["The Jews interpret in a crazy manner." Evaluation of a classical text]

The author scrutinizes a text taken from the law of Justinian, 553 A. D., which assigns the Jews a place in the occidental-Christian system of thought. The identity of personal power, whether imperial or papal, and legal text merges the real and the symbolic. That is, authority determines the interpretation of the text. The author designates this the Christian-industrial religion and the Christian-industrial psychology and thereby draws connections with the present. Jewish textual interpretation, in which the text alone yields authority, is nourished--like psychoanalysis--by the tension between reality and fantasy, by the contradiction between power and desire.