FROM HEBRAISM TO SCIENCE:

IDEOLOGICAL REFINEMENT IN CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY

FROM PAUL TO THE PUBLIC SPHERE

By

Tymen Devries

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Theology in the University of Trinity College and the Department of Theology of the Toronto School of Theology in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Theology Awarded by the University of St. Michael's College

Toronto 2010

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••I Canada ABSTRACT

In nineteenth-century Germany, the rise of Wissenschaft and the ethos of the research university led the discipline of academic theology into uncharted waters. I posit that the true inheritors of the revolutionary thought of the sixteenth century Protestant Reformers are not, as often claimed, nineteenth-century German Protestant academic theologians but, rather, the nineteenth-century Jewish theological reformers associated with

Wissenschaft des Judentums. As 1 demonstrate in terms of successive periods of

Christian ethnographies of Jews, Protestant academic theology responds to these shifting political and intellectual contexts with an entrenching ideological refinement. In addition to drawing some parallels between the critical social theory of the early Frankfurt School and the secularized cosmopolitanism associated with German Romanticism, I conclude with some comparisons between the Jewish Reformer Abraham Geiger and the unhappy professor of church history, Franz Overbeck.

u CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

1. JUDAISM AND THE PROBLEM OF CHRISTIAN UNIVERSAL1SM 6

Geopiety and the Transformative Power of Ideology 7

Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Jewish and Christian Imaginations 8

Dogmatic and Discursive Approaches to Scripture ! 1

Interiorization and the Hermeneutical Jew 14

Christian Hebraism 17

2. MODERNITY, RELIGION AND ETHNOGRAPHY 21

Between Judaism and Heresy 24

Censorship and Reformational Hegemony 27

3. RELIGIOUS CONTINUITY AND THE COSMOPOLITAN CHALLENGE 33

Revolution, Tubingen and Nineteenth-Century German Protestant Theology 33

German Romanticism and Mass Culture 36

The Public Sphere 42

Science of Religion and the Modern Research University 46

Interiorization Reversed: Franz Overbeck and Abraham Geiger 49

CONCLUSION 63

REFERENCES 68

iii INTRODUCTION

The central concern of this paper is with late nineteenth century Jewish/Christian1 relations in the German context. In an effort to better understand the qualities of

Jewish/Christian relations in this period, I will make some observations about the impact international modernism had on 'traditional' forms of Judaism and Christianity— in both discrete and comparative terms. As such, I will provide some discussion of the wider period of European intellectual history— from the French Revolution in 1789 and

Hitler's rise to power in 1933. As general historical benchmarks, these dates represent the best and the worst of times, respectively, and provide the essential context for a discussion of the interplay of Jewish and Christian theological reactions to the 'secular' developments of the modern age. As we shall see, the widely differentiated reactions exhibit many themes, ranging from a liberal embracement of change to a conservative impulse toward preservation and continuity. However, a critical discussion of the possibilities as well as the difficulties of this modern interplay can only follow an accounting of the complex history of introjection that is a salient feature of

Jewish/Christian relations.

A main premise in this essay is that Judaism exhibits an inbuilt provision for interpretive latitude that is not available to Christianity. I will examine the idea that, given the conditions (following the French Revolution) of less political domination and

1 Although I do not endorse a theory of "syncretism" (cf. n.2), I choose the backslash (rather than a hyphen, space, or specific word order) between 'Jewish' and 'Christian' to foreground the 150 years of ambiguity in the recent history of scholarship relating to Jewish and Christian relations, beginning with the problem of properly designating "Jewish Christianity". For a recent lucid introduction, consult Jackson- McCabe (2007). 2 The psychoanalytic term 'introjection' is used here in a non-technical sense to register the complex, often oblique, associations and borrowings that mark the history of Jewish/Christian relations. In important respects, the term may be understood in obverse relation to the word "syncretism." See below, n.66.

1 theological stricture, Judaism's intrinsic theological challenge to Christianity surfaces and is successfully maintained under the new conditions of science (Wissenschaft). The secular and materialist challenges to traditional Christian justifications associated with the emergent changes of the modern age become dramatically apparent in the academic reengagement of vital issues pertaining to Christian origins and anti-Judaism. My theme in the essay is that (German Protestant) Christian academic theologians respond negatively toward Rabbinic Judaism despite the emancipatory alternatives inherent to new social and intellectual freedoms that arise in association with the Enlightenment and

Romantic remapping of society. In formulating it in this way I draw on the pioneering work in the field of Jewish/Christian relations of R. Po-chia Hsia as presented in his article "Christian Ethnographies of Jews in Early Modern Germany." He states his argument succinctly:

Christian interest in Jewish culture, exemplified by the study of Hebrew scriptures and the Kabbala, arose from a dialectic of religion and ethnography. The religious interest among Christians— whether to deny the tenets of Judaism, or to expose the evil of Jewish rites, or to convert the Jews— existed in a dialectical relationship with the new ethnographic impulse to define identities and affirm boundaries. (226)

This project will be carried out in three parts. Part one is an exploration of the pre­ history of the "dialectic of religion and ethnography" in order to take account of the origins of the "religious interest" Christians have in certain aspects of Jewish literature and culture. This will entail an analysis of the origins of differences in belief concerning the status of Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Jewish and Christian imaginations. In an effort to ascertain patterns in Christian ideology through successive periods, conclusions drawn from this analysis will be interwoven with a discussion of continuity and change regarding examples of Christian Hebraism from the medieval period to the present day.

2 In part two, I will employ Hsia's notion of "inner and outer ethnographies" to explore the pre-nineteenth century ramifications of his suggestion that "in turning outward to face

Mesoamericans, Africans, and Asians, Christian Europe also viewed its internal aliens, the Jews, with a new perspective and inscribed them in a new, orderly ethnography"

(226). I shall then argue, in part three, that events related to the Emancipation of

European Jews in the post-Enlightenment period and the rise of the "quest for the historical Jesus" in the German theological milieu in the latter half of the nineteenth century, allow us to discern important patterns of refinement in Christian ideological conceptions of Jews and Judaism.

To facilitate my analysis of the patterns of interaction between Jews and Christians I will follow the basic thrust of Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations" thesis. In brief, Huntington asserts that as fundamentalist attitudes become more entrenched, fewer intellectual, cultural and material resources are devoted to abstract and more intensive political attempts to disentangle the roots of complex civilizational clashes. Huntington presumes that in time of social or economic strain individuals and communities will band together along traditionally established patterns or regionally specific historical values. I endorse this view because it concurs with my belief that insofar as Jews and Christians

3 Hsia's perspective follows a revisionist trend in current historiography deriving largely from postcolonial theory. This perspective employs close readings of documentary evidence in an attempt to elucidate crucial dimensions of social history relating to the subaltern. The impact of the shift from monocausal explanations to emphasize more subtle, immanental directions can be found in the comments of R.I. Moore, who notes "that the persecutions of heretics, Jews, lepers, sodomites and others in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Europe cannot be considered or explained independently of one another, as they almost always had been hitherto" (144). 4 In his introduction to Critical Terms for Religious Studies, Mark Taylor remarks that when "confronted by the growing power of institutions that seem alien, many individuals and groups turn to traditional forms of religion to legitimize strategies designed to secure a measure of independence and autonomy" (4).

3 (incidentally)5 belong to rival communities, humans will act and participate in their particular communities with healthy self-interest. Human inter-group competition is, therefore, a certainty; consequently, it is important that scholars—and particularly those in the field of religious studies— provide governing bodies useful information about the character of theological discourse and the mechanisms of religious politics. In other words, the tendency toward traditional or ethnic models of social consolidation presents a very significant challenge to democratic theorists interested in the preconditions of deliberative discourse.6 Yet, as is well known, this democratic ideal depends on mutual affirmations between parties concerning the terms of such abstract ideals as 'community' or 'justice' which, to a large degree, are determined by theological, religious, or otherwise 'cultural' frames of reference.

In terms of the ability to account for this abstract contextual prerequisite for the development of a deliberative democracy, I believe Huntington's thesis falls short in that he too quickly resorts to easy demonization. Accordingly, I adopt the corrective to

Huntington offered by Martin Riesebrodt where he suggests that the problem of fundamentalism is more subtle than a simple explanatory reduction to monolithic traditional communities allows. As he clarifies, Riesebrodt attempts to account for patterns of substantive difference and commonality within a single tradition that parallel those of another tradition:

5 My use of the word 'incidental' is intended to imply that, while 1 take into theoretical consideration various appeals to 'supernatural', 'revelatory', 'transcendental', etc., modes of authority, my framework is naturalistic. In this example, I eschew the notion that the concept of'community' is of divine consequence. Moreover, 1 contend that works in the field of'interfaith dialogue' that do not place explicit strictures on appeal to particularistic covenantal doctrines are, in essence, apologetic, polemical, and thus inherently anti-dialogical. In this respect, it is my more speculative aim to suggest promising avenues toward a viable tertium quid between potential dialogue partners. 6 An important volume involving these concerns is, Habermas, Modernity, and Public Theology, ed. Don S. Browning and Francis Schussler Fiorenza (New York : Crossroad, 1992).

4 Although religious traditions can be the basis of social identity and solidarity, all traditions in the contemporary world tend to be fragmented into a variety of cultural milieus which expose different attitudes towards major features of modern life. There exist comparable cultural milieus in different religious traditions which might share as much in common as opposing milieus within the same tradition. Therefore a realistic scenario of possible relations of solidarity and conflict has to be much more complex and mobile than the one suggested by Huntington. (286)

Following his assertions, I will explore certain commonalities and contradictions across traditionally upheld boundaries between Judaism and Christianity in an attempt to flesh out some less readily apparent lateral connections between the communities.

My investigation into these traditional boundaries will largely consist of literary analysis. Accordingly, a central underlying theme throughout this paper will be the preservation, abundance, quality and use of literary resources relating to Jewish/Christian relations. Certainly, the quality and quantity of the extant written record of the Judeo-

Christian tradition is unique in its influence on Western legal codes and moral traditions.

However, in spite of such an embarrassing trove of entwined literary riches, and for all the talk of 'Jewish-Christian dialogue', there is very little fruit indeed. Shemaryahu

Talmon sums it up nicely: "Basing themselves on differing, and more often than not conflicting premises, Christian theologians and Jewish thinkers who are engaged in this discussion never even arrived at the threshold of a dialogue situation" (301).

If intellectual leaders cannot avoid falling into the trap of ideologically sustaining the status quo, then there can be no real expectation for popular culture to avoid spectacle and caricature, and garner the available resources necessary for successful dialogue. In his influential book Orientalism Edward Said warns: "there will always remain the perennial escape mechanism of saying that a literary scholar and a philosopher, for example, are trained in literature and philosophy respectively, not in politics or

5 ideological analysis. In other words, the specialist argument can work quite effectively to

block the larger and, in my opinion, the more intellectually serious perspective" (13-14).

Taking his caveat seriously, I wish to explore this 'perennial escape mechanism' as it re­

surfaces in the field of Christian academic theology generally, and Jewish/Christian

relations in particular.

PARTI

JUDAISM AND THE PROBLEM OF CHRISTIAN UNIVERSALISM

The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 is one of the most salient topics in world

politics and the study of international relations. Post-holocaust support for a Jewish

homeland in Palestine was, evidently, affirmed by Western (Christian) religious and

political bodies; yet the affirmation was, despite the horror and destruction, for some still

tentative and politically nebulous. In fact, the spectrum of Christian views on the matter,

given the many different varieties and expressions of the global diffusion of Christianity,

is difficult to comprehend. As Uri Bailer puts it in his recent book, Christian opinion

toward the newly formed State of Israel "ranged widely, from the basic hostility and

categorical nonrecognition of the Catholic Church through the general Protestant

ambivalence toward Evangelical support" (xi). A key issue here is the problem of justifying the amazing diversity the increasingly global term 'Christianity' now bears

and, more importantly, the need to investigate the ideological processes that foment the

instability that so plagues the Christian religion.

6 Geopiety and the Transformative Power of Ideology

Leading the charge in this direction was Maurice Halbwachs' (1877-1945) innovative exploration into the relationship between history and memory. His treatment of the origins and evolution of significant places in the Holy Land within the popular imagination and piety of Western Christians is congruent, as we shall see in the next section, with deep concerns regarding the popularization of theology under conditions of

European secularization. In terms of ideology critique, of particular interest is

Halbwach's analysis of the 'transformation' of significant images, events and objects in the minds of those who are no longer proximate to these images or objects. He writes:

As the events came to be more and more distant, dogma profoundly modified the story of Jesus. It is not astonishing that the image constructed of Jerusalem was also transformed. The holy places became not only those that were the theater for the activities of Jesus but also sites consecrated by the fact that the essential truths of Christianity focused the thought of believers upon them. This transformation is likely to have occurred little by little. (201)

This incrementalism contributes to the development of what he calls an "enlarged collective memory," and it is the dynamics of this process of transformation that form the psychological underpinnings of such influential writers as Huntington and Said

(Halbwachs, 201).

An example of this process of transformation is the subject of Heleen Murre-van den

Berg's essay: "William McClure Thomson's The Land and the Book (1859): Pilgrimage and Mission in Palestine." In terms of the inner dynamics of a decontextualized, and thus interpretively ambivalent, feeling of imaginative belonging, Murre-van den Berg describes the dramatic influence Thomson's book had for Western (largely American) conceptions of the Holy Land. Thomson's illustrations and literary portrayal of the Holy

7 Land exhibits an exceedingly romantic, reified conception of the biblical lands.

However, it is not the description of the topography that is problematic per se; rather, in

what has been called 'geo-piety,' it is the evangelical presumptions that are, almost

physically, laid atop the geographical detail. That is, to see and understand the 'Land' is

'invaluable' to understanding the Bible, and 'essential' to proving its veracity and

reliability. "Such need for proof reflects the growing interest in a literal reading of the

Bible that, in Thomson's time, characterized Evangelical Protestantism in America.

Although in a few instances Thomson accepts symbolic readings of Bible passages, in

general it is the straightforward, 'commonsense', literal meaning that is confirmed by the

Land" (Murre-van den Berg, 48-49).

However, although not quite caricature, this was a different kind of literalism than that

attested by normative Judaism. Whatever judgment might be made of Thomson's

theological ideas and motives, the ramifications of this new conception of the physical

land resulted in new options for Protestant spirituality and missions. These "included the

idea of 'rightful possession,' which, over and above purely spiritual meanings, refers not

only to the right of pilgrimage, but also to concrete colonial aspirations" (Murre-van den

Berg, 62). The result was the creation of "a fundamental opposition between the spiritual

religion of the Protestants and the material religion of all other believers within the Holy

Land, whether Eastern Christian, Muslim, or Jew" (Murre-van den Berg, 62).

