Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 Chapter 1 - “Introduction” - Draft 2 Circulated for comment

If it had been the fate of [S. Ansky’s] generation to be torn between body and soul, between gentile and Jew, between tradition and modernity, then folklore held out the promise of reconciliation. In folklore one found no such thing as outright assimilation or national self-effacement. Here the Slavs and Jews were engaged in “mutual cultural influences,” with the folktales and folk beliefs of one being transmuted into the idiom of the other. - David G. Roskies

Viewing Jewish secularization from the perspective of the ethic of free individualism may add needed nuance to an understanding of Jewish acculturation and assimilation, which, in my opinion, is inadequately characterized as a process of self-abnegating accommodation to non-Jewish culture and society. - Paul Mendes-Flohr1

1. Preliminary considerations

1.1. Arguments and goals of the dissertation

I chose the above epigraphs in order to suggest two things. First, the bind (arguably a double bind) or crisis2 of the postemancipation Jew caught between Jewish tradition and Western

1. Both the Roskies and Mendes-Flohr quotations are from The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1992). The quotation from Roskies is found on 258 in his chapter, “S. Ansky and the Paradigm of Return” (brackets added). The quotation from Mendes-Flohr is found at 284n13 in his chapter, “The Retrieval of Innocence and Tradition: Jewish Spiritual Renewal in an Age of Liberal Individualism.” 2. I will use both terms interchangeably to denote the conflict of traditions and identities that played out in the lives of emancipation-era and postemancipation Jews. For an illustration from a linguistic history perspective of such a crisis as a double bind, see: Sander L. Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986). Gilman shows how assimilating German Jews first attempted to further their assimilation through the denigration of supposedly typical Jewish ways of speaking German (including Yiddish). Then, he shows how regret over assimilation was expressed by a celebration of the Ostjude, the ideal speaker of such Jewish languages, and a denigration of assimilated Jews. On Gilman’s account, the linguistically-expressed self- hatred of German Jews showed the extent to which they felt caught in an impossible situation.

- 1 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 modernity3 is a major and widespread theme of much recent Jewish thought. As both an assertion and a question (Can the Jews be Jews despite being modern Westerners?) it is major and widespread enough that both Roskies and Mendes-Flohr can assume that their readers are familiar with claims that postemancipation Jews are “torn,” “self-effacing,” or “self- abnegating.” In the second place, I chose these quotations because they provide examples of two (but not the only) possible responses to the narrative of this postemancipation bind: counternarratives of successful Jewish resistance (as evidenced by Roskies and as suggested by the rest of Mendes-Flohr’s chapter) and accounts of the bind that attempt to nuance or to dissolve it altogether. These responses point out the need for various sensitivities: to the important difference between influence and effacement; to the identity-affirming ways in which Jews have held onto their tradition in the face of challenges; and to the need for nuance in relation to a topic that has often occasioned bombastic rhetoric. Nevertheless, the persistence to the present of the quandary of the postemancipation Jew as a central question of Jewish thought argues against easy victories. Further, this persistence suggests that, simplis- tic or not, as question or assertion, this bind possesses sufficient power as a framing device helping Jews to make sense of, or at least query, their lives that it must be taken seriously.

In this dissertation I will attempt to take this bind seriously and to address it construc- tively by describing a trajectory in recent Jewish thought that I believe is helpful. This trajec- tory and the solution it points to emerge from readings of Jewish thinkers engaging with

Christian supersessionism, in general, but particularly with reformulations and reevaluations

3. I recognize that “Western modernity” and “the modern West” (and their derivative formulations) are potentially differentiable, and not only as a matter of accent. But both indicate the milieu of the focus of my concern in this dissertation: Ashkenazic Jewish thinkers of roughly the last hundred years.

- 2 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 of that doctrine by Christian thinkers over the last one hundred years.4 Though Jews have written a great deal about supersessionism (particularly after the Shoah), there has not been, to my knowledge, an attempt to construe such writings, as a genre, as a way that Jews have sought to come to grips with and address the bind of postemancipation existence. This then, is my most general claim: at least some Jewish writing about Christian supersessionism constitutes a valuable resource for efforts to address the bind so many Jews in the modern

4. Drawing on the work of R. Kendall Soulen, David Novak, and Michael Wyschogrod (see the end of this note for a select list of relevant works), I propose a generic understanding of Christian supersessionism as a belief that Judaism is: replaced by Christianity; made obsolete, irrelevant, or unnecessary for Jews by Christianity; decisively augmented or corrected by Christianity so that Judaism’s continued vitality and integrity after Jesus are wholly contingent on Jewish acceptance of Christianity. On a more abstract level, supersessionism can be understood as a belief that Christianity’s position vis-à-vis Judaism is one of, for both traditions, peculiar and singular normativity. That is, supersessionism is the construal of the Jewish-Christian relation such that Judaism’s character and truth are questions proper to and decided by Christianity. Supersessionism, then, can generate logics that serve as general frameworks regulating the interaction of Judaism and Christianity (and genealogically or analogically Jewish or Christian terms in ostensibly non-theological discourses). I am interested in, and will consider Jewish attention to, supersessionism on all of these levels, both as a concrete, explicit phenomenon, and as an abstract, implicit framework for thinking. I should note that there are Christian statements on Judaism that challenge one’s ability to distinguish between supersessionism and nonsupersessionism. For example, the many conciliatory statements by the hierarchy of the Catholic Church on Jews and Judaism are assumedly not meant to contradict the Good Friday prayer for the Jews in the Roman Missal. In such cases, a clarifying test might be whether a given position supports or rejects missionizing among contemporary Jews. Finally, it should be clear that I am interested in supersessionism’s criticism of Judaism—the communal life-forms of the Jews—rather than strong supersessionism’s condemnation of the Jews themselves. Relevant works by the authors cited above include, but are not limited to: R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996); David Novak, Talking with Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2005); David Novak, “The Covenant in Rabbinic Thought,” in Two Faiths, One Covenant? Jewish and Christian Identity in the Presence of the Other, ed. Eugene B. Korn and John T. Pawlikowski (Lanham, Maryland: Sheed and Ward / Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 65-80; Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations, ed. R. Kendall Soulen (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2004).

- 3 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 West feel themselves trapped in, or are concerned with.5 The Jewish writing that answers to this description is distinguished by two claims that it makes, usually implicitly, about

Judaism’s relationship to Christian supersessionism. These claims warrant the description of these texts as diagnostically and therapeutically oriented towards the bind of the modern,

Western Jew in its particular character, as they understand it. The first claim is descriptive, while the second comprises description (of a desideratum in Jewish and Christian thought) with implications that are prescriptive, or constructive, in regard to the problematic aspects of the existential situation of the modern, Western Jew.

The first claim these texts make is that the bind of the postemancipation Jew is at least partly attributable to the influence of supersessionism on internally-oriented Jewish thought.

That is, they suggest that Jews have employed—sometimes, but not always, unconsciously— supersessionist logics in their thinking about Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness.6 Second, these texts testify to a conviction that an important means of addressing the impact of supersession- ism on Jewish life and thought is the promulgation of a viable nonsupersessionism. By viable I mean a nonsupersessionism that finds its warrants within the Christian traditions that produced supersessionism, and that is or can be accepted by a large number of Christians.

5. Of course, Jewish thinking about Christian supersessionism can also have other aims, such as changes in the politico-communal dynamics of the Jewish-Christian relationship. 6. I will clarify, as I move through the readings, just what the authors I examine take the effects of this influence to be, and how these effects might be distinguished from the effects of other types of Christian influence on Judaism, as well as from other types of Jewish self- effacement. Preliminarily, I would suggest that supersessionist influences are distinguished specifically from these other phenomena by their reliance for persuasiveness on a framing logic of essential and zero-sum competition between Judaism and Christianity. Further, they result in a situation in which the thoroughness of Jewish self-reflective thought is determined by whether that thought has encompassed reflection on Christianity. When one tradition only becomes intelligible in light of the other, a fine line between influence (the inflection of native contents) and displacement has been crossed.

- 4 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 This viable nonsupersessionism is important because it can show that, insofar as modern,

Western civilization is genealogically Christian (the extent to which I would argue that it is is discussed in section 2.3), that civilization is not essentially antagonistic towards, or competitive with, Judaism, and may actually favor its survival. Thus, resolving the bind and addressing the effects of decisions made under the assumption of its being effective, compelling, and inevitable become possibilities. I will say a bit more about this now, but it will be fleshed out with a great deal of specificity in the readings I undertake in later chapters.

