Rabbinic Idealism and Kabbalistic Realism: Jewish Dimensions of Idealism and Idealist Dimensions of Judaism (forthcoming in The Impact of Idealism, general editor Nicholas Boyle, editor of volume on theology Nicholas Adams) Paul Franks For over two centuries, Jewish philosophy and post-Kantian Idealism, have been intertwined. Habermas has rightly noted “the German Idealism of the Jewish philosophers”, asking how, given the Christian or post-Christian character of Idealism, this intimacy is possible.1 In what follows, I offer an answer. First, however, I will deepen the puzzle. For what is internal to Idealism is not only Christianity or post-Christianity, but specifically the claim that Christianity or post-Christianity has superseded Judaism. Accordingly, Idealism constitutes a challenge to Judaism, which must justify its continued existence in the modern world. This makes it more puzzling that Idealism has attracted so many Jewish philosophers. To solve this puzzle, it is necessary to show that both Kantian and post-Kantian Idealism have what I will call Jewish dimensions – namely, rabbinic Idealism and kabbalistic Realism.2 By articulating these dimensions, Jewish philosophy has contributed to the inner development of Idealism. Moreover, by reappropriating these dimensions as Jewish, Jewish philosophers have found within Idealism the resources to respond to the Idealist challenge, by demonstrating that Judaism has not been superseded. The seeds of all these developments lie in works by Salomon Maimon, published between 1790 and 1793.3 In a sadly illuminating illustration of Idealism’s complex relationship to Judaism and Jewishness, Kant said of Maimon, “none of my critics understood me or the main questions so well.”4 He also complained about Maimon’s proposed “improvement” of the critical response to 1 these questions that, “Jews always like . to gain an air of importance for themselves at someone else’s expense.”5 The anti-Judaic trope is all too familiar. Anxiety concerning Christianity’s derivativeness from Judaism and Judaism’s capacity for vitality under adverse conditions gives rise to the prejudice that Jews cannot be original, and that, since Jewish promotion is always undeserved, it must always involve some non-Jew’s unfair demotion. Maimon was interested only in contributing to philosophy. His successors were also interested in showing that Judaism deserved to survive in the modern world. I: The Idealist Challenge to Judaism Karl Leonhard Reinhold, the first German Idealist, made Kant’s philosophy famous by presenting it as “the gospel of pure reason” that would resolve, once and for all, the conflict between reason and faith.6 Whether the various forms of Kantian and post-Kantian Idealism are Christian or post-Christian need not be decided here. Driven by their distinctive interest in the rationality of history and the history of reason, these philosophies inherit Christianity’s need to negotiate its relationship with its precursor: with Judaism, or whatever serves as its structural analogue. At one extreme lies Marcionism: the view that Christianity is the antagonist of Judaism, to which it owes exactly nothing. At the opposite extreme lie views that ascribe continuing roles to both Christianity and Judaism. Various views lie in between, including the supersessionist view that Judaism should not only acknowledge Christianity as its fulfillment, but should cease to exist once Christianity has arrived.7 The presupposition of Idealist discussions of Judaism is that Torah is, above all, law. Two millennia earlier, the Septuagint had translated “Torah” as “nomos”. However, what was once the law of nature, or the law that imitated nature, had become, in Spinoza’s hands, a political arrangement, vestige of a vanished state.8 2 Kant saw one aspect of the law – the prohibition of the representation of God – as sublime.9 But in the rest of the Mosaic law he saw no sublimity. Given by a deity external to reason, the Torah was surely heteronomous. Indeed, since religion consisted of the faith and hope required for morality, and since morality was autonomous, Judaism was not religion but politics. Yet, precisely because of Judaism’s sublime idea of an unrepresentable God, it was especially dangerous. Unlike the demands of desire, Judaism could be mistaken for morality. The purification of religion would require “the euthanasia of Judaism” – from Christianity as well as from Judaism itself.10 Kant was so insistent that Jesus “appeared as though descended from heaven”, taking nothing from Judaism, that Fichte’s neo-Marcionism becomes intelligible.11 He regarded Judaism as misanthropic, and retained only the Gospel of John. Hegel and Schelling, however, were supersessionists. Indeed, the Christianity’s supersession of Judaism