The Human Condition of Exile: Between Polis and Torah

The fundamental deprivation of human rights is manifested first and above all in the deprivation of a place in the world which makes opinions significant and actions effective. When I consider the Babylonian Exile, I do not see merely a religious catastrophe or a military defeat. I see the first great historical instance of statelessness—the condition of being thrown out of the polis, the public realm where man can appear to others and be seen.

To be stripped of one’s polity is to be stripped of one’s reality. The Temple in Jerusalem was not just a house of worship; it was the center of the Jewish res publica. It was the space of appearance. When Nebuchadnezzar destroyed it, he did not just burn stones; he destroyed the stage upon which the Jewish people enacted their existence as a political body.

The Loss of the World

In my analysis of totalitarianism, I have often spoken of the “right to have rights.” This right depends on the existence of a political community. The exiles in Babylon were the first “displaced persons” of antiquity. They were reduced to the status of private individuals, concerned only with the necessity of survival, cut off from the immortality that comes from public action.

The notes on Babylonian Exile describe this as a “traumatic event” that “raised existential questions.” But we must be precise. The trauma was not just theological; it was political. It was the discovery that without a polis, a people are nothing but dust in the wind of history. They are subject to the whims of empires—Babylonian, Persian, Roman—without the capacity to determine their own destiny.

The Torah as a Portable Polis

However, the human capacity for natality—the ability to begin something new—is never wholly extinguished, even in the darkest times. The Jewish Identity Formation that occurred in exile was a radical act of political innovation.

If the physical polis (the Land/Temple) is destroyed, can a virtual polis be constructed? This is how I understand the rise of the Torah and the Law. The Jewish people, facing the abyss of assimilation, constructed a “Portable Fatherland” (as Heine would later call it). They replaced the walls of Jerusalem with the walls of the Law.

• Dietary Laws: A boundary that separates “Us” from “Them” in every private meal.
• Sabbath: A temporal architecture that creates a sanctuary in time when the sanctuary in space is lost.
• Prohibition of Intermarriage: A biological border to replace the geographical border.

This was a brilliant, desperate attempt to preserve a “space of appearance” within the private sphere. By making every aspect of daily life—eating, marrying, resting—a matter of public law (Torah), they tried to turn the private realm into a pseudo-public realm. They tried to carry their polis on their backs.

The Perils of Distinctiveness

Yet, we must look at the cost of this innovation. The Ezra and Nehemiah Reforms show us the dark side of this survival strategy. To maintain this portable polis, the community had to become rigid, exclusive, and pure. “Divorcing non-Jewish spouses” is a violent act of exclusion. It is the closing of the ranks.

In the polis, one distinguishes oneself through speech and great deeds. In the portable polis of the Diaspora, one distinguishes oneself through adherence to the Law and separation from the “Other.” This creates a permanent tension. The Jews became the “pariah people”—distinct, separate, unassimilable. This distinctiveness saved them from disappearing into the Persian or Hellenistic melting pots, but it also marked them as targets.

The “Persian Imperial Strategy” of tolerance was not based on the recognition of human rights. It was based on the utility of client peoples. As long as the Jews were useful “operators of the switchboard” (as my colleague McLuhan might say), they were tolerated. But tolerance is not freedom. Tolerance is a gift from a master to a servant. It can be revoked at any moment.

The Banality of Survival

There is a danger in romanticizing this survival. The focus on “survival at all costs” can lead to a narrowing of the human horizon. When a people is obsessed with its own preservation, it risks losing the world. It risks retreating into a “warmth of the tribe” that shuts out the light of the public realm.

The “Internal War” of Moral Dualism—the struggle between Good and Evil within the heart—is a retreat from the political to the moral. It is what happens when you cannot fight the Babylonians in the open field, so you fight the “evil inclination” in your own soul. It is a noble struggle, yes, but it is a private one. It does not build a world.

Personal Reflection

I have lived the life of a stateless person. I know what it means to have your language but not your land. I know the temptation to retreat into the “inner emigration,” to find solace in philosophy or tradition while the world burns. The Jewish invention of the portable identity was a miracle of history. It allowed a people to survive for two thousand years without a state. But we must never mistake survival for freedom.

The “Pax Judaica” mentioned in the notes—the idea of a Jewish world order—sounds to me like a dangerous fantasy, a mirror image of the empires that oppressed us. We should not seek to replace the American Empire with a Jewish one. We should seek a world where no one needs a “portable identity” because every person has a place in the world, a polis where they can speak and act in freedom. The lesson of the Exile is not that we can live without a state. The lesson is that without a political community, we are vulnerable to the winds of fate. We must build a world where “the right to have rights” is guaranteed not by a scroll, but by the plurality of free men and women acting in concert.