One could multiply almost indefinitely the conflicts between Judaism and post-Enlightenment thought, but two in particular are worthy of attention. We touched on one in the previous chapter, namely nineteenth-century historicism: belief in “the uniqueness of all historical phenomena” and the idea that “each age should be interpreted in terms of its own ideas and principles.” The essence of historicism is its sense of the pastness of the past. What happened then has no necessary authority now.
Historicism went hand in hand with the Enlightenment assault on tradition. Edward Shils notes that “the time through which we have just lived has been one in which what was inherited from the past was thought of as an irksome burden to be escaped from as soon as possible.” From the French Revolution onwards, “Traditionality became the ubiquitous enemy to every critic of the ancien régime.”
The effect of historical consciousness on Judaism was to erode, indeed disintegrate, the idea of an authoritative Judaism or Jewish destiny. From a historicist perspective, Judaism is simply its own history, and there is no normative direction in which the future ought to unfold. It is made afresh as each generation individually, communally or nationally decides what to accept or reject from tradition in the light of its experience of the present. There is no Judaism beyond the decisions of Jews. There is no meaning in history beyond that which we choose to impose upon it. Nor do ancient texts speak to us with the immediacy of revelation. The past cannot command. At most it can be entered as a foreign country, somewhere else and long ago.
Against this, the concept of covenant implies that we can be obligated by the past. The Israelites’ assent to the words of God at Sinai binds their children for all generations. This is not a mysterious idea. The citizen of a state may be bound by laws enacted many centuries before his birth. A judge may be bound by precedents he had no share in making. The fact that history can be studied descriptively does not imply that it has no prescriptive force, that covenants or laws have no duration over time. To study history is one thing; to conclude that a tradition is nothing over and above its own history is something else, a conscious revolution against the past. Nathan Rotenstreich has rightly noted that “A concept of tradition that testifies to the changes that have taken place within Judaism and opens the way for further changes by denying the norms that provide men with imperatives is, in the end, destructive of tradition as a vital governing force.”
Equally destructive, and closely related, has been the modern concept of the self. Traditionally, Jewish identity was a given. Converts excepted, one did not choose to be a Jew. One was born a Jew and thus entered, unasked, a history and set of obligations. A born Jew is, according to the Talmud, “already foresworn at Sinai.” One is obligated without any need for a formal act of assent to the duties of Jewish life. But this traditional concept of Jewish identity offends against two of the most powerful axioms of modern thought. One is David Hume’s insistence that one cannot derive an “ought” from an “is,” a moral judgement from a descriptive statement. The other is Jean-Paul Sartre’s declaration that “existence precedes essence,” that there is no morally significant role into which we are born.
Against this, Judaism maintains that the “is” of birth entails the “ought” of the commandments and that “essence precedes existence,” in that one can be born into a covenantal role. Again the crucial analogy is with language. We are born into a linguistic community. This is a fact we did not choose, but it has the greatest consequence for our modes of self-expression. Fundamental to modern thought and the common feature of historicism, Hume and Sartre, is a sharp distinction between facts and values. The past cannot command. Birth cannot create obligations. What is cannot disclose what ought to be. This distinction arises from and reinforces the basic dichotomy of post-Enlightenment thought between what is true and universal on the one hand, and what is private and subjective on the other. Facts are true and can be agreed on by everyone. Values are not facts and are therefore private and subjectively chosen. Judaism sees this as a false dichotomy. Values are indeed not facts. But neither are they private or subjective. They are created by covenant: by a revelation of the part of God of what is just and right, and by an agreement on the part of a community to be bound through time by that revelation. As a result, a covenant in the past can command the present and one can be born into a covenant that one did not choose.
Untranslatability
The crisis of Jewish faith in modernity, then, has been of a singular and special kind. It was not that some new set of discoveries called into question the premisses on which Judaism rested. It was, rather, that a new mode of thought took hold, complex in its ramifications but simple in its basic dichotomies, which systematically excluded Judaism. No more compelling image exists for Enlightenment universalism than the tower of Babel, the search for “one language” that would comprehend the human situation. But every concept of Judaism presupposes that, before the end of days, this search is misconceived and will end in tragedy. Instead the unity of God coexists with and finds expression in a plurality of languages, cultures and faiths. God communicates to man through language. Faith therefore is neither universal nor subjective but, like language, a phenomenon of communities and their rules, traditions and histories. Judaism bears witness to this fact in the covenant by which it agrees to yield to neither tribalism nor universalism but to live as a distinctive people, different from others, while yet remaining faithful to God, the creator of all mankind.