was a principal model for their versions of sublation. On the one hand, supersession is an abstraction, an idealization of ancient history. On the other, Idealist sublation finds in concrete, actual Judaism one of its principal applications. Hegel and Schelling inherited Kant’s idea that Judaism was especially dangerous because it represented the stage immediately prior to salvation, where consciousness could easily become paralyzed, as if mesmerized by slavery in the guise of freedom.12 But they did not share Kant’s formal conception of freedom as autonomy. What Judaism lacked, in Hegel’s view, was a collective identification with the Lord that would give human action as such an essential role in God’s recognition of Godself in the other, which alone could reconcile infinity with finitude. This lack explained why Judaism had remained frozen for millennia: parochially particular and excluded from history’s march towards the universality of the absolute religion, which was at last in view. A major debate of the time was whether, a thousand years after their civil rights were removed by the Christianized Roman Empire, Jews should become citizens of the modern 3 European states that were superseding Christendom. That Jews should, as humans and as residents, become citizens, was agreed by Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Disagreement focused on whether Jews should shed their Judaism as a pre-condition of emancipation or as its consequence.13 That Judaism should be dispensed with was beyond question. Within Idealism’s modern world, Jews as humans would be welcome. But Jews as Jews would find no place. This was the new, Idealist version of the Christian challenge that Jewish philosophy would have to face after Kant. II: Kant, Plato and Rabbinic Idealism Kant’s critical philosophy has an explicitly Platonic dimension. After the Aristotelian emphasis of the Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason on cognition’s need for both intelligible form and sensible matter, it is striking that, in the Dialectic, Kant insists on the necessity for ideas too: rational forms that wholly transcend the senses and that are incapable of instantiation by sensible matter. These ideas play an essential role in setting the ends of cognition and also in the transition from theoretical to practical philosophy, where they provide the structure of rational faith. It is in this context that Kant claims to understand Plato better than Plato understood himself.14 Aristobulus, the first known Jewish philosopher, is said to have claimed that Plato knew the laws of Moses.15 To be sure, the high point of medieval Jewish philosophy is often said to occur with Maimonides, who did not admire his more Platonic predecessors, and who affirmed as true every Aristotelian statement about the sublunar realm.16 But, like other Arabic-speaking “Aristotelians”, there was more Platonism and Neo-Platonism in Maimonides’ view than he could have known, thanks to texts such as the Theology of Aristotle, actually an epitome of Plotinus’ Enneads. Moreover, precisely because of Maimonides’ self-professed Aristotelianism, Plato was favoured by those who opposed Maimonides’ radical rationalism in the name of “kabbalah” or tradition received from an authoritative source. 4 The association with Platonism was reinforced during the Renaissance by Pico della Mirandola, who had an entire library of kabbalistic texts translated from Hebrew and Aramaic, just as Marcilio Ficino had translated previously unknown Platonic texts. Both kabbalah and Platonism were presented as prisca theologia, anticipating Christianity. Simultaneously, open practitioners of Judaism were expelled from the Iberian peninsula, revitalizing kabbalistic thought in Renaissance Italy, and the idea of an accord between kabbalah and Platonism became more important to kabbalistically inclined Jewish writers. Thus, Isaac Abarbanel, a distinguished Iberian Jew taking refuge in Italy, wrote that Jeremiah was Plato’s teacher,17 and it became commonplace to compare Platonic ideas to the kabbalistic sefirot: the ten numbers or divine attributes mediating between the infinite and the created, finite world.18 Even when new and less Platonic waves of kabbalistic thinking spread from the Galilee throughout the Jewish world in the seventeenth century, they appeared initially in a Neo-Platonic guise, both in the Jewish community beyond the Land of Israel, and among the Christians who gained access to kabbalistic works only in the late seventeenth century, with the massive translation project of the Kabbala Denudata.19 In the words of Abraham Herrera, author of one of the translated works, “we follow our ḥakhamim or wise men sages and the Platonic philosophers who, being more divine [than the Peripatetics], are