Jerusalem and the Holy Land in Jewish and Christian Imaginations

What makes this fundamental tension insidiously challenging is the fact that successive periods of Christian theology have sustained and elaborated this resilient ambivalence. In

8 a prescient 1921 essay, the influential American Hebraist George Foot Moore famously

complained that "Christian interest in Jewish literature has always been apologetic or

polemic rather than historical". This tendency, of course, derives from "the Christian

theology of Israel" which interpretively transforms and expropriates the original biblical

(i.e., historical) Israel into a spiritualized supercessionist trope.7 Nowhere is this

imaginative Christian elaboration more pronounced than in the symbolization of the City

of Jerusalem; and as such, contemplating the status of Jerusalem provides a powerful

reckoning of the differences between Judaism and Christianity. In this regard, the status

of the city of Jerusalem is a unique heuristic with which to begin accounting for the

distorted dialectical relationship between Jews and Christians that is the root of the

polemical mutations of religious self-identification.

I'll let Talmon set the stage:

...at it's peak, the idea of the celestial Jerusalem as it was conceived by Jewish thinkers, and even by mystic fancy, never lost its touch with down- to-earth reality. A definite strand of this-worldliness, which seems to permeate normative Jewish religion in all its ramifications, effectively checked the tendencies which became rampant among Jewish fringe groups and in Christian mysticism to paint a picture of the celestial Jerusalem which is untrammeled by the image of the historical city. In contrast, normative Judaism was less concerned with the meta-historical 'Heavenly Jerusalem' than with the latter-historical 'New Jerusalem' which a, in the main, restorative eschatology portrayed as an improved edition of its historic prototype. (309)

The history of profound differences between Christians and Jews that Talmon touches on

is especially formidable due to the (often vicarious) cross-fertilization of incompatible

7 To be sure, there are significant exceptions to this norm, as Jacob Neusner points out in his foreword to the abridged version of E.R. Goodenough's Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period: "Goodenough worked on archeological and artistic evidence, so he took as his task the description of Judaism out of its symbolic system and vocabulary. [George Foote] Moore tackled the literary evidence, so he described Judaism as a systematic theological structure. Together they placed the systematic study of Judaism in the forefront of the academic study of religion and dictated the future of the history of religion in the West to encompass not only the religions of nonliterate and unfamiliar peoples, but also of literate and familiar ones" (xiii).

9 theological activity. Taking a shortcut in to this mess, I will sketch an outline of differences in Christian and postbiblical Jewish eschatologies as being transcendental and naturalistic, respectively. This is not to say that Jewish theology lacks Utopian and other-

o worldly speculation. Rather, normative Jewish theology envelops extrinsic influences in a way that Christian tradition historically has not, due to Christianity's Pauline universalism.9 This universal Christian 'ethic of freedom,' in a decisive contrast with

Judaism, asserts and maintains itself as a universal religion through a prescriptive creedalism. This legislative approach to freedom enables Christianity to transcend mundane contingencies (such as regional and linguistic diversity) thus forever setting itself in contrast with the particularism of Judaism. This story is not new; however, what

I am concerned with is the increasing gap between the prescriptive creedalism and the dogmatic overlays that obfuscate the ambivalence arising from inner 'Christian' diversity. I liken this willful activity to Said's comments on the need for ideological criticism in an effort to preclude 'perennial escape mechanisms'.

Although this paper deals, in the main, with Christian theology, that stream of Jewish thought that stems from Gershom Scholem's seminal work in Jewish mysticism is a certain influence. He writes: "The opposition between restorative and purely Utopian, radical elements in the conception of the Messianic Torah brings an element of uncertainty into the Halakhah's [the legal side of Judaism] attitude to Messianism. The battle lines are by no means clearly drawn. Unfortunately, a penetrating and serious study of this relationship of the medieval Halakhah to Messianism is one of the most important yet unfulfilled desiderata of the scientific study of Judaism" (21). 9 Again, referring to Scholem: "A positive commandment of a prohibition could scarcely still be the same when it no longer had for its object the separation of good and evil to which man was called, but rather arose from the Messianic spontaneity of human freedom purely flowing forth. Since by its nature this freedom realizes only the good, it has no real need for all those 'fences' and restrictions with which the Halakhah was surrounded in order to secure it from the temptations of evil. At this point there arises the possibility of a turning from the restorative conception of the final re-establishment of the reign of law to a Utopian view in which restrictive traits will no longer be determinative and decisive, but be replaced by certain as yet totally unpredictable traits which will reveal entirely new aspects of free fulfillment. Thus an anarchic element enters Messianic utopianism. The Pauline 'freedom of the children of God' is a form in which such a turning meant leaving Judaism behind. But this was by no means the only form of these conceptions, which appear in Messianism again and again with dialectical necessity" (21).

10 Dogmatic and Discursive Approaches to Scripture

The elaborate dogmatic infrastructure that I describe results from the fact that Christian tradition is unable to reject the Hebrew scriptures and continues to prepare solutions for having to accept, at least in part, that which it supercedes. As Fredrick Greenspahn explains, the Jews understood scripture to be something like a '"family history,' something Gentile Christianity could not claim.... By way of contrast, the Church's attention centered largely on the prophets and the Psalms, which are inherently less historical, even apart from the Christian project of applying them to a much later era than that in which they were written" (61). While Rabbinic Judaism developed a complex discursive approach,1 exploring alternatives within a particularistic tradition, Christianity continued in this meta-historical direction by elaborating the apocalyptic tradition abandoned by the Rabbis with the destruction of the Temple in 70CE.1' Zwi

Werblowsky provides an adequate description:

Rabbinic tradition took up and developed in its own peculiar way the notion of a heavenly Jerusalem that had begun to evolve in the intertestamentary period. But the rabbinic priorities are reversed when compared to the Christian scheme, where the symbolism of the heavenly Jerusalem tends to dominate. Liturgical devotion, popular piety, religious symbolism, and messianic hope—also in its nineteenth-and twentieth- century secularized forms—are directed first and foremost to the earthly Jerusalem as a symbol of the ingathering, on this earth, of the people to their promised land. A most striking rabbinic saying almost goes out of its way to invert the usual apocalyptic cosmology, according to which the earthly Jerusalem is but a reflection of the heavenly one. According to this midrash 'you also find that there is a Jerusalem above, corresponding to the Jerusalem below. For sheer love of the earthly Jerusalem, God made himself one above.' In other words, the earthly Jerusalem does not reflect a heavenly archetype, nor does it derive its significance from the fact that it mirrors a celestial reality. It is a value in itself, and as such

10 ,Davi d Kraemer, The Mind of the Talmud: an Intellectual History of the Bavli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 11 A standard discussion of the complexities of this topic is Shaye Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006), 214-31.

11 serves as the archetype of God's heavenly Jerusalem. According to this tradition, spiritual fullness can never be attained by playing down the historical sphere with its material, social, and political realities. (16-17)

My premise here is that Rabbinic Judaism is intrinsically more flexible and capable of adaptation than Christianity. Where Rabbinic Judaism is able, within normative parameters, to address and absorb this-worldly contingencies, Christian tradition is locked in dogmatic assertions that elaborate fantastic departures from its founding mythology. This myth centers on the formative expression of a radical eschatology within primitive Christianity, entailing world-renunciation and the imminent return of

Christ. In short, save vestiges of the Christian encratic12 tradition which sustains a central doctrine of belief in the imminence of the Parousia, the Christian religion has strayed, via theology, to parts unknown.

The manner in which Protestantism attempts to resolve the problems resulting from an undeniable, but remote, connection to Judaism is increasingly idiosyncratic and inevitably variable. As I shall discuss in greater detail below, the problem— related ultimately to the 'Jewishness of Jesus'— is effectively bracketed by the same type of sanitization and false consciousness that allow 'Sunday school' representations of Jesus to have blonde hair and blue eyes. These same ideological processes relate to the geo- piety already discussed. Cumulatively, given the regionally diffuse Christian demographic, the result is an abstracted, remote internationalization of Jerusalem and the

Holy Land.

Interestingly, as Murre-van den Berg noted above, evidence of the highly removed transformation of the Christian religion are especially salient in the Protestant tradition.

12 The literature on early Christian asceticism is vast. A useful introduction is Murray (2006). For connections between asceticism and monasticism, see: Peter Brown, Society & the Holy in Late Antiquity (London: Faberand Faber: 1982).

12 The early Syriac Christian tradition stands in dramatic contrast. As Robert Murray describes it, much of the difference between these two polarized Christian traditions is linked to the eschatological problem of the delay of the Parousia, or second coming of

Christ:

While most of Christian tradition has habitually allegorized the parables of Jesus so as to make his preaching of the kingdom or reign of God at least partially applicable to the Church in this world, and not a few have identified kingdom and church, thereby obscuring the essentially eschatological character of the Gospel, the early Syriac Fathers remained too close to their Judaeo-Christian roots to move far from the primitive, totally eschatological sense oimalkuta (which is here rendered variously as 'reign', 'sovereignty' or 'kingdom'). (239-240)

Needless to say, the delay of the Parousia remains the central problem for all who profess to be Christians, regardless of the increasing contextual distractions.

Indeed, the deep divisions that derive from the effectively combative approach to this central Christian problem are starkly contrasted by the discursive approach taken by Rabbinic Judaism. As Shaye Cohen persuasively argues in his essay

"The significance of Yavneh: Pharisees, Rabbis, and the End of Jewish

Sectarianism," the destruction of the Temple in 70CE, and the failure of apocalyptic dreams and prophecies, resulted in a novel deliberative ethos in

Judaism. Arguing against the usual view that the events of 70CE led to internal chaos and the domination of a single group of Rabbis, Cohen proposes that the destruction of the temple "warned the Jews of the dangers of internal divisiveness and it removed one of the major focal points of Jewish sectarianism" (29).

IT

Although his interpretation may be controversial due to the paucity of evidence,

Cohen's study of the extant literary evidence finds support in the reconstruction of

13 Note his comments on page 38.

13 the history of the ancient synagogue. The vital contrast between Christianity and Judaism that emerges from this evidence is that Christian universalism is sustained through domination (represented archetypically by the Council of Nicea in 325), while early Rabbinic tradition, demonstrably able to preserve minority opinions,15 attests the "emergence of the ideology of pluralism" (Cohen, 45). Of course, the qualification remains that Judaism achieves this within the boundaries of a normative, particularistic framework. Nevertheless, in terms of our underlying theme of deliberative democracy, the particularism of Judaism does not take away from the importance of the discursive model.16

Interiorization and the Hermeneutical Jew

Theologically, the vitality of the Jewish tradition largely eluded eleventh and twelfth century Christians. For the time being, Jewish cultural vitality was protected from more intensive Christian surveillance by a mystification that resulted from an abstruse manner of language use and inward orientation of the intellectual leadership. Hava Tirosh-

Samuelson explains this medieval Jewish interiorization:

Both philosophy and kabbalah were esoteric endeavors whose privileged knowledge was accessible only to the select few who were intellectual and spiritually suitable. The difference between them concerned the precise content of the esoteric meaning of the revealed tradition and the proper way of transmitting it. As esoteric and elitist programs, both philosophy and kabbalah were determined to protect their privileged knowledge from misinterpretation or misapplication. Hence they employed complex rhetorical devices to conceal the very secrets they set out to reveal. (252)

Christian leaders seemed unable, doubtless for a great variety of reasons, to grasp the fact

14 See especially, the work of biblical archaeologist Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 15 See especially Kraemer (n.12 above). 16 Cf. n.5 above.

14 that Judaism had continued to survive and develop despite the overwhelming political power of Christendom. Certainly, the vast majority of medieval Christian leaders— and even Christian dabblers in Hebrew— would have been unable to penetrate the esoteric language play of the Rabbis. Even more to the point, these Christian leaders were certainly not theologians, and the implementation of their policies, as R.I. Moore has suggested, were carried out by "a new class of functionaries—clerics and courtiers—for whom persecution might serve the twin purposes of providing the means to extend the power and advance the interests of their masters, while consolidating their own position and undermining potential rivals" (144). Moore's insights underline the somewhat nominal or pedestrian religiosity that characterizes the majority of medieval Christian society, and provides insight into the role played by the social power structure in the development of ideology and the implementation of group boundary maintenance. As

Moore sees it, prejudice and persecution in Europe has its origin not in the ruthless ignorance of the peasant masses but, rather, in the failure of the intellectuals to act responsibly by providing wise directives to their functionaries:

The systematic persecution of minorities in European history had its origin in the interests and concerns of this body of people, and not in the unregulated passions or prejudices of the population at large. It was they who identified and proclaimed the dangers with which the various groups of victims were held to threaten Christian society in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and they who prescribed the remedies; they who moulded the mentalities and devised the procedures which ensured that these patterns of persecution would endure in European society not just for the remainder of the middle ages, but until our own times. (144-45)

With regard to Jewish/Christian relations specifically, there is no scholarly consensus on the dynamic range of Jewish and Christian social and intellectual relations. However, as Daniel Lasker summarizes, a broad sense has been determined: "Just as the Christians

15 had not yet developed a full-fledged attack on the rationality of Judaism and rabbinic literature, so, too, Jews had not yet developed a full-fledged defense. That would come in the thirteenth century" (173). Lasker's ominous foreshadowing presses us toward the conclusion that intellectuals have a profound responsibility with regard to the ethical management of knowledge in the fight against the growth of harmful ideologies. Indeed, this will be a recurring theme in this essay. However, related to this is the task of recognizing— in both learned and popular circles— the distinction between orderly thought (be it mythological or scientific) and a determined and sustained false consciousness that is so intimately connected to fascism and prejudice.

Attempting to explain the medieval Christian romanticization of the 'Holy Land,'

Jeremy Cohen points to Augustine's Christian rationalization of the persistence of

Judaism—where Jews were accorded special status as instruments to be used by God toward the fulfillment of a Christian history. Jews were upheld as the living witness— and even the justifying element to the verity of the 'Old Testament'. But these were not real Jews; these were, as Cohen puts it, 'theological' or 'hermeneutical Jews' (19ff).

