Abstract

How do we think about home today? What does it mean to ‘belong’? To call a place ‘one’s own’? Conversely, what is it like to be away from home? To feel as if you don’t belong? To feel unwelcome?

This dissertation attempts to answer such questions by examining ongoing debates in Jewish Thought concerning the notions of home and ‘dwelling’. I begin by unpacking the concepts of ‘Homeland’ and ‘Earth’ as they appear in current philosophical and political discourse. I turn to the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger and his work on ‘dwelling’, as an ideological forefather of both ideas. I focus, in particular, on his attempt to define dwelling as a way of being at home which is open to the ‘unfamiliar’. I tie this openness to traditional discourses of nationalism and current work in ecological and ecofeminist thought in order to show that, for Heidegger, the Earth is our Homeland, and dwelling within it means being open to the unfamiliarity of the world itself.

Against Heidegger, I turn to a Jewish tradition which centralises everyday life. I read Martin Buber’s dialogical thought, and his later Zionism, as a demand to think about the banal interactions which colour our domestic existence. The meaning of home is not found by abstraction to the scale of the national and the terrestrial, but in daily life. I interpret this as a simultaneous riposte to the notion of Homeland and an opening to ecological thought, inasmuch as this attention to the banal can entail an orientation to the materiality of existence itself.

In a similar way, I interpret Emmanuel Levinas’ early work as a call to think about the everyday life of the home itself: what do we do, most of the time, at home? Eating and sleeping. Being at home, for Levinas, is an essentially mundane, domestic activity. The final part of the dissertation engages with Jacques Derrida’s thinking on hospitality, where home is a place for hosting others. Being at home means hosting others.

I conclude my research with a reflection on Jewish Thought today, and the challenges and opportunities for thinking about home which remain as present and important as ever.