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The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167-1900' H-Judaic Kogan on Shear, 'The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167-1900' Review published on Thursday, June 16, 2011 Adam Shear. The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xvi + 384 pp. $90.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-521-88533-1. Reviewed by Barry Kogan (Hebrew Union College - Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati) Published on H-Judaic (June, 2011) Commissioned by Jason Kalman The Life and Afterlife of a Great Book Over the past fifty years, historical investigation has devoted increasing attention to aspects of ordinary life and activity that are certainly familiar, but not necessarily well understood. Often such studies are occasioned by changes in social practice, of which some are closely associated with technological innovations. The invention of printing is an obvious example. One relatively new field of inquiry, which reflects these developments, is “the history of the book.” It is a genre that is interested not only in the practices associated with reading, writing, and publishing, but also in the broader impact these practices have upon the transformation of ordinary life in politics, culture, and religion. The volume under review represents a remarkable and, indeed, pathbreaking scholarly inquiry within this new field. What Adam Shear undertakes to do is to trace the cultural and intellectual history of one of the great classics of medieval Jewish thought, Judah Halevi’s Book of the Kuzari. He does so by focusing on its reception by Jews and Christians over nearly 750 years of translation, interpretation, commentary, criticism, and selective appropriation by individuals, groups, and even movements responsive to its teachings. However, his aim is not so much to chart the almost kaleidoscopic reconfigurations of ideas, arguments, images, and themes drawn from the Kuzari (though chart them he does and in considerable detail), but to clarify their use in creating and shaping new paradigms of Jewish identity over the centuries covered. In the Middle Ages, these range from the ideal of simple, yet intense, personal piety to that of the philosophically informed defender of tradition, and on to the kabbalistic master of sefirotic truths. They move on to the erudite and rhetorically skilled proponents of Hebrew humanism during the Renaissance, and then to the proudly Jewish, yet increasingly worldly and universalistic, modern rationalists of the Berlin Enlightenment, to the Wissenschaft des Judentums scholars able to study the Jewish past critically and in historical context, to the east European creators of a HebraicHaskalah , and on to the “Lovers of Zion” and other Jewish nationalists, to name but a few. In sum, Shear presents us with what he calls the “biography” of a book, and the story he tells gives us a comprehensive history of its reception. Early in the preface, he provides a helpful summary of the Kuzari’s contents and identifies what he understands to be its essential character. It is an anti-rationalist defense of rabbinic Judaism which addresses a variety of intellectual and religious challenges to both Jews and Judaism, not only in Halevi’s own day, but over the centuries. Here, the title under which the Kuzari first circulated, The Book of Refutation and Proof in Behalf of the Despised Religion, captures its thrust perfectly. His Citation: H-Net Reviews. Kogan on Shear, 'The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167-1900'. H-Judaic. 06-10-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28655/reviews/30708/kogan-shear-kuzari-and-shaping-jewish-identity-1167-1900 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Judaic basic argument is that the publicly witnessed and widely acknowledged revelation of divine commands to Israel at Sinai constitutes the clearest and most direct statement possible of what is pleasing to God. The Jewish people, in turn, were able to receive, understand, and reliably transmit this divine instruction to subsequent generations only because they were religiously and culturally superior to all other peoples. Indeed, their wide-ranging wisdom traditions were indispensable in helping them to fulfill the commandments properly and to flourish once they had settled in the Promised Land. What they understood, for example, about differentiating one day from another by conceiving of time zones and an international dateline, their notion of a common global calendar, their insights into the physiological, psychological, sociopolitical, and religious dimensions of the sacrificial system, their command of Hebrew (the original language in which God spoke with humanity), as well as their knowledge of cosmology and zoology--all of these were preserved in the famous sciences of the rabbis. More to the point, the Jewish sage of the Kuzari readily introduces the Khazar king to these subjects in response to the latter’s queries and thereby creates an extraordinary connection between Halevi’s anti-rationalist defense of the Jewish faith and his high regard for his ancestors’ intellectual achievements. The links and tensions implied by that connection represent the subtext of much, if not most, of what Shear discloses about the book’s reception history. His first concern is to show how the Kuzari came to be regarded as a classic wherever it was so received and disseminated. Here the focus is mainly on the image of the book and/or its author and the construction of their semi-canonical authority. In these discussions, Shear identifies and skillfully analyzes a wide array of evidence, ranging from the colophons of scribes to the designs and rhetoric that printers employ on title pages, from scholarly introductions to commentaries on and new translations of the work, to the booklists and library inventories that record its acquisition. He concludes that Judah Moscato’s encyclopedic, late sixteenth-century commentary on theKuzari played the decisive role in establishing its “classic” status. Of equal, if not greater, importance is the use to which the book was put. This, of course, is bound up with what the reader or community of readers understood its message to be. Was it a specific thesis that could be discerned regardless of the dialogue’s shifting subject matter, or was it the book’s variegated content taken as a whole? Or was it perhaps a combination of both? Once these questions are answered as clearly as possible, the issue of how the Kuzari was used in constructing Jewish religious or cultural identity can then be addressed and hopefully resolved. Here again, Shear builds his case on an impressive array of evidence and examples, usually discussed in great detail. His own underlying argument is that, over time, successive generations of readers clearly found enough within the Kuzari’s memorable summaries, affirmations, and analyses of Jewish teachings that they wished to use it in constructing and communicating their own paradigms of Jewish identity under quite different cultural circumstances. But to use the book convincingly, they had to engage in a dialectical process of working through the images of theKuzari that they inherited from earlier generations and reconceptualizing both its message and at least some of its content so as to address the concerns of their own generation and others soon to follow. In tracing this process through the centuries, one of the most interesting conclusions that Shear reaches is that, while there were a few works that emphasized Halevi’s anti-rationalistic defense of Jewish faith and ethnocentric particularism to the virtual exclusion of Israel’s more universal intellectual and scientific traditions, most interpreters of the Kuzari tended to affirm the connection between them to a greater or lesser extent until the late nineteenth century. From that time forward and well into twentieth century, Citation: H-Net Reviews. Kogan on Shear, 'The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167-1900'. H-Judaic. 06-10-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/28655/reviews/30708/kogan-shear-kuzari-and-shaping-jewish-identity-1167-1900 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Judaic however, a pattern of dichotomization predominates in which Halevi is presented as the unequivocal spokesman for faith as opposed to reason and particularism as opposed to universalism, while Maimonides is assigned the opposite role. As a result, the extraordinary connection noted above is either passed over in silence or treated as incidental. Among the many strengths of this fascinating study is Shear’s excellent introduction. In it, he provides useful background on reception theory and reader response criticism, examines contemporary scholarship on “the antiphilosphical Kuzari,” outlines his methodology and thesis, and explains clearly and concisely why he approaches the sources as he does. Each chapter, in turn, begins with a helpful précis, which contextualizes the discussion to follow by identifying key issues, raising important questions, or simply noting significant transitions. Each chapter also ends with a well-formulated summation that clarifies and integrates the main elements of what has just been discussed--surely a valuable service when the chapters are long, detailed, and disparate in content. The book’s greatest strength, in my view, is its ability to present both the “big picture” of the periods under discussion and the many factual details about events, personalities, and texts in
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