Themes of Jewish Modernity
“The Jewish people today,” writes Daniel Elazar, “are in the process of millennial change, the kind of change that has not taken place since the triumph of Pharisaic Judaism eighteen hundred years ago, or the emergence of the diaspora nine hundred years before that.”1Daniel Elazar, People and Polity (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 475. This book is about the responses of Jewish thought to that change. The situation of Jews had been transformed. How has this affected the relationship between Jews and Judaism?
At the core of Jewish faith is the idea of covenant, the mutual commitment between God and the people Israel. But the covenant embodies a specific tension. On the one hand, it is immune to history. Its text, the Torah, and the way of life it commands, are divine, eternal, immutable, unchanging. On the other hand, the covenant is realised in history. Indeed, as Yosef Yerushalmi notes, “the fathers of meaning in history were the Jews.”2Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, 2nd ed. (New York: Schocken, 1989), 8. For the Bible, events in time are neither cyclical nor random but the working out, in human society under the sovereignty of God, of destiny, justice and redemption. The twelfth-century poet and philosopher Judah Halevi drew attention to the fact that the Ten Commandments begin with a statement not of metaphysics but of sacred history: not “I am the Lord who created heaven and earth” but “I am the Lord who brought you out of Egypt.”3Judah Halevi, Kuzari, 1:25. Judaism is thus a metahistorical and historical faith, peculiarly poised between timelessness and time.
For many centuries, between the destruction of the second Temple in 70 CE and the beginnings of Jewish emancipation in Europe, the sense of timelessness prevailed. To be sure, Jews were subject to recurrent persecutions, expulsions and wanderings. But during the whole of that period, their condition was essentially unchanged. They were a holy people, meaning a people set apart. They were a nation in exile, dispersed and without power. History – in the sense of the chronicles of kings, empires, wars and revolutions – was made by others. Jews were suspended between memory and hope, memory of the biblical past, hope of the messianic redemption. Not accidentally, observers spoke of the “eternal Jew.”
Modernity, however, thrust Jews into the vortex of time. By any standards, the metamorphoses within Jewry in the past two centuries have been monumental. In 1840, some 90 percent of Jews lived in Europe. Today barely 20 percent do so. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, most Jews still belonged to the enclosed, semi-autonomous environments in which they had lived since their dispersion. Today they are fully part of their larger societies. For 1,800 years they had defined their existence in terms of religion. Today, Jews as a group are measurably more secular than Catholics and Protestants.4Surveys of religious attitudes in America since the 1950s have consistently shown Jews less likely to attribute importance to religion in their lives than have Catholics and Protestants. For example, in a national telephone survey undertaken by the Los Angeles Times in 1988, in answer to the question “Which qualities do you consider most important to your Jewish identity?” only 17 percent replied “religious observance”; 59 percent answered, “a commitment to social equality.” See Seymour Martin Lipset (ed.), American Pluralism and the Jewish Community (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990), 20. Throughout their history they had organised their lives by the edicts of Jewish law. Today perhaps as many as four Jews in five see themselves as Jews without reference to the commands and constraints of religious law.5Elazar, People and Polity, 153.
One example highlights the extent of the transformation. Since the days of Ezra – in a sense, since the time of Abraham – Jews had fought against intermarriage. The integrity of the family was Judaism’s vehicle of continuity. That sensibility endured to the twentieth century. To “marry out” was to have left the faith and deserted one’s people. In America in 1920, for example, the intermarriage rate was estimated at no more than 1 percent.6Samuel Heilman, “The Jewish Family Today: An Overview,” in Jonathan Sacks (ed.), Tradition and Transition (London: Jews’ College Publications, 1986), 186. But an American‒Jewish survey published in 1991 revealed that more than 50 percent of young married Jews had chosen a non-Jewish spouse.7Council of Jewish Federations 1991 National Jewish Population Study, reported in Newsweek, 22 July 1991, 54–55.
These transformations, intellectual, social and geographical, would in themselves compel the most profound reconsideration of the nature of Jewish existence since the destruction of the second Temple. But to them must be added two events of surpassing magnitude: the Holocaust, in which two-thirds of European Jewry perished, and the birth, in 1948, of the State of Israel, marking as it did the return of Jews to the land of the Bible. Between them they raised the most acute questions of Jewish theology: the suffering of the innocent, the nature of redemption and the signs and contours of the messianic age. Above all, they raised the question of the role of God in history. For here were events which it was not easy to assimilate into the paradigm of timelessness. Jews had, so it seemed, re-entered time.
