuglant de soleil.’ Let us consider once more the metaphor at stake here: ‘maternal writing’ is a blind mother who writes but will never be able to read ‘her’ own ‘words’. If it is so, the question that arises is whether the metaphysics of light literally is the ‘last word’on Creation. Apparently, Jabès does not think so. A writer is someone who inscribes words as wounds. These words, which can never be read, come from his inaccessible blind mother, who cannot see the sun as the seal of Creation. In this perspective, light is only another form of inscribing a word as a wound; it is not ultimate since every word is only begotten by a ‘maternal writing’. On the other hand, the constitutive blindness of a ‘maternal writing’ (écriture maternelle) is also the constitutive blindness of ‘Writing’ (Écriture) as a mother who begets her sons — Jewish ‘writers’ who are all that remains after the exhaustion of the Book. In this respect, ‘Writing’ (Écriture) is inherently secluded from literature, whose words written by ‘Jewish writers’ cannot be seen by writing, due to a structural blindness that buries writing into a tenebrous solitude:

‘blinding a man’, Reb Berre, then said, ‘does that mean you deprive his soul of the sun? The world inside is a black world. Each avowal, each gesture, is a candle that burns and, while we sleep, wakes deep within us.’5555Ibid., p. 158.

Jabès explicitly compares the act of writing to an unfortunate case of miscarriage: ‘therefore, a stillborn child; stillborn, i.e., dead in order to be born; life denied until its birth and frozen in it, whose breath and inertia were our own’ (donc, un enfant mort-né; mort-né, c’est-à-dire mort afin de naître; vie refusée jusqu’à sa naissance et figée en elle dont le souffle et l’inertie furent les nôtres).5656Jabès, Elya, p. 1172. In this perspective, the image of a miscarriage is eloquent enough to describe the dramatic act of writing as well as the risks of being misunderstood or, even worse, of delivering a work that is lifeless — stillborn. And yet there is something darker and uncanny at stake.

Let me insist once more on the notion of ‘maternal writing’. This notion seems to object to the traditional institution of circumcision, especially because it posits writing before life whereas circumcision posits life before writing. When related to the dimension of maternity, the notion of writing is exposed to the risks of pregnancy and especially to the threat of miscarriage. Jabès’s image of writing his own work projects his metaphor of a ‘maternal writing’ into a darker realm: if motherhood presupposes pregnancy, pregnancy might involve the risk of miscarriage. Here Jabès apparently maintains in much more radical terms that the notion of writing itself necessarily involves the event of miscarriage. The stillborn child carries a poignant name: Elya. Regardless of any lexicological and philological precaution, Jabès assumes the name Elya to be the anagram of his mother’s name — Yael. Therefore, the miscarriage figures not simply as an unfortunate event but rather as the tragic destiny to which the act of writing is inexorably delivered. In other words, the final consequence of a fatal mutation is reflected in the letter permutation of his mother’s name — from Yael to Elya. Still, this already dark dimension of motherhood does not exhaust Jabès’s notions of language and writing. At first, one should recall that Jabès claims — almost in traditional, naive terms — that a writer is someone who has rediscovered the dimension of his infancy; hence, a writer would apparently be like

[an] eighty-years old [woman] on her deathbed who, a moment before fading away, expressed herself in the language of her childhood that she had forgotten, already in her adolescence.5757Ibid., p. 618: ‘[une] octogénaire sur son lit d’agonie qui, un moment avant de s’éteindre, s’exprima dans la langue de son enfance qu’elle avait, depuis son jeune âge, oubliée’.

And yet infantile words — the words of someone who cannot yet speak — are those that a writer would allegedly be required to speak again. Still, they do not appear to be mere, unoriginal repetitions of some soft ‘baby talk’ but rather sound like the lamentation of an unfortunate creature — a stillborn — who has to face a tragic destiny: being out-spoken in words and therefore destined to death. Jabès writes: ‘deprived of its r, la mort, death, dies asphyxiated in the word, mot’ (privé d’R, la mort meurt d’asphyxie dans le mot).5858Edmond Jabès, El, ou le dernier livre, in Il libro delle interrogazioni, pp. 1474–1665 (p. 1532).

The transparent wordplay in the original French between mort (‘death’) and mot (‘word’) manifests an intrinsic relationship of the individual act of writing with the transindividual, inexorable destiny to die — one is born to die. As a consequence, the very event of motherhood is connected to the event of death not simply as an exterior risk of miscarriage but rather as an interior will of sacrificing her own son. What becomes manifest on the sacrificial altar of writing is that every writer’s ‘word’ (mot) is destined to ‘death’ (mort). More radically, this destiny is imposed as a sacrifice by writing itself — that is, by means of ‘the sacrificed and yet always awaited word’ (la parole sacrifiée mais toujours attendue).5959Edmond Jabès, Aely, in Il libro delle interrogazioni, pp. 1196–1473 (p. 1290). In these terms, Jabès’s notion of ‘maternal writing’ actually exhausts the patriarchal dimension of fatherhood, which is classically depicted in Scripture by means of two events: circumcision and the sacrifice of the firstborn. Besides, Abraham was the first: the first to become a Jew, the first to be circumcised, the first to offer his son as a sacrifice on an altar of fire (Genesis 22. 1–18).

By inscribing the act of writing into the dimension of sacrifice, Jabès militates for a reinstitution of traditional Jewish messianism. Yet he is well aware that this ‘tradition’ — the ordinary, patriarchal one — is outdated. His discomfort towards the actual Talmud, its hermeneutics, and its faith in a perpetual legal reasoning eventually brought him to write his own private Talmud — not a legal but a literary one. This fictional and yet somehow not fictitious Talmud met all the requirements for elevating Jabès’s otherwise trivial discomfort for Rabbinic literature to the truly metaphysical assumption that Jewish writing is intrinsically messianic. A literary Talmud — populated by fictional rabbis — substantiated a radical expression of this principle: the ‘inoperative nature’ of Jewish Law emerges exactly when messianism is completely secularized and can no longer bear its traditional message.6060I am clearly alluding here to Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer. Edizione integrale (Macerata: Quolibet, 2018). Jabès’s world is the world of revelation — from the radical perspective in which this world is returned to its own nothingness. In this respect, Jabès’s notion of ‘maternal writing’ delivers the act of writing to the sacrificial destiny of death: ‘The book is the place where the writer sacrifices his voice to silence.’6161Jabès, Elya, p. 1060: ‘le livre est le lieu où l’écrivain fait, au silence, le sacrifice de sa voix.’

Jabès’s notion of ‘maternal writing’ replaces the traditional notion of fatherhood together with its main institutions — circumcision and the sacrifice of the firstborn. We finally understand that Jabès’s claim that his ‘mother tongue’ is a foreign language only affirms the inability to find a centre within the perimeter of writing. Writing cannot provide a stable centre to those who inexorably err when disseminated in time and space. Jabès therefore delivers an uncanny diagnosis about speaking a mother tongue: the act of possessing a mother tongue cannot provide stability, and this is because one is inexorably delivered to the act of being written — and hence to die. As a consequence: ‘my mother tongue is a foreign language.’