In Heidegger’s Four Notebooks I and II (Black Notebooks 1947-1950), edited as volume 99 of the Gesamtausgabe of his writings, the author remarks that “One God, who as a unique God does not tolerate other Gods apart from him is outside divinity ”, the latter obviously referring to the Bible’s passage found in Exodus 34: 14 : “For you shalt worship no other God: for the LORD, whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.”. But how does Heidegger come to say that? How does he come to deny the divinity of the one God? This seems to be at first sight a radical criticism of the so-called ‘monotheism’. A major question remains unanswered, nonetheless: the sense in which the Jewish tradition focuses on the “One God”. In this context, “one” is actually not a number but a name. Far from being one of God’s attributes, it is God’s Name. It is a common ground that Heidegger had no access to the Hebrew text of the Bible, a biased situation which leads us to narrow-minded consequences regarding the ‘Old Testament’, where God is frequently called Elohim, i. e. a plural. Is the Jewish God exclusive, or rather Heidegger’s conception of Judaism restrictive? That is the question.

In this paper, we aim to reconstruct Heidegger’s critique of the modern conception of subjectivity, history and freedom, as it appears in his posthumous writings and in the Black Notebooks of the 1930’s and 1940’s. In order to do so, we will examine the meaning of decision (Entscheidung) and its links with the history of Be-ing (Geschichte des Seyns). Our first section will be devoted to a critical reconstruction of Machenschaft as a symbol of our modern times. According to Heidegger, the Machenschaft represents a place in history where no new historical decisions can be made in any conceivable way, and humanity becomes an animal historicum. In spite of that, the way of a new beginning and a new decision concerning ourselves remains difficult but possible, a phenomenon that we analyze in our second section: how the essence of humanity can be transformed in Da-sein, but only if we think anew our relationship with being.