The notion that Judaism and Christianity are not competitive is the core of the constructive proposal discernible in the work of the authors I examine, considered individu- ally or collectively. Its substance is—depending on each author’s emphases and assump- tions—that Jewish praxis, communal organization, characteristic forms of thought, and cultural values (to name only a few relevant areas that have been critiqued from supersession- ist perspectives) can exist alongside Christian alternatives. Not only can they exist alongside

Christian alternatives without being necessarily subject to criticism on the basis of those alternatives, Christians as well as Jews have reasons internal to their traditions for believing that they ought not be displaced or even normed by those Christian alternatives. Taking a description of the Jewish-Christian relationship as noncompetitive as a new point of departure, the Jewish thinkers I will read are able to reimagine modern Judaism, the modern

West, Christianity, and the relations between all three as allowing for simultaneous Jewish integration into and difference from Jews’ extra-Jewish contexts. This is, so far as I can see, the proposal on whose success hinges the success of those conceptualizations of Judaism that have, in contradistinction to the Ḥaredim following the Ḥazon Ish (Avrohom Yeshaya

- 5 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 Karelitz, 1878-1953), urged Jews to live as Jews not only within (geographically and tempo- rally) the modern West, but as modern Westerners.7

These, then, are my goals in this dissertation: to argue for the generic coherence and worth of a particular way of addressing the crisis that many have perceived among modern,

Western Jews, and to describe the contours and argue for the success of the constructive approach to resolving this crisis that emerges out of that genus of texts. My arguments do not involve claims made on my own behalf about the actual conditions under which Jews and

Christians live as Jews and Christians and relate to each other. Rather, I am making arguments about arguments that others have made. I assume these arguments and their objects are worth talking about, not least because so many before me have found them powerful, persuasive, and existentially relevant. Perhaps these many, along with the authors I will read, have been mistaken: there is no crisis at the heart of modern Judaism. What has been misinterpreted as a crisis is explainable in terms of other phenomena that are indifferent to Jews and Judaism. Against this suggestion I would argue that, whatever else Judaism is (the complicated business of defining Judaism will be discussed, if only briefly, in section 2.2), it is at least a tradition of inherited concern with a constellation of texts and concepts: Tanakh,

7. An examination of the relations between modernity and Christianity, on the one hand, and Ḥaredi Judaism, on the other, is beyond the scope of this dissertation. However, I take it that the Ḥazon Ish’s response to modernity—absolute rejection and self-segregation along with the organization of community around the attempt, which can never be wholly successful, to treat received texts as purely heteronomous authorities—is an at least possibly successful method of resisting non-Jewish influences. Thus, although Ḥaredi Judaism can be understood as a modern phenomenon, Ḥaredim could argue on their own behalf that it is so only negatively. That is, it represents a rejection of modernity dependent on modernity’s advent, but its constitutive positions owe nothing more to modernity. Lawrence Kaplan, “The Ḥazon Ish: Ḥaredi Critic of Traditional Orthodoxy,” in The Uses of Tradition, [Page range], presents a concise summary of the Ḥazon Ish’s particular distillation of Ḥaredi Judaism.

- 6 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 Mishnah, Talmud, halakhah (Jewish law), brit (covenant), Israel (the land and people), and

Moshiach (the messiah). The thinkers I interrogate concern themselves with that tradition and have in turn become links in the chain of that tradition. There are many arguments I could make for why one should take their arguments and assumptions seriously; why their belief— shared with many other moderns across the ideological and observational spectrums—in a crisis of modern Jewish self-negation is not prima facie absurd; and why their proposed remedies are worth consideration. But I think it suffices to say that such a belief has become one of the dominant frameworks of Jewish self-reflection within the tradition. It has been endorsed, denied, and inflected the tradition in numerous ways (as the example of the

Ḥaredim shows). To think about the belief of the authorities I concern myself with in this crisis, and their efforts to move past it, is the prerogative and duty of their inheritors. To those who deny their arguments not only success but a basis in fact, I can only say that they have made other voices in the tradition authoritative (which is not necessarily to say normative) for themselves. I do not think one can be concerned with the authors I read without taking these questions seriously, but if one is willing to refuse these authors as constitutive parts of the tradition one receives, one can do so. To overcome such a refusal, I can only try to make my account of their incisiveness and the existential power of their arguments as persuasive as possible.

1.2. Methods and procedures of this chapter and the dissertation

In the remainder of this chapter, I will attempt two things. The second of these will be to present and respond to what I take to be some of the more serious objections to which this project is liable. First, however, I will consider recent iterations of scholarly positions that

- 7 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 have contributed to critical understandings of a crisis of postemancipation Judaism. These positions should not be understood as monolithic in all respects, but as spectrums of opinion that have in common certain concerns, questions, and very general assumptions and conclu- sions. The positions I will examine are: (1) the ascription to anti-Judaism of a role of central importance in the development of Western, Christian civilization; (2) an understanding of postemancipation Jews as vulnerable to adopting Christian categories and habits thought, the implications of which for Judaism have not always been clear, and that often proved hard to resist once established in Jewish discourses; and (3) understandings of ostensibly secular modernity as both deeply shaped by Christianity and as originarily deceptive about this relationship. The importance of this third position for my argument is largely a function of its ability to help explain the persistence of anti-Judaism as seen in (1) and the trouble Jews have had understanding and resisting Christian influences as seen in (2).

I do not describe these positions, and the scholarship I take to be exemplary of them, because they directly advance my larger claim about supersessionism-focused Jewish litera- ture or the claims I find in that literature in its descriptive and prescriptive moments. Rather,

I take it that these positions concern what the Jewish authors I will read in the chapters that follow consider to be ingredients of the situation of crisis to which they are responding. That is, these positions overlap in or converge on a place in which Judaism is extremely vulnerable to the sort of crisis of self-negation with which the Jewish authors I examine will be concerned. I have highlighted positions (1), (2), and (3) because I take them to be the most relevant background to—and thus helpful in the explication of—the concerns of the texts I will read in the main body of the dissertation. As such, I will treat discussion of these positions—in more or less explicit and critical formulations—as signposts indicating that an

- 8 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 author is in the neighborhood of, and perhaps dealing with, the arguments and claims that are my focus. The pieces of scholarship I will discuss as exemplary of these positions have been selected because they are by respected scholars and are influential and rigorous works that reflect important facets of the current state of scholarly discussion of their respective topics.

In the chapters that follow, I will examine correlated explorations of supersessionism from the Jewish and Christian sides. That is, each chapter will explore a Christian formula- tion of supersessionism, along with the work of at least one Jewish thinker who reflects on or responds to that formulation. The thinkers discussed will include: Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy and Franz Rosenzweig (Chapter 2); Karl Barth and Michael Wyschogrod (Chapter 3); post-

Nostra Aetate Catholic theologians and Jewish thinkers who have engaged in dialogue with them (Chapter 4); and Christian postliberal theologians and David Novak and Peter Ochs

(Chapter 5). The chapters will thus move forward in a roughly chronological manner, which corresponds to a gradual softening of the supersessionisms expressed and the emergence of variously formulated nonsupersessionisms. Each correlation was chosen because it represents, on at least one of its sides, an important development in Christian thinking about superses- sionism and/or Jewish reflection on, and thinking in light of, supersessionism. The texts read for any one author are those most important to that author’s work in relevant areas.

In the last chapter, I will turn to British theologian John Milbank and the Radical

Orthodoxy movement with which he is associated. I will ask whether emergent Protestant and Catholic nonsupersessionisms can find support within a movement that has at times been explicit about its supersessionism.8 This will allow me to test the viability of at least some of

8. [Citations to Milbank and Pickstock on supersessionism.]

- 9 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 those nonsupersessionisms. Further, it could open up new possibilities for Jewish thought in conversation with Radical Orthodoxy, to which certain strands of contemporary Jewish thought (e.g., the Textual Reasoning movement) bear some similarities.

2. Relevant scholarly positions

The subjects of the historiographical positions described (through the discussion of examples) in this section are taken to be related to, or constitutive of, the situations the Jewish authors I will consider in later chapters perceive as facing their contemporary Jews and Judaism, and to which situations they react with both diagnoses and constructive proposals. My aim here is not to prove through credible or persuasive reconstructions of historiographical arguments that these Jewish thinkers were right to be concerned; that such a situation or situations

(however they individually construe them) did or do exist. Rather, I want to indicate widely acknowledged elements of such situations of crisis, so that assumptions of, or allusions to, these situations are more readily recognizable in later chapters. This will be helpful, because the thinkers discussed in those chapters are sometimes more obviously concerned with what ought to be done to rescue or revive Judaism—viz., by addressing supersessionist influences— than how Judaism has come to the point of needing rescuing or reviving. Setting out these elements of crisis individually will help to provide some historiographical and critical context for the theological texts I take up later.

