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Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture Jewish Prelims I-Xvi NEW.Qxp 25/10/07 14:06 Page Ii Jewish_Prelims_i-xvi NEW.qxp 25/10/07 14:06 Page i Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture Jewish_Prelims_i-xvi NEW.qxp 25/10/07 14:06 Page ii ‘More than just an introduction to contemporary Jewish philosophy, this important book offers a critique of the embedded assumptions of contemporary post-Christian Western culture. By focusing on the suppressed or denied heritage of Jewish and Islamic philosophy that helped shape Western society, it offers possibilities for recovering broader dimensions beyond a narrow rationalism and materialism. For those impatient with recent one-dimensional dismissals of religion, and surprised by their popularity, it offers a timely reminder of the sources of these views in the Enlightenment, but also the wider humane dimensions of the religious quest that still need to be considered. By recognising the contribution of gender and post-colonial studies it reminds us that philosophy, “the love of wisdom”, is still concerned with the whole human being and the complexity of personal and social relationships.’ Jonathan Magonet, formerly Principal of Leo Baeck College, London, and Vice-President of the Movement for Reform Judaism ‘Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture makes a spirited and highly readable plea for “Jerusalem” over “Athens” – that is, for recovering the moral and spiritual virtues of ancient Judaism within a European and Western intellectual culture that still has a preference for Enlightenment rationalism. Victor Seidler revisits the major Jewish philosophers of the last century as invaluable sources of wisdom for Western philosophers and social theorists in the new century. He calls upon the latter to reclaim body and heart as being inseparable from “mind.”’ Peter Ochs, Edgar Bronfman Professor of Modern Judaic Studies, University of Virginia Jewish_Prelims_i-xvi NEW.qxp 25/10/07 14:06 Page iii JEWISH PHILOSOPHY AND WESTERN CULTURE A Modern Introduction VICTOR J. SEIDLER Jewish_Prelims_i-xvi NEW.qxp 25/10/07 14:06 Page iv Published in 2007 by I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd 6 Salem Road, London W2 4BU 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 www.ibtauris.com In the United States of America and Canada distributed by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York NY 10010 Copyright © 2007 Victor Jeleniewski Seidler The rights of Victor J. Seidler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. ISBN: (PB) 978 1 84511 281 3 ISBN: (HB) 978 1 84511 280 6 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Designed and Typeset by 4word Ltd, Bristol, UK Printed and bound in Great Britain by T.J. International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall Jewish_Prelims_i-xvi NEW.qxp 25/10/07 14:06 Page v Dedication For Daniel Jeleniewski, who died on 13 January 1950 in New York City and For each member of the Jeleniewski, Ickowitz, Placek, Rosenbaum, Singer and Seidler families who were murdered in Europe between 1940 and 1945 Jewish_Prelims_i-xvi NEW.qxp 25/10/07 14:06 Page vi ‘If what we do now is to make no difference in the end, then all the seriousness of life is done away with. Your religious ideas have always seemed to me more Greek than Biblical. Whereas my thoughts are one hundred percent Hebraic.’ Drury: ‘Yes I do feel that when, say Plato talks about the gods, it lacks that sense of awe which you feel throughout the Bible – from Genesis to Revelation. “But who may abide the day of his coming, and who shall stand when he appeareth?”’ Wittgenstein: (standing still and looking at me very intently) ‘I think you have just said something very important. Much more important than you realize.”’ ‘Conversations with Drury’ in Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections edited by Rush Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981) ‘It is not the truth which any one possesses, or thinks he does, but rather the pains he has taken to get to the bottom of the truth, that makes a man’s worth. For it is not in having the truth but in searching for it that those powers increase in him in which alone lies his ever growing perfection. The possession makes one placid, lazy, proud.’ Lessing, Theologische Streitschriften, ‘Eine Duplik’ (1978) ‘In western civilization a Jew is constantly judged by the wrong measures which don’t fit. That the Greek thinkers were not philosophers in the western sense, nor in the western sense scientists either…many people see this. But it is the same with the Jews. For us the words of our language seek like absolute measures or standards, and we misjudge them again and again. There are now overrated, now underrated.