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Modernity as a Crisis for the Jews Michael A. Meyer Modern Judaism, Vol. 9, No. 2. (May, 1989), pp. 151-164. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0276-1114%28198905%299%3A2%3C151%3AMAACFT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3 Modern Judaism is currently published by Oxford University Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/oup.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Sat May 26 05:53:09 2007 Michael A. Meyer MODERNITY AS A CRISIS FOR T H E JEWS* I n popular consciousness Jews have become the very symbols of modernity. Although Spinoza was a heretic? Marx baptized a Christian at the age of six, and Freud the underminer of all transcendent faith, in the popular mind these shapers of modernity continue to be regarded as Jews. with apologists and critics alike ever and again seeking to link their modernity to their Jewish origins. More generally, affirmers of modernity have lauded the presence of Jews in the vanguard of intellectual innovation, while political movements of the extreme Left and Right have held Jews collectively responsible for fostering values that destroyed the medieval consensus and substituted a society of alienated individuals for an earlier harmonious community. Yet if indeed the Jews were instrumental in advancing critical thought and in the propagation of a capitalist ethos-a role much exaggerated by both their friends and their enemies -it is surely an irony that for the Jews themselves modernity initially presented such severe problems. Especially did it pose a crisis for the Jewish religion whose God (pace Karl Marx) was not "merely an illusory bill of exchange." Modernity. as the Jews of western and central Europe first encountered it in the eighteenth century. was seductive. for it seemed to offer liberation from political disabilities and from intellectual isolation. In their enthusiasm some Jews saw it not merely as the dawning of a new age, but greeted it with something approaching messianic enthusiasm. That it would also severely call into question the viability of Judaism and undermine Jewish solidarity was an outcome that a few Jews welcomed, others resisted, and many greeted with deep-seated ambivalence. My intent in this study is to analyze the nature of the challenge that modernity posed for the Jews, and especially for their religion, in the period when they first encountered it. What effects did that encounter have? How did Jewish thinkers attempt to reconcile Judaism and modernity? The undertaking is complicated by the shifting conceptual framework in which modernity presented itself to the Jews. While in its Enlightenment form it called forth one set of responses, post-Enlighten'This essay was delivered as a paper at a conference on "Jews,Christians, and Modernity" organized by the American Jewish Committee and the Harvard Divinity School in Nove~ilber 1988. 152 Michael A. Meyer ment thought produced a different confrontation and outcome. Indeed! the divisions in modern Judaism during the last 150 years reflect an ongoing rivalry between the two responses. The concept "modernity" is employed in such different fashion by various writers that my particular use of it requires explanation at the outset. The basic division in usage seems to lie between those who take it only as a temporal category and those who regard it as possessing a particular content. For the former it simply designates the most recent period of history. They take the word's etymology seriously and define it relatively as "now" in opposition to "then."' While the modern period at its inception thus marks a break with the preceding epoch? it remains openended in relation to the present. and "post-modernity" becomes a contradictory concept. The latter. in seeking an essence of modernity. have focused on a range of phenomena that made their appearance anywhere from the Renaissance until well into the nineteenth century. These phenomena not only mark a rupture with the past, but constitute a new way of viewing the world. There is, of course. no agreement on which elements of this modern Weltanschauung are decisive. and I suspect it is an irresolvable issue.2 Depending on one's angle of vision, the catalogue may be headed by scientific empiricism, humanism, relativism, secularism, pluralism, the instrumental use of reason! historical criticism. o r the ascription of authority to individual conscience-to name but a few of the actual choices. Clearly all of these elements also had their impact on Judaism, as they did on Christianity. But my interest here is less in the problems that modernity posed for Western religion in general than in its particular influence on Judaism. Hence I shall focus on those characteristics of modernity that affected the Jewish religion more decisively, or in a differentiated manner, than they did Christianity, with the intention of trying to reach an historical understanding of the specific ways that modernity affected Jews and their particular religious responses to it. On the most fundamental level it was political modernization in central and western Europe