Given the limited (though nonetheless important) work that these historiographical arguments will do in relation to the rest of the project, I will not attempt to reconstruct them fully, or step-by-step. Instead, I will present their major claims and the indispensable steps of

- 10 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 their progression so that these may be recognized in the texts under consideration in later chapters.

2.1. David Nirenberg and the fundamentality of anti-Judaism

I begin my adumbration of relevant historiographical arguments with anti-Judaism and the recognition it has garnered as a central value, or framework, guiding (which is not to say determining) Western, Christian thought.9 I do so in part because anti-Judaism and superses- sionism enjoy an intimate, if ambiguous relationship, and in part because it is the mostly failed attempt at overcoming anti-Judaism through emancipation that represents something of a beginning to the problematic dynamics of the situation facing modern Jews and modern

Judaism. This latter consideration will be explored throughout this section. As to the former, I will only briefly outline my understanding of the relationship between the two phenomena and indicate my reasons for treating the one here, while the other is the main focus of the dissertation.

In truth, I am not confident that the relationship between supersessionism and anti-

Judaism can be defined to the satisfaction of all. It seems most likely to me that supersession- ism can be construed as a species of anti-Judaism,10 if only because the claim that something is

9. The extent to which I would want to claim that Western thought remains Christian, even into secular modernity, will become more readily apparent over the course of this section. For now, though, I note that my qualification as Christian of the thinking to which anti-Judaism is central is meant to indicate both this contention, as well as the following consideration: I am interested in Ashkenazic Jewish thinkers who hail from areas of the Western world in which a majority of the population has been Christian for much of the last two millennia. Certainly, anti-Judaism played a role in Western, Muslim societies, but the Jews who lived in those societies have a very different history and were subjected to different influences than the ones whose texts I will be reading. Thus, “Christian” is in part a geopolitical marker, even if it is also a genealogical marker. 10. In which case, the specific difference of supersessionism vis-à-vis the genus of anti-Judaism

- 11 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 rightly displaced necessarily stigmatizes that in virtue of which it is displaced (i.e., superses- sionism implies at least a minimal level of anti-Judaism). On the other hand, not all of the anti-Judaisms that have persisted alongside Christian supersessionism can be easily reduced to the terms of the latter discourse. In other words, all supersessionism is anti-Jewish, but not all anti-Judaism is supersessionist. And of course, the anti-Judaisms of multiple cultures preceded the articulation of Christian supersessionism.11 But it should also be noted that supersession- ism need not be thoroughly anti-Jewish: it can involve positive evaluations of Judaism as having prepared the way for, or as worth following with, Christianity. The situation, then, is fairly confused. Would anti-Judaism have persisted in Christian societies but for the impor- tance of supersessionism to their self-understanding? Might supersessionism have been discarded but for the strength of anti-Judaism? These questions are interesting, but probably unanswerable. And so one is left to say, I think, that anti-Judaism and supersessionism have mutually affirmed and mutually justified one another over much of Christian history. At times they have been clearly differentiable, and at times they have almost disappeared into the unity of one phenomenon, but they have almost always prepared the ground for one another and perpetuated one another.

But why, then, if anti-Judaism is the broader phenomenon and relevant to the situa- tions of crisis many have perceived in modern Judaism, am I not examining how Jews and

Christians have grappled with it (as opposed to supersessionism) in the chapters that follow? would be that, while anti-Judaism generally denotes opposition to Judaism and “the Jewish,” supersessionism denotes a narrower relationship of opposition as judgment and displacement (or transcendence) involving, uniquely, Judaism and Christianity. 11. On Egyptian and Greek Egyptian anti-Judaism, see: David Nirenberg, “The Ancient World: Egypt, Exodus, Empire,” chap. 1 in Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013).

- 12 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 The short answer is that recent Jewish theologians, as they have tried to reconstruct the

Jewish-Christian relationship and diagnose and address the challenges facing modern

Judaism have done a great deal of significant work by thinking about supersessionism, specifically, rather than anti-Judaism, generally. Reasons for this preference might include the fact that supersessionism is the more concrete, less diverse phenomenon. It is obviously theological in ways that anti-Judaism is not always. Finally, supersessionism’s roots are more clearly noetic (or perhaps the better word is textual) than those of much of anti-Judaism, making the former more susceptible of being contested intellectually. Whatever the reasons may be, Jewish theologians have responded with such creative force to Christian discussions of supersessionism as to justify the treatment of those responses as a unique genus of Jewish thought.

The discussion to this point in the subsection has merely been a prolegomenon to the introduction of David Nirenberg’s study of anti-Judaism, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition.12 I selected this text as a representative exploration of the history and contours of anti-Judaism because it is, at this time, arguably the broadest and most rigorous statement on the subject.

With regard to what has come before in this subsection, I think Nirenberg would agree with much of it. He seems to treat supersessionism as a species of anti-Judaism, and even, one could argue, suggests a mutually-perpetuating relationship between supersessionism and broader anti-Judaism. (Nirenberg discusses supersessionism in the following places, inter alia:

83, 363, and 421.) What follows is a concise summary of those aspects of Nirenberg’s

12. Parenthetical references in this section are to this work.

- 13 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 argument that bear on the question of how anti-Judaism was transmitted to secular, modern, majority Christian, Western societies.

Nirenberg begins Anti-Judaism by clarifying that he is writing a history of ideas in which Judaism and anti-Judaism are broad categories through which people “make sense of and criticize their world” (3).13 He notes: “I have set out to write a history of how critical thought has been produced by thinking about Judaism, and has therefore also generated the

‘Jewishness’ it criticizes in the world” (5). Throughout, he cautions that although realized iterations of anti-Judaism are made available as possibilities by prior iterations, and in turn make possible later iterations, the tracing of such relationships of possibility is the limit of a responsible history of ideas. Arguing for the necessary outcome, for complete determination or causation, is on his account ruled out, just as he rules out arguing for the potential complete independence of ideas from an historical context (see, e.g., 10 and 469).

This is not, however, to say that some ideas might not become, for whatever reason, more determinative of later outcomes; that the way in which an idea is realized in critical thought might not make it more likely for its influence to predominate in later generations relative to competitive ideas. Thus, although Nirenberg gives the reader a glimpse of a

Christianity that might have been—and been relatively less anti-Jewish—in his consideration of the Didache (91), it is the normativity achieved by the writings of the Apostle Paul and the

Gospel authors that ensured that anti-Judaism would not be “some archaic or irrational closet in the vast edifices of Western thought. It was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed” (6).14

13. Cf. n. 4, above, where I discuss supersessionism as an abstract framework for thought. 14. As I have noted, Nirenberg traces the history of Egyptian and Greek-Egyptian anti- Judaism in the opening chapters of Anti-Judaism. While the influence of these traditions on

- 14 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 Nirenberg is careful to point out that Paul has a nuanced, complex understanding of, and relationship to, Judaism. What is of decisive importance, however, is that “Paul took all the errors of relating incorrectly to the fleshy things (texts, bodies, objects) of this world and provided for them—whether intentionally or unintentionally—a ‘Jewish’ name” (60).

Nirenberg reads Paul as making Judaism the originary oppositional element in Christianity.

To the extent that getting one’s relationships with these fleshy things right is central (whether as effect or cause) to Christian conceptions of salvation, Judaism becomes the Christian prototype of soteriological failure; the prototype of that which is to be resisted and feared.

And if Paul can be read in a nuanced way (cf. 84), he did not often receive such readings.

Instead, and perhaps as a result of his being read in the context of a canon that came to include the Acts of the Apostles and the Gospels, Paul became a foundational authority of

Western anti-Judaism.15 He made Judaism a fundamental category for ontology, epistemol- early Christian apologists cannot be ruled out, they do not have the perennially direct impact on Western thought that Paul and the Gospel authors and their major interpreters have had. For that reason, my account of Nirenberg’s argument and its significance for my own argument begins with early Christianity. For other works that discuss anti-Judaism as a central component of Western and/or Christian thought, see: J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Yeshayahu Leibowitz, “‘The Common Judeo-Christian Heritage’,” in Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 256-262; [I will add more here]. 15. Nirenberg notes that the Jews of the Gospel of John “are as close as canonical scripture ever comes to the embodiment—Satan aside—of a purely negative principle” (82f.). For an alternative viewpoint that argues that John cannot “be called polemically anti-Jewish,” see John McHugh, “In Him was Life: John’s Gospel and the Parting of the Ways,” in Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways A.D. 70-135 (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 123-158. The quotation is from 158. A similar defense is made in the same volume by James D. G. Dunn, this time on behalf of the entire New Testament (“The Question of Anti- semitism in the New Testament Writings of the Period,” 177-211). These arguments by Dunn and McHugh bring helpful nuance to the issue. Dunn, in particular, makes the important points that anti-Judaism may be a hard charge to bring against texts that were written when the boundaries of Judaism were far from settled, and by authors who might have identified or wanted to be identified with at least some of the communities laying claim to the name “Jew” (210). Nevertheless, and however the New Testament authors might have understood

- 15 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 ogy, and hermeneutics (60), and gave a permanently negative connotation to the verb “to

Judaize” (489n20), which would become a mainstay of intra-Christian debate.