…’ Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bermerkungen p.37 (written 1931) Jewish_Prelims_i-xvi NEW.qxp 25/10/07 14:06 Page vii Table of Contents Preface and Acknowledgements ix 1. Introduction: Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture 1 2. A Time for Philosophy 28 3. Reading, Texts and the Human Body 44 4. Preaching, Revelation and Creation 55 5. Hellenism, Christianity and Judaism 66 6. Creation, Ethics and Human Nature 73 7. Ethics, Deeds and Love 87 8. Pleasures, Sufferings and Transcendence 98 9. Language, Ethics, Culture and Denial 109 10. Traditions, Bodies and Difference/s 126 11. Love, Friendship and Hospitality 139 12. Dialogue, Responsibility and Ethics 153 Endnotes 177 Bibliography 212 Glossary of Jewish Traditions and Biographies 226 Index 232 Jewish_Prelims_i-xvi NEW.qxp 25/10/07 14:06 Page viii Jewish_Prelims_i-xvi NEW.qxp 25/10/07 14:06 Page ix Preface and Acknowledgements My father, Daniel Jeleniewski, was the only member of his family living outside the country when the German armies marched into Poland in 1940. He was also the only person to survive the Holocaust. No one else was left. None of my uncles, aunts or cousins were to escape alive. My father was my link to Jewish orthodoxy. Some of my earliest memories are of going with him to the local Adath synagogue in Brent Street, Hendon, not far from our home, and hiding behind his prayer shawl (tallit), a place of warm refuge. This did not last long, however, because he was to die in New York in January, 1950 when I was just five. He remained my connection to orthodoxy but it was a connection that became virtual and in some ways hidden. Each year, on the anniver- sary of his death, myself and my brothers would return to the Adath synagogue to attend morning prayers and recite the Prayer for the Dead. I am not sure whether my father was a Holocaust ‘survivor’ because he was also a victim who could not live with the news of the destruction and murder of his family. His heart could not stand the strain. As a child, I somehow felt as if it were up to me to keep his memory alive, especially when my mother remarried and we eventually changed our names. It was as if no visible traces of Jeleniewski were left and that somehow, through his death, a connection was made to all the deaths of the Holocaust. I am not sure that it is possible to ‘come to terms’ with the enormity of the Holocaust and it has taken me almost a lifetime to realise that I still often stay on the margins of the horror out of a fear that if I were to get any closer I, too, would be caught up in the fires and would not Jewish_Prelims_i-xvi NEW.qxp 25/10/07 14:06 Page x x Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture be able to survive. Children of survivors and refugees find their differ- ent ways of coping with these histories, but for years the post-war world seemed to be largely indifferent to what had happened to European Jewry in the Holocaust. It might seem strange thing to claim this now that the events of the Holocaust have become so familiar in different ways. As children growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, the Holocaust was something we felt at some level that we could not really talk about without feeling unsafe. In this way I have always lived with the tension between Jewish philosophies and ‘Western cultures’ and there have been different rela- tionships of concealment, shame and sharing. As I was growing up in the Jewish refugee community of north-west London, I knew that my parents had come from elsewhere, even if I was unsure where Vienna or Warsaw really were. Their foreign accents remained a source of shame since they seemed to undermine my attempts to ‘fit in’ and so become invisible and like everyone else, as I experienced the ‘shadows of the Shoah’. But if it was different in those years before mass migrations to acknowledge experiences of dislocation, migration and diasporas we knew that we carried, often uneasily, different inheritances that could prove difficult to bring into dialogue with each other. Often it was eas- ier to feel split and so to perform different aspects of identity in different spaces without really imagining or hoping that these different aspects could somehow be brought into conversation with each other. As chil- dren we often felt we needed to fulfil some of the unrealised dreams of our parents whose careers had often been cruelly interrupted.
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