Öffentlicher Gastvortrag und Workshop mit Dr. Silvana Rabinovich, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)
It is not only religion(s) in general, but also biblical texts and motifs that can bring out the best and the worst in people and societies. In the present day, they are used in both Jewish and Christian contexts to legitimise colonial land grabs, war and genocidal violence. At the same time, they serve as resources of resistance, hope and humanity, empowering victims and survivors to claim their dignity and justice – by placing their trust in a God who is the judge of all people and the saviour of the lost. Dr Silvana Rabinovich is a Jewish philosopher conducting research at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). She will deliver a lecture on the decolonisation of the Bible in the context of Gaza. Guiding this approach is the humanism of the other, as developed by the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas in the wake of the Shoah, which becomes a call not to turn away from the faces and cries of the people of Gaza. Her method also draws on Walter Benjamin’s messianic mode of thinking, which reads texts and images of the past in a constellation of events linked to the present (the ‘Jetztzeit’).
Silvana Rabinovich introduces her lecture as follows:
Unlike Adorno’s dictum on Auschwitz, we cannot speak of ‘after Gaza’ because, three years on, the cruellest phase of the Nakba is still unfolding, since the ‘ceasefire’ was never really a ceasefire. The toponym Gaza clings to our skin like the tunic of Nessus and we shall bequeath it on to future generations. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (who, as a Jew, described himself as ‘Vietnamese’) wrote about Vietnam: «some are guilty, but we are all responsible».
From Levinasian heteronomy, politicised and understood as justice of the other (which is more demanding than altruism, which shares one's own sense of justice with the other, as justice for the other), we shall put into practice responsibility for the other through a decolonial reading of figures from the Hebrew Bible who are instrumentalised by Israeli militarist discourse.
As readers of the Hebrew Bible, faithful to the teachings of the prophets, the aim is to liberate (Dussel) our reading from the shackles of coloniality of power (Quijano). Because the State cannot imprison sovereignty, which relates only to the Sovereign of the World (Ribbon ‘Olam), as the Book of Samuel demonstrates; because Naboth’s vineyard (in the First Book of Kings) lies at the heart of colonial distortion, I propose to brush selected texts of the Hebrew Bible against the grain (Benjamin) of Deuteronomistic source.
In « Der heilige Weg » (1919), Martin Buber, inspired by the Essenes, dedicated to his friend Gustav Landauer a path – that diverged from that of colonialism– towards the sanctification of the earth. Because the earth is not ‘holy’ in itself, but must be sanctified day by day through a way of life that honours the humility called for by the prophets. This vision represents a messianic seed of the prophetic socialism that both thinkers cultivated. The Bible is not a weapon of mass destruction (as some believe) but a treasure trove of messianic seeds capable of reversing the dark times that prevail in our day. Because in Palestine there is no ‘millennia-old religious conflict’, but rather the promise of translation between the children of Abraham practised for over a millennium by Arab Jews living in Muslim societies.
Dr. Silvana Rabinovich is Full Time Researcher C, definitive of the Hermeneutics Seminar at the Institute for Philological Research (IIFL) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and guest professor in Argentina, Brazil, Spain and France. She holds a PhD in Philosophy (FFyL - UNAM); Master’s degree in Philosophy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; and Bachelor of Philosophy, National University of Rosario, Argentina.
Among her recent publications are:
- La Biblia y el drone. Sobre usos y abusos de figuras bíblicas en el discurso político de Israel Casagrande, Rosario, 2020- Heredad, México, 2021. English translation: Biblical Figures in Israel’s Colonial Political Theology, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022.
- Trazos para una teología política descolonial , UNAM-IIFL, 2022. English translation: Notes for a Decolonial Political Theology, Routledge, 2024.
Organisation: Prof. Dr. Martin Kirschner
Prof. Dr. Isabelle Stauffer
Anmeldung für den öffentlichen Gastvortrag erbeten bis 23.11.2026 an: zrkg(at)ku.de