As soon as the attempt was made to translate the concepts of Judaism into Enlightenment thought, they disintegrated. Cartesian philosophy of knowledge left no space for a personal God. Kantian autonomy excluded Jewish ideas of revealed command and halakhah. Kantian universality excluded the concept of a divine covenant with a particular people. Historicism excluded midrashic consciousness, the idea that through tradition and interpretation the past commands the present. The self of Sartre excludes the very idea of Jewish identity as a set of moral obligations conferred by birth. As a result, Jews were thrown into one of the great intellectual crises of their history.
We have traced the effects throughout this book. The Cartesian revolution is evident in widespread Jewish secularism. Kant’s conception of autonomy is present in liberal Judaism’s rejection of halakhah. His principle of universality left its mark in the early Reform abandonment of Judaism’s particularist commands. Historicism undermined the idea of “Torah from Heaven.” The Sartrean self has led to unprecedented confusion about modern Jewish identity. Despite the bold attempts of Jewish thinkers to effect a synthesis between the classic terms of Judaism and post-Enlightenment thought, the effort was bound to fail.
It is no accident that almost all the great continental philosophers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Voltaire, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche – delivered sharp attacks on Judaism as an anachronism. Voltaire described it as a “detestable superstition.” Kant called for its “euthanasia.” Hegel took Judaism as his model of a slave morality. Nietzsche fulminated against it as the “falsification” of all natural values. In the twentieth century, Sartre could see no content to Jewish existence other than the defiance of antisemitism. Martin Heidegger, the greatest German philosopher of his time, became an active Nazi. Modern Western philosophy, promising a new era of tolerance, manifestly failed to extend that tolerance to Judaism and the Jews. Against this background, the transition from Enlightenment to Holocaust is less paradoxical than it might otherwise seem.
The Enlightenment was one of the great universalist movements in human civilisation, more so even than Christianity and Islam. Its promised salvation lay in the power of science to control nature and of reason to resolve conflict. It presupposed no revelation, tradition or faith. In liberalism it offered a simple solution to the conflict of religions, namely a new dichotomy between public and private domains. The public domain was to be neutral, governed only by universal reason (Kantian principle or the utilitarian maximisation of consequences). Religion was to be private, the subjective persuasion of individuals. It was a brilliantly abstract answer to a series of resolutely concrete human dilemmas. And yet one fact stands out in retrospect. The Enlightenment did not end antisemitism, but gave added impetus to it in a new and more systematic form.
Enlightenment thought consistently focused on man-as-such, humanity in the abstract, the self divorced from all tradition, particular histories and accidents of birth. Jews were to be accorded rights, but not as Jews; instead as abstract individuals. But Jews testified to the concrete particularism of human identity. They were not atomistic selves. They were, both in their own and others’ eyes, members of a people, participants in a history, bearers of a revelation, adherents of a tradition. Neither Jews nor Judaism fitted into the remorseless logic of philosophical abstraction. As always in their history they found themselves separate, distinct, “not reckoned among the nations,” now singled out by the philosophers of modernity no less than by the Christianity and Islam of the Middle Ages.
For Jews bore witness to the particularity of the human situation in the presence of God. Nowhere was this more manifest than in the sensed differentness of the Jews. But it has been precisely the differentness of the Jews that has, throughout history, been the moral refutation of each successor to the tower of Babel, each “final solution” to the human predicament. For if the other cannot be affirmed in his differentness, then the world is not yet redeemed.
A crisis of identity
But one haunting question remains. Why did Jews embrace Enlightenment as they had, for the most part, not embraced Christianity and Islam? The short answer, surely, is this. To convert to another faith, though it carried advantages, was to betray a people and its history. This at most times Jews were unprepared to do. But Enlightenment offered a challenge of a quite different kind. Here was a new universal order that was not religious but secular. To embrace it did not involve conversion. To Jews, having suffered for 1,800 years for their differentness, the prospect was overwhelming.