This, then, has been more than mere transformation. What lies before us is a collision between an unchanging covenant and epoch-making change. What happens to metahistorical Judaism when Jews find themselves, after millennial stasis, caught up in the currents and whirlpools of time? What conflicts, resistances, accommodations and integrations are set in motion? Judaism is the religion of a particular people. For this reason, historical and social developments in Jewry are closely connected with Jewish theology, both as effect and cause. There is an inextricable connection between Jewish life and Jewish thought. After the massive dislocations of modern Jewish history, what remains of the timeless connecting thread of Judaism, the covenant between an eternal God and a “holy nation”?
From secularisation to emancipation
Our subject is post-Holocaust Jewish thought. But to understand it, we must begin by setting it in context. The story begins a century and a half earlier, with the first encounters between Judaism and a new social reality.
Virtually every theorist of modernisation since the Enlightenment had predicted the eclipse of religion from the civilised world. Gemeinschaft was giving way to gesellschaft, the small traditional community to urban anonymity. Science was replacing theology as the means of explaining the world. Rational bureaucracy was supplanting traditional authority. The calculation of consequences was replacing the ethics of obligation. Objects no longer had an essence but a function, and persons no longer an identity but a set of roles.
The name given to this Copernican shift was secularisation, meaning the displacement of religion to the margins of society. It signified a transfer of power from the Church to the neutral state on the one hand, the choosing individual on the other. It heralded, too, a revolution in consciousness, beginning with the intellectuals of Enlightenment and eventually reaching all strata of society. Through it, divine command was transformed into personal autonomy. Meanings once held to be external truths came to be seen as internal, subjective constructs. The concept of a single overarching reality, a “common universe of meanings,”8Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 133. was gradually replaced by a pluralism of cultures and lifestyles. Revelation was naturalised into history. Tradition itself was disintegrating. Individuals turned towards the future, not the past, for inspiration. The idea of personal identity as something given by birth was on the wane. In its place came a sense of self as something fluid, revisable, consciously chosen.
Jews – at least the Jews of Europe – were thrust precipitately into this process. They were, in John Murray Cuddihy’s phrase, “latecomers to modernity.”9John Murray Cuddihy, The Ordeal of Civility (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1987), 165. From the destruction of the second Temple to the late eighteenth century, Jews had lived in dispersion, often as minorities in Christian or Islamic cultures. The period of wanderings and powerlessness was often a tragic history punctuated by persecutions, expulsions, inquisitions and pogroms. But Jews and Judaism survived.
That survival not infrequently evoked the wonder of observers. Nietzsche, one of Judaism’s severest critics, was struck by the sheer obstinacy of its endurance. “The Jews” he wrote, “are the most remarkable nation of world history because, faced with the question of being or not being, they preferred, with a perfectly uncanny conviction, being at any price.”10Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, translated by R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1968), 134. Nicholas Berdyaev wrote that
I remember how the materialist interpretation of history, when I attempted in my youth to verify it by applying it to the destinies of peoples, broke down in the case of the Jews, where destiny seemed absolutely inexplicable from the materialistic standpoint… The survival of the Jews, their resistance to destruction, their endurance under absolutely peculiar conditions and the fateful role played by them in history; all these point to the peculiar and mysterious foundations of their destiny.11Nicholas Berdyaev, The Meaning of History, quoted in Isidore Twersky, “Survival, Normalcy, Modernity,” in Moshe Davis (ed.), Zionism in Transition (New York: Arno, 1980), 349.
Religious Jews, myself included, would see that survival as evidence of the covenantal dimension of history. For Jews traditionally saw themselves as having been constituted as a people by the covenant at Sinai in which God and the children of Israel pledged themselves to one another, the latter to live a life in accordance with the Torah, the former to protect the people in their land and save them from extinction in exile. The eternity of God meant the eternity of the covenant which in turn meant the eternity of the people Israel. But precisely because at the heart of Judaism is a relationship, Jewish history can be understood from two perspectives, natural or supernatural, depending on whether we focus on one or the other partner to the covenant.
Seen historically and naturally, Jewish survival during the long centuries of exile depended on a delicate balance of internal and external forces. Internally Jews were held together by the shared discipline of halakhah, Jewish law. Halakhah served to create a community of action. Wherever they were, Jews rested and celebrated in the same ways on the same days. They prayed at the same times using largely the same words. They ate and refrained from eating the same foods. They studied the same canonical texts. Halakhah gave concrete shape – a shape that hardly varied through time and place – to the life of a holy community.
But halakhah was also a barrier against the thing Jews feared most, namely assimilation, their disappearance as a distinctive people. It had a powerful sociological dimension. The dietary laws prevented extensive social interaction with the surrounding peoples. The prohibition of work on the Sabbath stood in the way of complete integration into the local economy. The distinctive Jewish legal system, which adjudicated disputes and matters of personal status, led Jews to seek and usually acquire a measure of self-government. There were extensive safeguards against intermarriage. There were pressures against residential dispersion. Jews were, in the words of that paradigm of diaspora existence, the book of Esther, “a certain people, dispersed and scattered among the other peoples…whose laws are different from those of all other people.”12Esther 3:8. Jews preserved the halakhah. But halakhah also preserved the Jews.
