Article by David Lemler

How did a classic work of Jewish thought written in Arabic in the 12th century, which claims the absolute superiority of Jews and Hebrew, come to be cited by both the Israeli far right and the most radical fringes of anti-Zionism? To dispel this mystery and the misreadings of this text, David Lemler immersed himself in Yehuda Halevi’s Kuzari. His interpretation reveals an unexpected utopia, that of the Jewish state of the Khazars, whose critical function could help us escape contemporary aporias.

In the aftermath of the October 7 attack, the expression “hayot adam,” used by several Israeli leaders to describe Hamas terrorists, shocked the public and stirred controversy. Variously translated as “animals,” “wild beasts,” and “human animals,” the phrase is striking for its symbolic violence and, for those sensitive to the resonances of the Hebrew language, for the echoes it finds in biblical and rabbinic texts. David Lemler undertakes an archaeology of this problematic term, drawing on the memory of pogroms and Nazism as well as the deeper roots of the representation of the non-Jew in traditional sources.