Whether or not Paul deserves the blame for such a legacy, or has been the victim of bad readings, Judaism was a central category in his thought. And given his position of authority within the Christian tradition, he made it more likely that it would be central to that tradition and the civilization it molded, as well.

Nirenberg traces the perennial, but always contextually-inflected, realizations of anti-

Judaism from Paul to the post-Shoah period. He examines the work of church fathers such as

Justin Martyr and Augustine, the latter of whom would be an authority for much medieval political policy concerning the Jews (132). He shows how, in the wake of the church fathers,

Judaism became an all-encompassing hermeneutical framework, capable of judging every reading, every reader, and “all of human history” (104). He describes the effects of successful

European attempts to create societies free of Jews: counter-intuitively, the absence or decrease of actual Jews increased paranoia concerning the susceptibility of Christians to Judaism,

Jewishness, and Judaizing, as the examples of fifteenth-century Spain and Shakespeare’s

Merchant of Venice testify (see, e.g., 236 and 298f., respectively). And he shows how, in those societies where Jews had not yet been banished, or where they had been allowed back in, the

Jews became living, breathing framing devices for debates about the limits of sovereignty and citizenship (191-200 and 365). Crucially for our purposes, Nirenberg describes how anti-

Judaism made the leap during the Enlightenment into the sciences, and thereby became a constitutive element in the debate over new ways of thinking, even as anti-Judaism itself themselves and their writing, their texts would become the foundations of a tradition of Christian anti-Judaism. Thus Nirenberg’s characterization of them as part of that tradition (in which he is joined by many scholars) stands.

- 16 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 received the scientific treatment and its imprimatur of universal, objective, rational thought

(see, e.g., 390, 405, and 421). Nirenberg’s narrative reaches its climax with his account of how the Shoah was made possible—but again, not necessitated—by the history of interrelated anti-Judaisms that had preceded it (458f.), and had perhaps achieved an unsurpassable level of thoroughness when even certain mathematical theories were designated as “Jewish” (452).

As he presses on into the post-war period, Nirenberg broaches, not for the first time, but perhaps most extensively, several issues that are central to this project. Here he considers

Hannah Arendt, a paragon of twentieth-century critical thought who nonetheless recapitu- lates anti-Jewish tropes in her own thinking. As he has with Marx, whom Nirenberg discusses in the opening pages of the book and again in his chronological context, Nirenberg wonders why Arendt “and a great many other highly intelligent people (including many Jews)” did not perceive the dubiousness of the anti-Jewish ideas with which they worked (465). His answer is that the fundamental concepts they employed had been “themselves produced by a history of criticizing Judaism” (465). In twentieth-century critical thought, as it had been for most of the previous two thousand years, anti-Judaism was a foundational assumption. It was the basic, that behind which thought could not go because it was thought’s origin. This situation is testified to, beyond its resistance to criticism, by its perennial nature and place in the founding texts of Christianity.

Over the course of Anti-Judaism, Nirenberg shows how a concept with theological warrants in a particular civilization (anti-Judaism being his primary concern, but the same could be said of supersessionism, in its more abstract instantiations) could become so deeply embedded in that civilization’s fundament that its use could extend to the least obvious of contexts (places in which there were no Jews) and the least obvious of users (those who were

- 17 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 openly antagonistic towards the theology which had first made use of it, and those who were its victims). Like those of Michael Allen Gillespie and John Milbank, whom we will encounter later, Nirenberg’s argument can be understood as a case for the pervasiveness of theology.

Part of the significance of Nirenberg’s account of theology’s pervasiveness is its suggestion regarding the perverse self-relationships modernity has the potential to establish in those Jews incorporated into it through emancipation. Insofar as modernity is constitutively deceptive about the theologies it encodes (as we will see),16 those Jews would be made modern through their adoption of discourses and conceptual frameworks that presented their anti-Jewish assumptions and content not as matters of debatable or doubtable faith, but as matters of objective, atemporal, universal science and fact. In the resultant situation it would be hard for

Jews not to feel essentially torn or self-conflicted about what seem to be nearly irreconcilable commitments (to Judaism and modernity), and very difficult for them to discover and resist the causes of this conflict.

In the next section, I will attempt to illustrate this point by looking at a case-study.

Leora Batnitzky’s How Judaism Became a Religion describes Jewish susceptibility to a modern concept that disguises its theological specificity in a discourse of universality.17 More impor- tantly, it illustrates by examples just how hard it has been for Jewish thinkers to plumb the full depth of that discourse and resist a concept many understand as irreconcilable with the

Judaism to which they are committed.

16. See especially section 2.3.1, below. 17. Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).

- 18 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 2.2. Leora Batnitzky and overcoming Jewish “religion”

The second scholarly position I will explore, as mentioned in the preceding paragraph, is the idea that postemancipation Jews would find themselves under pressure to conform to, or adopt, the elements of Christian theology which the ostensibly neutral, secular spaces of modernity contained, or were even constituted by. I have chosen Leora Batnitzky’s book,

How Judaism Became a Religion, as a recent, widely-read example of the position.18

Batnitzky’s argument in How Judaism Became a Religion is based on two assumptions.

Neither assumption is wholly uncontroversial, but both are widely shared. The first is that the modern concept of religion is a Protestant theological innovation that is conducive to the perpetuation of the modern nation-state’s understanding of the form and extent of its politics and sovereignty (1 and 26). The thinkers central to the rise of this conception are, in her account, Schleiermacher and Kant (7). The concept of religion she understands them to argue for makes religion (a) a distinct sphere of life, differentiable from other, secular spheres, and (b) describes the religious sphere as primarily a matter of private belief, with any public components being unnecessary, though possibly helpful, auxiliaries to private belief. This definition of religion as private allows for direct relationships between all individuals and the sovereign, and clears a space in which the state is the primary context and arbiter of matters affecting the public (or publics). Finally, in keeping with modernity’s tendency to represent its contents as aspects of universal, essential humanity, this conception of religion has often been treated not as an product of German Protestantism, but as an objective understanding of true religion that, in virtue of their correspondence, confirms a particular understanding of

Protestant Christianity as the epitome of human spirituality post factum (1 and 26). The impor-

18. Citations to this work in this section will be given parenthetically in the text.

- 19 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 tance of this assumption is that Jews desirous of emancipation and its benefits would be under pressure to describe Judaism as conforming to this notion of religion, so as to make clear that the loyalty they owed to the state as citizens would be undivided (cf. 18).19 Many, probably most, would do so, but not always with an understanding of the potential of that move for remaking Judaism in the (formal) image of a particular kind of Christianity.

Batnitzky’s second assumption is that prior to emancipation (which she uses to mark the beginning of Jewish modernity) Judaism was never understood as a religion (1f.). That is,

Judaism has not, on her account, ever been a religion, and the religion that goes by the name of Judaism in modernity is something essentially different from its claimed antecedents.

Though she does not give their combination a generic name, Batnitzky assumes that Judaism has always had what would be called in modern terms political, cultural, and religious aspects

(2). In modernity, however, Judaism has conformed, or been made to conform, to the liberal

Protestant model by denying the first aspect and isolating and celebrating the last aspect.20

19. Cf. “The Assembly of Jewish Notables Answers to Napoleon (1806),” in The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History, ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 128-133. This extraordinarily explicit document, which confirms much of Batnitzky’s argument, shows the French Jewish community reimagining itself and Judaism as a whole in conformity with the civil liberties they anticipated. 20. Jewish culture, as not necessarily competitive with either the sovereignty-claims of the modern nation-state or the description of Judaism as a religion, is less crucial to her narrative. However, it does, on her account provide modern Jews with an option for creating a Judaism that is not a religion by transforming Judaism’s theological contents into cultural ones (that are, I would argue, no less theological for denying, or making no reference to, God). Batnitzky includes her exploration of this option in the half of the book dedicated to successful rejections of the categorization of Judaism as a religion—a move that I would argue is unwarranted. Given her assumption that Judaism is an integrated unity of culture, politics, and religion/faith, “Judaism-as-a-culture,” and the explicitly non-theological Jewish nationalisms she explores alongside Jewish culture, are not viable alternatives to Judaism-as-a- religion, by her own lights.