Significantly, the parallels to present-day Christian Zionism registers how little has changed. Although nuanced to incorporate modern sensitivities, such Christian instrumentalizing of the Jews is representatively illustrated in the mission statement found on the website of the Christian Friends of Israel:

As Christians we have received from God a love for Israel and the Jewish people. We want to bless them in the name of the Lord. We believe the Lord Jesus is both the Messiah of Israel and Savior of the world; however, our stand alongside Israel is not conditional upon her acceptance of our belief. We exist to comfort and to support the people of Israel, and to inform Christians around the world of God's plans for Israel. CFI teaches

16 the Church's responsibility toward the Jewish people, and brings awareness to the Jewish people of our solidarity with them.17

The 'theological' or 'hermeneutical Jew,' along with analogously constructed images of Jerusalem and the 'Holy Land,' are powerful hegemonic tools for the Christian majority to manipulate mundane phenomena according to fantasy borne of an uncritical, ideological, biblicism. However, this situation begins to change in the twelfth century when learned Christians began to undertake new critical efforts to 'account' for the Jews.

As we shall see, these critical efforts— despite their enlightening potential— never truly rise beyond the framework of Christian supercessionism.

Christian Hebraism

In a provocative essay entitled "Polemic and Exegesis: the Varieties of Twelfth-

Century Hebraism," Michael Signer suggests that "efforts by twelfth-century Christian scholars to use the Hebrew language for interpreting the Old Testament may be described as 'cultural' and 'lexical' Hebraism. The distinction between these two terms is based on whether the Christian scholar had independent access to reading Jewish exegesis in

Hebrew or was dependent upon his Jewish interlocutor" (22). The phenomenon of lexical Christian Hebraism can be explained in two ways. The first arises from linguistic and cultural interest in the more or less secular tradition of Renaissance humanism. As such, the theological implications are marginalized. The second is properly theological and apologetic. However, standard problems concerning classification apply. Just as there is no real way to adjudicate membership to a group when group boundaries overlap

17 Christian Friends of Israel, http://www.cfijerusalem.org.

17 and are drawn in jotted lines, these two possibilities are interconnected and subject to a great variety of social forces.

Perhaps the most well known Christian Hebraist, not least because of his substantial contributions to book history, is Johann Reuchlin (1455-1522). However, although

Reuchlin was a major force in the protection of Hebrew books, as Heiko Oberman tells us, his "Jewish sympathies need careful restriction: Reuchlin's undertakings were not motivated by pro-Jewish, let alone pro-Semitic considerations" (25). Reuchlin did indeed carry his Hebrew studies farther than, say Erasmus—and it is his obsession with Hebrew that raised the suspicions of the Dominicans. But it is plain in Erasmus' judgment that

Reuchlin was to be admired for his linguistic achievements: "It would be only right that a man who is equipped with so many languages and knowledge in so many disciplines should in the autumn of his life disseminate the rich product of his intellect to the whole world. To this end he should have been exhorted with praise, invited with rewards, and encouraged with support."18 Implicit within this statement is the idea that Hebrew studies are valuable and to be officially tolerated— according to the ideals of humanism— because they can be separated from the fears of Christian leaders that the faith of

Christians will be corrupted. "Tailored exclusively to the needs of a Christian society fragmented by competing social and religious forces, the sixteenth-century ideal of toleration had primarily the character of a Christian restorative, not of a modern, pluralistic ideal" (Oberman, 13).

In fact, Reuchlin's intense interest in Hebrew was motivated by mysticism. He sought to bridge the OT/NT interpretive gap through the expropriation of Jewish Kabbalah

18This is an excerpt of a letter of Erasmus to Cardinal Grimani concerning the Reuchlin affair; my emphasis. Quoted in Rummel (142).

18 (which, when Christianized is referred to as Cabbala). The quest for certainty that characterizes many of the Reformation figures is surely a factor here as well. Reuchlin is interested in using Cabbala as a complementary investigative measure to explore scientific and other mysteries. In a dedicatory letter to Pope Leo X, introducing his De arte cabalistica, he underlines the usefulness of his ambitions, linking them with the cumulative history of philosophy.

I Reuchlin, will join their number and exhibit to the Germans a reborn Pythagoras, dedicated to your name. This could not have been done without the Hebrew cabala, for the Pythagorean philosophy has its origin in it, and with the memory of the roots being lost, it entered the books of the cabalists again via Greater Greece. Thus everything had to be searched out again. I have therefore written of the symbolic philosophy of the art of the cabala to make Pythagorean teaching better known to scholars. But in all this I myself make no assertions.... (Rummel, 148-49)

It is clear that Reuchlin is, then, certainly a Christian Hebraist. But here an important distinction must be made. Despite the suspicions of the friars, he is not to be considered a 'judaizer.' The context of all the confusion regarding the case against Reuchlin, the suspicion of Hebrew studies, and the status of Jews within Christendom is the persistent difficulty of Christians to claim ownership of a scripture read merely in translation.

"Thus the recurring charge that Jews had corrupted their edition of the Bible can be read, in part, as the defensive posture of a church which was, on some psychological level, all too acutely aware of the hermeneutical distance between its positions and the textual basis on which they were claimed to rest" (Greenspahn, 59).

Paradoxically, reliance on the Jews for their intrinsic linguistic value forced Christians to come to terms with the fact that Jews continued to speak Hebrew and follow a very independent stream of interpretive practices. It is clear that Christians were not unified in their understandings of this embarrassing limitation. We have already noticed similar

19 positions between Erasmus and Reuchlin, although the former, whose Hebrew skills were relatively limited, was certainly not a Hebraist. We might also mention Luther and

Calvin each of whom shared the humanist passion for languages. However, like

Erasmus, neither of these figures were strict Hebraists either— made plain by the fact that that they rejected the use of rabbinic sources. The general position Luther and

Calvin maintained is that because the Jews refused to convert to the true faith, they were essentially damned and thus to be rejected. But not all Christian thinkers went so far as this. "Nicholas of Lyra has long been reputed the foremost medieval defender, in the tradition of Andrew of St. Victor and the Victories, of the literal interpretation of scripture—as the basis on which all 'spiritual' interpretation must be founded in order to be accurate" (Gow, 240). However, many reformers, notably Luther, found it extremely problematic to place a priority on the literal sense of scripture over the spiritual sense.

Indeed, says Luther, "no amount of Hebrew grammar or knowledge of special vocabulary could make up for a lack of the proper Christian perspective" (Gow, 251 -52) This is, from a Jewish perspective, highly ironic. Speaking about Jewish and Christian interactions, Jacob Marcus tells us that Rashi "is certainly the most popular Jewish Bible commentator of all times and was known even to Christian scholars. Nicholas de Lyra

(d. 1340), one of the most famous of medieval Christian exegetes, took many comments bodily from Rashi, and Luther, as we know, borrowed liberally from de Lyra" (360).

Certainly, given the Christian majority in Western Europe, the learned, lexical

Hebraism that Reuchlin illustrates can be viewed in terms of the machinations of censorship and (implicit) attempts to suppress Jewish vitality. Ultimately, however, despite Jewish ghettoization, Christian acts of political domination were met with

20 sophisticated intellectual adaptation that was increasingly interiorized. Thus, the shift in sophistication from 'cultural' to 'lexical' Hebraism shows an ambivalent process of discovery, and that Christian perceptions of postbiblical Judaism and Jews exhibit patterns that derive from a much wider matrix of intellectual and psychological interrelations between communities than monocausal theological explanations can manage.

PART TWO

MODERNITY, RELIGION AND ETHNOGRAPHY

As stated in the introduction, a key distinction in Hsia's analysis of the dialectic between religion and ethnography is the development within Christian Europe of "inner and outer ethnographies." Resulting from new information sources, such as those supplied by travelers, and in general, from migrations of people, medieval and early modern Christian authorities found it increasingly necessary to address this cultural confluence by elaborating the boundaries and criteria of in-group membership. In his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Development of

Nationalism, Benedict Anderson describes this modernizing process, arguing "that the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation" (46). Anderson's notion of the "fatal

19 Although the present concern is not to explicate the relationship that exists between individual and group, or to interpret field work concerning the rules and taboos of group membership, the anthropological processes relevant for such analyses are indeed influential for the study of complex social dynamics that lead to the rise of the modern nation-state.

21 diversity of human language" corresponds well with what Hsia foregrounds in terms of the growing recognition of not (external) foreigners, but "internal aliens". The implications of Hsia's observation are profound.20 Certainly, to conceptualize foreignness as deriving extrinsically is a basic aspect of'self,' and thus in turn, a building block of'community.' But the more intensive and socially reflexive awareness of internal difference is clear evidence of a higher sophistication in terms of social inventory and classification.

Both Hsia and Anderson are interested in describing the evolution of a 'new' social order. However, I want to slow down a little, in order to clarify—at least in terms of the present topic— the use of the term 'new.' In contrast to Hsia, I suggest that the newness of this social order is not a change in kind but, rather, one of degree. As I presented in part one, the shift from what Signer dubs 'cultural' to 'lexical' Hebraism that occurred already in the twelfth century was a significant scholarly development.

Whether or not this scholarly development in the area of Hebraica has correlates in contemporary popular culture is difficult to say. The same is not true of the early modern period Hsia and Anderson are concerned with. In this period it is clear that there is a much wider (i.e. more popular) stock of general cultural or ethnographic interest and knowledge. Consequently, the failure of Christian leaders— and theologians in particular— to respond, in this later period, with a commensurately 'enlightened' theological position towards the status of Judaism is evidence of an insidious

20 See above, note 3. 21 In today's terms, social order is primarily circumscribed by the infrastructure related to the nation- state; indeed, the nation-state is conceived almost synonymously with bureaucracy and complex institutional organization. The evolution of such extensive governmental machinery is certainly at the heart of the ethnographic theme. Further discussion about the rise of the public sphere and the role of such broad social processes as modernization to secularization, science, and related governance issues will follow, in part three.

22 recalcitrance. Given the learned scholarly activity attested by certain Christians in the twelfth century, if anything is truly new in Hsia's early modern period, it is the new depth of polemical ideology attained by the Christian theological leadership.

For Signer, the discussion of both cultural and lexical Hebraism involved exclusively learned Christians. Hsia, as I read him, implicitly collapses Signer's distinction between learned and popular Christian perceptions of Jews and Judaism, directing his attention to wider processes of social change. Thus, while I agree with Hsia when he claims that "in

Christian writings about Jews a new emphasis emerged during the fifteenth century: a fresh interest in Hebrew, the Kabbala, and in the cultural practices of the Jewish people was discernible, beyond the scholastic tradition of polemics against Judaism," Hsia understates the problem, I think, when he says the "underlying impulse of refuting

Judaism and defining a cultural 'other' remained unchanged^ (223). In my view, the lack of change is an indication of not merely maintaining the status quo but of increased moral delinquency as well. I readily acknowledge that Hsia is dealing with a period when ethnography was pre-critical and therefore his use of the term 'ethnography' is suitably loose.23 The result is that he leaves the more critical task of providing an explanation for the persistent growth of Christian ideology undeveloped. As we have seen in terms of the shift from 'cultural' to 'lexical' Hebraism, there is more involved

Emphasis added. 2j In part three I will be dealing with the period, in the late nineteenth century, that attests the emergence of professional ethnography. James Clifford describes this crucially important transitional period when the field matured as a result of conformity to a more scientific ethos: "The new style of research was clearly different from that of missionaries and other amateurs in the field, and part of a general trend since Tylor 'to draw more closely together the empirical and theoretical components of anthropological inquiry"' (Clifford, 28). 24 In effect, Hsia's effort serves as a prolegomena to a major discussion concerning the intellectual politics inscribed within nineteenth century institutional power dynamics. 1 will develop this discussion further in the next section in terms of the distinction Max Horkheimer has raised between 'traditional' and 'critical' theory.

23 with changes in Christian perceptions of Jews than a mere rehearsing of apologetic patterns and boundary maintenance techniques. In order to discuss the persistent growth in Christian ideology concerning Judaism between the twelfth century and the period of the European Reformation, I will attempt to complement Hsia's "dialectic of religion and ethnography" by establishing a parallel dialectic between 'expert and popular' epistemic fields. These contrasts are crucially important in terms of ideology critique related to the institutionalism that occurs in nineteenth century Europe.

At issue is the connection between intellectual power politics and the semantic relationship between the terms 'interest' and 'knowledge.' In terms of Jewish/Christian relations and the topic of Christian hegemony, Christian theologians often adopt a protectionist policy to mitigate the threat of 'judaizing' by buttressing Christian theology with actively intensive ideology. However, given the fact that Judaism and Christianity exhibit such an incredibly complex relationship—historically, textually, theologically, politically— it becomes increasingly more difficult to analyze shifts in either tradition.

In light of the increasing complexity, the topic of Christian Hebraism becomes an essential tool with which to assign a critical locus of ideological parrying—both internally (within Christian tradition in terms of the ostensible threat of 'judaizing') and externally (as attested by the reception of the work of Christian Hebraists by Jews).

Between Judaism and Heresy

The tentative nature of Christianity has been a feature of the religion since the earliest debates about 'judaizing' relating to Jewish Christians versus Pauline Christians. Indeed, as I shall discuss in part three, this is the topic of research that is at the heart of the

Tubingen school, with much of the discussion framed in terms of heresiology. My

24 concentration on the phenomenon of Christian Hebraism is meant to assist in my effort to pull away the veneer of Christian theologizing in order to allow the repressed relational dynamic that exists between Judaism and Christianity to emerge. As I noted in part one, neither Luther nor Calvin were 'strict' Hebraists. That is, although they new biblical

Hebrew well enough to satisfy their dogmatic obligations to the 'Old Testament,' they were decidedly ill equipped to engage with any of the varieties of Rabbinic Hebrew or

Medieval Hebrew. In contrast, certain others, such as Reuchlin, were certainly equipped in this manner— preparing translations, grammars and lexicons, in addition to teaching the Hebrew they studied. Such men were, indeed, 'strict' Hebraists. As can easily be imagined, their interest in post-biblical Hebrew literature (and culture) was viewed with suspicion by the mainstream Christian orthodoxy. And there were good reasons for this, as the example of the heretical Spanish Christian Hebraist Michael Servetus (1511-1553) makes clear. "Michael Servetus was the complete heretic. Repudiating Rome,

Wittenberg, Geneva and Zurich, Servetus also rejected infant baptism, Christ's humanity, original sin, conventional concepts of prophecy and Scripture and the orthodox trinity"

(Friedman, 133). Servetus raised the ire of John Calvin who was to no small degree the cause of Servetus' execution/martyrdom. The case of Servetus is illustrative of the violent manner with which Christian government has so often maintained control over diverse views of the correct teaching. As I shall argue below, this history of internal

Christian combat comes to a head in the nineteenth century when scientific approaches to history revolutionized Christian theology.

