2026.01.04 Enes Cakir. The Prophecy of the West
Attached is a pdf of my third book *The Prophecy of the West*. It is a study of the development of German Jewry in the 18th and 19th centuries and a broader application of the Jewish theological-political dialectic between particularity and universality in modern politics.
I wrote this in the spring of 2024. Looking back, I view it as a philosophy of collective history that led me to my present project, the philosophy of individual history. In and through these two studies, I have found that the method of collective development mirrors that of individual development.
As it has been brought to my attention that a "story" behind my writing of this book might be useful for some individuals, here is an account of my motivation for this text.
In May of 2000, at around 2:00PM, I was born in a hospital...just kidding. Though, the story behind any creative act is one that ought be holistic, we need not go this far back.
I was raised in religiously conservative Turkish household in America. This put me into a position between two worlds. Existential questions of identity and belief became important for me in my adolescence and then central when I graduated college. Recognizing this tension, I embarked on a philosophical expedition to understand the development of the Western world. Or rather, my basic attempt to understand Western society, and its contrast to Turkish and others, led me necessarily to a developmental study of Western history.
My second book was titled the Beginning of the West in which I articulated my findings: the axioms upon which Western consciousness originated were rooted in the Jewish story of the Exodus.
As I further particularized my approach to understanding Western history, recognizing the central position of Jewish thought, I encountered many people's views of Jewish people and their role in society, many of which were outlandish. In seeing this, and my self recognizing the importance of these issues in our society today, I decided to understand for myself the development of modern Jewish consciousness.
To this end, I began with Theodor Herzl's diaries and letters. In these, I noticed an unmistakable influence from Nietzsche, and, believing my self to be the first, decided to write a book on the topic. In attempting to place Herzl in his time and demonstrate his transvaluation of Judaism that created the identity of zionism, I had to study the historical conditions that made his existence possible. So, I studied the entire development of German Jewry's entry into the Western world, and their divergences and developments therefrom.
This book chronicles this study of a people caught between two worlds, and perhaps my ability to present such a cogent and revealing study was a consequence of my own position caught between worlds. The insights speak for themselves, and in other places on this site and works to come, I speak for myself.
Feel free to shoot me any questions you have at my email:
nscarik@gmail.com
Discussion
2026.01.08 Andrius Kulikauskas: Thank you, Enes, for all of your recent posts including your book, "The Prophecy of the West". Thank you for providing some personal context. You've delved deeply into your subject as a scholar of history, political philosopher and theologian. Thank you for the discussion you and I had which I would like to extend here and include others who care.
- Jere Northrop and I are the founders of Econet. He owns the domain and I host the website. Furthermore, I am the organizer of Econet with special concern for the investigatory culture we are fostering. We are just beginning and with your help we are clarifying our culture for ourselves and others. We wish to be inclusive of all people who wish to be included.
- Certain topics are problematic for an online community. They include suicide, use of illegal drugs, medical advice, financial advice, and analysis of a culture by those outside of it. As a Lithuanian, who happens to be an expert on crimes against humanity which Lithuanian leaders perpetrated against Lithuania's Jews, I care to be sensitive to commentary on Jews and Jewish culture.
- Enes, I firmly believe you consciously have good intentions. But I, at our website, on this consequential topic of Zionism, which you bring up, feel obligated to ever check on our unconscious intentions. Why are we doing what we are doing? Your personal context is, I think, all important and truly valuable. Our website is a place for thinking-out-loud as you are doing. Your book is relevant as your past work but also informing your future work. That seems reason to support you in the path you choose to take but it also seems reason to provide you friendly, honest, caring critique. This is an opportunity for me and all of us to think about the investigatory culture that we seek.
- One concern I have is the theoretical concept of "the Jew". Such a concept, like so many concepts, is in many ways unreal. But it affects real people. We have participants who can define themselves as Jewish or not as they like. To force anybody to decide if they are Jewish or not is, I think, contrary to our culture. It's their personal matter of self-definition, self-determination, self-understanding. We choose to empathize with them rather than contemplate about them. In empathy, I can say there are special hardships in being Black or Jewish or female or gay in that often they are not just minorities but visibly minorities. They can have an identity forced upon them. I think our compassion for individual people, their personal vulnerabilties, choices, aspirations, efforts, trumps any social theory.
