From Dialogue to Revelation: Alterity and the Concept of Fraternity (Fraternité) in Léon Askenazi’s Biblical Hermeneutics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Love: Accusative and Dative, Paul Mendes-Flohr explores ancient and modern Jewish engagements with the commandment to love the Re’a (neighbor) in Leviticus 19:18. Drawing on Rosenzweig’s phenomenology of divine–human love, Mendes-Flohr seeks to delineate the possibility of a humanist ethics of compassion that is not dependent, as in Rosenzweig, on hearing the divine voice. Taking Mendes-Flohr as point of departure, this paper explores the concept of fraternity (fraternité) as it figures in the thought of Yehuda Léon Askenazi (1922–1996), a North African kabbalist thinker and an important spiritual leader of Francophone Jewry in the twentieth century. Looking at two interrelated moments in Askenazi’s long career as a biblical exegete, I quarry Askenazi’s notion of fraternity for an account of alterity. Based on his discussions of the Cain and Abel story, as well as other biblical episodes, I argue that, for Askenazi, the challenge of fraternity, as figuring repeatedly in the Genesis narrative, is the preferred model to think of second-person relationships. Furthermore, I suggest, in contrast to Rosenzweig’s top-down account of revelation and human love, Askenazi’s approach represents a bottom-up model of love of one’s neighbor, which, when achieved, brings about divine revelation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".