25 The challenge to power concerning the correct interpretation of scripture that the example of Servetus shows is often described in terms of heresy and orthodoxy.25 The list of 'heresies' is long beginning with the excommunication of Marcion in the second century of the Christian era. At this time there was an incredible variety of ideas concerning the truth of nascent Christian teaching. The contest of authority attested in the Marcion situation represents a key turning point in the early history of

Jewish/Christian relations. Marcion was excommunicated because of the choices he made concerning which texts were to be considered authoritative. The most notable of his decisions is the rejection of the entire Hebrew Bible. He believed that the true significance of Jesus Christ can be understood only through Paul. This set him in very stark contrast to the more particularistic reading of Jesus maintained by the 'Jewish

Christians.' This latter group of early Christians believed very strongly in the continuing validity and relevance of the Mosaic Law. The significance of Jesus for the Jewish

Christians was not construed in such broad terms as the Pauline Christians would maintain.

The idea of rejecting the Hebrew Bible set these two examples of early Christian groups in direct and irrevocable conflict. Of course, all of these differences are 'settled' according to the creedal legislations asserted by the newly consolidated powers that emerge as 'orthodoxy' from the various ecclesiastical councils. As such, the

'judaizers'—those who (even implicitly) emphasized the Jewishness of Jesus and thus

Christianity— were effectively marginalized. Set in sharp contrast to the Rabbinical

25 See: Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, ed. Robert A. Kraft and Gerhard Krodel, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971). 26 For a masterful survey of the period, including Marcionism, see: Stephen G. Wilson, Related Strangers: Jews and Christians 70-170 CE, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995).

26 process that ended Jewish sectarianism, the process of arriving at the 'right doctrine' in the history of Christianity is marked by incessant infighting and bitter division. Norbert

Brox provides a terse description:

The devastating polemic, the unprecedentedly sharp aggression, the rejection of union and reconciliation, the unscrupulous means of dealing with 'opponents' show how one-sidedly the essence of Christianity was now seen as dogma, in favour of which other Christian postulates were misused. As a result of partisanship, fanaticism and also power interests, these conflicts were so complicated as to be virtually insoluble. Because of its very different, undogmatic understanding of religion, ancient society had not previously known such disputes over faith. It was Christianity which first caused them through its central interest in the formulae of faith. (120)

This description certainly does little to bolster one's confidence in the claims to holy wisdom asserted by the now hierarchical Christian ecclesiastical bodies. Indeed, the diversity that inevitably derives from either repression or bitter division does not cease to be the central characteristic of the global Christian religion.

Censorship and Reformational Hegemony

The somewhat natural interest in protecting one's own stimulates a more artificial extrusion of this biological impulse in the attempt to impose limits on the quality and accessibility of knowledge. Censorship and hegemony are thus closely related subjects.

In terms of our task of determining the extent of ideological interference, the issue centres on the possibility of making a correlation between sustained 'interest' in a topic and 'knowledge' of that topic. This question can be formulated, following Max Weber, as: when does the 'amateur' transform into an 'expert'?

In his essay, "Science as a Vocation" Weber writes: "Scientifically, a dilettante's idea may have the very same or even a greater bearing for science than that of a specialist.

27 Many of our very best hypotheses and insights are due precisely to dilettantes" (135-36).

Similarly, how does the experience of a cultural 'other' that occurs in a mundane context differ—in terms of ultimate comprehensive social processes— from the sustained interest, or (potentially) 'scientific' knowledge prepared by scholars? These grand questions are derived from processes that are, of course, difficult to analyze.

Furthermore, as we will discover, the task of arriving at conclusions concerning the dialectical relationship between learned culture and popular culture does not become simpler as a result of the intensive institutionalization that characterizes the nineteenth century. But before moving ahead, I have yet to describe, in light of the wider economic and political developments associated with the early modern period, changes and continuities in Christian perceptions of Judaism.

As Anderson highlights, and certainly Hsia as a Reformation scholar well knows, print technology was central to the complex modernization processes that occurred in the

Reformation/early Modern period. I maintain that the interest in language already attested in the twelfth century is a learned activity that peaks in the early modern period

(the salient example being Erasmus). Indeed, intimately linked to the increased philological independence characteristic of Christian lexical Hebraism are the technological innovations facilitating the production and availability of Hebrew grammars, lexicons, and language teaching aids. My argument is, however, that these highly sophisticated linguistic achievements are not complemented by more advanced

Christian theo-political developments. Rather, the social and intellectual journey towards the modern age is mercurial and tentative. As James Livingston, in his survey of modern

Christian thought describes,

28 ...while the Reformation included modern elements, it was essentially a modification of Medievalism. Troeltsch called the Reformation a 'second blooming' of the Middle Ages, but what was genuinely modern about the Reformation only emerged after classical, orthodox Protestantism was profoundly challenged by the intellectual and social revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (2)

Specifically in terms of Christian knowledge of Hebraica and Judaism, the extent to which Christian scholars and theologians gain independent mastery of Hebrew grammar, as well as knowledge of contemporary Jewish culture, there is little evidence of equivalency between linguistic and Christian theological appreciation of Hebrew culture.

My point, of course, is that despite a heightened level of intellectual discovery in all areas of learned culture, there is a puzzling hegemonic entrenchment within Christian society that does not correspond to its learning. Although many Protestant Christian historians will celebrate the events of the Reformation as a victory over tyranny and indulgence, the closer reading reveals merely an accruing of internal contradiction. Thus I follow

Richard van Diilmen's analysis regarding the connection between the Reformation and the advent of the modern era:

...the Reformation is not seen as the 'essential' dividing line between the Middle Ages and modernity, nor is it hailed as already embodying modern freedom, rationality and morality. New areas of freedom certainly emerged during the Reformation, but so did new strategies of suppression. Moreover, the Reformation, meaning the Reformation as a whole comprising the Lutheran, Calvinist and other movements, represents only one force among many in the genesis of the modern age. (198)

The puzzling entrenchment of Christian theology I am discussing seems best adduced not in terms intellectual difficulty, but rather to a tendency toward resignation in terms of particularly social matters. To explain this I appeal again to Said's notion of the

"perennial escape mechanism" employed by scholarly specialists attempting to avoid the

29 more "serious" ideological concerns raised by post-colonial theory. Reformation scholar,

B.A. Gerrish, cleverly illustrates Said's concerns:

The much-debated question whether the Reformation is best understood in religious, theological, political, social, or economic terms need not detain us. Our business here is with religious ideas that can be traced back to Martin Luther, not with claims about their influence in the sixteenth- century world. Luther's own place in the history of Christian thought is of course secure. But if our subject is Protestant ideas, not just Luther's, then the attempt must be made to place his thought in a wider setting, which is acknowledged as at once pluralistic and transient. (1)

By restricting himself to 'religious' matters, Gerrish is able to bracket the unsanitary social mess that is so clearly implicit in the debate he avoids. Despite the fact that

Gerrish acknowledges the period to be "pluralistic and transient," this is a clear example of scholarly delimitation according to the specialist argument Said is concerned about.

By treating the problem in the way that he does, Gerrish takes one step backward only to spring forward a few extra steps to avoid his highlighted concern. To be clear, 1 do not dismiss the value of Gerrish's work in the field of Lutheran studies; the example merely shows how difficult it is to bring specialist, disciplinary knowledge to bear on matters relating to the demands of intellectual freedom.27 The implications for governance and ethical issues are, of course, profound. Weber speaks to this perplexing difficulty when he says, "ideas come when we do not expect them, and not when we are brooding and searching at our desks. Yet ideas would certainly not come to mind had we not brooded at our desks and searched for answers with passionate devotion" (136). The conclusion I wish to draw, for the moment, is by no means a simple one: that interest is fleeting and

27 Deriving already from Kant's famous essay regarding the 'conflict of the faculties,' it is my feeling that the field of Religious Studies should, and perhaps does, lead the way within the modern university in terms of addressing the difficulties related to interdisciplinarity.

30 knowledge is fragile; and the politics of the preservation of knowledge is analogous to governance and control.

The hope, of course, is that by deepening our insights into the social processes relevant to the cultivation of interest, keener insights into the preservation of knowledge will develop— and with this, the restriction of ideology and prejudice. Such a step toward tolerance and democratic process cannot be merely legislated; it must occur organically— or to anticipate the Enlightenment, from within. Thus, the rise of literacy and education in the early modern period is, among many others, a decisive development from the great division in society perceptible in the contrast between scholastic sacerdotalism and 'ignorant' devotion. As van Diilmen asserts: "Humanist endeavors had shown the way, but education would not have flourished as we know it did in the sixteenth century without the support it received from the entire Reformation movement"

(208).

In contrast to the twelfth century, the great advances in learning associated with

Christian Hebraism in the period of the Reformation is attested by the publication of grammars, lexicons and other learning aids that accompany literacy and education. As described in the previous section, although postbiblical Jewish thought develops according to an internal and self-referential logic, this interior world of postbiblical

Jewish writing becomes more accessible to Christians as a result of a very lengthy process of independent discovery beginning with the rise of lexical Christian Hebraism in the twelfth century. However, this process of discovery is hampered by (as I have argued in connection with Huntington's "clash of civilizations thesis") very natural—that is, decidedly not 'religious'— human factors. We will deal with this lingering question,

31 concerning the accretion and analysis of traditional resources in the next section, framed specifically in terms of German Romanticism. The Romantic quest to plumb the depths of human mythology presents significant challenges to German Protestant theology, posing the question: how long before the superficial constructions of theological ideology inevitably disintegrate— only to again conform to organic expressions of humanity inscribed in (religious) mythologies and (scientific) endeavoring?28

In affirmation of the ability of human reason to transcend base instincts concerning personal survival and inter-group competition, the emergence of the modern age attests, among other things, an incremental, cumulative process of inquiry into internal Christian contradiction. This process eventually consolidates and merges with other social and political forces that coalesce in a general affirmation of egalitarianism and tolerance.

This coalescence, arising out of the mess of both learned and popular social histories is, as we noted with Gerrish, difficult to assess, van Dulmen elaborates:

The Reformation was far from being a phenomenon concerned only with the subjective faith and piety of individuals, or one that was merely a matter of ecclesiastical and secular public institutions. Without effecting any profoundly revolutionary changes in human conduct and community life, the Reformation did in the long term exert considerable influence on everyday structures of thought and conduct. Above all, by encouraging 'rational' communication in public life, the moral awareness of responsibility, a plain and practical piety and 'civilized' everyday behaviour, it favoured the development of modern forms of behaviour and structures of communication. (212)

Needless to say, these events had profound effect on the evolving manner of Jewish theological activity and, in turn, on the manner of Jewish/Christian relations. For perhaps the first time in Christian Europe there was a sense of a communicative 'public sphere,' giving European Jewry a hope of living as full citizens—oscilatting, as Hayim Hillel

281 register such a mythopoeic stage in a humanistic allusion to the biblical Hebrew petitionary formula, "How long".

32 Ben-Sasson has shown, "between revolutionary hope, on the one hand, and the attraction of stability in the social structure, on the other (315).29 In attempting to grasp a sense of this delicate historical moment, we do well to remember that it is only in the late nineteenth century that there arises the modern "welfare state"— and other democratic notions, such as "affirmative action," arise even later. A mature public sphere is a long way off; and as Ben-Sasson makes very clear, the "reforms within Christendom brought about a more intensive Christian consciousness rather than a rapprochement with

Judaism" (315). In fact, the entrenching ambivalence that characterizes much

Reformation thought concerning the Jews is to prove resilient— continuing through the

Enlightenment period, despite the formal Jewish Emancipation which occurs gradually throughout Europe following the French Revolution in 1789.

PART THREE

RELIGIOUS CONTINUITY AND THE COSMOPOLITAN CHALLENGE

Revolution, Tubingen and Nineteenth-Century German Protestant Theology

In this final section we discuss the period of the nineteenth century and I develop a key claim for my analysis of Jewish/Christian relations. As I have argued above, I maintain that the many changes relating to the modern age that began in the Reformation period consolidate in the eighteenth century Enlightenment 'age of revolutions.' However, while

I am persuaded that secularization processes stimulate the erosion of traditional bases of authority, I am under no illusion as to how subtle and ironically differentiated this and

29 The notion of a communicative rationality within a political public sphere is discussed more fully below in connection with the work of Jiirgen Habermas.

33 other aspects of modernization are. It is apparent that Enlightenment confidence in the transformative power of humanistic reason and science, in combination with a new sense of egalitarianism derived from the decline of the feudal system, led to a crisis in Christian theology— felt perhaps most acutely in the theological faculties. In the field of theology, the first work to apply new historical-critical methods is David Strauss' Life of Jesus published in 1835. The publication is generally considered to mark the beginning of the

Tubingen School, which had as its cornerstone the Jewish-Christian versus the Pauline

Christian problem (Harris, 181ff).31 What made Strauss' work so distinctive is that it was the first to break with the old conservative theological school by presenting a radical anti- supernatural viewpoint. It must be emphasized, in this respect, that Strauss was not hostile toward Christianity, nor was he attempting to subvert Christian theology. The significance of his work centers on the contrast between myth and modernity and thus gives a seminal preliminary expression, in the field of theology, of the great debates about rationality, experience and interpretation that continue to rage with regard to the many vicissitudes in (Western) intellectual history. However, despite the great ambiguities and political challenges that arise with the industrial revolution and the pluralism associated with an emerging mass culture, I suppose that the preservation of social order follows relatively inscrutable evolutionary systems that are more profound than even the most radical insurrections or revolutions. It is this belief that governs my

30 In his study entitled Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W.M.L de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness, Thomas Howard writes: "Instead of characterizing 'historicism' and 'secularization' as fundamental breaks with Europe's religious heritage, they are presented as complex cultural permutations with much continuity; for inherited theological patterns of interpreting experience determined to a large degree the conditions, possibilities, and limitations of the forms of historical imagination realizable by nineteenth-century secular intellectuals" (121). 31 On the Tubingen School see Harris (1975).

34 aim of drawing forth the somewhat oblique history of introjection between Judaism and

Christianity.