One case is particularly illustrative. Time and again in our analyses of modern Jewish thought we have come across a lonely figure at the eye of the storm: Benedict Spinoza. It was Spinoza who first naturalised revelation, dissolved the bonds of halakhah, separated Jewish history from providence and the land of Israel from special sanctity. Spinoza was excommunicated by the Jewish community of Amsterdam in 1656, and indeed his thought argued the end of a distinctive Jewish existence. Nonetheless, as the later inspiration of the two diametrically opposed movements of radical Reform and secular Zionism, Spinoza stands as the archetypal modern Jew. The question of his identity is therefore peculiarly emblematic.
Spinoza was the descendant of Marranos, Jews who had been forced to convert to Christianity in the wake of the Spanish inquisition and expulsion. Only recently have scholars given significance to this fact. Marranos represent a paradigm of conflicting identities. Outwardly Christian but secretly practising Judaism, they were held in suspicion by both communities: by Christians as covert Judaisers and by Jews as public betrayers of the faith. Spinoza’s thought is an extended attempt to construct a world liberated from this double-bind. His hero is Euclid, his model, geometry, and his aspiration is for a metaphysical and political order where there are no traditional and particular identities, only universal reason and the abstract individual.
Spinoza, followed in turn by such figures as Marx, Durkheim and Freud, testifies to a fact of fundamental significance: that modernity was experienced by Jewish intellectuals as a crisis of identity. As in fifteenth-century Spain, Jews were called on to undergo a kind of conversion, this time not to Christianity but to secular citizenship. But now as then, they found themselves regarded by European society as outsiders. They became secular Marranos, inwardly Jewish, outwardly westernised, viewed by both sides with suspicion, carrying the burden of double alienation. There was one solution. If one could arrive at a world free of the lingering traces of religion, whether by reason (Spinoza), revolution (Marx) or the cure of neurosis (Freud), if one could stand outside the givenness of religious meanings, then alienation could be cured. There were Jews therefore who not merely embraced the universalism of modern Western thought, but became its most active shapers.
Seen in the full perspective of hindsight, Enlightenment constituted an assault on Jewish particularism more subtle and powerful than medieval Christianity and Islam. Some saw with absolute clarity that two mutually exclusive civilisations were about to collide. Spinoza was one, and was prepared to draw the consequence that Jews should now abandon Judaism. Others, especially traditionalist Orthodoxy, drew the opposite conclusion, that Jews should decline the offer of emancipation and continue to live segregated lives. For the most part, however, Jews believed that Enlightenment and Judaism were compatible. Thus was born an unprecedented Jewish ambivalence about identity. Jews continued to be Jews, but became at the same time passionate universalists. They denied that they were different, but were continually reminded that they were.
The new Judaisms that emerged in the nineteenth century were, each in its own way, attempts to escape the singularity of the Jewish situation. Reform offered universal ethics in place of distinctive ritual. Secular Zionism offered a Jewishness of nationhood in place of religion. Each spoke of “normalisation.” Both rejected the idea of a chosen people. It is impossible to understand the crisis of modern Jewish thought without appreciating the extent to which Jews saw in secularism a deliverance from eighteen centuries of unparalleled and unabated religious persecution. Enlightenment thought, hostile though it was to Judaism, was passionately embraced, for it seemed to promise the triumph of reason over prejudice and universal citizenship over religious identity. American Reform’s Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 summed up a mood that could be found in many sectors of Jewish life: “We recognise in the modern era of universal culture of heart and intellect the approach of the realisation of Israel’s great Messianic hope for the establishment of the kingdom of truth, justice and peace among men.”
That secularism might not end anti-Judaism but instead transform it into racial antisemitism; that even the Holocaust and the State of Israel might not end antisemitism but instead transform it into a fundamentalist anti-Zionism: these, for the Jews of modernity, were the unimaginable disillusionments. The history of Jewish thought since the Holocaust has been the response to this second crisis, coming as it did so soon after the first. Its central theme has been the slow realisation that the pursuit of normalisation was neither possible nor ultimately admirable. Seemingly inexorably, Jews are cast in the role of a singular people bearing witness to a universal God.
