It would avoid, on the one hand, the excesses of the maskils who wanted to assimilate themselves out of existence and, on the other, the Orthodox who really wished to ignore the world altogether. It would enable the Jews, by the state they created–repudiating both the superstitions of Christianity and the orientalism of Islam–to realize the Jewish idea in practice and so be a political light to the gentiles. At the same time it would allow them to achieve their own redemption not by Marx’s negative proposal to destroy their traditional economic functions, but by the positive act of creating an
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