that presented a crisis for Jewish religious existence. Until modern times Jewish communities possessed the right to conduct their own affairs in accordance with Jewish law. The state required little more than that the Jews pay the taxes levied on them and in no way offend Christian sensibilities. It recognized the right of the communities to discipline their own for religious breaches no less than for civil ones. But the emerging modern centralized state, whether in England. France or the various states of Germany, required the demolition of competing structures that impeded its direct authority. Thus the political process that led to the emancipation of the Jews was characterized as much by the breaking down of communal authority as by the liberation from onerous restrictions. Even so backward a state as Poland had Modernity as Crisis for Jews 153 attempted to assert greater direct authority over its Jews when it abolished the representative Council of Four Lands in 1764; eighty years later Tsarist Russia did away with Jewish self-government even locally when it declared the Jewish kahal illegal. I n the West there was a steady erosion of Jewish communal autonomy. German states in the eighteenth century abolished or curtailed rabbinic juridical functions. In 1808 Napoleonic France took over direct control of its Jewry by reorganizing Jewish life in a consistory system under its own aegis. What remained in the wake of this process were communities that lacked authority to impose the traditional way of life upon their members. The most effective instrument of internal Jewish social control had been the cherem, the ban. More severe in its economic and social effects than an excommunication. threat of the cherem induced religious conformity, and when invoked. required painful and demeaning penance before it could be lifted. In the eighteenth century states became increasingly reluctant to allow Jewish courts to apply this penalty. In a recently studied case that caused a considerable stir in the early 1780s. Rabbi Raphael Kohen of Altona (then controlled by Denmark) failed to coerce a recalcitrant Jew, Samuel Marcus, to give up his fashionable wig and grow a beard. Although Marcus was unsuccessful in attempting to remove himself entirely from the rabbi's jurisdiction. promulgation of the cherem was henceforth subject to government confirmation in Denmark and therefore ceased to be a powerful threat. Kohen's view, expressed in a sermon, that "the foundation of Torah and commandment was constructed upon coercion." no longer reflected empirical reality. Having lost the ability to enforce their views. champions of the old ways could resort only to the rhetoric of condemnation.3 The successful efforts of the modern state to constrict ecclesiastical power were of course directed at Christian institutions 110 less than at Jewish ones. Erastianism prevailed increasingly in the age of enlightened despotism; church courts suffered no less than rabbinical ones. Frederick the Great of Prussia viewed all religion with contempt, seeing it simply as an agent of social control. and asserting the right of the state to interfere in church affairs. With ecclesiastical authority diminished?churches became associations of likeminded persons that derived their influence from individual a ~ s e n tStill. . ~ they continued to enjoy state support and to benefit from their close connection with secular rulership. Although the church needed to transform itself organizationally and theologically to meet the new conditions. Christian theology was ensconced in the universities and the role of Christianity in the modern nation state-while its nature might be disputed-was never in widespread doubt. The Jewish situation was far more serious because Jewish solidarity had been constructed upon separation. When integration replaced separation! the implication was religious assimilation, not the bestowal of equal status with Christianity in the life of state and society. Thus the breakdown of rabbinical authority opened the way to increasing disregard of the norms that had held the Jewish community together. Like Calvin's Geneva, the medieval Jewish corporations had been theocracies, miniature and more limited continuations of the ancient theocracy of Israel. But now the observance of Jewish law became a matter of individual conscience, with the result that chaos replaced the earlier conformity. Solidarity gave way to a variety of responses, as individual Jews drew conflicting personal consequences from their new situation. Some continued undeterred in the old ways. But others rejected rabbinic Judaism entirely, affirming only what they called "the pure faith of Moses." Still others arbitrarily kept certain traditions-not necessarily the most important ones historically -while neglecting those that stood in the way of economic or social advance. Children frequently conducted their religious lives very differently from their parents. Jewish practices in the home became an embarrassment in the presence of strangers.5 By the turn of the nineteenth century. the more radical Jewish exponents of enlightenment regarded rabbis as almost wholly