User talk:ThomasMikael

[Archive July 1, 2025]

Overquote

Just wanted to let you know, I've removed the quote you added with this edit to Oskar Goldberg as it was way too long to fall under fair use. See this page for more information. Feel free to trim the quote and add it back into the article if you want. If you have any questions, feel free to ask. Thanks. The4lines |||| ^{(Talk) (Contributions)} 00:08, 15 May 2025 (UTC)

Totally fair it was kind of redundant anyway. Bless for checking up on the page ThomasMikael (talk) 23:29, 15 May 2025 (UTC)

Gershom Scholem

Hello, your changes do not appear to have reliable sources. Please make sure you use reliable sources and cite them. Please do not put AI-generated text directly into Wikipedia. Text such as this is opinion and not encyclopedic style: One feels that Benjamin—had he survived—would have defended these works against Scholem’s attacks. While falling short of optimism, Arendt maintain a measured sense of hope or at least commitment to the real possibility of a human future for—eschewing a pessimism otherwise characteristic of this phase in the literature and standing out from it. Arendt never would have considered herself mystical though, as she says in an interview, neither would she ever have denied that she was a Jew before she was a German, a philosopher, or anything else. She speaks to the whole world, mourning but then moving on from the event which was the destruction of every sacred canon, into the future and speaks to us more directly than any of these other authors today in a voice whose lucidity, urgency, ethical rigor and overwhelming power of illumination require no pre-requisite reading or proficiency in ancient languages to understand or to heed. Andre🚐 22:54, 16 May 2025 (UTC)

The comment about me beings an AI stings just slightly as I've put in years of my life into reading Scholem, but I grant that the quantity of text I posted while planning to double back to enter citations was excessive. I'll feed it onto the page more slowly while being careful to cite as I go, I know you're just looking out. ThomasMikael (talk) 22:45, 19 May 2025 (UTC)

Thank you ...

... for a lovely barnstar, only: please put it on my talk, not on my user page. Thank you for improving Kafka and Heine! -- Gerda Arendt (talk) 21:42, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

Done. I’ve never been much in terms of backend awareness or deftness but I know or seem to remember, nevertheless, I’ve run into you on several occasions over the years. Our first interaction, whatever that may have been, I only dimly recall and have no idea what issue or page it may have been attached to. Whatever it was I have the vague intuition that I appreciated your presence and the acumen of your judgment on some relatively fine (probably Germanic and likely adjacently Judaic issue) whose presentation was nevertheless meaningfully fraught with disproportionate consequence (as that overlap sometimes is) and requiring an editor such as yourself as a defender even if I (very likely, by some carelessness) was the one who tripped the trigger. ThomasMikael (talk) 22:05, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

Thank you! - I meet many editors and have a bad memory, but noticed you recently on Heine, and like what you did! ... and now Kafka. You have a great user page! --Gerda Arendt (talk) 22:29, 20 June 2025 (UTC)

Kafka

Thanks for your comment on my Talk page. I think that some of your contribution to Franz Kafka is too esoteric for Wikipedia. This sentence, for example, is way over my head and probably most readers' heads: Benjamin remarks that Kafka's world is pre-animistic (as opposed to the dualism of later religions)—implying a universal and primordial ur-phenomenology (prior to the distinction of the spiritual and the substantial in human perception) that emerges as a hallmark of Kafka's style. I just inserted two Wikilinks in the sentence, which may be of use to readers who want to try to figure out the sentence, but I think that it would be a good idea either to remove it or simplify it substantially, which I appreciate may be impossible without oversimplifying it. Maurice Magnus (talk) 19:57, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

I see what you mean. Like: it turns on the fact that the argument within the community of early publishers and critics are sort of implying that monotheism is pre-Judaic but survives in early conceptions of Judaism and that Kafka’s vision is a revival of this early sensibility. The monotheists of ancient Israel were not ‘Jews’ (Judaeans, without direct connection to Judah the land) until they were taken to Babylon and came back. Prior to this their just ‘the people’(as with virtually every indigenous group there are specific names mostly for the outgroups or known neighbors)—a mostly incoherent group with rising self-awareness of inter-tribal connection under threat between the crosshairs of every ancient empire (Egypt, Hatti, Assyria, Babylon etc.) on a piece of ground that cannot be held by any of those Empires (Egypt calls it Khor and where parts of it fall to Assyria it become Retjenu re: Syria. Syria has another name for it). The word apiru in Egyptian (also present with very slight inflectional change in Babylonian and ancient Assyrian also Hittite etc.) means: people from beyond the boundary without association, dusty from the road (mud people is one interpretation), brigands, people without connections to the land etc. All of this is clarifying in real-time as archaeological evidence comes in and ancient inscriptions are being translated while Kafka is writing and as the first group of his mostly Jewish commentators are writing. To reiterate these finding sounds too antisemitic: so Kafka becomes this icon where that sentiment can be projected. Kafka was familiar with some of this stuff too though in passing. So in a way they’re saying: Kafka isn’t Jewish because, properly and historically understood, the ur-Jews of the Torah aren’t Jewish. And we will be like them now, and drop these fine distinctions while also incidentally keeping up on the scholarship and annotation of course because that’s our job as…humans. And that is, yes: complicated. I added the note on Benjamin and Arendt as an earlier beat to the scholarship where universalism is appealed to in this very curiously and beautifully Jewish way. I didn’t want to overwhelm the sentiment and overly insist on Kafka’s Jewishness with Mann and Buber quotes though those inflections seem obviously to be more direct and important than later scholars who are just making judgments on the basis, pretty much, of exactly the earlier material I cited and also on the unexpurgated diaries and more complete texts that came out via Fischer Verlag later on. If you can simplify, that’s great. Remove the paragraph: fair enough. It’s a democracy. Thanks man. ThomasMikael (talk) 20:54, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

I will go over the section for style, but I'm not competent to simplify it, and it would be presumptuous of me to remove it, because other readers might benefit from it. But who's to say what other editors will do? Maurice Magnus (talk) 20:58, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Than you ThomasMikael (talk) 21:15, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Like the death of God in German philology, source criticism, Wellehausen, Nietzsche yadda yadda—don’t forget that Arendt is Heidegger’s greatest student (much greater than him, in my opinion), that Heidegger is heir and expansionist to Nietzsche, that Nietzsche’s god is dead riff is a kind of popular rendering of results from Wellehausen that have been building up since Ibn Ezra whose popular threshold comes with Spinoza who sort of begins the tradition of secular source criticism. Benjamin and Scholem position themselves as nemesis to Heidegger from 1916, Benjamin attended seminar with Heidegger in the classroom of his mentor in the decisive semester that set them both on their paths of research. Kafka becomes a battleground for this discussion. Is Kafka aware of any of this stuff himself? He’s not unaware, but he’s a practicing lawyer not an academic. His response is intuitive and translates the whole vibe, which rumbling through the Prague Jewish community. He doesn’t take propositional stances, he is the poet of this moment—a translator of the overload into a vernacular that non-scholarly readers can absorb. He’s not responsible, perhaps not cognitively trying to figure any of this out but he speaks it via a remarkably smooth and relatively light (v. dense, heavy) intuition. That is the background. It doesn’t require deep trench work on the page but that’s what Benjamin’s comment is surfacing: his ambiguity as Jewish or not Jewish hits on all this stuff that has major consequences. ThomasMikael (talk) 21:15, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

I forgot to mention the Hebrew word for apiru is ivri (re: transliterated as ‘Hebrew’). Only one person in the Torah is described as an ivri: Avram. His name, arguably, is a personifying riff on the word itself: the exalted father of the ivri. ThomasMikael (talk) 21:20, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Totally unexplained and unjustified

Hey ThomasMikael, you provided not a single edit summary during your demolishing and LLM-restructuring of Eschatology, and it stayed in that state for the better part of June. Please don't do something like that again if you can't provide a single edit summary or acknowledge any of the other editors who tried to stop you as you were starting on it. Remsense 🌈 论 20:15, 1 July 2025 (UTC)

I did provide citations, and speak with an editor but you’re right I should have annotated the changes in the edit summary. The revision was in response to the notation up top. Eschatology is a largely Judaeo-Christian notion. That does not mean that other cultures don’t have end of the world scenarios or theories of the afterlife—not at all. But to apply the term to all of these seems like an anachronism on a philological basis and on several other levels—historically, and schematically on the basis of the form of the belief and its implications for how the meaning of history and personal behavior is approached. Better behavior according to subjective understanding is not particularly indicated in eschatology, for example: There is the faith versus works argument but on both sides of that argument salvation is not accomplished by the saved. I say this as a student of etymology not as a proselytizer or a believer. My only agenda was to bring up clarity on the historical concept.

There is no graduation there are no levels of gradual improvement it’s a single dose concept. Of course there is now a whole page for Hindu eschatology, and I don’t want to pick a fight saying that that page shouldn’t exist. It just seems anachronistic to apply a Greco-Hebrew conception to a Brahmanic or Hindi conception like that. The conflation here diminishes both traditions and muddles the page.

For example, a cyclic process versus a linear beginning and end—those two conceptions are distinct enough that their conflation is ambiguously justified at best. If there are papers written that appropriate the term I can’t argue. It was an attempt to improve and clarify the page on the basis of scholarly notes on the word in a scholarly lexicon (primarily the Anchor). That said, I cede the field. If you feel the page was not improved by my notes and citations it can revert back to its prior state. ThomasMikael (talk) 12:29, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

I am actually curious--do you think it would be legitimate for me to repost if I attached a note rather than confining discussion to a back and forth on talk pages? The edits were a good faith attempt to improve the page. I would be hesitant to attempt to replace the text if you have an argument for the reversion beyond the fact that changes weren't annotated. But if that's the only reason for the revert, I would gladly replace the text with annotation. What is your interpretation--is the problem a lack of annotation or is there some other reason you wiped out the contributions? ThomasMikael (talk) 17:19, 2 July 2025 (UTC)

I second this, this was going on Heinrich Heine as well/ LakesideMiners^{Come Talk To Me!} 14:34, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

I put the same question to you then, will you accept the revision if the changes are annotated? On that page I was responding to the tag up top as well and giving an overview of Heine’s major impacts. I don’t appreciate the insinuation that I used an LLM. I’ve read in this field for twenty years. ThomasMikael (talk) 14:59, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

I’ve rebuilt the section with careful annotation as I rewrote the original text, adding it piece by piece. Notes on the trend Paris correspondents and a few other things will still need to re-added and addressed. The section is much shorter now given that each atom was attached to a citation to avoid revert, and I think the page is poorer for it but I hope it will meet your standards and prove or at least strongly demonstrate that I was also the author of the original text not some bot. ThomasMikael (talk) 20:36, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

I need to do the same thing for Scholem page to clear my name of this now apparently trending aspersion by which to ax large contributions but that will likely take two days of work (the first attempt took a day and I’d planned to drop citations that evening when it was axed at which point I just retreated) and the opportunity just hasn’t come up yet. ThomasMikael (talk) 20:39, 3 July 2025 (UTC)