The Legacy of Liberal Judaism

Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt's Hidden Conversation

Ned Curthoys

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781782380085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia ebraica

Comparing the liberal Jewish ethics of the German-Jewish philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Hannah Arendt, this book argues that both espoused a diasporic, worldly conception of Jewish identity that was anchored in a pluralist and politically engaged interpretation of Jewish history and an abiding interest in the complex lived reality of modern Jews. Arendt's indebtedness to liberal Jewish thinkers such as Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, and Ernst Cassirer has been obscured by her modernist posture and caustic critique of the assimilationism of her German-Jewish forebears. By reorienting our conception of Arendt as a profoundly secular thinker anchored in twentieth century political debates, we are led to rethink the philosophical, political, and ethical legacy of liberal Jewish discourse.

CHAPTER 1

‘This Man of Our Destiny’

Moses Mendelssohn, Nathan the Wise and the Emergence of a Liberal Jewish Ethos

While most foundation myths centred on the heroic achievements of individuals require sober appraisal, it is difficult to overestimate the unique significance of one man, Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), for the emergence of a liberal Jewish philosophical tradition in Germany. Even liberal German Jewish thinkers such as Hermann Cohen and Ernst Cassirer, who demurred at Mendelssohn’s critique of Lessing’s philosophy of human progress, remained faithful to his reconciliation of Judaism and reason and his pride in Judaism’s ethical monotheism. For liberal Jewish intellectuals and for much of the German Jewish community up until 1933, the legendary character of Mendelssohn, his capacity for cross-cultural friendship and his aptitude for kindling ecumenical dialogue, transforming anti-Jewish hostility into admiration and respect for his extraordinary talents, helped to efface the image of Jews as permanent outsiders to European civilization. Mendelssohn promised German Jews a dignified future as creative agents in a culturally progressive, secularizing European modernity.¹

Mendelssohn’s importance for nineteenth-century liberal Jewish thought, which was acutely aware of its relationship to the history of Judaism and the Jewish people, is only comprehensible, I would suggest, if we move beyond the trite image of Mendelssohn as a classic Enlightenment rationalist, a disciple of Christian Wolff with little regard for the formative power of history and tradition. I think it much more rewarding to situate Mendelssohn as a ‘world-thinker’, someone who, according to Edward Said, is an ‘overturner and a re-mapper of accepted or settled geographies and genealogies’.² Mendelssohn’s desire for a renaissance in Hebrew culture, his attempt to revive philosophy and Biblical exegesis in Hebrew, reflects Sutcliffe and Brann’s argument that in periods of transition and transformation for Judaism Jewish intellectuals have actively ‘refashioned their relationship to the Jewish past and its available canon of cultural ideals’.³ As David Sorkin argues, Mendelssohn was one of the foremost representatives of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, which originated as an ‘indigenous effort to correct the historical anomaly of a Judaism out of touch with central aspects of its textual heritage and the larger culture’.⁴ Following Shmuel Feiner, we should be mindful that every social, cultural, and political trend in modern Jewish history has been accompanied by a ‘distinctive sense of the past’, a caution that we should not take Mendelssohn’s seeming indifference to history at face value.⁵ If Mendelssohn’s character and worldview resonated with many German Jewish intellectuals in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it may be because he fashioned the possibility of a diasporic and syncretic Judaism in continuing conversation and cross-fertilization with other cultures. Mendelssohn re-imagines a Judaism that is not culturally isolated or insular, but outwardly directed and relational, thus open to transformation and renewal.

There could be no more salient representation of a modern Jewish individual as a creative ‘world-thinker’ disrupting normative identities and bringing warring cultures into dialogue than Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s epochal 1779 drama Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise). Its chief protagonist, the noble and wise Jewish merchant Nathan, is almost universally acknowledged as inspired by Lessing’s friend and critical collaborator, Moses Mendelssohn. Given the degree of recent critical opprobrium towards the play and the character of Nathan, now disdained as an innocuous exemplar of ‘humanity’ who lacks Jewish attributes, I wish to reconstruct the appeal of Nathan’s character and Lessing’s play, which was extolled by the predominantly liberal German Jewish community throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁶ Before discussing the play and its historical significance as a text of the philosemitic radical Enlightenment, it is important to reflect on why the character of Nathan, and his putative historical model Moses Mendelssohn, have become such controversial representatives of Judaism for twentieth-century criticism, particularly since the Holocaust; namely because of a withering social historical critique concerned to identify and repudiate the failed German Jewish strategy of assimilation as an archetype of diasporic Jewish passivity and bad faith. This influential genre of critique has been hostile to Mendelssohn, now held responsible for the erosion and atomization of Jewish identity. David Sorkin points out, for example, that whereas the Jewish rabbi and historian Meyer Kayserling could celebrate Mendelssohn in 1862 as a ‘sincere religious Jew and a German writer’, as a ‘noble model for posterity’, since the late nineteenth century there has been a contrary tendency to judge Mendelssohn caustically as the ‘false prophet of assimilation and de-nationalization’.⁷