- 20 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 Before exploring modern Jewish rejections of Judaism qua religion, Batnitzky spends the first part—and majority—of the book describing affirmations of Judaism’s status as a religion. For some thinkers she discusses (such as Moses Mendelssohn [1729-1786] and

Abraham Geiger [1810-1874]), affirming Judaism’s status as a religion is unproblematic. That is, they affirm Judaism’s being a religion explicitly and their other commitments (cultural, political, or theological) are consistent with this affirmation. For most of the thinkers she discusses, however, their affirmation is problematic for one of two reasons. For one group,

Batnitzky interprets their work as affirming Judaism’s status as a religion, despite their claims to the contrary. This group—which includes figures such as Samson Raphael Hirsch

(1808-1888) and Hermann Cohen (1842-1918)—reject the description of Judaism as a

“religion,” mainly because of the term’s Christian, specifically Protestant, connotations

(Batnitzky discusses Hirsch at 41f. and Cohen at 55). Batnitzky claims that the members of this group, however, implicitly affirm Judaism’s status as a religion by affirming components

(a) and (b) of her definition of religion as described above. Members of the other group— which includes Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993) and Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903-1994)— affirm that Judaism is a religion and accept, with varying degrees of explicitness, components

(a) and (b), even though doing so is inconsistent with other commitments they hold, such as differentiating themselves absolutely from liberal Jewish opponents (Batnitzky discusses

Soloveitchik at 64 and Leibowitz at 65-68).

Batnitzky’s account is not unproblematic. As I have noted, her apparent belief that cultural and national Judaisms successfully resist Judaism’s categorization as a religion is inconsistent with her contention that Judaism is, properly, an integrated whole comprised of cultural, political, and religious elements. Her own account would suggest that cultural,

- 21 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 nationalistic, and religious Judaisms repeat the same formal error. Further, her claim that a

Judaism that is not politically competitive with the modern nation-state is necessarily discon- tinuous with traditional Judaism seems to ignore the possibility that politics may come in a diverse number of forms, and that an authentic Jewish politics (whatever that may be), might simply not be competitive with the modern nation-state. I am not suggesting that this is the case, only that it is a possibility worth exploring. Most problematic, however, is her assump- tion that Judaism has always been a unity of political, cultural, and religious elements.

Something like this unity certainly characterized medieval, European Judaism, with its high levels of segregation from Christian populations, corporate politics, and judicial autonomy.

And there were periods of time in ancient Jewish (as opposed to Hebrew or Israelite) history when political institutions (e.g., the high priesthood) existed that sought to extend their reach to be coextensive with the worldwide population of Jews, whether defined by descent, obser- vance, or confession.21 But it is equally the case that, for almost as long as the ideas “Jew,”

“Jewishness,” and “Judaism” have existed, their meanings have been complicated by liminal cases who are Jewish in one way, but not another; who are politically Jews (i.e., Judaeans) but do not worship the Jewish God; who worship that God but are not circumcised or descended from Jews; who are descended from Jews but attempt to live as non-Jews.22 As a result, there

21. Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1999), 70-75 22. Shaye Cohen’s excellent book, The Beginnings of Jewishness, is devoted to examining the many permutations of Jewishness and aspects of Jewish identity from, roughly, shortly before Hasmonean rule was established until the completion of the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds (although he does discuss the handling of certain Talmudic passages by medieval rabbinic decisors). His argument anticipates Batnitzky when he succinctly notes that “The uncertainty of Jewishness in antiquity curiously prefigures the uncertainty of Jewishness in modern times” (8).

- 22 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 have always been attempts to break Jewishness and Judaism down into parts.23 And for almost as long, people have been wondering and disagreeing about which of those parts make the

Jew.24

Batnitzky’s claims about Judaism as it existed before emancipation are complicated by a longer historical perspective. There have been times when Jewishness and Judaism have been understood in roughly religious or confessional terms, as distinct from, and in isolation from, political, cultural, or biological denotations of Jewishness and Judaism. She is probably right, however, that before emancipation Judaism had not been understood as a religion according to the modern conception of religion, as a matter of spiritual inwardness and belief.25 It was the adoption of this conception of religion that would prove hugely contentious in intra-Jewish debates over what Judaism’s relation to modernity should be. And further, it would prove hugely problematic for Jewish thinkers unsure of what the religiousification of

23. Jewishness and Judaism are differentiable concepts, but their differences are not relevant in this context, in which the similarities between the dissociable structures they have been assumed by many to have are paramount. 24. The Roman collection of the fiscus Judaicus, a tax levied on Jews as punishment for the rebellion of 66-73/74 C.E. (dating the end of the rebellion to the fall of Masada), makes an interesting example. From 71-96 C.E., under the Flavian emperors, the tax was collected from all those who could be considered ethnically Judaean, including those who had apostatized. In 96, under the Emperor Nerva, the ethnic test for liability to the tax was dropped in favor of a religious test. From then on, all those who worshipped the God whose Temple had been in Jerusalem were expected to pay, whether they were ethnically or politically Judaean, or not. See: Martin Goodman, “Diaspora Reactions to the Destruction of the Temple,” in Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways A.D. 70 to 135 ed. James D. G. Dunn (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1999), 31-34. 25. Cf. Cohen, Beginnings of Jewishness, 148-62, on perceptions in antiquity of the non- Jewishness of those who only believed as the Jews believed, and the possible or definite Jewishness of those who took part publicly in Jewish religious and communal practices.

- 23 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 Judaism meant for their tradition, or whether there were conceptual alternatives to hand with which they could resist that process.

Batnitzky’s account, then, is valuable for at least two reasons. First, she clearly shows that Jewish emancipation into modernity put pressure on Jews to adopt modern discourses and conceptual frameworks that were shaped by Christian theology and significantly different from, perhaps even incompatible with, prior conceptualizations and instantiations of Judaism.

I would emphasize here her own emphasis on the difference emancipation made to the

Jewish community. The questions, Why remain Jewish? and, What is Judaism? suddenly became questions that needed answering and that anyone could answer. And many did answer them through creative reinterpretations of Judaism made possible, in part, by new, unprecedented levels of intimacy between Jews and Christians, Judaism and Christianity. A radical assimilation of Judaism to Christianity became possible that would have been prevented by both Jewish and Christian authorities before emancipation and the end of

Jewish corporate politics. Second, these discourses and conceptual frameworks proved hard to resist. Their claims to universal validity discouraged the formulation of alternatives, and the extent to which they were widely implemented made the production of alternatives difficult, and the subject of contention and uncertainty when it was attempted.26 In short, Batnitzky’s

26. A good example is Mordecai Kaplan’s Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life (New York: Schocken, 1967). Kaplan suggests that Judaism be reimagined as a civilization composed of, for example, religious and linguistic elements and folkways (such as musical and literary traditions) as a way of restoring to Judaism the holistic integrity that it lost when it became a modern religion. Kaplan’s civilizational Judaism dissents from Batnitzky’s conception by not being politically competitive with the United States’ government. Further, just as Kaplan criticizes all of the streams of Jewish life in his contemporary United States, his attempt to redefine Judaism has not met with much success (although some of his practical suggestions concerning Jewish communal centers have been influential). Finally, it seems likely that Kaplan’s notion of the “civilization” repeats what he takes the failure of the idea of Judaism-as-a-religion to be: shoehorning Judaism into a

- 24 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 discussion of the ways in which the redefinition of Judaism as a modern religion has divided

Jews and led to less, rather than more, clarity about what Judaism is confirms Nirenberg’s claim that within modernity it can be difficult to critique or resist basic concepts Jews ought to be wary of.

Previously in this section, I examined David Nirenberg’s history of Western anti-

Judaism. Of particular importance in this context is his contention that anti-Judaism, espe- cially in its “scientific”, post-Enlightenment iterations, is just as fundamental to Western thought as it was in its more explicitly theological iterations, but is now particularly resistant to critique—even by Jews. This is because it is now given the warrant of objective reasonable- ness and taken as an uncritiqued assumption by supposedly critical thought.27 Anti-Judaism, however, can be understood primarily as a framework, or tool, for thought, even if it sometimes can become an object of thought. The modern concept of religion, as described by

Leora Batnitzky, more clearly shows how an individual concept (which can at least facilitate anti-Jewish critique) can insinuate itself into Jewish theological discourses, and, once there, wreak havoc (on her account) while resisting critique. Both Nirenberg and Batnitzky agree that the theological positions that modern discourses encode present special challenges to

Jewish thought. In the next subsection, I will turn to accounts of the theological origins of modernity’s secular character and attempt to make more explicit what this could mean for the Jews and Judaism that have come under its sway. Subsection 2.3 will thus help to further explicate some of Nirenberg and Batnitzky’s claims from a slightly different perspective.

category it is historically ill-suited for and that neglects historically important, if not constitutive, aspects of it. 27. Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 405.