Jewish law was itself only part of a wider vision which helped Jews understand their situation and endure it. Since the destruction of the second Temple, they were in exile because of their sins. But the divine presence was with them, even in their suffering, and would eventually lead them to return to their land. This too prevented Jews from staking their identity on a particular environment or culture. It allowed them to keep a mental distance from their immediate circumstance, which they understood as merely temporary. It gave them hope that their history had meaning. It might have tangled, even tortuous, diversions but it was leading towards a known destination. Besides which, as Judah Halevi noted in the twelfth century, their very sufferings confirmed the covenant and its promised consolation. Had not Amos said, “You only have I chosen of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your sins”?13Amos 3:2. The inquisitions, expulsions and pogroms with which medieval Jewish history was punctuated were themselves evidence of the covenantal nature of fate.
To others, the Jewish insistence on chosenness was a sign of the obstinacy of this strange people. But external pressures only served to reinforce it. Jews were confined within particular occupations. They had little access to the main avenues of political power or cultural life. At times they were forced to wear distinctive clothing, at others to live in enclosed locations. They were subjected to discriminatory legislation. They were often regarded, in Max Weber’s phrase, as a pariah people. Their residential rights were subject to arbitrary review and curtailment. It was, at times, an unenviable fate. But it precisely and repeatedly confirmed Jewish self-understanding. Here was a people in exile awaiting redemption. Reality matched theology.
Spinoza, the grandfather of Jewish secularism, was the first to see the symbiotic relationship between an inner sense of chosenness and the outward experience of hostility. The survival of Jews in dispersion, he argued, was fully comprehensible since “they so separated themselves from every other nation as to draw down upon themselves universal hate… That they have been preserved in great measure by gentile hatred, experience demonstrates.”14Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise, translated by R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1951), 55. That mutual distance between Jews and their neighbours, however interpreted, was sustained throughout the Middle Ages.
All of this was radically transformed by the process known as emancipation. Starting with the French Revolution in 1789, Jews were invited to become equal citizens of the modern secular state. The course of this development varied from country to country throughout Europe. In some it occurred naturally and gradually, in others it occasioned fierce debates and resistances. But it shattered the delicate ecological balance which had been at the heart of Jewish existence for centuries and it was to have consequences that have lasted to the present day.
Emancipation and its consequences
To Jews the benefits of emancipation were obvious. It augured entry into the professions, universities, the political process and the full range of social, cultural and civic life. It ended the Jew’s status as an outsider. But to some at least, the threat was equally apparent. It meant a possibly fateful compromise of Jewish identity. Jews would no longer simply be Jews, members of a dispersed but covenantal people. They would be Englishmen, Germans or Italians of the Jewish persuasion. Their language, education, culture, occupation and place of residence would no longer be distinctively Jewish. The first impact of secularisation on Jews was less intellectual than sociological. What space existed in the modern state for the structures and solidarities of collective Jewish life? Could there be social integration without assimilation and shortly thereafter the complete disappearance of that “certain people”?
The sudden change in the social situation of the Jew occasioned, throughout the nineteenth century, a deep internal debate about the terms and meaning of Jewish existence in the modern world. The old certainties, set forth in the Bible and refined by almost two millennia of rabbinic Judaism, were shaken. A single century gave birth to more dissension on how to define Jewish identity than the whole of the preceding seventeen centuries combined.
There were those who, following in the footsteps of Spinoza, saw the whole Jewish destiny as reaching to its end. Heinrich Heine once complained that Judaism was not a religion but a misfortune. Those who felt like him now availed themselves of the opportunity to convert, assimilate or otherwise lose themselves in the anonymity of a growingly universalist and secular culture. Nor was this a solely passive process. A number of thinkers, themselves of Jewish birth or background, constructed new maps of reality in which the hold of religion over identity was to be overcome. Marx and Freud are perhaps the most famous examples. Such ex- or alienated Jews were not merely the beneficiaries but also among the active architects of the idea of a neutral, secular space in which the Jewish‒Gentile dialectic would pass into ancient history.
There were others who believed that a Jewish religious identity could continue. But it would have to make substantial accommodations to new social realities. The most striking example of this was the radical Reform movement in Germany of the 1840s. Much of Jewish law, argued Samuel Holdheim, again following Spinoza, was predicated on the idea of Jews as a separate nation. That made sense so long as they were a sovereign people in their own land. It even had a certain logic in the diaspora hitherto. But it made no sense now that Jews were seeking to be integrated into their host societies. All laws that served to keep Jews a people apart were now to be foregone, among them the dietary laws, the prohibition of work on the Sabbath and rabbinic jurisdiction over divorce. In particular, the Jewish hope for a return to Zion had been superseded. The messianic age was nothing other than the era of universal brotherhood and tolerance that was about to dawn in Europe. A similar position was later adopted by Reform Judaism in America.