irrelevant. Deprived of their authority. unwilling or unable to take on a new mediating role. rabbis were reduced to making ritual decisions for those who would bother to consult them. The observance of Jewish law. no longer recognized as binding by the state, had become a matter of individual choice. T o those for whom Jewish ritual possessed no subjective meaning. conversion to Christianity became an attractive ~ p t i o n . ~ As more and more Jews withdrew themselves from the moral authority of traditional Judaism and absorbed values from the surrounding world, they perceived their heritage - to use a contemporary image - as "a mummy" whose wrapping was unravelling. The well-preserved body inside would crumble into dust as it was increasingly exposed to the light of day. Universalism, it seemed. was incompatible with Jewish particularity. "Judaism necessarily ceases when the people begins to lose and forget its consciousness of itself as the people of God," wrote Moses Moser in 1824. "From thence there is no other religion but the world religion, as Christ and Mohammed attest."' For Christianity the confrontation with modernity was more gradual because it had all along been in contact with the world that was modernizing. For Judaism the exposure was almost sudden, unleashing energies whose direction was by no means clear at the time. As the historian Isaac Marcus Jost recalled from his own youth at the beginning of the nineteenth century. for the young men who streamed to Berlin a new day had dawned, arousing them as if from slumber and turning them to activity whereby, in the course of a generation. they hastened through whole ~enturies.~ Modernity as Crisis for Jews 155 It was not, however, state interference alone that shattered the Jewish religious consensus and factionalized Jewish communities. Part of the responsibility lay with the attraction of the ideal of tolerance, which because of its special significance for the Jews became the most alluring facet of modernity. Modernizing Jews could justify departure from traditional Jewish norms? once that became legally possible, by reference to the soon internalized value of tolerance for diverse religious opinions. It was the prospect of their increased tolerance by Christians that drew Jews to identify with the non-Jewish world and, of course, to hope for their social and political integration. But for enlightened Jews? consistency required an internal Jewish tolerance as well. T h e most prominent figure to advocate such tolerance actively was Moses Mendelssohn, the father of Jewish enlightenment in the eighteenth century. His position on the subject was extreme. John Locke, who greatly influenced Mendelssohn. had written of the church as "a free and voluntary society" which may not use force to obtain the obedience of its adherents. But Locke did allow for excommunication as long as it would "carry with it no rough usage of word or action whereby the ejected person may in any wise be damnified in body or estate."g Still a century later the Christian advocate of ameliorating the Jews' political status, Christian Wilhelm Dohm, did not object to the continuation of ecclesiastical discipline among the Jews even under conditions of political integration.10 But Mendelssohn rejected such coercion as wholly out of keeping with the properly understood character of religion. "True divine religion," he wrote, "requires the use of neither arms nor fingers; it is pure spirit and heart." H e labelled church discipline, whether among Jews or Christians. a "pernicious prerogative" inappropriate for devotees of a God "who, as we all acknowledge. is love itself."ll Mendelssohn's view had doubtless been influenced by the ban leveled against Spinoza in Amsterdam and likely also by the intolerance contemporary rabbis exhibited with regard to his own work. I t is more difficult to determine whether Mendelssohn foresaw its consequences. For advocacy of a tolerant Judaism as the true Judaism gave internal sanction to the external pressures from the centralized state. Judaism became a private matter between the individual and God, following the lead of Protestantism in this regard. The Jewish polity became more similar to a church. Liberated from institutional control and subjectivized. Judaism entered the modern world without clear norms and uncertain of its future. Given the Jews' precipitous plunge into modernity, it is not surprising that they should have looked, sometimes furtively, to their environment for cues and models. Initially, these came from the German Aufklarung. Leibniz and Christian Wolff provided the Mendelssohn circle with a rationalism open to religion that was as attractive to them as it was to 156 Michael A. Meyer enlightened Christians. Mendelssohn became a lifelong Wolffian, virtually impervious to the critique leveled by the Spataufklarung and romanticism against the earlier metaphysics. Religious rationalism of the type developed by the German neologists was especially attractive to Jews emerging into non-Jewish society. It set aside the conceptions of original sin and divine grace that constituted doctrinal barriers between Christianity