- 25 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015

2.3. Narratives of secularity and modernity

Modern Jewish thinkers have often looked back on Baruch Spinoza’s exit from the

Amsterdam Jewish community as the moment in which the possibility of modernity dawned for Jews. When Spinoza left the Jewish community without becoming a Christian, he gave further definition to a space that had been emerging within Christendom for some time: the secular. Minimally, it can be understood as a space in which confession did less work, or at least less obvious work. This work might have previously included determining the interrela- tions of political, social, and economic institutions and corporate bodies; providing the basic vocabulary and directives of cultural and academic production; and, for Jews particularly, determining the possibilities of the individual life, in matters large and small. The biography of Spinoza seemed to many Jews, at least in retrospect, to mark the beginning of an age in which Jews could hope to be treated in their public lives simply as humans—equal in this respect with their Christian neighbors—while their Judaism or Jewishness would be their private concern. Of course, Jews were not alone in experiencing the retreat of religion, confession, and theology in the public domain as a boon.

But throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, a consensus has grown that however those who lived through it may have experienced it, the rise of the secular cannot be explained as the straightforward diminution of religious/confessional influence and the concomitant revealing of an irreligious or non-theological humanity, or society, or polity, or reason.28 Though scholars debate what the relationship might be, they are mostly agreed

28. Martin Buber worries in similar terms about the effects on the Jewish duty to be a “holy nation” of a post-emancipation, modern secularity in his Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman P. Goldhawk (New York: Collier Books, 1951), 171. He argues that a kind of lessening or

- 26 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 that there is a relationship between the idea of the secular that came to be a, if not the, defining feature of modernity and the Christianity of the civilization that produced that secular space. Whether its relation to Christianity is positive (i.e., one of replication or adoption) or negative (i.e., one of rejection),29 the secular that has been increasingly embraced as one of the broad ideals of Western civilization for some three hundred years is not the creation of an atemporal, universal human reason. Rather, it is marked by the Christian context of its development. Insofar as modernity was defined as the rise of self-awareness, and this self-awareness was linked with the decline of heteronomous, theological influence, one might say that modernity reached a nadir of self-deception in its understanding of secularity.

In this subsection, I will describe works by two scholars in different disciplines, with different motivations and emphases, who nonetheless provide congruent and convincing arguments for understanding Western modernity and secularity as having a particular,

Christian cast. Tracing their arguments will enable us to form an understanding of secular and modern spaces that will go some way towards explaining the worries of the authors I will read over the course of this dissertation about those spaces as the environment of the genera- tions of Jews who followed in Spinoza’s footsteps. circumscription of the role of Emunah (on his account, the native Jewish stance of faith) among the Jews is “breaking-up” what ought to be a “holy nation”—singular and integrated in its purpose and activity—into the differentiable formations of a “religious community” and a “secular nation.” While secular Jews are still Jews for Buber, he seems to assume that their secular nationhood is assimilable to some universal type of secular nationality. That is, when the pervasive influence of Emunah is disentangled from the Jewish nation, the Jews lose their particularity and begin to resemble that universal, default type of polity. I cite Buber only to show that the narrative of secularity I am describing is not a straw man; that it remains a powerful narrative of modernity into the present; and that it even maintains a hold on the imagination of many—including many Jewish thinkers—who are suspicious of secularity’s supposed benefits. 29. [Examples of these positions]

- 27 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015

2.3.1. Michael Allen Gillespie

Gillespie’s The Theological Origins of Modernity is framed as a response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.30 In it, Gillespie describes his conviction that the Western world (by which he means a civilization whose historical roots are in Western Christendom) is party to a clash of civiliza- tions, but one subject to an important asymmetry. On the one hand, the Islamic world seems cognizant of its own theological assumptions and motivations. On the other, the Western world perceives itself as a stronghold of modern, secular toleration and freedom from theolog- ical heteronomy. Gillespie’s thesis, in short, is that the West is deceived in its assumption of the non-theological character of modernity. Modernity, he argues, is constituted by a matrix of theological assumptions and reactions to these assumptions. A rapprochement between the

West and the Islamic world will remain impossible until the West recognizes its theological character and engages the Islamic world in an honest dialogue about how two different theological visions can coexist, rather than presenting itself to the Islamic imagination as the threatened negation of theological commitment (ix-xii and 293f.).

In outline form, Gillespie narrates the theological origins of modernity as follows.

Christianity has, from its inception, contained a tension between an emphasis on revelation— with its implications of divine omnipotence and willfulness—and a commitment to under- standing the world as rationally ordered, and as discoverable as such by the philosopher (20).

The great attempt at achieving a synthesis between these commitments was made by the scholastics of the High Middle Ages, who adapted Aristotle (recently made available to them

30. Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008). Subsequent citations to this book in this subsection (2.3.1) will be given parenthetically in the text.

- 28 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 through his Arab commentators) for the expression of Christian truth. Although scholasti- cism—primarily as expressed in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas—would later be largely vindicated by the Catholic Church, it was controversial at the time and led to an anti-Aris- totelian backlash. This backlash was largely expressed as nominalism, which, by denying the central scholastic/realist proposition of the real existence of universals, placed a renewed emphasis on divine omnipotence and a concomitant radical individualism (14f., 21, and 27).

Nominalism’s picture of a God who is unknowable, save through God’s own capricious self- disclosures, was, Gillespie argues, terrifying, and elicited two responses: humanism and the

Reformation. These responses are united in their broad acceptance of nominalism’s ontology, but are divided as to the relative priority of God and the human, considered “ontically.”

Christian humanism developed a (perhaps not so semi-) semi-Pelagian account of humanity in which the human came to occupy a position of unconstrained willing, much like God. The terror of an unpredictable God is assuaged by making the human divine, giving the human control. The Reformation, in contrast, developed an account of the human in which the human’s salvation consists solely in submission to the divine will. The terror-generating gulf between God and the human is not diminished, but God reaches across that gulf in a trust- worthy and wholly gracious act of redemption for those will accept it, and not try to span that gulf themselves (16).

This disagreement about relative ontic priority rooted in an agreement about the ontological had two consequences, according to Gillespie. First, the nominalist ontology that humanism and the Reformation shared had the unintended effect of making God irrelevant to much this-worldly action (36). If creation—including humanity’s political, cultural, and economic activity—cannot be understood as ordered towards God, as subsumable under a

- 29 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 larger teleological scheme; if the divine cannot be “read off” the mundane, then humans are, so to speak, largely left to their own devices. Of course, there are divine moral dictates, but these leave a great deal of leeway to human ingenuity. A way was prepared by nominalism’s envisioning of creation as chaos for the carving-out of a space in which God could be under- stood as non-dispositive for much human thinking and activity. Second, the conflict between humanism and the Reformation helped to ignite the continent-wide conflict of which the

Wars of Religion were a part (17). One of the ways in which these conflicts were resolved was through the emergence of a consensus that nature should have relative ontic priority over

God and the human (17). The nature that subsequently became the focus of scholarship was able to epitomize the sort of space that nominalism allowed people to treat as though it were disconnected from God. This move—the ontic elevation of nature—did not solve the problem rooted in the divide between humanism and the Reformation: that split would be re- enacted by thinkers sharing an evaluation of nature as ontically primary (e.g., by Hobbes and

Hobbesians as analogues of Luther in their debate with Descartes and Cartesians as analogues of Erasmus) (42).

Thus goes Gillespie’s argument. Modernity emerges with a secular space that, for most purposes, can be treated as if it were indifferent to God, and in which nature (and all that can be construed as natural, including almost all human endeavors) is ontically primary.

Most importantly, the transition to modernity and the opening up of the secular space that defines it were effected because of widely-held theological commitments. Modernity and secularity, on this account, are not forged through rebellion against religion and theology.