Few went so far, for it was hard to see how anything substantive could remain of Jewish life beyond an abstract commitment to “prophetic” ideals. Nonetheless a series of religious movements arose, most pronouncedly in Germany and America, that either abandoned or modified the demands of Jewish law – among them Liberal, Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaisms. In its place as the definitive mark of Jewishness would come “ethical monotheism” a broadly conceived traditionalism or a sense of group solidarity and of Judaism as an “evolving civilisation.” This was a significant development because for the first time in many centuries Jews were declining halakhah without declining a Jewish identity. Jewish law contained no room for denominations, but they had entered Jewish life.
More radical still was the development, later in the nineteenth century and especially in Eastern Europe, of secular approaches to Jewish existence. The phrase “secular Jew” is not a contradiction in terms. Judaism is a religion, but Jews are a people. And there were therefore those who saw that even while the hold of religion was weakening, Jews could continue as an identifiable group through the bonds of language or culture or ethnicity or political activity. Some favoured Yiddish culture. Others revived the Hebrew language and in it created new literary genres. Yet others found Jewish expression in revolutionary politics. Some, like Simon Dubnow, argued for Jewish autonomy within the framework of the Russian empire.
Undoubtedly, though, the most significant outcome of this approach was the birth, in the second half of the nineteenth century, of secular Zionism. Its first prophet was Moses Hess, who believed that no other solution could be found to the tensions of emancipation than Jewish self-emancipation. In Europe they were caught between the twin catastrophes of assimilation and antisemitism. Only in their own land could they reconstitute themselves as a nation and there resume their natural development.
Orthodoxy
Each of these was a momentous break with the classic terms of Jewish life. But Jews remained who were determined to hold fast to traditional Jewish faith, law and practice. Early in the nineteenth century they became known by their opponents as “Orthodox” Jews.15The earliest recorded use of the term “Orthodoxy” occurred in 1807, in the course of the debates surrounding Napoleon’s proposals for Jewish emancipation in France. They too faced the same problems, but believed that they must be solved within the non-negotiable parameters of the Torah, the constitution of the holy people since the days of Moses. Within Orthodoxy itself, however, there were at least four approaches to the dilemmas of modernity.
One was segregation. The ghetto walls had been breached, but Jews could still enclose themselves as far as possible within a total religious environment and minimise their contact with secular culture. The Chassidic movement, a mystical and pietist tendency in Eastern Europe, had already developed a strong network of communities in the second half of the eighteenth century. Its intense inner life proved to be a remarkably strong defence against the incursions of secularism. Other Central and East European traditionalists found an almost equally powerful stronghold in the yeshiva, the traditional seminary for rabbinic study. This now became not merely an educational institution but a countercultural fortress in which a cadre of Jewish leaders could be trained who would lead the fight against secular values.
Segregation was a necessary survival strategy in countries where modernity confronted Jews as an onslaught against religion. There were other countries, most notably England, France and Italy, where the process was less traumatic. Here Jews were able to negotiate their entry into society while remaining organised primarily as a religious group, and by making merely cosmetic adjustments to the spirit of the age. In these countries Orthodoxy became the establishment rather than an embattled minority. Jews remained associated with it for reasons of sentiment or tradition and it became the vehicle of their social aspirations. In Germany and America, however, where the Reform presence was strong, a third kind of Orthodoxy emerged. Here there was a need to formulate a self-conscious defence of tradition while at the same time affirming at least some of the values of emancipation and the open society. This was known at various times as neo- , “modern” or more recently “centrist” Orthodoxy, and it was distinguished by its attempts to create an intellectual synthesis between Torah and secular culture. This was an “elite” rather than a “folk” Judaism, and the degree of self-consciousness it imposed on its adherents meant that it could never become a mass movement. But it was from this group that the most searching philosophic encounters between Judaism and modernity emerged.
A fourth group appeared in Eastern Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century. Like the secular Zionists they believed that there was no future for Jews in Europe. They saw the force of Hess’s dilemma. Jews were caught between the honey and the sting of assimilation and antisemitism. Jewish life would have to be reconvened on the stage of the biblical land of Israel. The diaspora was at an end. Those who thought thus were religious Zionists, and they were of two broad kinds. Some, like Rabbis Samuel Mohilewer and Isaac Reines, believed that the ingathering of exiles was a practical necessity. Jewish lives were at risk after the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, and what was needed was a place of refuge. Others, most notably Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, saw Zionism in a theological perspective. The end of exile meant the beginning of redemption. The upheavals of the nineteenth century were the travails, the “birth pangs” of the messianic age.
