Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (Yale UP, 2013). Reviewed for Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, 32.2 (2014). (original) (raw)
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Introduction: Thinking Jewish Modernity
2016
"Modernity," Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1859, "is the transitory, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable." 1 As one side of art, modernity is also one side of history, and thus one side of Jewish history. In all these cases, modernity connotes a state of mind more than it indicates a historical period or structural condition. As a catalyst for latenineteenth-century critical thinking, modernity takes up the promises, limitations, and failures of the Enlightenment as they reconstitute themselves in a postrevolutionary, bourgeois age. Thinking about modernity involves a complex relation to time, in which the past appears as both distant and relevant, the future at once promising and vague. Makers of Jewish Modernity offers original portraits of thinkers, writers, artists, and leaders who founded, formed, and transformed the twentieth century and laid down intellectual, cultural, and political foundations for the world ahead of us. These forty-three portraits understand intellectual and political biographies in the context of the life-worlds of their protagonists-in other words, in terms of the mutualities of texts and contexts, space and time, thought and action, inheritance and transformation. Modern Jewish experience forms a dimension of our post-Enlightenment world. The term "Judaism" is, in English, immediately problematic as a noun alongside of which "Jewish" is the adjective. "Judaism" often connotes religion and religious texts and laws rather than a more fluid category of general cultural and intellectual inheritance. A bagel, as the saying goes, is not the Talmud. The more general category of Jewish culture in relation to the world at large is often referred to by the awkward word "Jewishness." There is no simple replacement for the powerful and polysemic German term Judentum, which strikes the tone and meaning we would engage here. Moreover, it should escape no one that the word Judentum, and its implicit claim of a strong religious as well as secular cultural world, came from the nation that subsequently sought to destroy precisely the powerful hybrid that it had nurtured. Introduction t h i n k i n g j e w i s h m o d e r n i t y
In popular consciousness Jews have become the very symbols of modernity. Although Spinoza was a heretic, Marx baptized a Christian at the age of six, and Freud the underminer of all transcendent faith, in the popular mind these shapers of modernity continue to be regarded as Jews, with apologists and critics alike ever and again seeking to link their modernity to their Jewish origins. More generally, affirmers of modernity have lauded the presence of Jews in the vanguard of intellectual innovation, while political movements of the extreme Left and Right have held Jews collectively responsible for fostering values that destroyed the medieval consensus and substituted a society of alienated individuals for an earlier harmonious community. Yet if indeed the Jews were instrumental in advancing critical thought and in the propagation of a capitalist ethos-a role much exaggerated by both their friends and their enemies -it is surely an irony that for the Jews themselves modernity initially presented such severe problems. Especially did it pose a crisis for the Jewish religion whose God (pace Karl Marx) was not "merely an illusory bill of exchange." Modernity, as the Jews of western and central Europe first encountered it in the eighteenth century, was seductive, for it seemed to offer liberation from political disabilities and from intellectual isolation. In their enthusiasm some Jews saw it not merely as the dawning of a new age, but greeted it with something approaching messianic enthusiasm. That it would also severely call into question the viability of Judaism and undermine Jewish solidarity was an outcome that a few Jews welcomed, others resisted, and many greeted with deep-seated ambivalence.
Modernity: The Jewish Perspective
New Blackfriars, 2013
This paper aims at delivering a definition of modernity as offered by modern Jewish theology: a theological capturing of the modern era as an epoch possessing its own unique and positive religious characteristics. This positive theological evaluation of modernity seems to derive uniquely from the Jewish perspective which sees in modernitas a hopeful repetition of the narrative of Exodus: the story of liberation and autonomous self-constitution of man helped by God who wished his subjects to stop being just subjects, but also wanted to offer them freedom. This emphatically affirmative definition of religious modernity has only one equivalent in Christian theology: the millenarist notion of a "new age"die Neuzeit, or modernitas -as the third age of the spirit, which greatly influenced the most ambitious strain of modern philosophy: German Idealism and Hegel in particular. In referring to the writings of Jacob Taubes (most of all his Occidental Eschatology) I will attempt to show that the twentieth-century Jewish messianism tends to perceive modernity, also in its Christian version, as an epoch of the reawakening of the original spirit of the Hebrew revelation, conceived most of all as the emancipatory event of Exodus.
History as the rise of a modern Jewish identity
History has always held an important place in the forming, inflection and reflection of Jewish identity. The emancipation movement and subsequent Jewish enlightenment in 19th-century Germany brought about a major crisis in Jewish identity regarding issues around integration to modern German society. From this emerged both an intellectual and a religious movement that sought different ways to negotiate Judaism within a Christian hegemony. But these movements were in conflict with one another, each vying to support the correct means of social participation and integration without assimilation. History, more precisely historiography, became the central element of delineating one form of modern Jewish identity upon which this conflict was waged. In this article, I will outline the important role historiography took in the rise of the scientific study of Judaism or Wissenschaft des Judentums in modern Germany, the emergence of the Jewish Reform movement and its impact on Jewish socio-religious identity, and conclude by delineating the second-generation of Wissenschaft des Judentums and its negation of the Reform movement. This essay underscores the connections between historiography and identity. Reform Judaism developed out of the 19th-century emancipation movement in Germany that allowed Jews, and other ethnic minorities, to participate openly in civil society as citizens. Within this inclusivist social thrust, the German Jewish community were offered new opportunities to engage modes of cultural production—i.e. academia, art, governance, economics and business. This, along with new secular-modernist definitions of citizenship and an identification with the nation-state, developed a need to reinterpret Judaism from its conceptions of the past to fit modern views. However, Jewish emancipation came with the price of assimilation to Christian society. Jewish scholars and liberal reformers aimed to negotiate Jewish identity within this modern social context without succumbing to assimilation. By mid-century, this caused an irreparable rift between liberal Jewish reformers and conservative Jewish scholars. History and historiography became the rhetorical tool in this polemic between social engagement and ethnic differentiation. I wish to discuss the relevancy and impact of 19th-century Jewish historiography on the Jewish Reform and counter-reform movements, and the forging of a modern Jewish identity. This thesis will be argued in three major sections. The first section will engage the definition, historical context and experience of Jewish emancipation and the Jewish Enlightenment within a German context. In so doing, we will understand the emergence of Wissenschaft des Judentums or the scientific study of Judaism. The second section will investigate the burgeoning Reform movement by underscoring its relationship to Wissenschaft and modernity, its founders, and its core values and concerns. In order to gain the clearest view of these developments, I will explore the work and worldview of Abraham Geiger, considered the progenitor of the modern Jewish Reform movement. This will lead to the third and final section that questions the impact the Reform movement had on Jewish historiography, or the writing of Jewish history, at the height of the 19th-century. This discussion is most concerned with the place of historiography in the counter-movement against Jewish Reform. I will discuss the second generation of Wissenschaft scholars focusing on the historian Heinrich Graetz. I will outline his conception of history and delineate how he used historiography to counter Geiger's Reform movement and make epistemological innovations. This, ultimately, will explain how this very influential religious movement impacted the writing of Jewish history and, moreover, the forging of a modern Jewish identity. 1 I would like to thank Dr. Ira Robinson for his guidance and mentorship in writing this article, Dr. Rebecca Margolis for her comments and editing, and David Walsh for his insight and patience in reviewing this material.