Historicism, the Holocaust, and Zionism

Critical Studies in Modern Jewish History and Thought

Steven T. Katz

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9780814748497
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Jewish Theology

"[Of] the 12 well-crafted essays in this volume...the most useful are those dealing with the Holocaust."
— Choice

"Especially recommended for college-level students of Jewish history and culture."
— The Bookwatch

This is a critical exploration of the most repercussive topics in modern Jewish history and thought. A sequel to Katz's National Jewish Book Award-winning study, Post-Holocaust Dialogues, this book identifies the main issues in the contemporary Jewish intellectual universe and outlines a larger, more synthetic understanding of contemporary Jewish existence.

1

On Historicism and Eternity: Reflections on the 100th Birthday of Franz Rosenzweig

Originally prepared for the International Congress held in Kassel, Germany, in 1986 in honor of the 100th anniversary of Rosenzweig’s birth. Reprinted by permission of Verlag Karl Alber, Munich.

In honoring Franz Rosenzweig on this centenary occasion, it is appropriate to ask what it is in his work that brings us together. Is this gathering, for all of its special and genuine poignancy, yet another form of war reparations, the honoring of a long-dead Jewish thinker by his native German city nearly 40 years after the Shoah, or is it something else? And if something else, what else can it be? That is to say, there are many who would contend that Rosenzweig’s philosophical and theological contribution was forever buried in the rubble of Nazism, another minor casualty of Germany’s obscene onslaught against the Jewish people. For it can and has been argued, that Rosenzweig’s relations to Hegel, to Idealism, to Germany, to the Galut, to Christianity, to Zionism, were all so deeply the product of his late 19th-early 20th century German context that the destruction of that Sitz im Leben eliminates the viability, the authenticity, the concreteness of his thought. Still more, it is reasonable to suggest that his style is, for all its radicalness, for all its strangeness, for all of its fascination, so thoroughly rooted in the now deeply questionable Germanic philosophical tradition emerging out of Kant and Hegel as to be, in places, nearly unintelligible today. As such, it makes little sense to attempt to extract still usable truths from his peculiar, if original, metaphysical constructions, from his abstruse negations, from his mysterious grammatological proclamations. Let us, contend the critics, move on instead to more certain, less vulnerable, thinkers.

At times, this negative recommendation commends itself to me; but upon studied reflection I am convinced that to follow it would be an error of considerable proportions. And this because, given the absolute centrality of issues relating to history and historicism in all forms of modern philosophical and theological reflection, Rosenzweig still has much to teach us, if only by way of his refusal to capitulate to the dominant historicizing modalities regnant in contemporary conceptual formulations and deconstructions.

I.

History, as reconceptualized in historicist thought, is not only a descriptive category but a prescriptive normative ideology. In the movement from Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes to Ranke’s essays for the Historisch-Politische Zeitschrift and to Meinecke’s 1936 historicist classic Die Entstehung des Historismus, one observes a progressive unfolding of an idea whose power has been felt everywhere in modern intellectual life. Believed to possess almost salvific potencies by some, the historicist idea can be characterized in Dilthey’s words as follows:

“Thus historical awareness of the finitude of all historical phenomena, of every human or social situation, the consciousness of the relativity of every sort of belief is the final step towards the liberation of man.”¹

But this affirmation is not without negative and far reaching implications. Thus it is not surprising that in theological circles Christian thinkers from F. C. Baur to Rudolf Bultmann and still more recently W. Pannenberg have wrestled with the skeptical and corrosive implications of this position for Christianity, while Jewish thinkers have engaged the matter not so directly as hermeneutic but rather in the fundamental character of the Jewish theological encounter with modernity which has generated all the reformist movements in Judaism since the Emancipation, ranging from classical Reform to S. R. Hirsch’s neo-Orthodoxy (in which the neo is all important), to contemporary Reconstructionism.

