Sublime

Les juifs modernes, ceux qui persistent à « se nommer juifs aujourd’hui encore4 » — telle est l’expression exacte de Freud,

There will be a scarcity of saints but an abundance of martyrs. That is the way of our moment in time.

Murder

Thomas Walsingham, a monk in St. Albans Abbey who witnessed the destruction of the abbey’s archive firsthand, described how the rebels “set fire to all court rolls and muniments, so that after they had got rid of these records of their ancient service their lords would not be able to claim any right at all against them at some future time.”[48] Kil

This, like the 1948 war, was planned to be a war of extermination.

Yet martyrdom alone could not have stopped the massed power of the Seleucids and Hellenizers. In Chasidic reasoning, apocalypse was the only hope left. Indeed, had the Chasidim survived the persecution and won out within the Jewish community, the religion would have been decisively turned onto a path of pacifism, apocalyptic expectation, and denigr