and Judaism. Through its espousal of natural religion, it provided a common religious basis for Jew and gentile. The existence of God, providence, and immortality were eternal truths available to all humans. Revelation. a divisive source of truth, was not necessary for salvation. I t simply supplemented, illustrated, and dramatized what unaided reason could also attain. Yet almost without exception even the most enlightened Christian theologians and intellectuals were unwilling to allow that Judaism could. like Christianity. be transformed into a fully rational?and hence modern faith. They could draw upon rich veins of anti-Jewish literature located not only in works of the old polemical tradition. but also in the writings of prominent deists, who almost invariably declared Judaism incorrigibly primitive, incapable of either rationalization o r tolerance. In Germany such views were taken up by Michaelis, Reimarus, Spalding and others." For Herder the Jewish religion, and therefore also the people obedient to its laws, belonged to Palestine, less to Europe than to Asia.13 As Reinhart Koselleck has pointed out. the Enlightenment in general and even its culminating figure. Immanuel Kant, favored toleration in the realm of ideas, but it possessed little toleration for divergent religions. Put bluntly. the Enlightenment was not pluralistic.'J It sought to build a new order on the ruins of the old. The crisis for the Jews. then. was the widespread view that modernity in the present. like Christianity in the past. required of the Jews some form of conversion. Unlike Christianity itself, which could be made rational and allow the right of individual conscience. Judaism could not. It was irreconcilable with the values of the Enlightenment. Judaism was by nature a religion of the medieval ghetto. It could not be tolerant. Had the Jews not driven out Spinoza? I t could not be rational. Had not vast numbers of Jews only three generations earlier gullibly put their faith in the messianic pretensions of Shabbetai Zevi? Even in the eighteenth century some Jews continued to use Sabbatian amulets. Mendelssohn's response to this dilemma was audacious. H e sought to reconceive Judaism in such a way that it was intellectually more. not less. in accord with Enlightenment standards than was Christianity. Ignoring those elements in Jewish tradition that favored a mystical understanding of God. Mendelssohn stressed that the doctrinal content of Judaism did not extend beyond the limits of natural religion. Unlike Christianity, Judaism possessed no superrational dogmas. Moreover, it was more tolerant than Christianity. While the latter was ever concerned Modernity as Crisis for Jews 157 to save souls from outside its ranks-as Lavater and others had ardently hoped for the salvation of Mendelssohn's own soul through conversion -Judaism held to the tenet that "the righteous of all nations have a share in the world to come." Mendelssohn was thus turning conventional wisdom on its head. H e was arguing that inherently Judaism was not less capable of viability in the context of modernity than was Christianity; on the contrary. it was more so. Of course to avoid goring himself on the universalist (and deist) horn of the dilemma. Mendelssohn had to allow for Jewish particularism and for revelation. And, as is well known. he did so by declaring that Jewish law, not dogma, was the essence of the Sinaitic theophany. That law remained binding on all Jews. though its observance was not necessary for the salvation of those outside their ranks. The Mendelssohnian bifurcation of Judaism to make it both enlightened religion par excellence and a particular response to God's will by keeping the law became paradigmatic for a certain ongoing kind of Jewish modernism. While. as we shall see. Mendelssohn's solution proved inadequate for most modern Jews, it became a model for those who would in the nineteenth century call themselves Neo-Orthodox or Modern Orthodox. The i~ltellectualprogenitor of Neo-Orthodoxy was Samson Raphael Hirsch, a rabbi of the new kind, secularly educated and playing a role more analogous to the Christian clergyman. but no less committed to scrupulous observance of Jewish law than was Mendelssohn. Though Hirsch lived two generations after Mendelssohn. in a very different German intellectual context. he. more than any other major figure. represents the continuation of Mendelssohn's legacy. For Hirsch. just as for Mendelssohn. Judaism was "eternal," by which Hirsch meant that its religious truths and its laws were not subject to historical vicissitude. The norms of Judaism, emanating from revelation, stood above history. judging the world but not judged by it. What made Hirsch a latter-day Mendelssohnian, rather than simply an Orthodox Jew, was that he too adopted a bifurcation in Jewish identity. though its lines ran somewhat differently. For Hirsch. as for Mendelssohn. Judaism was a rational religion, without dogmas. without mystical fantasies. For him. too. God singled out the Jews by giving them an immutable law! not by constricting their reason with dogma. But Hirsch laid out the Jewish and general realms more