Let us be more precise about what we are calling historicism, a word used in a variety of differing, at times even antithetical, senses. We are not, first of all, concerned with the political implications of the doctrine as focused upon especially in Karl Popper’s several famous polemics.² Nor by historicism do I mean to emphasize Meinecke’s concern with the individual, the unique, historical event. Rather, as over-against these usages, the concept is here employed to mean an ideology that: (a) views all events and experiences as in and subject to historical change; (b) views the “truth” as accumulative and open to the future rather than individual and possibly fixed in the past; and (c) holds that to understand an event or experience we need to consider it in relation to, and in the context of, a process of development. Two further corollaries of the notion that we also have in mind when we employ the term are: (a) the claim for the necessarily temporal nature of reason and human judgment; and (b) the claim that authentic knowledge can be arrived at, as it is the product of history, only through a knowledge of history. In addition, two allied, though not necessarily connected factors, also require recognition as part of our attempt to frame an adequate appreciation of the term. The first is the ideology of progress,³ i.e., the doctrine that we are moving along an upwards path in moral and metaphysical values. This was a major feature of 19th century historicism that, despite the skepticism of Nietzsche and Troeltsch, is still not dead. In the Jewish community this presumption was, and is, a major force in the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist branches of Judaism. The second is the principle that history is subject to certain laws, the position most often associated with the philosophical outlook of Hegel and Marx (and certainly of Marxism).⁴

Under the inspiration of this modern historicist concern as we have just described it, it has become fashionable for scholars to characterize Judaism (as well as the other biblically rooted western religions more generally) as “historical”. In contrast, it was Rosenzweig’s particular genius, perhaps the consequences of his “uneducated” Jewish sensibility and “raw” encounter with its formative canonical sources, to recognize that Judaism’s religious experience cum tradition suggests that historical events qua historical events do and do not matter, that Judaism is and is not subject to change, that Judaism can be said to be open to verification in history and that the converse is also a justified conclusion, that Judaism is and is not “this worldly”. What this means is that the issues of history and historicity, the claim that Judaism is a historical religion and all that is insinuated by this assertion, need re-consideration.

II.

Rosenzweig, above all others in the contemporary pantheon of Jewish thinkers, was sensitive to the a-historical reality, the meta-temporal normativity embodied in Judaism. Inspired by his fear of the nihilism, the skepticism, the relativism he rightly perceived in historicist postures, he sought to arrest this drift by recalling from “above” non-changing, eternal, verities. In the form of an inventory, I remind you of some of the more important evidences which he called to witness; that is, I wish to provide a brief itemization of those radical realia which for Rosenzweig stood over-against, even contradicted, the monolithic, systemic, claims of the historicizing consciousness.

(1) Let us begin with his astonishing, insistent reformulation of the “miraculous”. In the second section of the Star that Rosenzweig titles Über die Möglichkeit, das Wunder zu erleben (On the Possibility of Experiencing Miracles) he fashions a decisive reconstruction of this primal notion. Here he has profound things to say about the complementary relation of miracles to scientific law, and therefore about the relationship of religion (theology) and rational truth, and also through his dense exposition about the development of modern thought and the reasons for its rejection of miracles. But beyond this, and for our present purposes, I concentrate upon the connection he makes between miracles, creation and revelation, i.e., upon the implications of his thought for the understanding of prophecy and redemption. That is, I recall to notice his striking observation that “nothing in the miracle of revelation is novel, nothing is intervention of sorcery in created creation, but rather it is wholly sign, wholly the process of making visible and audible the providence which has originally been concealed in the speechless night of creation, wholly—revelation.”⁵ Accordingly, by a reasoning we cannot, and need not, recapitulate here, the “miracle”, while embodied in the givenness of spacetime, of creation, stands beyond the phenomenal, even beyond the moral and aesthetic, and makes itself present in our existential awareness, our direct intuition, of revelation and redemption. Even philosophers restricted to the historical-temporal must admit the possibility, if not the reality, of such an awareness, of such an address, out of the empirical, to that which lies beyond the empirical. “Where Art Thou”, the Divine Address, is the content, arrived at by stages, of the miraculous. A content neither controlled nor addressed by the phenomenal query “Where are you”. The miracle is miracle precisely by virtue of its power to open up for us the connectedness of man, world, and God; an existing interpenetration, a linkage, unstudied by, but not in contradiction to, the natural environment that is the proper subject of scientific inquiry. The singularity of the human “I”, the response of the transcendental “Thou”, the reciprocity of love, the dialogue of creation and creator, of created being and created being, of covenant and final redemption, all reveal themselves as, at least, possibilities, given this decoding of the real as the locus of the miraculous. And in so doing these possibilities, if still only as possibilities, transcend the false limits of an ardent historicism.