I will continue this line of thought by arguing that, given the condition of less political domination and theological stricture (which occurs in Europe following the French

Revolution in 1789 and the 1848 Revolution in Germany/Prussia), Judaism's intrinsic theological challenge to Christianity surfaces and is successfully maintained under the new conditions of intellectual arbitration associated with the rise of a modern ethos of research, exact scholarship and nascent critical theory. My underlying goal is to disclose the relative impotence of current Jewish/Christian relations in comparison to the creative potential apparent in the decades before the Holocaust. To achieve this goal it is essential to clearly discuss the theo-political difficulties in dealing with a period of German history that so closely antedates the Holocaust. My specific concern, therefore, is to provide a historiographical characterization of the pre-Holocaust German-speaking theological contexts that precludes an ambition to garner resources to support continuing apologetic aims. Indeed, within this framework lies idea that the failure of Christianity becomes increasingly self-evident in the context of secularization and modernization. In contrast, the successful display of adaptive functioning demonstrated by the Jewish community provides an ominous index of how vacuous the Christian religion had become.

32 In an attempt to achieve such a level of care, a key historiographical guideline must be acknowledged: namely, to avoid anachronism on one end, and antiquarianism on the other. Anachronism tends to implant current desiderata within the interpretation of historical events or figures—beyond that which the extant evidence can support. Antiquarianism, by contrast, is an obscurantist obsession with or presentation of detail to the detraction of current topical relevance.

35 German Romanticism and Mass Culture

In contrast to the previous two sections of this essay (although not independent of them), my project becomes significantly more complicated during the German Romantic period. As Azade Seyhan describes, beginning with the French Revolution there was an extraordinary shift in the understanding of history:

The Judaeo-Christian tradition had represented time as the agent of sacred history, whereas the Revolution became in the Romantic mind an allegory of disruption in time, the eclipse of teleology and the rise of chaos. Neither the Enlightenment ideal of progress nor a millenarian belief could make sense of the explosive and destructive course of history. Romanticism can thus be seen as originating in our human anxiety about the interlinked crises of the political turmoil that engulfed Europe and the limits of understanding introduced by Immanuel Kant's critiques. Thus, Romanticism came to view expressive freedom in life, writing and art as an end toward which humanity had to strive in order to rise above mere physical and natural existence. (Seyhan, 6-7)

However, while Church dogmas relating to scriptural authority and the normative origins of the Christian faith were decisively set on trial during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, it must be stressed that the secularization of Christian Europe was the result of tumultuous historical processes, with many of the consequences largely unforeseen.

Indeed, the 'new mythology'34 that the Romantic period attests is, to some degree, a secularized expression of Jewish/Christian eschatological thought set in terms of the modern industrialized nation-state. This returns us to the goal of distinguishing between

33 The complexity relating to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire that precedes the eventual unification of Germany in 1871 is illustrative of the unknown ramifications of specific historical contingencies. Although the Protestant princes removed themselves from the control of the Catholic emperor, the social infrastructure outlasted the Holy Roman Empire. "The titular political protection and the juridical framework of the Empire made it possible for a diverse group of principalities to coexist without being taken over by more powerful neighboring or rival states" (Seyhan, 3). 34 As Seyhan notes, the "early Romantics' notion of a 'new mythology' rested on a vision that strove to synthesize diverse literary traditions to create the most artistic form of all arts, art to the highest power" (13).

36 continuity and change— now complicated by a critical historical consciousness propelled by an ethos of scientific research35 that relativizes tradition and the very notion of value.'

The new egalitarian political dynamic that occurs in this age of revolution, in response to the dramatic changes in technology, rationality, social mobility and mass society generally, is a topic of great importance for the study of Jewish/Christian relations. In social terms, the revolutionary hope in an emerging public sphere that first enticed

German Jewry in the Reformation period becomes much stronger. Indeed, many Jews and Germans alike begin to think in terms of a possible Jewish-German "symbiosis."36

In academic circles, the professionalization of historical studies according to the assumptions of scientific research entails a direct challenge to traditional religious discourses, and results in the exhaustive analysis of the archaeological and literary resources related to the origins of the Judeao-Christian tradition. According to the new research demands that were scientifically formalized in such new disciplines as philology and ethnology, Christian researchers were compelled to restrain and complement their primary theological and apologetic ambitions with a serious and comprehensive treatment of cognate fields. Perhaps the most salient example of this inclusive framework is Emil

Complementing the comments of Clifford regarding the rise of the field of ethnography (above, n.23), Georg Iggers explains: "It was only in the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic invasions that a modern university system was established in Germany and that the professionalization of historical studies took place. The founding of the University of Berlin in 1810 occupied a central role in this transformation. It was part of a broad reform of education initiated by Wilhelm von Humboldt. The reform strengthened the role of the Greek and Roman classics in the humanistic Gymnasien, the secondary schools, which served to prepare a highly select student body for the universities. At the core of the reform of the secondary schools was Humboldt's ideal of cultivation or Bildung, intended to provide the upper middle class or Burgertum with a solid liberal education founded on the Western tradition of classical culture as a preparation for its role in public life. Instead of making wealth the criterion of status, as was increasingly the case in Western European societies where a market economy was already more firmly established in public consciousness than in Prussia, Humboldt wanted status to be linked to culture and education. The new University of Berlin represented a radical break with older universities. It was no longer perceived primarily as a professional school, preparing physicians, lawyers, and pastors for a relatively static traditional society, but an institution in step with the conditions of the modern world. Instruction was to be joined with research, which was assigned a key place in the new university" (228). j61 take the term from Wolfgang Benz who demonstrates that such a symbiosis did not exist.

37 Schiirer's monumental The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, first published in 1885. However, despite the profound accretion of knowledge in the nineteenth century— and, cognizant of a friendly eagerness to establish and defend the triumph of rational clarity associated with the Enlightenment— we must keep in mind that the journey of discovery from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment is a history marked by irony and ambivalence. Indeed, it is the lingering questions set off by the

Reformers concerning origins, tradition and various claims to authority that become salient in the Romantic period.

In keeping with my topic of seeking patterns in Christian perceptions of Jews and

Judaism in successive periods, in this final section I will focus on the responses of nineteenth century Christian communities to the challenges presented by Enlightenment and Romantic (or modern and post-modern) thought in the German context. I concentrate exclusively on German Protestant academic circles because it is in Protestant scholarship that we first find the rigorous application of scientific methods applied to historical and textual studies. I will show that despite the generous intellectual bequests of their Reformational and Renaissance predecessors, and despite their own considerable intellectual and historical achievements, in the field of Jewish/Christian studies (and by extension other cultures also) nineteenth century modern German theology did not yield as much from these novel investigative freedoms as might be expected.38 With regard to

Judaism, nineteenth century German Protestants seem unable to provide a suitably cogent

37 Shiirer's History has recently been given an editorial overhaul by Geza Vermes and Fergus Millar (1973). In addition to being thoroughly revised, this edition has stripped the original of its polemical material. Cf. above, n7. j8 As developed in part two in terms of the impact of language study on Jewish/Christian relations, the critical spirit of freedom of inquiry developed in the Reformation and Renaissance infuses nineteenth century Protestant ideals.

38 theological position—one that integrates new historical research into Christian origins with evolving perceptions of Jews and Judaism under new ostensibly more 'tolerant' political conditions. Rather, in a manner analogous to Said's "perennial escape mechanism," most Protestant theologians seek consolation to the threat presented to

Christian theology by cultural relativism in increasingly extravagant "ideological refinements"40 designed to either accommodate modernity (best represented by Adolf von

Harnack) or retreat from it.

Concerning Jews and Judaism, the vast majority of Christian theologians have a simple attitude of triumphal ism. As I pointed out in the previous section, Calvin and Luther formed crucial opinions about Jews, Judaism, and the Hebrew bible, yet neither were strict Hebraists. Their facility with Hebrew was meager and was exercised only for apologetic or polemical purposes. The same can be said of such influential modern theologians as Schleiermacher, Harnack, or Bonhoeffer. Moreover, those who approached Judaism more comparatively or who were strict Christian Hebraists (such as

Franz Delitzsch and Hermann Strack) cannot be properly considered 'judaizers' due to the fact that that their primary objective was to convert the Jews. ' In fact, this latter group felt that the conversion of the Jews was the most urgent task facing Christian leaders.42 As such, these Christian theologians' response to the conditions of cultural pluralism is best characterized as pietism. The puzzling range of Protestant opinion

39 The notion of tolerance is inherently linked to the problem of power which, in this case, refers to the hegemony of Christian society in which the Jews are minority and thus susceptible to the possibly whimsical attitudes of Christian authorities. 401 borrow the phrase from Jeremy Cohen (103ff). 41 See Alan Levenson, "Missionary Protestants as Defenders and Detractors of Judaism: Franz Delitzsch and Hermann Strack," The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, 92 (Jan.-Apr., 2002): 383-420. 42 A fine study focusing on the German/Prussian context is that of Christopher M. Clark, The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728-1941, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

39 concerning the Jews—from haughty indifference to urgent feelings of conversion or assimilation reveals a seemingly inherent uncertainty in the dogmas of modern

Christianity, obviated by the demands of historical and disciplinary rectitude. This ambivalence in Christian perceptions of Jews is most worrisome when one considers that because the Christian allegiance is ultimately tentative, either treatment of the Jew

(indifference or conversion) is due to a categorical bias and not substantive decisions.

This Protestant inattention to the individual, substantive quality of religious identification has a particular irony given the emphasis Protestant theology places on the individual.

Moreover, in an age of increasing fundamentalism, as we have already discussed in terms of Riesebrodt's corrective to the Huntington thesis, such rigid and monolithic modes of thought deny complexity and more subtle inquiries into the nature of human belonging.

Just as modern German Protestantism exhibits a range of reaction to contemporary

'culture' (from accommodation to resistant engagement), Protestant academic theology seeks to sustain a dominant position by treating Judaism in an analogous fashion, ranging from radical supercessionism to active proselytization. The analogue derives from a similarity with regard to degrees of affiliation. While German Protestantism is distinct from wider 'secular' culture—a fact that leads either to supercessionist or protectionist policies— there is also strong identification with wider German culture that causes the paradoxical responses of accommodation and symbiosis. Similarly, this ambivalence can be understood in parallel with Hsia's comments regarding the motivations of Christian interest in Judaism— which, we will recall, he presented as a continuum between the denial of "the tenets of Judaism, or to expose the evil of Jewish rites, or to convert the

43 With respect to the sociology of conversion, an example of such a subtle inquiry can be found in Paradigms, Poetics, and Politics of Conversion, ed. Jan Bremmer, et al., (Leuven: Peeters 2005).

40 Jews" (226). As discussed throughout the paper, the phenomenon of Christian Hebraism is largely associated with heresy and judaizing. While both heresy and judaizing are forces that operate against the grain of the orthodox Christian teaching, the institution of the Church has dispatched heresies with greater efficiency, and even logical justification, than it has been able to deal with the threat of judaizing. The reasons, discussed previously, have to do with the inability of Christian teaching to 'wash its hands' of its particularistic Jewish heritage. Simultaneously, the ability of Christian dogma to control the population was losing ground to the array of alternative forms of modern allegiances: faith in science and knowledge, industry and the economy, as well as nationalism all hinged on an ethos of existential and deliberative autonomy which was anathema to traditional modes of social order. Consequently, the tactics of caricature and demonization that institutional Christianity had long employed to suppress Judaism— in the period before mass literacy— was no longer as effective.

Much of the Protestant literature of the nineteenth century can be discussed in terms of

Christian theology's engagement with history—it's own as well as others; in other words,

Christians are forced to assume a formal position over against 'culture.'44 As Amy

Newman illustrates in her essay "The Death of Judaism in German Protestant Thought from Luther to Hegel," the seemingly irrepressible urge of Protestant Christians to interpret historical events according to an ideological impulse to repress the "apparent discrepancy between Protestant discourse and historical reality" is nowhere clearer than in their thinking toward Judaism (455). In an ideological process very similar to

Augustine's illusory romantic portrayal of post-biblical Jews and Judaism in terms of a

44 The term 'culture' here represents the relativistic perspective that increasingly dominates nineteenth century society as a result of complex processes of modernization and secularization. It is here that the ideology critique called for— in this paper— by Said, Cohen, and others, becomes especially urgent.

41 idyllic biblical pastoral scene, Hegel refines his earlier thoughts to accommodate his current needs:

Hegel's study of Egyptian religion led him to abandon the tendency of scholarship since the eighteenth century to link Judaism closely with Egyptian religion and to devalue or idealize it accordingly. Hegel's knowledge of Egyptian religion in fact led to a curious reversal in his lectures on the philosophy of religion: his rearrangement of his 1831 lectures so that whereas Judaism had come after Egyptian religion in earlier outlines, which in Hegel's system indicates a progressive development, it now came before Egyptian religion. (Newman, 476)

In order to sustain the Christian religion's dominant position in the new hierarchical conceptions caused by the inundation of competitive ethnological information (in addition to the new scientific ethos within comparative religion), extensive ideological maneuvering was required by academic theologians who faced the discursive competition set forth by a naturalistic, scientific paradigm. The challenge of scientific research to the field of theology has already been noted in terms of secularization. The other part of the discussion that requires outlining is the rise of a public sphere which threatened the traditional European power structure in processes that run parallel with those of secularization. The common denominator between the two is the empowerment of the masses through learning and voluntary association.45

The Public Sphere

The notion of a 'public sphere' has received its most influential expression by the

German thinker Jiirgen Habermas. While the broad scope of his work is clearly outside

In an essay entitled "Traditional and Critical Theory" Max Horkheimer provides us with an apt comment: "Critical thinking is the function neither of the isolated individual nor of a sum-total of individuals. Its subject is rather a definite individual in his real relation to other individuals and groups, in his conflict with a particular class, and, finally, in the resultant web of relationships with the social totality and with nature. The subject is no mathematical point like the ego of bourgeois philosophy; his activity is the construction of the social present" (Horkheimer, 210-11).

42 the bounds of this paper, a basic sense of the political public sphere is essential to our discussion of nineteenth century Jewish/Christian relations within the broader context of

European secularization. In a terse introduction to the concept, Habermas suggests that the 'public sphere' denotes "first of all a realm of our social life in which something approaching public opinion can be formed. Access is granted to all citizens" (49).