Instead, they are the result of efforts to cope with certain theological positions. These positions are encoded in these space-defining efforts and reinscribed in those spaces by

- 30 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 activity that assumes them as the conditions of its possibility. Whether one accepts Gillespie’s argument in all of its detail, I think that much is convincing. From the perspective of theology, the modern, far from being theologically neutral, is constituted by a position that one can take on the relation between God, humans, and the world. And it is, Gillespie claims, a Christian position. Even its most obfuscatory moment, its denial of its Christian origin and its claim to create itself, is “the result of a long development within Christianity” (357n34). As we shall see, the Christian character of modernity and of the secularity that defines it are exactly what John Milbank will contest. But in doing so, he reinforces those aspects of

Gillespie’s argument that are relevant to this project, and so I now turn to him.

2.3.2. John Milbank

I will discuss Milbank’s work at length in the last chapter of this dissertation. Here I depend on him mainly as a supplement to Gillespie, and so will be brief in my summary of the argument of what is a colossal, wide-ranging book: Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular

Reason.31

In contrast to Gillespie, who affects the neutral posture of the ideal historian toward his sources as he works to get them “right,” Milbank is a Christian theologian. He is attempting

to put forward an alternative mythos . . . embodying an ‘ontology of peace’, which conceives differences as analogically related, rather than equivocally at variance. . . . This strategy, of course, necessitates also a different genealogy, one which sees in history not just arbitrary transitions, but constant contingent shifts either towards or away from what is projected as the true human telos, a true concrete representation of the analogical blending of difference. (279)

31. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). Subsequent citations to this book in this subsection will be given parenthetically in the text.

- 31 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 I will address momentarily just what it is that he sees himself as offering an alternative to. For the moment, it is enough to recognize that he is not neutral: the historical twists and turns he plots are not “just arbitrary transitions.”32 Rather, they are value-laden steps toward, or deferments of, what he will ultimately call salvation: the altera civitas, a social peace in which the different is related and all are oriented toward a common, proper end (440).

Milbank sees his book as a step towards that “true human telos.” But it is primarily a diagnosis and a genealogy of a situation he deplores, and as such he focuses on that situation’s constitutive “shifts away” from “the analogical blending of difference.” This situation is the rule of secular reason, the development of the concept of which Milbank charts through the rise and ramification of discourses of social theory (e.g., political science, economics, and sociology). It is the claim of these discourses to fundamentality—to being a non-reducible, non-translatable last word—a claim whose warrant is their construals of themselves as exercises of fundamental, universal, secular reason, to which Milbank objects. He objects to these discourses and the secular reason (or the notion of secular reason) that underwrites them because he finds them to be incompatible with the social, cosmic, and ontological harmony he understands Christianity to envision. Further, he claims that the origin of these discourses is just as mythic as Christianity’s, and so argument cannot decide between them. Rather, the choice between them must be an aesthetic one, based in persuasion (331).

Milbank argues that the “invention of the secular began at least in the eleventh century” (441). That is, he understands the production of the (or at least a) primary content of modernity to begin in the milieu that produced the clash between scholasticism and nominal- ism. And just as for Gillespie, the rise of nominalism is of decisive importance for Milbank.

32. I have added the italics for emphasis.

- 32 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 The difference between the two, however, is that whereas for Gillespie nominalism is the

Christian, ultimate origin of modernity, Milbank takes nominalism’s influence in the genealogy he is constructing as a sign of secular reason’s anti-Christian, heretical character.

Like Gillespie, Milbank understands the advent of nominalism as the rise of a theology of radical individualism and unconstrained will—at first divine, but later human (16 and 27).

The arbitrariness of that will and the dissolution of the organic bonds that had once been understood as the interconnections between all facets of creation and between creation and

God mean that that theology is implicitly nihilistic and violent (279). Nihilistic because an arbitrary will, based in nothing but itself, testifies to an absence of meaning, of value. Its only content, which it cannot but replicate in all of its motions, is its own ephemeral, meaningless will-to-power (261). And thus such a theology understands all that is as a realm of violence, of competitive willing. In the absence of meaning and value, one cannot be persuaded or attracted, one can only be forced by a stronger will to do something, to think something.

Because Christianity, for Milbank, can only be about peace, and can only posit the real existence of such guiding values as the Good and the Beautiful, nominalism cannot be

Christianity, but at most a distortion of Christianity (cf. 23f.).

Milbank traces the influence of this theological distortion through the rise of political science, of economics, and of sociology. It is, he argues, in conjunction with the revived paganism of Machiavelli (see, for example, xiv and 23-25), responsible for the production of the discourses and narratives of secular reason.33 As we saw in Gillespie’s understanding of modernity, Milbank argues that secular reason should not be understood as an always latent,

33. Such paganism, in virtue of the “sacred violence” it celebrates, is congruent and not competitive with nominalist influence on Milbank’s account (280).

- 33 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 universal human potentiality that is waiting to express itself when theological constraints on reasoning are cleared away. Rather, secular reason is deeply theological and deeply indebted to the Christian theological tradition, although Milbank, I think, would want to call it anti- theological, and does call it “Anti-Christianity” (xiv and 280).

Though Milbank argues that the mythos of secular reason constitutes an Anti-Chris- tianity, he confirms Gillespie’s argument that secular modernity is covertly theological and constantly inscribes its theological assumptions in the spaces that comprise it through the interplay of subjects and objects that have been made to conform to it. Whether one agrees that those theological assumptions are Christian, or that they facilitate something that can be called Christianity (as Milbank would not), they were at least produced by Christians, within

Christian discourses in which what was at stake was a more faithful witness to Christian truth.

I am not claiming that genealogy is everything or wholly determinative; that there is nothing new, but only an unfolding of original presuppositions. That is, I am not arguing that

Christian origins give a Christian character (however attenuated) to all that descends from them. But what I would argue is that Gillespie and Milbank can, at a minimum, be taken to show that the secular, modern West can be made sense of in light of Christianity; that if the theologies it encodes do not simply reproduce Christian theology, they are in conversation with its presuppositions and questions and share a great deal with it. There is an intimacy to the relationship between Christianity and secular modernity that marks them as relatively proper to one another, compared to traditions introduced into the modern West that had not had a similar hand in shaping that milieu.

Gillespie and Milbank provide background for, and a more critical articulation of, the process pointed to by Nirenberg and Batnitzky whereby Christian theological assumptions

- 34 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 and conceptual frameworks (such as anti-Judaism) and concepts (such as a particular under- standing of religion) persisted, in often obscure ways, into a secular modernity that was particularly fitted to them. In this way, they help to explain the dissonance noted by modern

Jewish thinkers attempting to talk about Judaism and the Jewish in the terms of a conceptual apparatus that they often felt was unsuited to the task. In short, they help to indicate why so many Jewish thinkers would come to worry about the secular, modern environments into which the Jews were emancipated.

At the end of this section, we have before us something like the following critical picture: modernity, which represents itself in most respects as an irruption of the non-theolog- ical, as indifferent to or neutral between theological traditions, is in fact formed by and reproduces at least aspects of the Christian theological tradition. This includes the anti-

Judaism that is a central component of that tradition. At the same time, by obscuring its theological character and urging conformity with its ostensibly universally valid norms, it induced Jews to remake themselves in the image of, or to narrow the distance between themselves and, Christianity. One can reject any or all of these arguments, but a great deal of recent Jewish thought, including the theologians I will be discussing, can be located along all or some of these vectors, whether in their earlier or more recent stages of development.

Insofar as this project is an exercise in better understanding the work of a set of thinkers, the reality of the situation of crisis described by the convergence of these vectors is less important than the fact that taking its possibility seriously is a prerequisite of taking those thinkers seriously. Like many, I think they deserve to be taken seriously. The examples I have given of these critical trajectories have been intentionally recent, so as to be able to give as full as

- 35 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 possible an account of positions that are only alluded to (but not less important for that) in some of the theologians that will be discussed later. This critical picture will be crucial in helping us to identify and explain the condition and situations of Jews and Judaism that worry and motivate these theologians, and will help us to interpret the responses they produce through their engagement with supersessionism.

3. Objections and assumptions

In this section, I will discuss (in a regrettably piecemeal fashion) some of the objections to which I take my arguments to be liable. These discussions will also give me an opportunity to make explicit some of my own assumptions that guide this project.