(2) Consider, secondly, certain definitive aspects of Rosenzweig’s unique understanding of religion. Here Rosenzweig should be understood as providing data not arguments, i. e., though I am skeptical of his overarching synthesis through which he brings these discrete phenomena into a “new thinking”, I am quite confident that these elements are beyond the capacity of any strong historicism to assimilate. To be noted are his contentions that:

(a) All historical events are partial and corrupt. As a consequence salvation can only be provided by a metahistorical religiosity.

(b) Creation is a non-temporal logical conception. Its dialectical counterpoint, revelation, is more than historical and provides history’s direction and orientation.

(c) The problem of death points out beyond itself, beyond time. As Rosenzweig explains in his comments on “Immortality” in the Star:

“The inevitable growing of the kingdom is not, however, simply identical with the growth of life, and this becomes evident here. For while life wants to endure, it wages a struggle uncertain of issue: that all life must die is a matter, if not of necessity, at least of ample experience. Thus the kingdom may build its growth on the growth of life. But in addition it is dependent on something else, something which first assures life of that immortality which life seeks for itself and which the kingdom must demand for life. Life is assured of citizenship in the kingdom only by becoming immortal. In order to become manifest form, the world thus requires an effect from without in addition to its own inner growth, the growth of life which is precarious because never certain of enduring. This effect affects its vitality in the act of redemption.” (Star, 224–225)

(d) The reality, the continuity, of the People of Israel challenges all immanent decipherments of the movement of history. Though I do not share his insistence on Israel’s more than historical being, all of Rosenzweig’s views on the meaning of Israel’s eternity are substantive and insightful. Of this People he writes:

“Time has no power over it and must roll past it … Elsewhere past and future are divorced, the one the sinking back, the other the coming on; here they grow into one. The bearing of the future is a direct bearing witness to the past … The Patriarchs of old call upon their last descendant by his name—which is theirs. Above the darkness of the future burns the star-strewn heaven of the promise: ‘so shall thy seed be’.” (Star, 298)

One might be rightly cautious of this Rosenzweigian emphasis on “ethnos with God”; but one cannot avoid the fact that it is in keeping with biblical rhythms, and after Auschwitz is both data and doctrine. As such, the imperatives of any Neo-Kantian ethicism, that is, any Hermann Cohen-like interpretation of Judaism and Jewish peoplehood, as over-against this Rosenzweigian ethnicism, should be complementary, not oppositional, and hence reductive.

Here, in the context of an evaluation of Rosenzweig’s contentions regarding the eternity of Israel, it should also be noted that even his much criticized understanding of and distance from Zionism is, however open to rebuttal, sensitive to a real issue. Gershom Scholem has already suggested in criticism of Rosenzweig that he “turned Judaism into a Church”, by which he meant that Rosenzweig’s Judaism lacked the political element. In this sense, according to this national-political criterion, as Scholem correctly perceived, Zionism, and Jewish history more generally, have transcended Rosenzweig. But, and I say this as a Zionist, Rosenzweig sensed the deep and abiding problematic inherent in the Zionist enterprise. That is, he recognized correctly that Zionism is not like other nationalisms, for the State is not absolute in its self-consciousness, rather the State is there only to serve the Jewish people; and is created to solve the historical problems connected with Israel’s exilic condition.⁶ The internal tensions within contemporary Zionism still reveal that this dilemma abides with repercussive consequences.⁷

(e) History requires, in the strong sense, transcendence, the meta-historical, in order for it to be redeemed from meaninglessness. Without the transcendental there is, ultimately, only that fragmentary meaningfulness which cannot, finally, withstand the primordial chaos, the absurdity that follows upon relativism.

In and through these five elemental “religious” concerns, along with his reading of the miraculous, Rosenzweig, sensitive observer that he was, the defender of that philosophy of experience which he continually made reference to, erfahrende Philosophie, raises again “givens” whose decoding pushes back the frontiers, challenges the premises, of any rigorous or narrowly historical argumentation. We need not accept Rosenzweig’s ontology of the Star as the definitive way of explicating these elemental factors, as the preferred solution to the metaphysical and axiological conundrums that these diffic...