Di fronte alla Legge. Rosenzweig e la prospettiva ebraica nella cultura occidentale

Enfältig wandeln mit deinem Gott» these words are written on the Gate which opens to the Star of Redemption. They refer to the particular walking of Israel through the desert: the exodus. According to Franz Rosenzweig, the exodus doesn’t happen to Israel by chance but it is what Jewish people are made of. «Judesein» means being deeply rooted in the everlasting lack of any root. As a matter of fact, the Jewish Law – which shapes the Jewish identity – is established though a crossing of the desert, which is the place par excellence without borders and frontiers. Only in the desert the Jewish Law can grow and being set. As a result since its foundation, it shows a fundamental difference with the western nomos, as it is analyzed in the work of Carl Schmitt. According to Schmitt, nomos is defined by a fundamental connection with normativized space. In addition to natural motivations – land is primarily source of food and shelter – there is also a non-natural aspect that binds man to territory: the Landnahme. It is in fact the original possession-taking of land that starts legal history through violent occupations and conquests of areas related to other human communities. The aim of my dissertation is to juxtapose the traditional concept of nomos in Schmitt and the new concept of law in the work of Franz Rosenzweig. As stated in Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption, Jewish law «counts on period of time, on a future». This temporal dimension is related more to what the philosopher calls the “eternal life” of the Jewish people than to territorial conquests. As consequence, violence, which appeared being an essential quality of the territorial nomos, is mainly removed in the Rosenzweig’s law. Also the nationalistic connotations of the concept of “people” seem to play a weaker role in this new conceptualization of law, which, rather than being expression of a command, is the expression of a living trust.