Antisemitism
Thus a relatively coherent understanding of the Jewish vocation came to be drastically fragmented. Meanwhile, however, another phenomenon was gaining momentum. The Enlightenment and the political transformations it heralded promised an era of rationality and tolerance. Old animosities and prejudices would be cured. At the very outset, however, it became clear that change would have a darker side. In 1789, while the French Assembly deliberated on whether to grant citizenship rights to Jews, anti-Jewish rioting broke out in Alsace. Wherever proposals for Jewish enfranchisement were publicly debated, reservations were heard. The long centuries of Christian and Islamic hostility to Jews still exerted their influence.
But slowly it became clear that if prejudice persisted, a change was nonetheless taking place. Hitherto, opposition to Jews had carried with it a religious rationale. Jews were disliked for what they believed and did. As society became secularised and many Jews themselves deserted their faith, this no longer sufficed to account for the feelings many Europeans still entertained. A new basis was found in the racial theories which had gathered ground in France and Germany throughout the nineteenth century. According to these, the character of individuals was determined by their racial origin. Racial traits were genetically transmitted and the features of particular races were immutably fixed. Changes in environment and education were powerless to affect the given: people were what their race had made them. On this new theoretical foundation, religious anti-Judaism metamorphosed into racial antisemitism. Jews were to be hated not for what they believed or did but for what they were.
Already in 1862 Moses Hess was writing of the inevitable failure of emancipation. “The Germans hate the religion of the Jews less than their race. Neither ‘radical’ reform…nor baptism, neither education nor emancipation completely unlocks for the German Jew the portals of social life.”16Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem, translated by Maurice Bloom (New York: Philosophical Library), 25–26. By the 1870s racial antisemitism was beginning to enter German political life. A wave of pogroms hit Russian Jewry in 1881, eventually sending some two million Jews into flight from Eastern Europe. In 1882, an assimilated Russian Jew, Leon Pinsker, wrote that “Judeophobia is a psychic aberration. As a psychic aberration, it is hereditary; as a disease transmitted for two thousand years, it is incurable.” He added, “For the living, the Jew is a dead man.”17Leon Pinsker, “Auto-Emancipation,” in Arthur Hertzberg (ed.), The Zionist Idea (New York: Atheneum, 1981), 185, 188. Pinsker was now convinced that there was no future for Jews in any country but their own. In 1894, another assimilated Jew, Theodor Herzl, was himself radicalised by the antisemitism he discovered in France at the time of the Dreyfus affair. Two years later he wrote, “In vain are we loyal patriots…in vain do we strive to enhance the fame of our native lands in the arts and sciences, or her wealth by trade and commerce. In our native lands where we have lived for centuries we are still decried as aliens.”18Herzl, “The Jewish State,” in Hertzberg, The Zionist Idea, 209. Jews had become “the Jewish question.” Throughout wide swathes of Europe their existence had become an irritant verging on the intolerable.
Nor was this wholly unrelated to the intellectual currents of the time. As early as the 1760s Voltaire, France’s most powerful advocate of free thought and religious liberty, could write of the Jews, “In short, we find in them only an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by whom they are tolerated and enriched.” In a generous afterthought he added, “Still, we ought not to burn them.”19Cited in Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.), The Jew in the Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press), 252–53. Sharply critical caricatures of Judaism are to be found in the writings of Kant, Schleiermacher, Hegel and Nietzsche. Richard Wagner spoke of the “instinctive repugnance against the Jew’s prime essence” and called for “emancipation from the yoke of Judaism.”20Ibid., 268–71. Against nineteenth-century conceptions of the modern state and its single culture, Jews represented a distinctive subgroup, a “nation within a nation.” Against the universalism of Kantian thought, Jews stood out in their inescapable particularism. Against Hegel’s evolutionary view of history, Jews remained firmly tied to a faith which long preceded Christianity. Jews failed to fit the intellectual categories of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thought. There was no space for them on the conceptual map.
Thinkers from Voltaire to Marx to Nietzsche had already anticipated a world free of Judaism. In 1833 Friedrich von Holzschuher speculated on a world free of Jews. They might, he mused, be relocated on the moon. But “the total extermination of Jewry would be incomparably easier.” A competition might be held to find ways in which the “total massacre” of Jews could be used for productive purposes. Their bodies might be turned into tallow candles or used to improve the soil.21Ibid., 261–62. Little more than a century later, the thought had become deed. The Nazi Final Solution harnessed the massive machine of the modern secular state to the project of a Judenrein universe. Jewry was to come to an end. By the time it was halted, one in three of the Jews of the world had died.