3.1. The asymmetrical relationship between Judaism and Christianity

In her book, Judaism in German Christian Theology Since 1945: Christianity and Israel Considered in

Terms of Mission, the scholar of the Jewish-Christian relationship Eva Fleischner argued that

“Christians should not expect the same theological preoccupations with Christianity on the part of Jews that Christians feel toward Judaism. Christianity as a religious phenomenon concerns Jews in general very little.” Krister Stendahl, in his preface to that book, quoted this statement with approval.34 More recently, Ruth Langer has argued that “Christianity has to deal with the Judaism from which it has emerged . . . But Judaism has no internal theological need to engage with Christianity . . . only historical ones . . .”35 My argument—that Jews have

34. Eva Fleischner, Judaism in German Christian Theology Since 1945: Christianity and Israel Considered in Terms of Mission (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1975), 109. Repeated by Stendahl in his preface to the same work (xiii). 35. Ruth Langer, “Exploring the Interface of Dialogue and Theology: A Jewish Response to

- 36 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 done internally-oriented theological work by thinking about Judaism in relation to superses- sionism, and that developments in Christian understandings of that doctrine have been at least helpful to that work—would seem to be at odds with the assumptions behind these statements. At a minimum, I think these statements share an assumption that a static asymmetry (between Christianity’s internal relation to Judaism and Judaism’s external relation to Christianity) characterizes the Jewish-Christian relation. The asymmetry is static because it is predicated on an essentialist understanding of Judaism and Christianity, in which the essence of Judaism was fixed before there was a Christianity to which it could have been related. Beyond the scholars who would agree with this characterization of the Jewish-

Christian relation (and I do not think these three are alone), this view has a great deal of popular currency among Jews, who might be resistant to the implication of this project that

Jews can think about Judaism by thinking about Christianity; that Judaism, in itself, has anything to do with Christianity.

There are of course asymmetries in the Jewish-Christian relation, including the fact that Christians and Christianity do not mean hermeneutically and soteriologically to Judaism what Jews and Judaism mean to Christianity. Christians do not play as central a role in

Judaism’s foundational texts as Jews play in Christianity’s. But the essentialism of Langer,

Fleischner, and Stendahl is rendered suspect by the high degree of continuity (in fact, the identity) that it demands obtain between rabbinic and pre-rabbinic Judaisms (which would establish Judaism’s chronological priority over Christianity),36 as well as its assumption that

Christian Rutishauser, Thomas Norrish, and Liam Tracey,” in Christ Jesus and the Jewish People Today: New Explorations of Theological Interrelationships, ed. Philip A. Cunningham, Joseph Sievers, Mary Boys, Hans Hermann Henrix, and Jesper Svartvik (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2011), 294. 36. Cf. David Novak’s interesting essay on understanding rabbinic Judaism and Christianity

- 37 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 rabbinic Judaism, as it coalesced or over the almost two millennia since, has not been open to influences from the wider society (which might have supplied “internal” reasons for Jews to concern themselves with Christianity). Both of these assumptions have been problematized to the point where they cannot be maintained a priori.

If one rejects this essentialism as historically inadequate, or at least unlikely, there is no reason to assume that historical considerations cannot become internal considerations, and do so without destroying the entity they are incorporated into. That is, even if one understood

Judaism as having, under Christian influence, developed internal reasons for taking account of Christianity, one need not assume that such internal relations to Christianity would be either permanent or so centrally important as to render the Judaism into which they were incorporated more discontinuous than continuous with prior Judaisms. Rather, there could still be reasons for understanding that Judaism as constitutively continuous with past Judaisms

(in virtue of, e.g., a consistent ability on the part of both Jews and non-Jews to identify Jews, or the persistent centrality of certain texts), despite its changed relationship to Christianity.

In brief, assumptions of Jewish essentialism should not a priori rule out readings of

Jewish theologians that ascribe to them the position that Judaism has been so significantly influenced by Christianity that reflection on Judaism or some aspects of it should necessarily reference Christianity if it is to be intelligible or effective.

as parallel traditions with structurally similar relations to late Second Temple Judaism. “From Supersessionism to Parallelism in Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” in Talking with Christians: Musings of a Jewish Theologian, 8-25.

- 38 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 3.2. Discourses about supersessionism are inherently supersessionist discourses

This objection argues that discussions of supersessionism as effective in the Jewish-Christian relationship inevitably construe Judaism, Christianity, and the Jewish-Christian relation in ways congenial to a supersessionist understanding of those terms. In the process, such discus- sions enact what they seek to treat as a theological hypothesis.

I am sympathetic to the charge that, in talking about supersessionism, one tends to fall into the habit of treating Judaism monolithically as something that came before and can be replaced, and Christianity as something that came after and can do the replacing. That historical narrative—in both its Jewish and Christian versions—warrants interruption, as I noted in the previous subsection. But the fact remains that supersessionism has had real effects as a theological hypothesis, shaping Christian and Jewish understandings of Judaism,

Christianity, and their relation. Perhaps the most that can be said is that discussion of supers- essionism is necessary (at least from a Jewish perspective), but that it needs to always be accompanied by an awareness of supersessionism’s capacity to become a self-actualizing discourse. If one can maintain a consciousness of, and guard against, that discourse’s tropes, supersessionism might be susceptible of a responsible treatment.

3.3. The hypothesis of the bind or situation of crisis does not correspond to reality

Against Jewish intellectuals who have posited various conflicts between Jewish and Western identities, many Jews might respond that they are able to lead lives that involve varying degrees of attachment to Jewish tradition while only experiencing superficial tensions between these identities (e.g., difficulty observing Jewish holidays in a society where those days are schooldays, workdays, gamedays, etc.). These Jews might claim that being Jewish outside of

- 39 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 the State of Israel is not significantly different from being Christian, though it might be less convenient.

Against this objection, one can note that not feeling torn is not evidence that one has not been torn. The Jews for whom the bind was present in its most pristine form—during the tumultuous generations of a drawn-out emancipation—certainly understood that they were caught in a bind and they responded explicitly with varying degrees of accommodation to, and rejection of, modern, Western society. That Jews today no longer feel the effects of those choices so poignantly could be explained by the habituation of the election of those choices.

What once required anguished introspection is now a matter of inheritance. But why, then, does the bind of the modern, Western Jew need to be dredged up and addressed yet again? If the goal of such efforts is helping Jews to find peace as Jews in Western societies, these efforts would seem to be unnecessary for most Jews.

I think there are at least two reasons why discussions of this aspect of recent Jewish thought are still necessary, despite this state of affairs. First, not at all Jews feel such peace, as the persistent attention of Jewish thinkers to this issue attests. Further, I would argue that some of the supposedly superficial discomforts of Western Jews are symptomatic of deeper tensions. The fact that tensions are not expressed or even perceived does not mean they are not operative, and perhaps detrimentally (as opposed to creatively) so. Second, it might be that the varying levels of accommodation to Western civilization that most Jews have arrived at are worth preserving: they present compromises whereby Jews can lead politically, eco- nomically, socially, and culturally vibrant lives while remaining within the Jewish people.

From the perspective of Judaism, however, those compromises would still need to be vindi- cated as not merely convenient for Jews, but as not in fact disguising something more than the

- 40 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 mere evolution of Judaism (viz., Judaism’s acquiescence in being normed by Christianity). I am convinced that the examples of Jewish engagement with supersessionism that I will muster testify both to the presence of wounds that have been opened in the Jewish community by supersessionist influences during the processes of emancipation and accommodation, as well as to the (still unrealized) possibility of healing them in situ.

4. Conclusion

The work of Nirenberg, Batnitzky, Gillespie, and Milbank—diagnosing the theological peculiarities of Western discourses—points to a problem and a possibility. The problem is the bind facing modern, assimilated Jews that their work collectively implies as a possibility. Their overlapping arguments can help in identifying and understanding similar diagnoses of that situation in other authors. That situation is something like this: a theologically-saturated modernity has transmitted supersessionism, among other Christian theological propositions, to Jews, who have struggled to diagnose and resist this situation, at least partly because of secular modernity’s denial of its constitutively theological nature. In the chapters that follow, I will look for elements of the diagnosis of this situation in the work of Jewish thinkers in conversation with differentiable Christian stances toward supersessionism. I will ask how that diagnosis or its elements motivate these thinkers. And I will do so while showing that how

Christians talk about Judaism can make a difference to the Jews who engage them, and thus that Christian reevaluations of Jews and Judaism can serve as points of departure in new directions for Jewish thought.

So we come to the possibility opened up by a diagnosis of the theological peculiarities of modern, Western discourses: considering whether those discourses, in virtue of reevalua-

- 41 - Jeff Fowler February 20, 2015 tions of the traditions underlying them, might ultimately not be hostile to Judaism, but favorable to it. Exploring this possibility might lead to reimagining Judaism as existing not under, but alongside, without being normed by, Western civilization. This could free many

Jews to hold noncompetitive commitments to both Judaism and modern Westernness. I will have occasion to note some features of such an existence for Judaism in the chapters that follow, but the full description of this possibility is beyond the scope of this dissertation.

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