The Anti-assimilationist Critique of Moses Mendelssohn and Nathan the Wise

The biographer of the German Jewish poet and essayist Heinrich Heine, Jeffrey Sammons, has argued against the ‘condescension toward if not condemnation of German Jews that has become a conspicuous feature of post-Holocaust discourse and, in the interest of justice and equity, is much in need of readjustment’.⁸ There are a number of reasons for this condescension, including Zionist influenced hostility towards the supposed assimilationist tendencies of German Jews, and a deeply rooted hermeneutic suspicion of the Enlightenment as an arrogant ideological project that attacked traditions and cultures that did not live up to rational norms, a project perceived as particularly inimical to the alleged backwardness, obduracy, and sectarian exclusivity of the Jews.⁹

Criticism of Nathan the Wise has been profoundly affected by the near universal critical consensus that Lessing based the humane and wise character of Nathan on his dear friend the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, the first German Jewish public intellectual, of great repute in both the German and German Jewish communities, and throughout Europe, for his writings on metaphysics, aesthetics, political theory, and in his mature years, Judaism.¹⁰ Mendelssohn was one of the chief promulgators of the German Enlightenment or Aufklärung and its core values of religious and ethnic tolerance, humanism, and rationality. He is also considered the progenitor of the Haskalah, the German Jewish Enlightenment, which encouraged Jews to enter secular studies such as science, history, and languages, often deplored the intolerance, insularity, and parochialism of orthodox rabbis, and reconceived Judaism in less exclusive and more universalist terms as a faith compatible with reason and the progressive tendencies of world history.

Debate still rages over Moses Mendelssohn as a figure of Jewish modernity and over the effect of his legacy on Judaism. The prominent historian of the German Jewish encounter with modernity, Michael Meyer, articulates the continuing anxieties catalysed by Mendelssohn’s philosophical idealization of Judaism as a rational and inclusive religious faith, when he describes emancipation and the Enlightenment as ‘seductive’ for the Jews, an era that called into question the ‘viability of Judaism and [undermined] Jewish solidarity’.¹¹ Mendelssohn’s insistence on a ‘tolerant Judaism’ that was more a matter of individual faith than a cohesive community of observance created, Meyer argues, a ‘subjectivized’ Judaism that ‘entered the modern world without clear norms and uncertain of its future’.¹² Thus the question as to whether Mendelssohn is a Jewish hero inaugurating the cultural efflorescence of Judaism after emancipation, or a catalyst for the destruction of Judaism by the forces unleashed by a homogenizing modernity, is at the very heart of post-war Nathan the Wise criticism. The historian George Mosse’s pointed question in German Jews beyond Judaism – ‘what, after all, was Jewish about Nathan?’ – lingers on. The question was first articulated by a generation of German Jews in the vanguard of the Jewish Renaissance in the Weimar Republic, who rejected the bourgeois assimilation of their parent’s generation, critiqued the political inertia of German Jewish history, and sought to articulate a more vital and distinctive conception of Jewish identity that proudly acknowledged Jewish difference.¹³

One such prominent figure of the post-assimilationist Jewish Renaissance was the German Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, who, in a 1919 lecture on Nathan the Wise, responded with irritation and bemusement to Nathan’s famous declaration to the hostile Knight Templar: ‘Are Christian and Jew sooner Christian and Jew than human being?’ Rosenzweig exclaimed in his notes, ‘how empty is this presupposition of humanity, if men do not want it’.¹⁴ In contrast to the play’s enthusiasm for the ‘unhoused’ human being as revealed in the play’s ‘anemic’ fifth act, Rosenzweig commends Zionism for recognizing that, in light of contemporary circumstances, ‘the Jewish human being has the power of a fact’; for today, muses Rosenzweig, we German Jews can no longer wish to remain ‘naked human beings’.¹⁵ Rosenzweig also laments the mesmerizing appeal of the Mendelssohn/Lessing friendship on which the play was supposedly based, a friendship, he suggests, that was not really the meeting across difference of Christian and Jew but rather of two men who ‘found themselves in the common abstraction of their positive religions’.¹⁶ Rosenzweig regards the Lessing/Mendelssohn friendship as only possible in an age, that of the Enlightenment, that ‘lacked the blood of the present time’.¹⁷ Indeed, laments Rosenzweig, the space of co-existence and mutual dialogue envisioned by Nathan the Wise is today devoid of even ‘the best Christians’.¹⁸

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of Nathan the Wise for Rosenzweig is the legacy of Mendelssohn himself, that ‘man of our destiny’ who was a Jew but also ‘covered up the fact’, a reference to Mendelssohn’s many Gentile friends and his initial reluctance to become involved in religious controversy.¹⁹ Ten years later, in 1929, in his ‘Pronouncement for a Celebration of Mendelssohn’ upon the bicentennial of his birth, Rosenzweig ambivalently refers to Mendelssohn as the ‘first German Jew’ but one who ‘has not been able to bequeath to us the protection under which he himself effected the new combination’. Rosenzweig laments Mendelssohn’s heirs, many of whom were converts to Christianity (such as the famous composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy), as a ‘symbol of the menace into which he led the existence of our, his, spiritual descendants’. Mendelssohn, complains Rosenzweig, ‘led us defenseless into this danger’, the danger of an anti-Semitism that no longer accepted converted or assimilated Jews. For Mendelssohn’s own protection was the ‘worldview of his century’, an ephemeral phase of German history that believed in the unifying power of ahistorical ideals such as humanity, tolerance, and truth.²⁰

Hannah Arendt

From the early 1930s the political theorist Hannah Arendt, energized by the Zionist critique of Jewish assimilation, endorsed Rosenzweig’s sentiments, interpreting Mendelssohn as prefiguring all those educated and secularized ...