broadly: on the one hand there was Torah, encompassing the totality of revelation, Written and Oral Law; on the other, there were the norms of the modern world in all areas of life. While Torah was the dominant category, it did not restrict freedom of thought or, except where ritual law would be violated, full participation in nonJewish culture and society. For Hirsch. then, as for Mendelssohn, modernity did not necessitate recognition of the impact of historical change upon religious faith and practice. Well into the nineteenth century Hirsch could ignore historicism, basing his theology on the transcendent God who entered history in revelation, yet remained apart from it. But as the earlier Enlightenment thought reached the end of its tether with the Kantian critique and the assault of romanticism. the way was opened for a new conception of religious modernity, one that separated itself from tradition precisely in its recognition that religious truths were not transhistorical. that they were conditioned -or at least their understanding was conditioned -by the historical experience of particular peoples and of humanity as a whole. On the intellectual side. the failure of the Mendelssohnian model of Jewish modernity to be passed on to a broader segment of German Jewry than the modern Orthodox lay in large measure with the two important figures in whose work the Aufklarung culminated and went beyond itself. Both Kant and Lessing were venerated by modern Jews. yet each of them independently undermined the Mendelssohnian solution. Ironically. there is no modern philosopher who influenced Jewish thinkers more than did Immanuel IZant. From Solomon Ludwig Steinheim in the early nineteenth century through Hermann Cohen toward its end. and on to Leo Baeck in the twentieth century. the Kantian imperative was equated with the call to moral responsibility in the Hebrew Bible. Jews were among the earliest disciples of Kant and Jews continued to uphold his basic principles even when other philosophies were more fashionable. Yet Kant himself failed to recognize the possibility of a modern Judaism. Adopting Mendelssohn's view that Judaism was differentiated by its law and focused upon its observance, he declared Judaism for that reason a non-religion and looked forward to its rapid demise.15 Like the other Enlightenment figures. Kant too was not a religious pluralist. H e offered his philosophical religion as the exclusive basis for religious unity. Enlightened Jews who were persuaded by Kant drew the consequence that the Kantian religion of morality had in fact made Judaism anachronistic. If Judaism was law and legalism. if Christianity transformed and purified through Kantian philosophy had taken over the moral seriousness of Jewish tradition, then Judaism remained an empty shell. Some Jews toward the end of the eighteenth century. having lost personal attachment to observance of the law. drew the proper conclusion and became Kantians within the socially more acceptable Christian framework. Those Jews who drew Kant into a Jewish framework were faced with the task of appropriating a heritage not intended for such disposition. At their hands Kantianism became an aspect of Jewish modernity in spite of IZant.16 The double role played by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in bringing Jews into modernity is especially poignant. His rather threadbare early play. Die Juden, dramatized the issue of Jewish moral acceptability. It argued that. despite popular prejudice, virtuous Jews who remained Modernity as Crisis for Jews 159 Jews were possible. Almost thirty years later, in Nathan the Wise, Lessing created a well developed character who, though a medieval Jew. was in his worldview a man of the Enlightenment in the best sense. For German Jews from the eighteenth century through the dark 1930s Lessing remained the embodiment of the noble German -precisely because he had found nobility even and especially in the Jew. Nathan's tolerance and highmindedness became for them the fictionalized ideal of their own Jewish modernity. even as Mendelssohn served as their historical model." But Lessing also wrote The Education of Humanity, a work that wholly undermined the Mendelssohnian solution. By equating revelation with education, Lessing deprived it of the eternality insisted upon both by Mendelssohn in the eighteenth century and later by Hirsch in the nineteenth. Concepts of God. Lessing argued in 1780. evolved with the spiritual evolution of the human race. Ancient Israel was a primitive people incapable, for example, of rising to so exalted a conception as the immortality of the soul. Only under the influence of "purer Persian doctrine" were the Jews able to recognize a universal God in their national deity. And only under the influence of "a better pedagogue." Christ, was the religious evolution of humanity able to advance to recognition of the soul's immortality.18 Lessing. the paragon of Enlightenment tolerance, thus gave a modern cast to the older doctrine of the Christian supersession of Judaism. With abundant variations. other thinkers. from Hegel to Toynbee. would later imply or declare the