How Judaism Became a Religion

An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought

Leora Batnitzky

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781400839711
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Jüdische Theologie

A new approach to understanding Jewish thought since the eighteenth century Is Judaism a religion, a culture, a nationality—or a mixture of all of these? In How Judaism Became a Religion, Leora Batnitzky boldly argues that this question more than any other has driven modern Jewish thought since the eighteenth century. This wide-ranging and lucid introduction tells the story of how Judaism came to be defined as a religion in the modern period—and why Jewish thinkers have fought as well as championed this idea.Ever since the Enlightenment, Jewish thinkers have debated whether and how Judaism—largely a religion of practice and public adherence to law—can fit into a modern, Protestant conception of religion as an individual and private matter of belief or faith. Batnitzky makes the novel argument that it is this clash between the modern category of religion and Judaism that is responsible for much of the creative tension in modern Jewish thought. Tracing how the idea of Jewish religion has been defended and resisted from the eighteenth century to today, the book discusses many of the major Jewish thinkers of the past three centuries, including Moses Mendelssohn, Abraham Geiger, Hermann Cohen, Martin Buber, Zvi Yehuda Kook, Theodor Herzl, and Mordecai Kaplan. At the same time, it tells the story of modern orthodoxy, the German-Jewish renaissance, Jewish religion after the Holocaust, the emergence of the Jewish individual, the birth of Jewish nationalism, and Jewish religion in America.More than an introduction, How Judaism Became a Religion presents a compelling new perspective on the history of modern Jewish thought.

PART I

Judaism as Religion

Chapter 1

MODERN JUDAISM AND THE INVENTION OF JEWISH RELIGION

For both biographic and philosophical reasons, Moses Mendelssohn is rightfully considered the founder of modern Jewish thought. While Mendelssohn lived before individual Jews had political rights, he articulates a vision of how Jews and Judaism could complement the modern nation-state. Mendelssohn gives voice to the claim that I will be exploring throughout this book: that Judaism is a religion. In fact, he invents the modern idea that Judaism is a religion. Yet his argument is fraught with the fundamental tension that would and still does define much of modern Jewish thought: religion is a modern German Protestant category that Judaism does not quite fit into. I will look at the development of this category in greater detail later in this chapter, but for now one can understand this Protestant notion simply as the view that religion denotes a sphere of life separate and distinct from all others, and that this sphere is largely private and not public, voluntary and not compulsory. Although Judaism as it has historically been practiced conflicts with this idea of religion for a number of reasons, which I will discuss, the most basic one is that Judaism and Jewish life have been largely, though not entirely, public in nature.

In characterizing Judaism as a religion, Mendelssohn is aware of and actually emphasizes the implicit problems that follow from trying to define it thus in a German Protestant vein. Indeed, far from simply assimilating Judaism into an alien category, Mendelssohn’s attempt to define Judaism within the modern Protestant category of religion brings with it not-so-subtle criticisms of this very category. More particularly, and somewhat paradoxically, Mendelssohn makes his argument not by denying Judaism’s public character but by stressing it. In this chapter, I will explore the creative tensions that arise from Mendelssohn’s claim that Judaism is a religion. These tensions are relevant far beyond the historical significance of Mendelssohn, for they contain the beginnings of many streams of modern Jewish thinking that followed him, including those strands that criticize his vision but remain within the framework of trying to understand Judaism as a religion and those that attempt to reject this framework.

MENDELSSOHN, FRIEND OF GOTTHOLD EPHRAIM LESSING

If one visits the Grosse Hamburger Strasse cemetery today in the former East Berlin, one will see a reerected headstone marking Mendelssohn’s grave—the only gravestone standing, since the Nazis destroyed the rest of the cemetery’s headstones. Across from the cemetery is Berlin’s Jewish high school, founded in 1862, whose building was used by the Nazis as a deportation center for Jews. Mendelssohn’s image is engraved in stone on the building, with the inscription “Moses Mendelssohn, Philosopher and Friend of Lessing.” This phrase captures what is clearly still taken to be Mendelssohn’s legacy—that he was a friend of the great Enlightenment philosopher Lessing (1729–81). On the face of it, it is strange that Mendelssohn’s life should be memorialized by who his friend was, perhaps leading one to conclude that Mendelssohn’s significance derives only from what must be Lessing’s monumental greatness. Yet both in its own time as well as today, Mendelssohn’s friendship with Lessing tells us less about the importance of Lessing than it does about the unlikely fact that Lessing, an enlightened Christian philosopher, was actually friends with a Jew. Appreciating the perceived novelty of this improbable friendship allows us a window into not only the complex historical and political situation of early modern Jews but also the philosophical and political quagmire in which Mendelssohn would eventually find himself.

