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Chapter 1 - “Introduction” - Draft 2 Circulated for Comment 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.
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