- I ask participants about their deepest value in life, their investigatory questions, their relationships with truth so that we could empathize with them. These are boxes we seem happy to put ourselves in. We avoid the usual boxes. We choose how to define ourselves. Our goal is to learn to live as people-in-general, very much like Jesus, loving our neighbors as ourselves.
- At this early stage of econet, I see the difference between the bottom-up factual science, as given by our investigations of our questions, and the top-down theory, art, mythology, storytelling of the big picture. Your book is not science but it is a mythology in which "the Jew" is a theological vehicle. I think all of our big pictures are similarly mythological. I think it's important, in seeking absolute truth, and fostering a culture for that, to invert our story telling. I suggest we start at the end, where is it that we want to end up, and ask ourselves why we want to end up there. You are interested in the balance of individual and collective mindsets, as are Daniel, Jere and I. Why not start there?
- Enes, there are so many trees in our garden that you can eat fruit from. As a bottom-up investigator or as a top-down theologian, why choose this tree? Personally, if indeed Zionism is key to your theology, then I suggest, for all of our sakes, we spend twice as much energy trying to understand, what is it about you that makes it so important? That's my natural moral impulse. I appreciate our discussion and wish to include others.
Enes Cakir
Hello Andrius,
I initially considered responding by email, but since this exchange is taking place on the site itself, it felt more appropriate to respond here.
First, I want to thank you for taking my work seriously and for engaging it in context of the values you are trying to cultivate at Econet. I appreciate the care you bring to shaping an investigatory culture, and I recognize the responsibility that comes with holding that role.
That said, I want to clarify a few points where I think we are operating from different assumptions about inquiry.
Let me begin with the concern you raised around my use of the term “the Jew.” When I use this language, I am not referring to individuals, nor to identity as self-definition, but to an idealized, theological–historical figure used to analyze a structural tension between particularity and universality in Western development. It seems you recognized part of this in the recent email you sent to the group. This is a mode of analysis I take from Jewish thinkers themselves—most centrally Arthur Cohen’s The Natural and Supernatural Jew, which explicitly works with this abstraction. I also take it to be methodologically comparable to Max Weber’s use of “the Protestant” or similar ideal types in political theology and historical sociology.
So my question here is not rhetorical but genuine: Is the concern with abstraction itself, or with the risk that abstraction may be mistaken for prescription? If the latter, I share that concern, which is why I try to make the scope and limits of the abstraction explicit in the text. If the former, then we may simply be working from different views about what historical-philosophical inquiry requires and indeed, can be possible with.
Related to this is a broader methodological question that emerged for me in your response. You emphasize the importance of guarding against harm, sensitivity, and imposed identity, which I understand and respect. At the same time, I wonder how a culture of investigation distinguishes between necessary ethical care and a form of preemptive closure that limits what can be thought at all. In my own work, I operate from the assumption that serious historical inquiry must risk abstraction, even when that abstraction touches painful or sensitive histories, precisely because avoiding those risks often leaves inherited narratives unexamined rather than dismantled. This I believe is central in order to move forward collectively as humans.
There is one further assumption I’d like to question openly, because it seems to sit beneath several of the concerns you raised and one that you explicitly articulated. It appears that the legitimacy of studying a culture for you is tied to belonging to it, or at least to standing in a position of direct identification. Part of what makes you an expert, or maybe all, on the history of Lithuanian crimes against humanity is that you are Lithuanian. The fact that you mentioned that you were an expert, by self-qualification, as a means of leveraging the closing of historical inquiry led to my reconsideration of my collaboration with you and econet. I understand this impulse but find it antithetical to my spirit of seeking truth. I find it difficult to see how serious historical or philosophical inquiry could proceed if understanding were restricted only to insiders, and I think such a posture invites misunderstanding and the forms of prejudice that your approach seems founded in defending against.
