Rosenzweig claims that the Jew “converts the inner pagan” inside the Christian because it is the living presence of the Jews that checks the Gnostic tendencies resident in Christianity.
Before God stand both of us…Jew and Christians, laborers at the same task… It is only the Old Testament that enables Christianity to defend itself against [Gnosticism], its inherent danger. And it is the Old Testament alone, because it is more than just a book. The arts of allegorical interpretation would have made short work of a mere book. If, like Christ, the Jews had disappeared from the world, they would denote only the Idea of a People, and Zion the Idea of the midpoint of the world, iust as Christ denotes only the Idea of Man. But the sturdy and undeniable vitality of the Jewish people—to which anti-Semitism itself attests—opposes itself to such “idealization.” That Christ is more than idea—no Christian can know this. But that Israel is more than an idea, the Christian knows, because he sees it…Our presence stands surety for their truth. [Translation by Spengler in First Things]
Spengler in an article in First Things goes on to comment:
In the post-Holocaust world, after neopaganism nearly conquered Europe, Rosenaweig’s contention that Christianity requires the presence of the Jews found great resonance. Yet his formulation stems from a theological sociology with broader application. Pagans, Rosenzweig explained, have only the fragile and ultimately futile effort to preserve their physical continuity through blood and soil. Their hope for immortality takes the form of a perpetual fight for physical existence, which one day they must lose. Rosenzweig’s sociology of religion thus offers unique insights into the origin and nature of civilizational conflict when he argues that a pagan people, ever sentient of the fragility of their existence, are always prepared to fight to the death.
This is why torture demands a pagan ethos. One has to ultimize the enduring of one’s culture in order to be willing to do anything, including dehumanizing one’s self along with one’s victim, to preserve it.