Arthur Green has noted that “The period of Jewish history that began in late-eighteenth-century Germany has ended. We whose identities were formed after 1933, 1945, 1948 and 1967 are no longer modern Jews.” The modern Jew had placed his faith in the universalist thrust of Western civilisation. The postmodern Jew has a more sombre awareness – born of his knowledge of the Holocaust and anti-Zionism – that universalism has its darker side and that Jews are called on to testify to the plurality of faith and to the religious right to differentness. There is no clearer evidence of the recent transformation of Jewish consciousness than the fact that, in the 1960s, Jews began to describe themselves once again as “the people that dwells alone.” Alongside the fragmentation of Jewish thought and life has gone a new awareness of collective fate and what Emil Fackenheim calls the “singled out” Jewish condition. The turning point was the worldwide Jewish response to the threat to Israel in the weeks prior to the Six-Day War. Twice within a quarter-century Jews had faced the threat of genocide. West and East, Christianity and Islam, had left a legacy of hatred that, in Europe and now the Middle East, threatened the covenantal promise with destruction. Jews were agreed on this, that they would survive and in surviving show that they were an eternal people. This is the leitmotiv of Jewish postmodernity.
The “new Jewish stand” manifests itself in many ways: an understanding of the State of Israel as a response to, though neither an explanation or redemption of, the Holocaust; a resurgent Jewish ethnicity; a return within liberal Judaism to previously discarded forms of particularism such as religious ritual, the Hebrew language, Jewish schooling and even a fresh assessment of halakhah; and the new interest of secular Jews in the Bible. Perhaps the most notable phenomenon has been the renaissance of Orthodoxy as the most vigorous sector of contemporary Jewish life. Since the beginning of the nineteenth century it had been seen as destined for eclipse, but against all predictions, Orthodoxy has risen phoenix-like from the ashes of the Holocaust. Its newfound strength is evident in its large and relatively stable families, in the growth of intensive Jewish day schools, the proliferation of yeshivot, and the many thousands of ba’alei teshuvah, Jews who have found their way back to traditional styles of study and life. Intellectually too, most of the leading thinkers of recent years have worked broadly within the Orthodox tradition: Soloveitchik, Leibowitz, Wyschogrod, Berkovits, Greenberg and Hartman. Even the most significant current non-Orthodox thinker, Emil Fackenheim, has dedicated his work to an engagement with the rabbinic tradition as did his precursor, Franz Rosenzweig. Collectively this represents a marked turn from the universalist, rationalist and historicist mood of the nineteenth century.
Does this crisis of identity, from which Jewry is only slowly emerging and of which Jewish thought still bears the signs, have some religious meaning? One biblical passage above all others has seemed, at times of trauma, to epitomise the Jewish destiny. Not surprisingly, for it is the passage in which Israel receives its name. For the sages of the second century CE it described the confrontation between Jews and Rome. For Nachmanides in thirteenth-century Spain it foreshadowed the persecution of Jews at the hands of medieval Christianity. It is no less evocative in the wake of the Jewish encounter with Enlightenment. It is the narrative of Jacob’s wrestling match with the angel.
Following a suggestion of the eleventh-century exegete Rabbi Shmuel ben Meir, let us offer this commentary. Jacob had his own crisis of identity. For he had received the blessing not as Jacob but dressed in the clothes of Esau. Now, after a long exile, he is about to confront Esau again. There is no alternative but to be Jacob. Jacob is afraid and tries to run away, but now he finds his way blocked by an angel. He wrestles and wins, but not without facing the risk of death and the actuality of injury. But he is now Israel: he who knows the inescapability of his identity, though it involves struggling with God and man.
It is a scene repeated many times in Jewish history. The burden of chosenness, of being singled out by God, is heavy, and man tries to flee from it. The Israelites in the wilderness try to return to Egypt. Jonah seeks to escape his prophetic mission. Ezekiel predicts a time when Israel will “want to be like the nations, like the peoples of the world.” The nineteenth century was such a moment. Jews sought in normalisation a release from the destiny of differentness. But in the Holocaust, their way was blocked by the angel of death. We will never fully understand those dark biblical passages in which God turns His people towards life by the threat of death. Why must Jews endure suffering to remain a people? That, like the Holocaust, remains a mystery no prophet has ever fathomed. Like Jacob after his struggle, the Jewish people limps, still scarred by that encounter. But those who remain have like Jacob taken up the journey again, no longer seeking flight from fate but instead determined to survive as Jews. The State of Israel, diaspora Jewish activism and a renascent Orthodoxy all express this fundamental affirmation. The Jewish people has returned to its perennial vocation: to be Israel, the people of the covenant, though this means struggling with God and with man.