Arising in the eighteenth century, without an historical precedent, Habermas points to the part newpapers and journalism had in achieving consolidation and expressing public opinion (52-53). "The public sphere as a sphere which mediates between society and state, in which the public organizes itself as the bearer of public opinion, accords with the principle of the public sphere— that principle of public information which once had to be fought for against the arcane policies of monarchies and which since that time has made possible the democratic control of state activities" (Habermas, 50).

The plain sense of what Habermas here refers to as "arcane policies" is set by the terms of the feudal social order, a time before the emergence of the political public sphere when the powerful were relatively unconstrained by public reasoning and democratic consensus as prescribed by the force of argument and due process. Much of this pre-history of the public sphere can be summarized with adherence to a general theory of secularization; yet, a trite re-stating of the secularization thesis risks oversimplifying the evolutionary process that moves from a period characterized by 'pre-criticaF social practices and sources of authority to one that is properly 'critical' and 'modern'. Habermas explains:

"Because of the diffusion of press and propaganda, the public body expanded beyond the bounds of the bourgeoisie. The public body lost not only its social exclusivity; it lost in addition the coherence created by bourgeois social institutions and a relatively high

43 standard of education" (54). With mass 'higher education' came the need for the

Church to adjust its doctrines to suit the increasingly pluralistic, and literate, secular

European society in which it so indissolubly inhered. Stephen Toulmin treats this theme in an essay published in a volume devoted to theological reflections on Thomas Kuhn's notion of'paradigm change,' where he describes attempts of Christian theologians to reconcile Christian dogmas with currently evolving scientific theories:

Twice already, Christian theologians have committed themselves enthusiastically to the detailed ideas of particular systems of scientific theory. This happened, firstly, when the medieval church 'naturalized' Aristotle, and gave his views about nature an authority beyond their true strength; secondly when, from the 1680's up to the late nineteenth century, Protestant thinkers (especially in Britain) based a new religious cosmology on mechanical ideas about nature borrowed from Descartes and Newton, as interpreted by an edifying reading of the argument from design. In both cases, the results were unfortunate. Having plunged too deep in their original scientific commitments, the theologians concerned failed to foresee the possibility that Aristotle's or Newton's' principles might not forever be 'the last word'; and, when radical changes took place in the natural sciences, they were unprepared to deal with them. (For reasons I do not understand, Judaic scholars did not make the same mistake). (237)

To be sure, the political debates associated with attempts to control discovery and manage contingency are not peculiar to Christian society. As we have affirmed in connection with Weber's uncertain contrast between dilettante and expert, these difficulties are universal questions. The difference however, between the situation that

Toulmin presents with that of the nineteenth-century context, is that the 'arcane policies' of the powerful were, in the nineteenth-century, set against publicly accessible and institutionally acknowledged standards, the latter regulated by long processes of human collaboration. Toulmin's somewhat 'throw away' comparison of Christian and Judaic

46 As we shall see, for Overbeck, these changes in bourgeois constitution become a source of intellectual inspiration. His immanental critique of modern Christian theology (that is, critiquing Christian theological frameworks from within its own categories and infrastructure) finds external amplification by the challenge to Christian theology by emancipated German Jewish theologians operating in the public sphere.

44 scholars—a year after publishing a major study on the history of moral reasoning, in which Rabbinic modes of practical reasoning are discussed in relation to the more ambivalent Christian tradition— seems the result of circumstantial rather than intellectual limitation. Yet, as the central interest in this paper is to compare Judaism and Christianity in terms of how they respond to each other under various circumstances, this comment assists my attempt to establish certain patterns within each peculiar tradition with regard to broadly construed abilities relating to mitigation and adaptation, continuity and change. Accordingly, I suggest that the minimum that can be stated is that the flexibility that characterizes the Rabbinic tradition that we have discussed throughout the paper continues in the modern period with the emergence of the 'science of Judaism'

(Wissenschaft des Judentums). I do not suggest that the history of Christian schism and prevailing denominationalism cannot be reasonably compared to Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform movements in Judaism. Rather, I am asserting that Judaism is more capable, within its particularity, to respond to and inhabit the changes associated with the emergence of the modern age. The Rabbinic expounding of the dialectic between oral and written torah affords Judaism an inbuilt doctrinal provision for interpretive latitude that is not present in Christianity.48 Certainly, as Karl Lowith suggests, the history of

Christianity cannot be reduced merely to "a series of dogmas" (382); but, recalling

Toulmin's comment, Protestant academic theology, in contrast to Rabbinic Judaism, frequently opts to either attenuate its core beliefs or awkwardly sustain them. Neither

47 Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley: University of California Press) 1988. 48 At a future date I should like to establish parallels between the work of Abraham Geiger (1810-1874; associated with the Reform movement that begins in nineteenth century Germany) and that of Solomon Schechter, Geiger's younger contemporary (1847-1915; representing Conservative Judaism in the United States).

45 trajectory can be seen as an elegant engagement with the provocations cultural relativism poses to traditional (i.e., unscientific) intuitions, and thus becomes a curiosity meriting further exploration.

Science of Religion and the Modern Research University

Although the process of removing Christian academic theology as the 'queen of the sciences' was very gradual— due to its illustrious history and more recent inventiveness— it was, paradoxically, also decisive. This decisiveness is registered by the revolutionary intensity of the crucial Tubingen debates about the historical Jesus, facilitated by the new critical and inclusive research ethos. Certainly, the institutional ramifications of these debates— which impinged on the very foundation of a properly

Christian theology— cannot be well understood apart from a grasp of the impact the new historical critical methods had on the ideologically suppressed controversy concerning the Jewishness of Jesus. As described in part two, it is only in the nineteenth century, that the social and political ramifications of Renaissance humanism finally reaches equilibrium with the linguistic achievements of the previous centuries. As Fritz Ringer notes:

The German research university of the nineteenth century drew some of its vitality from the neohumanist enthusiasm of the eighteenth century, which also inspired a new vision of education. The birth of the research seminar and the subsequent expansion of the 'philosophical' faculties were linked to the emergence of the philological and interpretive disciplines, which initially shaped the dominant paradigm of exact scholarship or Wissenschaft. (195)

Indeed, many scholars understand the Reformation not in terms of theological innovation but rather the first step in a socio-political restructuring that took many decades to

46 consolidate. A final step, then, in this gradual consolidation of processes of human collaboration is the application of scientific methods to the institutionally mature field of academic theology. However, in his important book Protestant Theology and the Making of the Modern German University4 Thomas Howard points out that scholars too often overlook the strength of theology in this transitional period of university history. He tells us that "viewing university development through the lenses of theology helps one see certain otherwise occluded continuities in the making of the nineteenth-century university

(8). Continuing, he suggests:

Exclusive focus on dynamic and expanding fields such as philology, history, chemistry, physics, and medicine tends, by virtue of the choice of subject matter, to give histories of the modern German university a storyline of distorted discontinuity. Focus on theology, by contrast, restores an element of the 'persistence of the Old Regime' to university history. (Howard, 8)

Additionally, Howard warns that "we should not lose sight of the remarkable fact that a theologian, Friedrich Schleiermacher, served as the principal intellectual architect of the modern German university, whose arguably most renowned and accomplished representative at century's end was yet another theologian, Adolph von Harnack" (8-9).

It becomes clear that the "persistence of the old regime" is largely a combined effort of both the traditional anti-modernist theological establishment as well as the liberal reinvention of this traditionalism to defend its institutional power against the wave of new ideas broadly associated with the 'History of Religions School'

(religionsgeschichtliche Schule). As we have already noted in terms of the (scientific) professionalization of such disciplines as ethnography and history, the incredible increase

All quotations from Howard hereafter are taken from this 2006 publication.

47 in resources erupted into a "protracted, theoretical debate on the nature and purpose of theological study, a debate that pitted those in favour of a more general

Religionswissenschaft (the new avant-garde) against defenders of wissenschaftliche

Theologie (the old avant-garde) as it had developed in German universities since the time of Schleiermacher" (Howard, 385).

As established earlier, in connection with the radical approach of the Tubingen School, this transitional period is by no means easy to characterize. The bold strokes of belonging and alienation that characterize traditional pre-modern societies, become harder to manage in the changed rigidity of the revolutionary modern age. The historical criticism associated with the Tubingen school provokes both Jewish and Christian thinkers to respond to the ancient tension— between feelings of identification and supercession (represented by Christian Hebraism)— in a manner of academic engagement that was, for the first time, potentially free of Christian bias. I do not suggest, however, that political agendas and personal bias are removed; rather, I am endorsing the institutional proceduralism (such as peer review processes, and the like) that is designed to maintain academic freedom in the hope of achieving balanced inquiry.

The engagement centres on the historical figure of Jesus which results in dramatic exposures of Christianity's history of internal instability and schism. Howard reduces the

Howard elaborates: "Prior to the 1860's, numerous factors contributed to the feasibility and growth of [the science of religion]. Most fundamentally perhaps, data and artifacts collected by Western colonialists, missionaries, and explorers had made available in Europe a hitherto unknown wealth of ethnological information on 'primitive', non-Western cultures, languages, and religions. Of early significance, in 1822, Jean-Francois Champollion famously deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and shortly thereafter published his famous Pantheon egyptien. At roughly the same time, excavations in Mesopotamia unearthed thousands of cuneiform documents in the great Babylonian and Assyrian palaces and libraries, while the discovery of important Eastern texts in Avestan, Sanskrit, Pali, Chinese, Tibetan, and Mongolian allowed European scholars to study and translate them for the first time" (Howard, 381-82).

48 complexity within nineteenth century academic German Protestant theology to two main questions:

First, what status should be accorded to Christianity in university study? Did it possess a unique standing among world religions, meriting special handling, or should its scholarly treatment be indistinguishable from, say, Zoroastrianism or Buddhism? Second, how did the practical function of the theological faculty (equipping society with learned clergymen) bear on the scientific content of instruction? In other words, should a faculty committed to the production of Christian clergymen have legitimate business spending extensive time on the study of non-Christian religions? Both issues, it should be clear, presented a fundamental challenge to the dual conception51 of theological study articulated by Schleiermacher, who, despite his musings on the general importance of 'religion', had never questioned the superlative position of Christianity and had legitimized the theological faculty (the seat of a 'positive science') on the basis of its practical task of training Christian clergymen" (Howard, 385).

Interiorization Reversed: Franz Overbeck and Abraham Geiger

I wish now to discuss a more interesting alternative to either the liberal theologians' approach to the preservation of Christianity's superlative position (represented by

Harnack) or the pietistic expropriations attempted by the Christian Hebraists and

Christian missions (Missionswissenschaft). The alternative is not a middle position between the two. It does not reject modernity, nor does it merely accommodate it; rather, representatives of this approach are judicious and critical, soberly receiving the results of scientific research in the context of mass culture. The intellectual context of German

Romanticism can be associated with a secular cosmopolitan utopianism which places more value in understanding human relationships than in controlling them. Perhaps

51 This dual conception holds that academic theology should be free to pursue scientific knowledge about Christianity while at the same time remain a servant of the Church by "leading it to purer forms of expression" based on the results of scientific inquiry (Howard, 393). 521 find the progressive universalism that imbues the Romantic consciousness resonant with Horkheimer's important comments regarding the difference between "traditional" and "critical" theory. He writes: "As a matter of fact, the fruitfulness of newly discovered factual connections for the renewal of existent knowledge, and the application of such knowledge to the facts, do not derive from purely logical or methodological sources but can rather be understood only in the context of real social processes. When a

49 this explorative egalitarian sensitivity arose because the German Romantics were responding, as Seyhan puts it, "to an intellectual and moral crisis that marked the end of the rationalist and Classical world view." She continues:

Romanticism's critical anxiety was prompted by the radical eruptions in the historical and intellectual landscape of the age. The social and political upheaval set off by the 'earthquake' and the aftershocks of the French Revolution ran parallel to a crisis of understanding the conditions and limits of human reason. The chaos that threatened to erase the pillars of reason necessitated new paradigms of understanding and counter-order. The uneasy confrontation with an uncertain future and the impossibility of accessing a truth hidden in the noumenal world, an occult code or a forgotten past characterized the many crises of an age that seemed to have lost its place in the order of history. (9)

This creative period attests perhaps the most important stage of Jewish/Christian relations since the so-called 'parting of the ways' in the first century. It is a period when discrete communities, and especially certain individuals within these communities looked past traditional boundary markers, censorship and hegemony, toward a more discursive interaction. For Jews in a secularizing Europe this meant an option to reverse the protective necessity of communal interiorization and begin to participate as full citizens of the nations of Europe. Indeed, we must look more closely at this tentative new universalism. Given the path German society eventually took, the importance of this brief moment of awakening, where both traditions could at last examine their oblique and introjected relations in legal and discursive equality, cannot be understated— because it has not happened since; the weight of guilt, and the preservation of the memory of horror, now intractably precludes it.

discovery occasions the restructuring of current ideas, this is not due exclusively to logical considerations or, more particularly, to the contradiction between the discovery and particular elements in current views. If this were the only real issue on could always think up further hypotheses by which one could avoid changing the theory as a whole. That new views in fact win out is due to concrete historical circumstances, even if the scientist himself may be determined to change his views only by immanent motives" (Horkheimer, 194-195).

50 In the decades before the Second World War, Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), well known for his literary and Romantic aesthetic criticism, published a volume of German letters entitled "German Men and Women: A Sequence of Letters." Benjamin introduces the letters thus:

The twenty-five letters making up this volume span a century. The first is dated 1783; the last, 1883. Although the sequence is chronological, the opening letter falls outside the sequence. Dating from the middle of the century covered here, it provides a glimpse into the time—Goethe's youth— marking the inauguration of the era in which the bourgeoisie seized its major positions. But the immediate occasion of the letter—Goethe's death—also marks the end of this era, when the bourgeoisie still held its positions but no longer retained the spirit in which it had conquered them. It was the age when the German bourgeoisie had to place its weightiest and most sharply etched words on the scales of history. And it had little to place there except those words—which is why it met its unlovely end in the boom years of the Griinderzeit.53

Although there are many themes that run through the collection, the letters dramatically portray the shifting perspectives of German bourgeois mentality over the period of a century. In a manner not unlike the discourse provided by Weber in his "Science as a

Vocation" (discussed in the previous section), Benjamin provides a palpable retrospective analysis of the changing role of the educated class due to the overwhelming and rapid developments of the modern industrial age. Indeed, as Weber's essay details, this is a time when the Enlightenment confidence in the emancipatory function of knowledge was growing less assured. Benjamin uses an aptly dour comment of an aged Goethe to register the tension between a true sense of progress and the inherent limitations of quality associated with the explosion of mass culture:

53 The editors of the volume provide a note to the term 'Griinderzeit' ('founder's years') which reads: "The Griinderzeit is the period 1871-1874 in Germany, years of rapid industrial expansion and reckless financial speculation following the Franco-Prussian War and the establishment of the Second Reich. It effectively marked the end of the sense of unbounded confidence and prosperity enjoyed by the German bourgeoisie earlier in the century" (Benjamin, 221, n.l).