Much of what we know about cultures, traditions, and historical transformations has emerged precisely through encounters across boundaries. Jewish history itself has been studied, interpreted, and even preserved through dialogues that cross cultural, religious, and national lines, including by Jewish thinkers who explicitly invite such engagement. To say this is not to deny the importance of lived experience or self-definition, but to suggest that understanding humanity as such requires the freedom to study human cultures as phenomena that can be approached, interpreted, and contested from multiple vantage points.
So my question here is not whether sensitivity matters—it clearly does—but how we distinguish sensitivity from a prohibition on inquiry. If the analysis of cultures were only legitimate from within, then history itself would become largely opaque, and comparison—one of the most powerful tools we have for dismantling prejudice rather than reinforcing it—would be impossible. My own interest in Jewish history arises not from detachment or authority, but from identification across difference: seeing in that history a mirror through which broader human and Western developmental patterns become intelligible, including my own. The nature of projection is self-evident — we are dealing with mirrors — but, depicting it from that angle is the essence of my psychological approach to history.
This brings me to another point where I believe we differ in our approach. When investigation of truth shifts from engaging arguments and historical claims to examining an author’s unconscious motivations as a criterion of moral legitimacy, I find that the inquiry itself obfuscates the issue and changes the category of investigation, as well as creates a hierarchy of moral correctness, placing others under the scrutiny of self-defined moral valuations which seemingly are not up for discussion. I don’t deny that psychological motivations are a valid object of study—in fact, I take them very seriously in my analysis of thinkers—but to say that a work is its motivation rather than its content is a conflation that does not engage open and honest thinking, but, in my view, just shuts down conversation and thought and prevents honest self-reflection.
This is why I was struck by your suggestion that, rather than engaging the historical development I trace, it might be more fruitful to ask why I find this topic important. That question is not illegitimate, but it is a different question. I wrote The Prophecy of the West to make a historical claim about the development of Western consciousness; the work itself is my answer to why the topic matters historically.
I also want to say clearly that I recognize and respect your role in setting boundaries for Econet. Every inquiry operates within limits, and I have no objection to you articulating yours. At the same time, encountering those boundaries has helped me see more clearly that my own work does not belong here. That difference simply reflects divergent orientations toward modes of inquiry of truth.
Through this tension, I’ve gained a much clearer sense of the culture Econet is cultivating—both what it encourages and what it hesitates to pursue. That clarity has been genuinely valuable for me. It has also made it clear that it wouldn’t be honest for me to think of myself as fully aligned with the investigatory framework at econoet as it’s currently defined - I am not interested, at present, in assimilating to any mode of any inquiry aside from the one that I am building, that is, one that recursively develops atop itself through expanding past its former boundaries. The speed with which I can do this is quicker through independent work, and given that one of the boundaries I expand past in pursuit is a central boundary on your site, it is clear that this tension will persist in dialogue regarding my work. As I said, I'm not interested, at present, in continually explaining my self.
Finally, regarding your suggestion of starting inquiry “at the end”: I appreciate the invitation and see how you find value in that approach. My own work, however, depends on holding bottom-up and top-down inquiry together. I’m interested in genealogy precisely because it resists assuming the endpoint in advance, even when that assumption is held consciously — this has been my means to greater understanding: the collapse of former understanding. That is to say, I can't operate otherwise in my pursuit of knowledge, *precisely because this has been my means to knowledge.
You said if Zionism and tandem are important to my theology, that everyone at econet spend double the time discovering why. Honestly, I don’t wish to spend any energy defending the psychological motivations of a work whose defense I believe is already contained within it. I am open to legitimate engagement with content, but the conflation of the two has already compelled my reconsideration of my priorities and dedications of energy. What feels most important to me at this stage is continuing to build my philosophical foundation and method of inquiry without constant translation into a different epistemic frame — though, that doesn’t preclude future collaboration.
I’m grateful for the engagement with everyone here, even though it has not been much, and for what I’ve learned through it, which has been much! I hope this clarifies my position!
Best, Enes
2026.01.12 Andrius: Dear Enes, thank you for your thoughtful letter. I would be sad if you left us, both for me and for our culture. There's a lot to think about. For now, I will leave it at that. I will be happy if you join us tomorrow, and in general, if we continue.