Jewish postmodernity
Jews, latecomers to modernity, were among the first citizens of postmodernity. From Moses Mendelssohn in the 1780s they had been the most ardent devotees of Enlightenment, rationality and universalism. From Spinoza onwards they had held a disproportionate place among secularism’s avant-garde. Having suffered for centuries from religious persecution, they saw the solution to “the Jewish problem” in terms of a world without religion altogether. There is a driven, almost religious quality to the energies brought by Marx and Freud to the economic or psychoanalytical liberation of man from God. The vision of an enlightened Europe seemed to many Jews, both secular and religious, the portent of a messianic age.
The Holocaust shattered those dreams. The change in Jewish consciousness since then represents a turning point in the history of the covenantal people no less significant than emancipation a century and a half before. Indeed for many Jews the past half-century has been as fraught with significance as any period since the destruction of the second Temple, the event with which an almost 2,000-year story of exile and dispersion began.
A recent survey of American attitudes concluded that
There is a widespread feeling that the promise of the modern era is slipping away from us. A movement of enlightenment and liberation that was to have freed us from superstition and tyranny has led in the twentieth century to a world in which ideological fanaticism and political oppression have reached extremes unknown in previous history. Science, which was to have unlocked the bounties of nature, has given us the power to destroy all life on the earth. Progress, modernity’s master idea, seems less compelling when it appears that it may be progress into the abyss.22Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler and Steven Tipton, Habits of the Heart (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 277.
Jews experienced this disillusionment in a uniquely tragic event. In the Holocaust, they encountered the abyss. After it – or after its enormity had fully entered Jewish consciousness – Jews found themselves thrust into the postmodern situation, aware of the ambiguities of science and civilisation and the fragility of rationalism.
The postmodern Jew has had to question what the American Reform Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 called “the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect.” From the late eighteenth century in one way or another Jews had been engaged in a flight from particularism. For Moses Mendelssohn, the first Jewish theoretician of enlightenment, the foundational truths of God and morality were discoverable by reason and applied to everyone everywhere. Revelation merely disclosed the local legislation by which Jews were bound to live out these truths in their individual way. The great movements of rebellion against rabbinic Judaism – Reform and secular Zionism – were each in their way attempts to “normalise” the Jewish situation, the former by pruning away rituals that set Jews apart, the latter by turning Jews into Hebrews, Canaanites or Israelis, a nation like any other.
But Auschwitz testified to what Emil Fackenheim terms “the Jewish singled-out condition.”23Emil Fackenheim, The Jewish Return into History (New York: Schocken, 1978), 21. It represented an assault on all Jews, assimilated and traditionalist, secular and religious, self-hating and self-affirming. Small wonder then that even highly secular Jews today, with little or no connection to the Jewish religious heritage, see themselves inescapably as Jews, for they would have been so regarded by the Final Solution. “Can I deny,” asks the writer Frederic Raphael, “that I am defined more by history than by creed, more by circumstance than by decision?” The prophet Ezekiel had once envisaged such an outcome. “You say, ‘We want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the world…’ But what you have in mind will never happen…” 24Ezekiel 20:32. For many, the Holocaust stands as a refutation of assimilation as a coherent Jewish strategy. There is, among Jews today, a new particularism, partly the product of the resurgent ethnicity of the 1960s, but at least in part the result of a determination not to yield to the verdict of Auschwitz, that merely to exist as a Jew is a crime.
Jewish postmodernity is also marked by a new moral vocabulary. Ever since the failure of the Bar Kochba rebellion against Roman rule in the second century CE, Jews had been politically quietist. To “take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them” was impossible. There was no choice but to “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Dispersed and disenfranchised, they necessarily espoused an ethic of passivity. The central virtues of rabbinic Judaism were trust, the rule of law, the “ways of peace” and where necessary martyrdom, the ultimate expression of “sanctifying the name” of God. The sages’ definition of “might” was self-restraint. The rabbinic tradition is for the most part ahistorical and apolitical. Its highest value is peace and what Gershom Scholem called “a life lived in deferment” – a daily waiting for the Messiah to arrive.
We can date almost to the moment the transformation of Jewish consciousness from the passive to the active mode. It occurred in the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943. Jews within had decided on a policy of armed resistance. The question was, should religious Jews join the struggle or instead go to their deaths with perfect faith as martyrs? A religious leader in the ghetto, Rabbi Yitzchak Nissenbaum, made a momentous speech to his followers. “This is a time for kiddush ha-chayyim, the sanctification of life, and not for kiddush ha-Shem, the holiness of martyrdom. Previously the Jew’s enemy sought his soul and the Jew sanctified his body in martyrdom. Now the oppressor demands the Jew’s body, and the Jew is obliged therefore to defend it, to preserve his life.”25Quoted in Shaul Esh, “The Dignity of the Destroyed,” in Yisrael Gutman and Livia Rothkirchen (eds.), The Catastrophe of European Jewry ( Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 1976), 355.
