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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".