Tolerance in Judaism: Medieval and Modern Sources (original) (raw)
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TOLERANCE IN JUDAISM: THE MEDIEVAL AND MODERN SOURCES
This is a slightly revised version of the published article, "Tolerance in Judaism: The Medieval and Modern Sources." Copyright is retained by the author. Tolerance is concerned with how one treats differences and boundaries, both within our own group, and between our group and others. These two are intertwined, for tolerance of internal differences builds a foundation for tolerance of external difference. Furthermore, delineations of differences and boundaries are systemic matters, structuring a group's world-view and self-definition, political attitudes, and much else. So this article will briefly review folk attitudes and Rabbinic statements from the medieval to the modern periods relating to diversity amongst Jews, as well as the actual treatment of internal diversity and sectarian tendencies within medieval and modern Judaism. It will then turn to attitudes to non-Jewish cultures and religions. To start with, we must ask how non-Jewish religions have actually been treated in the various independent, mostly quite remote Jewish nations that have arisen over the past two millenia, and how these treatments were justified. But we usually have more information about attitudes of Jews under majority Christian and Muslim rule. We can therefore review the historical changes in medieval Jewish attitudes to other religions in Muslim and Christian lands, in philosophical writings (particularly by Judah Halevi and Maimonides), halakhic (legal) discussions and mystical texts. All of these have influenced present attitudes. The most pivotal formulation of the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in the modern period, however, was given by Moses Mendelssohn in the 18th century. His views on tolerance and non-Jews helped to shape later Jewish self-understanding, as can be shown in the writings of Reform, Conservative and neo-Orthodox movements in the 19th and 20th centuries. The article will close with a brief account of some modern Jewish thinkers whose views of other religions have been significant.
wrote a letter in which he presented his opinion about the place of secular studies in Jewish tradition. His opening programmatic state ment is significant and serves as an appropriate point of departure for this volume: Regarding your request to clarify the ruling concerning the study of "the wisdom of the nations"... it is extremely difficult to render a clear precise decision (ki-halakhah). For matters like these are based very largely on ideologies and opinions that are associated with the aggadic [or nonlegal] portions [of the Torah].... Even though there are several positive and negative commandments associated with them, it is impossible to establish firm rulings with regard to them as [one can do] in the halakhic portions, that is, to issue a ruling applicable to all. They depend very much upon the temperament of the individual person and upon his IX Jacob J. Schacter unique mode [of life], and also depend upon the conditions of time, place, circumstance, and environment.* Indeed, the attitude ofjews throughout history to gentile learn ing and culture is not monolithic and unidimensional and cannot be reduced to any simplistic, facile generalization. On the contrary, it is complex, changing, and nuanced, very much reflecting "conditions of time, place, circumstance, and environment." Affirmation and acceptance in one part of the world or during a specific century was countered by rejection and denial or simple benign disinterest in other times and places. Often differences existed even within the same cultural milieu and identical chronological time frame. All sorts of factors directly influenced how Jews in any given place or time throughout their history reacted to non-Jewish culture. It is this interesting and fascinating story, with a specific emphasis on those factors which militated in favor of an openness of traditional Judaism to non-Jewish sources, which serves as the focus of this volume. This issue ofjudaisms relationship to non-Jewish wisdom {Lam entations Rabbah 2:13) is one of, if not the most basic concern ofjewish intellectual history from antiquity to modern times. Indeed, it is difficult to identify an issue of greater centrality and duration in the history of Jewish thought throughout the ages. It is fundamental to an understand ing of the way a minority Jewish culture confronted the majority cultures within which it functioned, struggling to retain its own identity, integrity, and authenticity under the pressure of other and often hostile environ ments. On occasion, Jews responded positively, even going so far as to appropriate ideas, concepts, and values from the outside and creatively integrate them into its own cultural-and even religious-matrix. There I. Rabbi Bloch's letter was first published by L. Levi, "An Unpublished Responsum on Secular Studies,"
Some Reflections on Jewish Universalism
Tradition, 2022
is the Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies and Director of the Catholic-Jewish Studies Program at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. Some ReflectionS on JewiSh UniveRSaliSm T he accusation that Judaism is insular, ritualistic, misanthropic, and particularist is almost as ancient as Judaism itself. The idea seems to have first emerged in the third century bce, around the same time that Jews throughout the Hellenistic world were establishing diasporan communities. 1 Although Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans accused these Jews, and their Judean kin, of being insular and misanthropic, the argument that Jewish particularism posed an existential threat to a universalist system is primarily a making of the Church Fathers. 2 Molded by second-century figures such as Justin and Tertullian, and expanded by John Chrysostom and Augustine in the fourth century, this idea presents Judaism as a symbolic force whose essence opposes and undermines the universality of Christianity. Ironically, the argument that Judaism is excessively legalistic presupposes gnostic ideas that the Church rejected in the fourth century that separate the Old Testament from the New Testament on the basis that the latter knows only a lower god that is angry and retributive, while the former encounters a higher deity that is nurturing and 1 This paper uses the referential Jews and the term Judaism within the context of the second century bce or later, following Shaye J. D. Cohen's position that the shift from Ioudaios as an ethno-geographic marker to an ethno-religious designation likely took place at this time. Shaye J. D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, 2 nd ed.,
Judaism in Practice: From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period
The Sixteenth Century Journal, 2004
From the Middle Ages through the Early Modern Period testifies to the great variety of religious practices that characterized Judaism in the twelve hundred years between approximately 600 C.E. and 1800 C.E. Although this vast span of time has often been regarded monochromatically, scholars have increasingly come to speak of this period's enormous complexity. The more that we learn about Judaism during this period of time, the more we recognize the dimensions of this complexity, as we will see below. One of the many ways in which this anthology differs from earlier collections of primary Jewish source materials is in its focus on religious practice and religious experience-in keeping with the series of which it is a part. Older sourcebooks have tended overwhelmingly to be interested in either the political, social, and economic history of the Jewish people as a minority community under Islam and Christianity, or in documenting the intellectual religious achievements of medieval and early modern Jewry. There are thus a number of anthologies having to do with medieval Jewish philosophy, mystical thought, and religious poetry, but virtually nothing of scholarly consequence that seeks to encompass the broad range and variety of Jewish religious practice. That this is the case is a matter of considerable irony, in light of the fact that Judaism has historically been regarded as essentially legal, that is, practical in nature. Yet, it is only recently that scholars have come to explore with increasing sophistication the embodied nature of Jewish religion. As the contents of this volume will demonstrate, the ways in which Judaism has been practiced can hardly be isolated from the historical and political experiences of Jews, or from their many different constructions of faith and theology. Nevertheless, a fuller appreciation of the dimensions of religious practice in Judaism requires that they be studied not merely as an appendage to treatments of Jewish history or Jewish thought but on their own terms, as well. The chapters in this book illustrate many different approaches to the analysis of ritual and practice, including literary, anthropological, phenomenological, and gender studies, as well as the methods of comparative religion. Rather than encompass the entire history of Judaism, this sourcebook focuses on the medieval and early modern periods. There are several vantage points from which to construe the emergence of medieval Judaism. From a political point of