When the alternatives are conversion or death, death is a form of religious resistance. But when death itself is decreed, a tenacious defence of life is the only possible defiance of evil. Several Jewish thinkers, including Emil Fackenheim and Irving Greenberg, have concluded that a responsible embrace of power is the only viable future for the people of the covenant. The “suffering servant” paradigm of Isaiah is no longer adequate to a post-Holocaust world.
These developments find expression in a single concrete reality: the State of Israel. Proclaimed in 1948, it represents for many Jews the “Jewish return into history” and the vindication of the covenantal promise that one day Jews would return to their land. Rarely has a sequence of events lent itself more naturally to theological interpretation. The central drama of the Mosaic books is the threefold sequence of enslavement in Egypt, exodus, and revelation at Sinai. Twentieth-century Jewish history has had its own enslavement and attempted genocide and its own exodus and entry into the land. The successive migrations of Jews to Israel from Eastern Europe, North Africa and the Arab lands of the Middle East and most recently from Ethiopia and Russia have held, even for secular Israelis, a biblical resonance as the names of the various evacuation programmes testify: Operation Magic Carpet (which airlifted the Jews of Yemen, as they put it, “on eagles’ wings”), Operation Ezra and Nehemiah (the Jews of Iraq), Operations Moses and Solomon (the black Jews of Ethiopia) and Operation Exodus (the Jews of Russia).
The State of Israel has in itself transformed the terms of Jewish life and brought to the forefront a series of theological questions that had lain dormant or disattended since the end of the biblical period. What is the relationship between divine providence and human action in the interpretation of history? Are the days marking the birth of the state in 1948 and the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 secular events or religious holidays? What is the proper relationship between religion and state? Are the debates and conflicts which animate Israeli life the contemporary equivalents of the old clashes between kings, priests and prophets? Above all, what place does recent Jewish history occupy on the biblical and rabbinic continuum of exile and redemption? Are the birth and wars of the state part of the prelude to messianic time?
The existence of the State of Israel has underlined the postmodern situation of the Jew. It has served as a worldwide focus of Jewish peoplehood and thus deepened the new particularism. The shift it has marked from passivity to the active shaping of history has encouraged Jews in the diaspora to adopt a more activist stance of their own. Its political isolation and the anti-Zionism which has grown since 1967 have increased the sense twentieth-century Jews have of being alone in a hostile world. Its mere existence has been the most potent symbol of a Jewish determination not to yield to the trauma of the Holocaust but to continue to reaffirm life.
Inevitably, too, the existence of Israel has meant a searching self-examination on the part of diaspora Jewry. Twice a year, at the supreme moments of the Jewish calendar, Jews had prayed, “Next year in Jerusalem.” What does that prayer mean when a Jewish Jerusalem is only an aeroplane flight away? Does Israel negate the rationale of the diaspora? What does galut, “exile,” mean in a contemporary context? Most Jews continue to live outside Israel. The largest Jewish population in the world is not there but in the United States. This too is a fact that calls for theological interpretation. Moreover the health and viability of diaspora Jewish communities is a fiercely contended issue. In the past half-century there has been intense activity on the part of Jewish communities in America, Britain, Australia and elsewhere in building synagogues and schools, the key institutions of a Jewish community. But a question remains. To paraphrase Stevie Smith: Is the diaspora waving or drowning?
For alongside the epic historical events that have shaped modern Jewry have gone the social trends with which we began. Until the 1960s, most sociologists predicted the progressive marginalisation and eclipse of religion. The processes that go under the names of secularisation and individualism have taken their toll of Judaism no less – and in some respects more – than of other religions. In the diaspora, Jews have experienced high rates of intermarriage, a less than replacement level of births, and a rising level of divorce. These trends have significance not only for Jewish morality but also for Jewish continuity. Israel for its part, despite the close entanglement of religion and politics, remains a secular state with a secular majority among its Jewish population.
Jews and Judaism
These then have been some of the leading themes of Jewish modernity and postmodernity. They bring out a salient feature of any deliberation on Jews and Judaism. The present work is a study of Jewish thought. But no analysis of Jewish thought, least of all one written in the late twentieth century, can be theological or philosophical alone. Applied to Judaism, the word “religion” is an abstraction and an infelicitous one. Even the words “Judaism” and “Orthodoxy” are neologisms. It is not clear that Torah – the traditional and authoritative way of life of Jews – fits into these conceptual categories without distortion and remainder.
Torah itself – by which we mean the Pentateuch and the biblical and rabbinic literature seen as commentaries to it – is not simply a text or set of documents from which doctrines can be derived, but a relational category. It is, for Jews, the constitution of the covenant binding God and a particular people in an eternal and highly charged relationship. Its words spell out the way of life which that people undertake as “a kingdom of priests and a holy people.”26Exodus 19:6. They articulate, too, a way of interpreting history as the record of that people’s response to the covenant through time. History, for Torah, is neither random nor predetermined. It is not meaningless but it is not prescripted either. It is the story of the relationship between God and Abraham’s extended family. Its categories are those of fidelity and faithlessness, exile and return, attempted flight and perpetual reminders that the covenant, once undertaken, cannot be rescinded.
