Vid Snoj – JEWISH SEXTETS

The book titled Jewish Sextets by Prof. Vid Snoj, PhD, comprises essays on six modern Jewish authors: Gershom Scholem, Erich Auerbach, Franz Werfl, Lev Shestov and Franz Kafka. The modernist literature, broadly speaking, from the Enlightenment onwards, has been featured by the „Jewish emersion“ in the areas of science and spiritual teachings, art, music and literature. The common interpretation of the exceptional achievements of Jewish people in all these areas is attributed to the opening of ghettos, simultaneously leading to the cessesion of the fixation on the holy scriptures and the banishment of depicting the image of the God, and so on. For example, it is obvious that, from the point of Christianity, the choseness of the Jews ended in the area of religion. The choseness then extended into the art which, on the other hand, resurfaces as a realm of epiphany of what is – or as a space of a-phany, un-utterencing, obliteration, nothingness, replacing thus the religion. The creative work by the Jews in the real world almost throughout their history, not only in the modernist literature, has been emerging from the deep and spiritual experiencing of the chosen ones and the exile, the chosenness on earth and the exile from the worldly places. This experience brings Jewish people into a particular position – being countryless in a country; being chosen for the world but homeless.