Messiri’s most significant achievement was his eight-volume encyclopedic work, Jews, Judaism, and Zionism, a systematic critical deconstruction of everything Jewish that claimed to reveal its true and essential nature: Adorno’s instrumental reason — the will to dominate — relocated from its original home in Athens to Jerusalem. Where Critical Theory had located the origins of Western civilizational pathology in ancient Greek mythology and rationality, Messiri located it in its other half, in Judaism. Using literary critical methods, he argued that everything in Judaism and Zionism was fictitious, colonialist, imperialist, immanentist, and dehumanizing. After deconstructing and unmasking this inhumane Judaism, he contrasted it with an abstract, romantic, authentic Islam — the true unfolding human essence of freedom, resistance, and spirituality, an Islam identical to abstract and fluid humanism. Link to full essay below: