THE IDEA OF MODERN JEWISH CULTURE The Reference Library of Jewish Intellectual History The Idea of Modern Jewish Culture ELIEZER SCHWEID Translated by Amnon HADARY edited by Leonard LEVIN BOSTON 2008 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schweid, Eliezer. [Likrat tarbut Yehudit modernit. English] The idea of modern Jewish culture / Eliezer Schweid ; [translated by Amnon Hadary ; edited by Leonard Levin]. p. cm.—(Reference library of Jewish intellectual history) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-934843-05-5 1. Judaism—History—Modern period, 1750–. 2. Jews—Intellectual life. 3. Jews—Identity. 4. Judaism—20th century. 5. Zionism—Philosophy. I. Hadary, Amnon. II. Levin, Leonard, 1946– III. Title. BM195.S3913 2008 296.09’03—dc22 2008015812 Copyright © 2008 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved ISBN 978-1-934843-05-5 On the cover: David Tartakover, Proclamation of Independence, 1988 (Detail) Book design by Yuri Alexandrov Published by Academic Studies Press in 2008 145 Lake Shore Road Brighton, MA 02135, USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com Contents Editor’s Preface . vii Foreword . xi Chapter One. Culture as a Concept and Culture as an Ideal . 1 Chapter Two. Tensions and Contradiction . 11 Chapter Three. Internalizing the Cultural Ideal . 15 Chapter Four. The Underlying Philosophy of Jewish Enlightenment . 18 Chapter Five. The Meaning of Being a Jewish-Hebrew Maskil . 24 Chapter Six. Crossroads: The Transition from Haskalah to the Science of Judaism . 35 Chapter Seven. The Dialectic between National Hebrew Culture and Jewish Idealistic Humanism . 37 Chapter Eight. The Philosophic Historic Formation of Jewish Humanism: a Modern Guide to the Perplexed . 43 Chapter Nine. The Science of Judaism—Research in Judaism as a Culture . 71 Chapter Ten. The Science of Judaism, Reform Judaism, and Historical Positivism. 85 Chapter Eleven. A Critique of the Science of Judaism and the Cultural Ideal of the Enlightenment. 95 Chapter Twelve. Accelerated Change and Revolution . 101 Chapter Thirteen. The Vision of Jewish Cultural Renaissance in Political Zionism . 105 Chapter Fourteen. The Pioneering (Halutzic) Culture of the Jewish Labor Movement in Palestine . 115 Chapter Fifteen. Polar Views on Sources of Jewish Culture . 123 Chapter Sixteen. Alienation from Religion and Tradition . 125 Chapter Seventeen. The Jewish Folk Culture of Eretz Israel . 130 Chapter Eighteen. Judaism as the Totality of a National Historic Culture . 146 Chapter Nineteen. Sanctity and the Jewish National Movement . 173 Chapter Twenty. The Dimension of Sanctity in Pioneering Labor Zionism . 193 Chapter Twenty One. Orthodox Zionist Culture—Sanctifying Modernity . 212 Chapter Twenty Two. Judaism as a Culture in the Diaspora . 226 Chapter Twenty Three. The Secular Jewish Culture of Yiddish . 237 Chapter Twenty Four. The Transition from the Hebrew Culture of Pre-state Eretz Israel to Israeli Culture . 241 Glossary . 261 Bibliography . 263 Index . 269 Editor’s Preface The Idea of Modern Jewish Culture is the keystone of the intellectual-historical and theoretical thought of Eliezer Schweid. In it, he articulates his own personal formulation of the “spiritual-Zionist” vision of Ahad Ha-Am, Bialik, and A. D. Gordon, of which he is one of the leading contemporary proponents and spokesmen. Eliezer Schweid was a child of pioneer Zionism. Born in Jerusalem in 1929, he was educated in the secular Zionist schools and youth movement, and was a member of a kibbutz-forming “gar’in.” At 19, he was a soldier in the Israeli War of Independence. His spiritual crises, growing out of that experience, led him to explore the legacy of Jewish thought in all its manifestations—religious and secular, ancient, medieval and modern. As Professor of Jewish Thought at Hebrew University, educator and intel- lectual, and author of 40 books on Jewish thought of all periods, he has taught and mentored generations of Israelis to mine the spiritual, intellectual and moral legacy of Jewish thought for the formation of their own identities and to provide the experiential background and moral compass to guide them in the present. The current work addresses the questions: (1) How did Jews, from the Enlightenment to the present, come to perceive their Jewish existence as “culture”? (2) How has that perception shaped nearly all the forms— religious and secular, academic, Zionist, Yiddishist and general-political— that Jewish life has taken in the modern age? (3) Has the dream to create an authentic Jewish culture ever been fully realized? Is it being realized now? This book is “prophetic,” not in the prognostic sense but in the spiritual- critical sense that Ahad Ha-Am articulated in his essays “Priest and Prophet” and “Moses.” It is designed to