51 "Wealth and speed are what the world admires, and what all are bent on. Railways, express mail-coaches, steamboats, and every possible means of communication— that's what the civilized people of today strive for. So they grow overcivilized, but never get beyond mediocrity.... This is the century, in fact, for men of ability, of quick, practical understanding, whose skill gives them a feeling of superiority to the masses, even though they themselves have no gift for higher things. We may be the last representatives—with a few others perhaps—of an era that will not easily come again." (Benjamin, 167)

At the conclusion of the sequence of letters, Walter Benjamin interestingly terminates his chronological characterization of the German bourgeoisie with a letter written by Franz

Overbeck (1837-1905) — Professor of Theology and Church History at Basel, and colleague, housemate, and friend of Friedrich Nietzsche, to whom the letter is addressed.

Among other things, the letter captures the tension between the Romantic isolated genius and the intense institutionalization that occurred in the nineteenth-century. Overbeck apologizes to Nietzsche for using the "appalling language of our time" to intimate to his brilliant friend that Nietzsche should concede to the forces that be— given his increasingly dire situation— swallow his pride, and become a relatively simple teacher in a grammar school (quoted in Benjamin, 219).

It is perhaps significant to Benjamin that Overbeck's major work, entitled Uber die

Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie,54 is published in 1873. As Benjamin highlights in his preface to the letters, this date marks the end of the Grunderzeit boom years, signaled by the great stock market crash in Vienna, the effects of which rippled across

Europe. Just two years prior, the unification of Germany had created much optimism.

And now, two years later, Overbeck writes his relentless critique of Christianity generally, and German Protestant liberal and apologetic theology specifically. Indeed, it is within these demanding social and economic vicissitudes that Overbeck criticizes

54 1 use the recent translation provided by Henry (2005).

52 Protestant Christian leaders for ignoring the complexity and profound contradictions he finds readily apparent in recent theology—or, in his words, the theologians "organized ambiguity and dishonesty" (quoted in Kahl, 156). Overbeck is profoundly dismayed by the lack of integrity and responsibility Christian leaders exhibit through their depreciation of available intellectual resources and irresponsible concern to popularize theology by pandering to the whims of popular 'culture' rather than offer more sophisticated synthetic analyses of the material. In addition, Overbeck is amazed at the level of complacency regarding critical issues related to Christian identity—both by the populace, who refuse to think critically, and by theologians who renege their duty to promote learning.

What this implies becomes even more evident when we consider how incomparably more powerful are the resources our present-day theology—as opposed to the Reformation—has at its disposal, in seeking to influence the general population, and how incomparably weaker the effect it is having. The Reformers and their contemporaries exposed the web of deception and forgeries on which papal power had been based over the course of time, compared the early church with the church of their own day, and appealed in particular to the apostle Paul as a witness against the current state of the church. The result was the greatest even of the Reformation, the separation from Rome. We have people telling us that almost the entire New Testament is a web of fictions, we go back not to the early church but to primitive Christianity and appeal not to Paul but to Jesus himself, and nothing at all happens. (95-96)

To be clear, Overbeck does not support the attempt to 'influence the general population'; rather, he chastises his peers for not doing more to complement the incredibly hard won gifts of the previous generation of Protestants and humanists. Overbeck himself wrote only for professional colleagues, and made no attempt to simplify his work to align with publishing trends to accommodate the loathsome business side of theological activities.'

I always let my audience determine for themselves how as theologians they should deal with what they learned from me. I never tried to make things especially difficult for them, nor, to be sure, did I do anything to make them easy.... What I

55 "Overbeck wrote exclusively for learned journals and would have nothing to do with efforts to reach a wider readership" (Gossmann 379).

53 taught was simply.. .what I knew about the topic under discussion, nothing else, and I presented that as clearly as I could, given my very skeptical and cautious way of proceeding in matters historical, (quoted in Gossmann, 370)

Furthermore, he ruthlessly, and with great precision, attacks those who did bend to the whims of popular interest which, in his mind, was the worst crime an intellectual leader could commit during such uncertain times.56 This is evidence of a mature and responsible thinker. Overbeck refrains from bullying or undermining the learning of his underlings, holding his teaching service sacred. At the same time, in line with his understated Romantic quest for an undisclosed utopianism, he is unrelentingly critical of those who would, in his mind, betray the duties that attend the honorable service of teaching.

Not only does Overbeck vehemently critique the irresponsibility of sensational or blatantly erroneous work of minor scholars and theological functionaries, he also attends to the more subtle, interpretive inconsistencies of such luminaries as Harnack. In fact,

Overbeck becomes critical even of the Tubingen School which had been such an influence on his entire generation. Reflecting on the Tubingen School's principal, F.C.

Baur, Overbeck writes:

One thing that always remained completely alien to me, in relation to Baur, was his philosophy of religion, which was based on Hegel. The only aspect of his historical critique of early Christianity I could ever fully adopt was the right, which certainly to my mind he vindicated with complete success, to depict primitive Christianity in purely historical terms, i.e. as it really was, against the theological apologetics of the time or the pretension of theology to challenge his right to do so. (12)

Exhibiting an intensely ambivalent relationship with theology, not unlike that of

Feuerbach, Overbeck explores the tension between Enlightenment Idealism and

Especially relevant is Overbeck's chapter entitled "Contemporary Apologetic Theology."

54 Romantic thought. Martin Henry, one of Overbeck's few English commentators, elaborates this tension:

In attempting to analyse Overbeck's critique of theology, we shall begin by examining his belief— rooted in Romanticism— that knowledge and life- sustaining illusions are mortal enemies. According to this view, which marks his reconstruction of the beginnings of Christian theology, there is a qualitative difference between experience and understanding. Great historical movements, moreover, are perceived as being strongest at their origins, declining inevitably thereafter: in the case of Christianity, faith declines and is replaced by knowledge (theology). Given this general perspective, it is not surprising to find Overbeck constantly attacking theology for being only an attempt to resurrect intellectually what is no longer truly alive, an attempt doomed inevitably to frustration. It is instructive to see how on this point Overbeck is close to the theologians with whom he disagrees. However what they wish, in his view, to keep artificially alive, he wishes to cast off. (216-17)

Overbeck is unequivocal in his feeling that a true Christianity can only accord with the primitive Christian myth which has an uncompromising and utterly otherworldly orientation. Although this belief places his tenure as a modern theologian in a dubious relation to that of his colleagues, it is nevertheless reasonable that he dismisses modern theology outright: "Theology has always been modern, and for that very reason has also, by its very nature, always betrayed Christianity" (193). What is perhaps the most interesting here is that Overbeck does not supply any particular replacement for that which he "wishes to cast off, as Henry puts it. While in accordance with the Romantic skepticism of his time, his reluctance to specifically name an alternative to the vacuum created by his theoretical dispatching of Christianity leaves readers to consider the

Comparing Hegelian Idealism and the thought of those who reject it, Andrew Bowie writes: "Both positions could, then, be said to be 'ironic', in the sense that any truth claim is taken back, even as it is asserted. The difference is, though, clear. In Hegel's case the irony ceases at the end of the system, because all the negatives lead eventually to the positive recognition that one has exhausted negativity: negativity is the path to the truth. Romantic irony, on the other hand, does not come to an end. The sense that we can never rest with a final certainty becomes the essential fact about our being" (98-99). 58 It should be noted that the vehemence and sarcasm that often characterizes Overbeck's writing is difficult to adequately convey in scattered quotations. Suffice to say, the radical language of'betrayal' is very much intended— consciously flowing from the pen of an alienated theologian. Further elaboration of the theme of betrayal shall follow with the comments of Joachim Kahl.

55 implications of his thoughts. In his obsession with Christian origins (and therefore, if only implicitly, also Jewish/Christian relations) he clearly distances himself from both contemporary liberal theology as well as the ideology of expropriation characteristic of

Missionswissenschaft. But aside for his bitter demands for professional responsibility, his more constructive aims about the state of theological studies seem to present either a return to Judaism or a profoundly Utopian direction about which he is thoughtfully reticent.59

We have already observed that Rabbinic Judaism has a greater malleability than

Christianity due to the discursive manner in which Rabbinic Judaism transmits its authority. In terms of comparison to Christianity's universalism, the question is ultimately locked to Judaism's particularism. As Overbeck notes, although

"otherworldliness...is the characteristic mark of original Christianity" the Church found itself caught by the growing pains of its own universalism—brought on ever more intensely by the 'delay' of the Parousia (85). Overbeck goes on to explain that

"embracing the pagans turned out in fact to be a cause of the most serious inner conflicts for the church. Even though it managed to silence the rigorist sects that had begun to spring up in its midst from the second half of the second century onwards, there was certainly no question that, in doing so, the church had adjusted finally to the situation

59 This same reticence, deriving from a sense of academic responsibility and an awareness of historical lacunae, causes Overbeck to reject the creative exuberance of Nietzsche and the speculative fusion of religion and German nationalism characteristic of Paul de Lagarde (Howard, 386). More speculatively, Overbeck's hopeful— but decidedly sober— manner of thought seems to parallel (pre-Holocaust) cosmopolitan notions of German-Jewish symbiosis. These speculative sentiments derived from a secularized eschatology, attested, for example by Walter Benjamin's rejection of Zionism (Rabinbach, 45). Cf. n.8, above. 60 The "situation" Overbeck is referring to is the problem of tailoring the 'truth' of the Christian message to the expanding encounter of new contexts that occur as a result of the continuing 'delay' of the Parousia.

56 and, after the admission of a profane multitude into its bosom, modified its ideal of holiness" (85).

The original ideal of holiness is an ascetic otherworldliness, nearly hostile to the temporal, that seems utterly foreign to contemporary understandings of "Christianity".

Overbeck continues:

The church finally came up with the idea of making a distinction between two kinds of Christianity, while at the same time being in no doubt about the lower status of lay or worldly Christianity. It must then be categorically denied—and this is closely connected with the point just discussed—that primitive Christianity's expectation of the imminent second coming of Christ simply receded into the background in the church after its actual failure to materialize, and that this in particular also meant that the other-worldliness characteristic of primitive Christianity became a thing of the past. (86)

In Overbeck's view, to be negligent in this regard is the worst of crimes: "it will always remain an insoluble mystery how a faith, whose whole view of the world had depended for its validity on the actual realization of its claims, was not shattered when its claims were not realized" (86).

Overbeck's concerns tie into my discussion of the responsibility of the educated and the leaders of society to preserve and articulate intellectual resources with as much clarity as possible. Although he certainly devotes energy to criticizing those theological peers that he finds gravely mistaken or irresponsible, Overbeck spends more meaningful time—ie., less polemical—with Strauss' work, whom he considers a truly "critical" theologian (Lowith, 381). But aside from a few dim lights, Franz Overbeck became sadly resigned toward the intractable task of fighting the forces of fantasy and the irresponsible positing of Christian dogmas. One philosophical sympathizer, Joachim

Kahl, presents Overbeck's situation thus:

57 I have learnt a great deal from Franz Overbeck's writings—so much that his personal fate terrifies me. At the end of his long period as Professor of Theology at Basle, he admitted: '1 can honestly say that Christianity has cost me my life. To such an extent that, although I never possessed it and only became a theologian as a result of a "misunderstanding", I have taken the whole of my life to get rid of it.' (21)

In light of Overbeck's comprehensive and incisive criticism of his peers, the conclusion to be drawn is that Overbeck is truly and profoundly disappointed— even surprised— at the inadequacies displayed so thoroughly by his peers. One has only to read a few lines to register the sense of a deep sarcasm— evidently derived from a melancholy and terminal judgment of German theological scholarship. In fact, thirty years later, reflecting on the critical reception and consequences of his "little tract," his judgments are only worse. Despite incredible resources made available through rigorous historical- critical studies, modern theology, in his view, is unable to make any meaningful conclusions. He writes:

I for one, indeed, am at a loss to see how, with these [extensive, and specialized] libraries, the said theology has managed to produce out of the study of [primitive Christianity]— for the time being— anything other than a heap of rubble in which hardly anybody knows what's what any more, or at least no two people can agree on what's what. Consequently, no headway can be made either, with the most important and the most interesting problems connected with the period in question. And I am just as much at a loss to understand how, in terms of the continued existence of Christianity in our world, this state of affairs can be a matter of such indifference, as it seems to be to the present authorities in modern theology. (186)

In effect, Overbeck is convinced that modern Christian theology is entirely vacuous and, indeed, false. However, in addition to this telling sentiment, we might add a very puzzling feature of Overbeck's writing. Despite his central interest in Christian origins his discussion almost never reaches the topic of Judaism directly— a fact which further distances him from the many other Christian theologians who treat Judaism extensively and with a decidedly uncompromising triumphalism. About this unusual reticence we

58 have little explanation save a thirty year old lament that he had urged others to be "silent and quiet" but instead, he sardonically adds, 'modern theology' "preferred to enter into one of its most garrulous and most active writing periods" (183). It is abundantly clear that Overbeck felt caught, as the above quote by Kahl illustrates, and urged silence in his isolated attempt to get beyond the inanities in which modern theology had devolved.

Overbeck never states explicitly what he would wish to fill the vacuum created by the silence and quiet he urges. Indeed, in line with the Romantic longing for a new mythology, secular Utopian speculations may not have been far from his mind. But

Overbeck is a proper historian and, unlike his friend Nietzsche, the writer of Zarathustra, is decidedly resistant to historical conjecture.61 What he does tell us concerns less about where Christianity is going than reminding us where it came from. Overbeck boldly declares that if the radical eschatological otherworldliness is reduced, by fear and convenience, to "simply living in expectation of something that is to happen within the world— then this is more or less tantamount to a return to Judaism pure and simple, and to its messianic hope" (87).