In the eighteenth century, many European philosophers began to highlight notions of reason, science, human progress, and universalism, which often called into question traditional beliefs and customs. This intellectual and cultural movement is frequently referred to as the “Age of Enlightenment.” To start to appreciate the cultural, political, and philosophical significance of Mendelssohn, it is necessary to recognize the way in which an abstract conception of “the Jew” was crucial for many Enlightenment philosophers, even, or perhaps especially, when they did not know any actual Jews. The Jew was the test case for the possibility of mass enlightenment; if even the Jew could be enlightened, then enlightenment was a potentiality for everyone.

Nowhere is this sentiment expressed more clearly than in Lessing’s play The Jews, which tells the story of a Jewish traveler who saves a baron from an unknown robber, who turns out to be the baron’s own servant. The baron is unaware that the hero of the play is a Jew, and the Jewish traveler only reveals this fact when the baron offers him his daughter’s hand in marriage as a reward for his bravery. The Jewish traveler confesses that he cannot accept this generous offer because he is a Jew, and Jews and Christians are forbidden to marry. The play ends with the baron declaring to the Jewish traveler, “Oh, how commendable the Jews would be, if they were all like you!” and the traveler responding, “And how worthy of love the Christians would be, if they all possessed your qualities.”¹

In an otherwise-positive review of the play, the Protestant theologian Johann David Michaelis, who I will return to soon, argued that while Lessing had expressed a nice sentiment, it was highly unlikely that such a Jew existed. It was in this context that Mendelssohn was introduced to Lessing by a mutual acquaintance, producing a friendship that symbolized the possibility of universal enlightenment and culminating in Lessing’s famous play Nathan the wise. Both Jews and Christians were astonished by Mendelssohn, not just because of his great intellect (in 1763 he won first prize in a philosophy essay contest where the second place went to Kant), but also because he was able to thrive at once within Jewish and German Enlightenment circles.

Mendelssohn was born in Dessau. He received a traditional Jewish education and was a promising Talmudic scholar. In 1743, at age fourteen, he went to Berlin to continue his studies. With the help of other Jews interested in Enlightenment ideas, Mendelssohn was able to teach himself German, Latin, Greek, English, and French as well as mathematics, logic, and philosophy. He quickly became part of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), which was attempting to make reforms in Jewish education in conjunction with some of the German Enlightenment’s ideas. Jews and non-Jews alike knew him as the “Socrates of Berlin.”²

It is essential to underscore, however, that despite his fame, Mendelssohn, like all other Jews, had no civil rights. Two small facts about Mendelssohn illustrate this point. First, as mentioned, at age fourteen he found his way to Berlin. He walked from Dessau to Berlin (apparently it took him five or six days), which at that time still had a medieval wall around the city. Mendelssohn would have had to enter Berlin through the Rosenthaler gate because this was the only gate through which Jews and cattle were allowed to pass. Second, when Mendelssohn received a permanent personal visa to remain in Berlin in 1763, it could not be transferred to his wife and children if he died. So even though Mendelssohn may have been the Socrates of Berlin, his physical existence remained precarious. He could neither walk nor live where he chose. And because the Jewish community was subject to collective punishment for the behavior of individual Jews, Mendelssohn’s relation to the non-Jewish world brought with it implications not just for himself and his family but also for the entire Jewish community.

The instability of Mendelssohn’s political position reached its height in 1769 when John Caspar Lavater, a Swiss theologian, challenged him to either refute Christianity or convert. Lavater was baffled by Mendelssohn’s persona, as were many Christian thinkers sympathetic to Enlightenment philosophy. From their perspective, if Mendelssohn was so smart, as everyone seemed to agree that he was, then why didn’t he simply convert to Christianity? For Mendelssohn, Lavater’s challenge was double edged because he had to defend the rationality of Judaism and hence Judaism’s compatibility with the German Enlightenment without offending his Christian interlocutors. He had to defend Judaism without refuting Christianity. Mendelssohn responded in his now-famous Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism by making an eloquent plea for the separation between church and state. It was in this context that he claimed that Judaism was a religion—a proposition that would provide the framework for all German Jewish thought to follow. Before turning to the specifics of Mendelssohn’s view of Jewish religion, we must consider in a bit more depth its political context: the rise of the modern nation-state, and more specifically the Prussian state, in the late eighteenth century.