Election and holiness are not, for Torah, abstract categories that can be described in theology without reference to time, place and empirical reality. They are embodied, concretely, in the communities and societies that Jews create and the choices they make as they chart their destiny through time. Necessarily then, and especially in periods of seismic change, Jewish thought is responsive to history, sociology and demography. The contemporary philosopher Michael Wyschogrod gives this proposition its most forcible expression when he says that “God appears in history as the God of [the people] Israel and there can therefore be no thought about God that is not also thought about Israel.”27Michael Wyschogrod, The Body of Faith (Minneapolis, MN: Seabury, 175). That Jews choose to marry other Jews, identify as Jews and have and raise Jewish children is a fact no less significant for the future of the covenant than theological reflection on the principles of the Jewish faith. Nor are these two kinds of fact unconnected.
In the succeeding chapters we follow the routes mapped out by recent Jewish thinkers as they reflect on the meanings of exile and redemption, alienation and return, the messianic age, the particularity of Jewish existence and the universality of its God, the concept of a covenantal people at a time of cultural and intellectual fragmentation, Jewish law as the constitution of a holy community, and the interpretation of sacred texts in a secular age. These are, for Jews, timeless questions but they have received different answers at different times. They form part of the mandate of Torah in each generation: to delineate a Jewish destiny in faithful response to a covenant enacted long ago at Sinai, and to discern where the pillar of fire is leading us through the wildernesses of time toward the beckoning vision of redemption.
The route I have chosen to take is as follows. It begins in the next chapter with the Holocaust, not the event itself but subsequent Jewish reflection on it. The Final Solution raised in the most fateful way the most basic questions of Jewish existence: the presence of God in history, the theological significance of Jewish survival and the “singled-out” quality of Jewish life in the modern world.
In the next chapter we turn to the second shaping event in recent Jewish history: the creation of the State of Israel. This, as we have seen, raises fundamental questions of covenantal history. Is the return of Jews to their biblical land part of a messianic process? Where does it belong in the theological categories of exile and redemption? Does secular history have a religious meaning and can a state brought into being through the political process be seen as part of a divine plan?
From Israel, we turn in Chapter 4 to the contemporary diaspora. Can Jewish identity be sustained in an open society? What, indeed, does Jewish identity mean for contemporary Jews? Here we encounter fierce debates on the interpretation of Jewish identity and status: What is a Jew, who is a Jew and how is Jewishness to be measured? These debates are further evidence of the interconnectedness of Jewish law, theology, sociology and demography.
By this stage the reader will have become aware of an acute tension in post-Holocaust Jewish life: between the strong sense of Jewish peoplehood that emerged in the wake of the Holocaust and the State of Israel and the fierce divisions as to what the substantive content of that peoplehood is. Chapter 5 examines the attempts of several contemporary Jewish thinkers to provide theological content to the idea of the Jewish people as a “single entity standing before God.”
Prior to modernity, the bond that constituted Jews as a people was halakhah, Jewish law. How has halakhah been affected by the secularisation of Jewish life and by the reconstitution of Jewish national existence in Israel? This is the question addressed in Chapter 6.
In Chapter 7 we turn to a yet more fundamental concept, one that provides not only Jewish law but the whole of traditional Jewish thought with its authority: the Bible, specifically the Pentateuch, as revelation. Here we consider the idea of “Torah from Heaven,” the principle of Jewish faith which has come under the most sustained assault in modernity. How has Orthodoxy defended it, and how have other tendencies in Jewish life reconceptualised revelation?
The importance of the idea of “Torah from Heaven” and its collision with Enlightenment scholarship leads us, in Chapter 8, to a broader enquiry into the nature of the relationship between revelation and time and the reciprocal interplay, in Judaism, between the interpretation of texts and of history. In particular, I argue the centrality of midrash or interpretation to Jewish consciousness.
In the final chapter I attempt a summation of the central drama of modern Jewish thought, the collision between Jewish singularity and the universalism of Enlightenment culture.
Jewry, as we noted at the outset, has experienced modernity in a uniquely dramatic and tragic way. Subject, like other peoples, to secularisation, it discovered that the thesis had a brutal denouement. What began as a prediction that Jews would cease to exist as Jews culminated in a policy that Jews should cease to exist tout court. The timeless, eternal people came face to face with the decree of time and the angel of death. The affirmation of Jewish life after the Holocaust is itself testimony that the covenant survives and that the voice of God continues to be heard, however obliquely and obscurely, by the contemporary heirs of those who stood at Sinai.