Covenantal fate
The historian Barbara Tuchman, reflecting on the course of Jewish fate, writes:
The history of the Jews is…intensely peculiar in the fact of having given the Western world its concept of origins and monotheism, its ethical traditions, and the founder of its prevailing religion, yet suffering dispersion, statelessness and ceaseless persecution, and finally in our times nearly successful genocide, dramatically followed by fulfilment of the never-relinquished dream of return to the homeland. Viewing this strange and singular history one cannot escape the impression that it must contain some special significance for the history of mankind, that in some way, whether one believes in divine purpose or inscrutable circumstance, the Jews have been singled out to carry the tale of human fate.
Paul Johnson, at the end of his A History of the Jews, comes to a strikingly similar conclusion. Jews were, he writes, “exemplars and epitomisers of the human condition. They seemed to present all the inescapable dilemmas of mankind in a heightened and clarified form… It seems to be the role of the Jews to focus and dramatise these common experiences of mankind, and to turn their particular fate into a universal moral.”
Perhaps, then, the story of modern Jewish thought has some larger significance. Subject like other peoples to secularisation, Jews experienced it in a uniquely traumatic way. Emancipation and Enlightenment contained a hidden premiss. Jews were to be tolerated and granted rights to the extent that they became instances of man-as-such, humanity in general. Socially, this meant assimilation. Intellectually, it meant the disintegration of those values and beliefs by which Jews had pledged themselves to be bound since Sinai. Many Jews believed this process to be benign, for who in the early nineteenth century could foresee the consequences and recall the story of the tower of Babel? But what began as the promise of a new era of equality and tolerance ended in the ovens of Auschwitz.
And yet out of this tragic process something not unremarkable has occurred. Jews have not ceased to be Jews. In the diaspora, for the most part, they have found freedom. In Israel they have found themselves, after 1,900 years of exile, gathered once more as a sovereign people in the land of their beginnings. There has been a slow mending of the wounds, physical and spiritual, of the past two centuries. There is a renewed search for peoplehood and tradition. Above all, there has been a recovery of the sense of Jewish singularity, as if the epic events of the twentieth century contained intimations of that larger design called providence, summoning Jews to continue the covenant across the discontinuities of time.
The dilemma faced by the great religious and philosophical attempts to understand the human situation is the conflict between the unity of truth and the plurality of man. Sir Isaiah Berlin once wrote:
One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the altars of the great historical ideals… This is the belief that somewhere…there is a final solution. This ancient faith rests on the conviction that all the positive values in which men have believed must, in the end, be compatible, and perhaps even entail one another.
No finer statement has been given in our time of the project of the tower of Babel. In a century which has witnessed totalitarianism, fascist, communist and religious fundamentalist, on an unprecedented scale, it remains a still urgent moral.
If the role of Jews is, as Johnson argues, to “turn their particular fate into a universal moral,” then Judaism’s truths have not lost their wider relevance, even if they have recently lived a hazardous life among Jews themselves. Faith belongs to particular covenants with a universal God. There are universal requirements of morality, but beyond this minimum our moral and spiritual lives are as plural as languages, neither private nor universal but bound by the rules preserved by faith-communities in their dialectic between revelation and interpretation. Each of us carries the inescapable burden of duality, of being true to our faith while recognising the image of God in, and being a blessing to, those who are unlike us. Any attempt to reduce this duality to a unity results in either tribalism or universalism, both of which end in human sacrifice.
Between Babel and the end of days, the unity of truth cannot be purchased at the cost of the plurality of man. For the world, though redeemable, is not yet redeemed. Truth, though absolute, is not yet universal. Indeed, to paraphrase Johnson, the universal moral is the particularity of fate. The challenge of unredeemed time, one that has lost none of its force in an age of mass destruction, is to work through the religious and moral implications of differentness: of the fact that one God has created one world in which many faiths, cultures and languages must live together. Judaism stakes its being on faith in the religious integrity of difference.
These are difficult truths, and modern Jewish thought is in part the story of attempts to find alternatives that would end or at least mitigate the burden of differentness. But after its fateful, almost fatal, encounter with modernity, Jewry’s dialogue with destiny has been taken up again. The covenant has neither altered nor ceased but continues to unfold in the strange, paradigmatic story of a singular people and its relationship with God.