ON THE CIVIC IMPROVEMENT OF THE JEWS

A movement away from the feudal and corporate structure of medieval Europe toward a unified Prussian state went hand in hand with the German Enlightenment’s argument for a universal, rational ideal. One may have expected sympathy for the Jews and claims for their full integration into such a unified state. But instead the Jewish community was increasingly accused of being a “state within the state” that could not, by definition, be integrated into the Prussian one. As Prussia consolidated into a state, the Jews were especially resented for their moneylending practices. Yet Jews had no other occupational options beyond money-lending and other commercial pursuits. In Mendelssohn’s day, Jews were still banned from artisan trades, farming, and landownership as well as military service.

Jews sympathetic to the German Enlightenment, known as the maskilim, shared an important assumption with those who opposed granting civil rights to Jews: that the Jews by definition needed improvement. The difference between the Jewish enlighteners and their Christian opponents was that the former believed that the Jews could change for the better, while the latter held that change was not possible for the Jews because their faults were inherent to them and Judaism. Michaelis, a prominent Protestant theologian and scholar who, as mentioned above, claimed that Lessing’s literary portrayal of a rational and moral Jew did and could not cohere with reality, clearly belonged to this second camp. In contrast, the maskilim contended that especially with regard to moneylending, if given the opportunity to change—if Jews could legally become artisans or farmers—Jews could and would change for their own betterment along with the betterment of the state. In preparation for what they hoped would be their eventual acceptance into the Prussian state, the maskilim sought to improve themselves both intellectually and culturally. To this end, they revived Hebrew as a literary, though not a spoken, language in order to suggest that Judaism had a classical language worthy of respect (just as German classicists pointed to Greek).

Christian Wilhelm Dohm, a journalist, political writer, and Prussian civil servant, brought great hope to the prospects for Jewish emancipation when in 1781 he published, at Mendelssohn’s behest, On the Civic Improvement of the Jews, arguing for the extension of civil rights to Jews. Dohm was willing, as others were not, to follow the Enlightenment’s philosophy to its logical conclusion and contend that “the Jew is more a man than a Jew.”³ Dohm suggested that the Jewish tendency for “fraud and usury” was a result of their degraded political situation, which began after the Romans destroyed the Second Temple in 70 ce. He pointed out that prior to the Roman conquest of Jerusalem, the Jewish nation was politically autonomous as well as religiously, culturally, and economically dynamic. The loss of Jewish political autonomy brought with it what Dohm called Talmudic “sophistry” and an obsession with ceremonial minutia. As he put it: “Certainly, the unnatural oppression in which the Jews have lived for so many centuries has contributed not just to their moral corruption, but to the degeneration of their religious laws from their original goodness and utility.”⁴ From this analysis Dohm concluded that if they were given civil rights, Jews could and actually would improve enough to be worthy citizens of the state.

Two underlying premises in Dohm’s thinking are especially noteworthy. First, it is important to emphasize that Dohm’s argument that the Jews could improve is based on the assumption that Jews and Judaism are by definition profoundly problematic (again, Dohm takes it for granted that Jews engage in fraud and that Judaism as practiced by the Jews of his day is sophistry). Second, while Dohm makes a historical argument about the nature of Jews and Judaism, his claims are premised on an underlying Christian and especially Lutheran assumption that religious law is intrinsically problematic, as reflected in Martin Luther’s strong reading of 2 Corinthians 3:6, “The letter kills, but the spirit gives life.” As Dohm remarks, “This anxious spirit of ceremonies and minutiae that has crept into the Jewish religion will certainly disappear again as soon as the Jews receive a greater sphere of activity.”⁵ As I will show below, Mendelssohn adamantly calls this description of Jewish law into question.

The larger context of Dohm’s contention is also intimately tied to his particularly Lutheran perspective on the history of Christianity. The ultimate target of criticism in his treatise is medieval Christendom and its early modern aftereffects. According to Dohm, the degraded situation in which Jews and Judaism find themselves results from the merging of religion and politics by Constantine in the fourth century, and by the Holy Roman Empire thereafter. Prior to Constantine’s conversion, Dohm asserts, the Roman conquest of Jerusalem was a good thing for the Jews because they became part of the Roman Empire and even served as soldiers at one time. Even more significantly, the Roman conquest of Jerusalem serves for Dohm as a model for modern Prussia’s attempt to become a modern empire. Dohm seeks to reestablish a distinction between church and state with the precedence he finds in the Roman Empire, while also using the Roman Empire as the prototype for internally colonizing the Jews for what he maintains will be the economic betterment of Prussia.

Despite his clearly negative portrayals of Jews and Judaism, Dohm’s arguments were by far the most sympathetic within the confines of Enlightenment debates about the Jews. Dohm received many negative responses to his proposals, the most influential rejection of which came from Michaelis (on whose historical work Dohm had actually drawn), who contended not only that the Jews could not improve but that in keeping with Dohm’s vision of Prussia’s colonial...