arouse discomfort in every reader, whether Jewish or non-Jewish, Israeli or Diaspora, secular or religious, political or apolitical in orientation. The discomfort is aroused by calling attention to ideals that were only partly fulfilled in their heyday, but refuse to be relegated to the dust-bin of history, because they still have the power to stand as a beacon and basis of critique of current reality. vii Leonard Levin The ideal central to this book is simple and powerful: that Judaism, conceived as a humanly-created culture on religious foundations, distilled from over three millennia of Israelite-and-Jewish history, life and thought, should stand as a beacon and guide to the formation of a distinctive Jewish group-life today, in dialogue with contemporary world culture but not overpowered by and subordinate to it. The ideal is clear and powerful. The critique that issues from it is equally powerful, for hardly anywhere in the world today—not in the disco-clubs of secular Tel Aviv or the yeshivot of ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim, not in the Bar Mitzvah parties of American Jews or (except now and then) in the halls of Jewish academia, and only haltingly and imperfectly in the best communal foci of Jewish group-life, religious or secular throughout the world—is this vision taken to heart and turned into flesh-and-blood reality. It is easy to disqualify this vision-statement and critique. The ultra- religious may disqualify it because it does not recognize the unqualified divine origin of Judaism. Diaspora Jews may disqualify it because it depicts typical Diaspora institutions —liberal Jewish religion, Western- style academic Jewish scholarship, the early-20th-century Yiddish literary flourishing and more recent Yiddish revival—as less potently “Jewish” and more assimilationist in tendency than the Hebrew-based cultural revival. Politically-minded Israelis may disqualify it because the call to Jewish culture seems utopian and does not provide a ready practical answer to Israel’s current pressing realities. Academic scholars may disqualify it because Schweid admittedly does not aim at producing the most detailed, foot noted empirically-based factual research for its own sake but has in- stead made another objective the central focus of his attention—namely, how the fruits of historical scholarship can be enlisted in addressing the existential spiritual concerns of the Jewish people, redefining its identity and guiding its life-decisions in the present age as in previous ages. There may be some validity in each of the critiques, from their respective standpoints. But each critic should examine his own soul and ask, whether the critique may perhaps arise partly from defensive motives, to avoid taking seriously the prophetic challenge implicit in Schweid’s vision. Apart from its value as visionary-critical statement, The Idea of Modern Jewish Culture provides two other valuable services, analytical and his to- rical-pedagogic. As an analytical essay-monograph, it provides a compre- hensive overview of the impact of the notion of “culture” on many phases of modern Jewish life—liberal Jewish religion, academic historical Jewish scholarship, the Jewish nationalist and socialist movements, and even Jewish assimilationism—that are not normally studied together. The value of such an analytical approach for generating insight should be self-evident. In the heat of debate between polar opposite positions—the religious-versus- secular, the Diaspora-versus-Zionist—it is important to stress the common viii Editor’s Preface denominator between them. It is not intuitively obvious, for instance, to view a modern religious movement as having a secular-cultural dimension, or a secular movement as responding to religious questions, but once we learn to appreciate these subtleties, our understanding of each of the phe- nomena is enriched, as well as their place in the total sweep of modern Jewish history. Ultimately, it is to the understanding of Jewish intellectual history that this work—as well as the vast majority of Schweid’s oeuvre—is devoted. In that larger enterprise, this work stands as a monograph devoted to a specific topic: the role of “the idea of Jewish culture” in the unfolding of alternative programs for Jewish existence in the modern period. Specific in focus, it addresses one facet of a complex reality. On the axis of the religious- secular dichotomy, this inquiry focuses predominantly—though not exclusively—on the secular side. The reader of Schweid’s larger oeuvre will easily find other works, written from different perspectives, to complement the specificity of this focus. To name three: 1. In The Classic Jewish Philosophers (Ha-Filosofim ha-Gedolim Shelanu), Schweid offers a general historical narrative of