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CHAPTER SIXTEEN WHICH WISSENSCHAFT? RECONSTRUCTIONISM’S THEOLOGICAL APPROPRIATION OF SOCIOLOGY AND RELIGIOUS NATURALISM

ROBERT M. SELTZER

I

If the branches of can be characterized as to whether they welcomed scientific knowledge, ignored, or rejected it, Mordecai M. Kaplan’s Reconstructionism was, perhaps, the most science-minded of all. The theories and findings on which Kaplan relied, however, were not so much the meticulous historical researches of Wissenschaft des Judentums but the social sciences and the theological implications of the natural science of his youth. The ideological roots of Reform and Positive-Historical Judaism can be traced to the first half of the nineteenth century when Wis- senschaft des Judentums was taking shape: Abraham Geiger, Zacharias Frankel, and other figures important in the non-Orthodox sector of German Jewry were active participants; by the 1880s these scho- lars, trained in German universities but excluded from the German professorate, had produced an array of monographs on Jewish sub- jects using classical philology to critically analyze primary sources. Like wissenschaftlich German historiography of that period but from a Jewish perspective, they were influenced by the Enlightenment, philosophical idealism, and Romantic nationalism.1 In contrast, Kaplan’s Reconstructionism had its roots in the changed climate of opinion that emerged in the 1880s and 1890s, the onset of the so-called “war between science and religion,” a surge in collective social ideologies, the declining hegemony of philosophical idealism, the triumph of the nation-state in the West, and the emergence of minority nationalism in Eastern Europe. Kaplan’s worldview was

1 Samson Raphael Hirsch’s neo-Orthodoxy rejected the relevance to Jewish theol- ogy of academic Wissenschaft.

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shaped by Pragmatism, structural-functional sociology, modernist Protestant theology, and Spiritual Zionism. Complicating the picture is that at the beginning of the twenty- first century, Reconstructionism no longer represents the religious stance of one man. Kaplan’s own ideology (for convenience let us call it “Kaplanism”) eventually led to a small but vigorous Recon- structionist denomination in America. Reconstructionism became one of a handful of Jewish movements in early modern and modern times instigated by a “founder.” Earlier there was eighteenth-century Beshtian Hasidism and its offshoots such as Habad and Satmar Hasidism, and the nineteenth-century Musar movement, founded by Israel Salanter. Subsequently perhaps, we might note the Jewish Renewal group around Zalman Schacter-Shlomi, which some label “New Age” Judaism.2 We might add to that list the Ethical Culture movement founded in 1876 by , son of the prominent Reform (Samuel Adler). All these founders seem to have pro- pounded teachings refocusing key elements of Judaism in ways that turned out to be fecund even when their specific ideas were elabo- rated almost beyond recognition by epigones. Mel Scult, Kaplan’s devoted and expert biographer, avers that Kaplan said many times that Reconstructionism was “a school of thought,” not a separate denomination.3 But step-by-step that is what occurred. Most of his life a member of the faculty of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Kaplan had been rabbi of two prominent New York Orthodox synagogues when, in 1922, he and his supporters founded the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ). The SAJ served for the rest of his career as a congenial setting which enabled him to express his ideas, somewhat like the Free Synagogue that Stephen S. Wise founded in 1907, except that Kaplan did not receive a salary at the SAJ. The SAJ Bulletin gave way to a printed journal, the SAJ Review, which in 1935 became the Reconstructionist magazine, one of a

2 This group, like Reconstructionism, has an intensely involved following but is the antithesis of Kaplanism with respect to taking modern science to heart. 3 Mordecai M. Kaplan, Questions Ask: Reconstructionist Answers (New York: Reconstructionist Press, 1956), 441: “As matters stand at present, none of the existing religious groups subscribes to the foregoing principles. That does not mean, however, that it is necessary to add a fourth denomination to be known as Reconstructionist. On the contrary, we hope that the foregoing principles will ultimately be adopted by the existing religious groups.” Also see Mel Scult, Judaism Faces the Twentieth Century: A Biography of Mordecai M. Kaplan (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 257.

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