The return to Judaism is, of course, not a new notion. The religion of Jesus was

Judaism; Christianity is a departure. However, with the legal emancipation of the Jews in

Germany, following the egalitarianism of the French Revolution, the hard interiorization of the Jewish community began to hopefully soften and thoughts of Jewish-German symbiosis began to emerge in earnest.62 This new Jewish socio-political presence,

61 See: Sommer (2003). 62 In connection with the Emancipation of the Jews in Europe, a statement by a prominent German Rabbi in a German-Jewish periodical in 1848— the year of the revolution— reads: "We are Germans and want to be nothing else! We have no other fatherland than the German fatherland and wish for no other! Only by om faith are we Israelites, in every other respect we belong with devotion to the State in which we live" (quoted in Rurup, 49).

59 respectfully articulated in the validated manner of Wissenschaft was perceived as a clear

and present danger to German Protestant theology's recalcitrant 'old regime.'63

Regardless of the compromises to the advancement of scientific knowledge, with respect

to the state of Jewish/Christian relations, the democratic potential was marred by the

exercise of a well rehearsed Christian tradition of ideological refinement. Protestant

theologians attempted to repress the challenge of Christian Europe's 'internal aliens,' the

Jews— to refer again to Hsia's notion of 'inner and outer ethnographies'. The attempt

becomes especially salient when set over against the work of Jewish scholar Abraham

Geiger (1810-1874). One of the founders of Reform Judaism, an essential intellectual

force in the new Wissenschaft des Judentums, and attentive student of the Tubingen

school theologians, Geiger presented a very provocative Jewish version of 'Christian

origins'. In her study of Geiger, Susannah Heschel describes the Wissenschaft des

Judentums as "one of the earliest examples of postcolonialist writing," and that within

this new movement, Geiger "began to recognize the institutional power of the church that

transformed falsehoods into accepted truth, a system of power that more recent theorists

have termed an 'ideological regime'" (3). The parallels to Overbeck are striking. Indeed,

what is understood by the nouveau liberal theological regime (represented by

Schleiermacher and von Harnack) as an intense provocation is, as Overbeck's critique

confirms, merely a matter of historical record. But, as Schleiermacher— the illustrious

first man of Protestant reason— himself confirms, Christian theology is ever poised

toward increasing ideological elaboration. Heschel explains:

63 In fact, Howard is unequivocal about the effects of such anti-scientific and ideologically motivated majority elements in German academic theology, noting that "an independent science of religion did not gain the institutional foothold in Germany that it did in other lands, even if Germany, as many proclaimed, was the indisputable birthplace of the critical methods for this new field" (394).

60 Schleiermacher's insistence on the theological significance of Jesus' unique religiosity functioned as a metaphysical escape from historical criticism. Jesus no longer had to be viewed as a Jew, because what was essential about him, his religious consciousness, was not subject to historical analysis; subjectivity by definition is not an object of such analysis, and that which is unique cannot be studied by historical-critical method. His approach was shared by liberal Protestants and mediating theologians, who were linked in their desire to avoid the spectre of Jesus as a Pharisee. Instead, Jesus' teachings and actions might be defined as Jewish, but the essential quality distinguishing his extraordinary nature was sui generis, immune from the influences of the surrounding Jewish culture. (129)

Heschel's comments resonate with much of the evidence I have been presenting in terms of Christian perceptions of Jews, and also concurs with Overbeck's critique of modern Protestant theology's lack of ability to reconcile historical data with post-biblical

Judaism. The fact that Geiger raised the ire of the Christian theological community exposes their primary ambition to preserve Christianity's superlative position by sacrificing a commitment to scientific integrity. For Geiger's alternative picture of

Christian origins attacked the foundation of Christian institutional hegemony with a scientific rigor akin to Overbeck's. However, despite evidence of merit, German-Jewish researchers were blocked from formal academic careers. Nevertheless, as David Meyers elaborates, the political climate was shifting:

Despite this lack of acceptance by the German university system, Jewish scholars rarely wavered in their adherence to the ultimate standard of German (and gentile) validation: Wissenschaft. For them, Wissenschaft was more than scholarly method; it was an instrument of power through which to achieve social and intellectual acceptance. To question the utility or composition of this instrument was to diminish the capacity to reshape Judaism, and, hence, block full entrance to German society. (712)64

64 As Geiger makes clear in a letter to a colleague, dated 1865, his commitment to scientific integrity is a primary concern: "We are, of course, agreed on the definition of the nature of Wissenschaft. It is the sum total of the entire intellectual development of mankind, constantly striving for liberation from the limiting one-sided effects of transitory and strictly national phenomena. Both Christianity and Judaism have been effective factors in this process; but they have value only insofar as they have provided the human spirit with certain definite orientations, and have caused its inherent potentialities and vitality to come to fruition. If they lay claim to a permanent higher sort of validity, then they are unwissenschaftlich (unscientific)" (quoted in Wiener, 128).

61 What makes Geiger especially interesting for the current project is that he represents, par excellence, a progressive Reform Jewish thinker operating within the relaxing political strictures of a secularizing Christian society on one hand, and facing challenges from more traditionally minded German-Jews on the other. As noted in part one, the esotericism and protective interiorization that characterizes Jewish intellectual life in the medieval period begins to emerge with a new hopefulness in the Utopian speculations of the Romantic period.

We found in Overbeck a theologian who became increasingly embarrassed, disappointed and then utterly aghast at the inflated teachings and irresponsible sensationalism of his theological colleagues. In his urging for "silence and quiet," in addition to humility Overbeck displays a sober realism. He gives up on his dream to write a "profane history of the Church" due to the fact that, in the area of "primitive

Christianity" alone, the abundance of scholarly resources is simply overwhelming (185).

The point to take away here is that Overbeck does not understand how modern Christian theology coheres. That is, without being able to justify the staggering and disparate wealth of historical information with the foundational Christian claims, his sense of scholarly integrity compels him to give up his previous projects. As a result he is reduced to the unhappy task of criticizing those Christian intellectuals who refuse to sensibly govern themselves as responsible scholars.

Overbeck's efforts to check the unrestrained indulgences of modern theology would have been well met by Geiger, his contemporary. In a letter to the Orientalist Professor

Theodor Noldeke, Geiger writes:

65 As a result, the tone of Overbeck's writing is often witty, sarcastic and filled with reasonable incredulity. See, for example, page lOOff.

62 Our complaints at the unfair treatment of Judaism on the part of Christian scholars who are otherwise sympathetic are not based on any demand on our part that they should concern themselves more with its post-biblical literature.... We do not have the right to prescribe the course or direction their studies should take. But we do have the right to ask that those who are not familiar with this literature should either refrain from passing judgment on it or, at least, be circumspect in expressing their opinions. We do have the right to denounce the ignorance of those who, despite such ignorance, and with boundless arrogance and spite, air their derogatory opinions on such matters; and we are justified in banning such persons from the company of fair and honest scholars. Of course, those Christian scholars who engage in the study of the origins of Christianity are not free to choose whether or not to study the later developments of Judaism. If they are to acquire the proper judgment they must be familiar with the conditions which prevailed within Judaism at that period, and it seems only fair that they should make use of Jewish sources for that purpose...." (Wiener 135-36; my emphasis)

In line with what M. Goshen-Gottstein has called "Tanakh theology", perhaps Overbeck, whose area was indeed Christian origins, realizes the very fact to which Geiger points.

It stands to reason— given his scholarly integrity— that he abandons his dream to write a

"profane history of the Church" because of the limitations imposed by his lack of Hebrew and Talmudic education; for to write a profane history of the Church is to also write a history of Judaism— a history somehow free of apology and polemic. One might even argue— given the relinquishing of investigative autonomy by nineteenth-century

Protestant academic theology in Germany, in favor of ideology— that it is the Jewish

Reformers who are the authentic beneficiaries to the bold freedoms deriving from the sixteenth-century Europeans.

CONCLUSION

From our post-Holocaust vantage, it is easy to note that the Utopian speculations of the

Romantic period in Germany, displayed variously by both Overbeck and Geiger, were

In addition to the work of Goshen-Gottstein, see also Levenson.

63 dashed by the ultimate failure of Jewish-German symbiosis. However, Overbeck's extensive analysis of the failure of modern Christian theology finds a good deal of common ground with the progressive, scientific perspectives of Geiger. The intensity with which both figures simultaneously looked within their traditions, and also forward, beyond their traditions, is evidence of how open and prescient these transitional thinkers were. Their subtle historical and immanental analysis regarding the development of institutional ideology, and the early awareness of the commodification of knowledge and culture, brings them very much in line with the sullenly hopeful demands that characterize the interdisciplinary work of the Frankfurt School a generation later.67

Within the ambivalent intellectual context of German Romanticism, we have seen that

Overbeck is a model of scholarly discretion. While he avoids the poetic inventiveness characteristic of many of his Romantic contemporaries due to his commitment to being a critical historian, it cannot be said that he was unaffected by the Romantic 'new mythology'; for he demonstrates, perhaps tragically, a belief in the highest order of aesthetic achievement. Overbeck duly imposes the appropriate limits to his own historical research of Christian origins. Accordingly, although Overbeck never explicitly advocates a return to Judaism or 'Tanakh theology', unlike his thoughts concerning

Christianity, he certainly believed Judaism to be a viable religion. However, beyond the

In his introduction to The Frankfurt School on Religion Eduardo Mendieta writes: "For in the Frankfurt School's critical theory of religion we find a dual confrontation with the religious sources of modern, European, and Western Culture, sources that unleashed a fateful dialectic of introjected and sacrificial violence, and an attempt to rescue what makes the religious not just a source of alienation and negation of the world, but also of remembrance, hope, redemption, and Utopia. This dual perspective that seeks to render explicit the ways in which modernity, and the West in general, could not become what it became without the perennial confrontation among Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, opens up a line of dialogue with other religious world views and lifeworlds, in which religion can be both a source of reification and opium, but just the same, of memory, hope and yearning that may from within instigate new forms of Enlightenment and Cosmopolitanism" (11).

64 topic of religion, deriving from his searching commitment to a universal aesthetics, his writings show a sustained interest in the ethics of scholarship and political leadership.

Indeed, in his very personal and incisive literary style, he amply expresses his belief that the role of the intellectual is one of profound service to humanity— an ideal he was unhappily forced to defend in mundane fashion. Although his writing takes shape in accordance with the subject matter of theology and history, at root his natural concern is with the potential of the human intellect. Moving beyond Hegel, Overbeck offers no distractions and no consolation; he provides a service to those who would learn, and criticizes those who would detract from learning by fashioning ideologies and other illusions.

The general conclusion to be drawn from the evidence presented in this paper is that when Christian theologians have had the opportunity to avoid the fundamental theological problem the continued existence of an historical Judaism presents to

Christianity, they have done so. As I have demonstrated, the history of Christian

Hebraism can be summarily described in terms of expropriation, supercession and hegemony. We explored the roots of Christian reliance on ideological constructions of

Judaism to rationalize the superlative position of Christianity over all other religions and cultures, beginning with Judaism, from whose matrix Christianity emerged. The reified transformation of historical details, persuasively demonstrated by Halbwachs' innovative work in the ideological aspects of constructed collective Christian memory relating to the geography of the Holy Land, wields immense explanatory power in terms of identifying patterns in Christian ideological portrayals of Jews and Judaism. In the rare moments where historical circumstances demanded a less instrumental engagement with

65 Judaism— that is, in intellectual terms based in theoretical argument, rather than

simplistic reduction to base or circumstantial factors, such as demographic advantage—

Christians have largely responded with simple violence or increasingly elaborate

ideological forms of Christian protectionism.

In view of the difficulties involved in wrangling the ramifications of the tension

between the delay of the Parousia and the many trajectories of interpretive Pauline

universalism, it is a fairly trite observation to note that the Christian house is not in order.

This statement becomes less trite when placed in the context of an agonistic global arena.

For Christians to neglect the obvious fact that the universal validity of the term

"Christianity" is ambiguous— and often a constitutive factor in the compounding of

political conflict and ideological escape mechanisms— is an urgent problem that must be

seen to trump all other issues on the collective Christian agenda. To move forward in

division, with merely a token effort at reconciling this critically primary concern,

regionally and confessionally disparate communities contribute, perhaps archetypically

(given the predominance of "Christian" tradition in world affairs), to the demise of

popular confidence in leadership and public service generally, and in viable religious

leadership in particular.

Given the results of this paper, concerning the consistently oppressive patterns of

Christian theology, I am somewhat worried by the fact that there has been a great deal of

effort on the part of Christian theologians to find 'resources' within the Christian tradition that will reaffirm "orthodoxy", or offer new strategies for Christian

apologetics.68 Recently, the Christian theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been hailed as

68 A recent example is Thomas C. Oden, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity. New York: HarperCollins, 2003.

66 one who is "now in a position to make an unprecedented contribution to theology" (Ford,

272). David Ford, a founding Christian member in the Society for Scriptural

Reasoning— a society dedicated to the close reading of the scriptures of the Abrahamic faiths— cleverly omits a modifier that would identify the specific theology to which he refers. Unfortunately, while I do not question Bonhoeffer's good work in the area of

Jewish/Christian relations, he is inseparably associated with the Holocaust, and the debates over the circumstances relating to his philosemitism will be interminable.69 It is my feeling that the critical, immanental approach that Overbeck sets forth provides a promising direction to explore the formidable difficulties relating to Christian political theology and the many superficialities that artificially sustain the ecumenicity and pluralism in the field of biblical theology.70 The brief period between the French

Revolution and the Holocaust that attest the "glad tidings of emancipation" was, indeed, taken seriously by many Jews interested in the possibilities of the new deliberative ethos

(Benz, 96). In terms of Jewish/Christian relations, this provided a unique occasion for thought for the common, if secularized, resources to be reappraised without either party hiding behind language, interpretation or ideology but, rather, united in facing the challenge of new discoveries associated with the veiled promises of science and democracy.

As Ruth Zerner contends: "Although unequivocal in his stand against the exclusion of baptized Jews from the Christian ministry, Bonhoeffer penned several equivocal and problematic paragraphs in his first essay concerning church responses to the state's Jewish policies. Bonhoeffer completed this document, 'The Church and the Jewish Question', on 15 April 1933. As one of the first Christian theologians to sense the crucial centrality of Nazi anti-Semitism for Christian communities, bonhoeffer clearly separated the Christian church's attitude towards the new political problems of Jews in general from the special problems of baptized Jews within the Christian church. Moreover he thrust the entire Jewish policy first against the backdrop of church-state relations and then against a wider historical and eschatological horizon. In neither framework are his arguments convincing or compatible with contemporary, post-Holocaust political and theological perspectives" (193). 70 Cf: Levenson, 282.

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