anachronism of Jewish survival into the modern world. A fossil might be preserved in the airless darkness of the ghetto. but? like the mummy mentioned earlier?it now belonged in a museum. Mendelssohn, of course. possessed little sympathy or understanding for either the critical work of Kant or the historicization of religion set forth by Lessing. They represented new challenges that Mendelssohn. late in his life, was not prepared to meet. He held on to his established views in spite of them. Others tried to come to terms with Kant by rejecting the Mendelssohnian notion that Judaism was essentially the law. Some early Jewish Kantians severed Judaism from the Mosaism, purged of the ceremonial law, to which they themselves adhered. But that provided no specifically Jewish norms. Saul Ascher, a later Enlightenment Jewish thinker? attempted to overcome the Mendelssohnian bifurcation by arbitrarily selecting certain Jewish observances as binding. while others might fall into neglect. But his abstruse writing had little contemporary impact. The burden of historicism was not easily borne. Like the Aufklarung. it was blessing and curse together. Politically, recognition of the influence of history worked to the benefit of the Jews. Gentile and Jewish proponents of emancipation argued that all of the "faults" attributed to the Jews could be ascribed to the historical role they had been forced to 160 Michael A. Meyer assume at the periphery of Christian society. If they were avaricious and petty. that was because they had been forced into moneylending and pawnbroking, occupations that had shaped their characters in particular ways. Their undesirable traits were neither inherent nor the products of their religion. They were simply the result of their unfortunate historical experience. Freedom of opportunity would change them for the better.19 Yet applied to their religion! the same historical thinking forced the conclusion that it was no more appropriate for Jews any longer to remain adherents of Judaism than it was for them to remain predominantly petty entrepreneurs (rather than farmers, artisans, and professionals). The initial impact of such thought in its Hegelian form is most evident in the history of a small circle of Jewish intellectuals founded in Berlin in 1819. Their Society for Culture and Scientific Study of the Jews was a conscious effort to preserve Judaism by bringing its investigation into the orbit of German Wissenschaft. Their broad orientation enabled some of them to recognize in Judaism an ethnic as well as a religious foundation. But lack of community support and their own ambivalence caused the society to collapse after five years. Deeply influenced by Hegel, its president. Eduard Gans. had sought to reconcile Hegelianism with Judaism. But to do so meant to act directly against the Hegelian view of Judaism as no more than a stage in the history of the Absolute Spirit that had long since been left behind. Although the practical motivation of Gans's conversion to Christianity in 1825 was to obtain a professorship at the University of Berlin. he could justify his act by the argument that Judaism's contribution to civilization had already been absorbed. T o continue as a Jew was to ignore dialectical progress. As the nature of modernity shifted from rationalism and toleration to historicism. the nature of the crisis that it represented for the Jews shifted as well. Now the issue was no longer whether Judaism was inherently capable of religious rationality and broadmindedness. but whether it had not stagnated two thousand years ago and any change now was a rupture rather than a continuation of the process of evolution. Was it inherently capable of development? Could it be shown, on the basis of its own tradition, that Judaism had responded creatively to external challenges in the past and that modernity therefore simply represented a new encounter, not a crisis without precedent? It is as an attempt to deal with this second stage of modernity that we can best understand the rise of a new interpretation of the Jewish religion called "historical Judaism."20 First appearing in Germany in the second third of the nineteenth century. it quickly gained the religious center. with both more orthodox and more radical positions remaining nonhistorical. For not only. as noted above, did modern Orthodoxy persist in declaring that revelation remained untouched by political change and Modernity as Crisis for Jews 161 intellectual progress. but the religious radicals. ironically. assumed a similar stance. Their most prominent spokesman was Samuel Holdheim. rabbi of the Reformgemeinde in Berlin. His religious position gave nearly the same normative status to the Zeitgeist that Hirsch attributed to the revelation at Sinai. For Holdheim the present did indeed require a rupture with traditional Judaism. and he held u p to ridicule attempts to read modernity into the Jewish past. The Reform Judaism that he espoused was fundamentally different from earlier Judaisms. and he made no attempt to conceal that fact. 111 instituting a Sunday service and rojecting Jewish law entirely. the Reformgemeinde of Berlin broke consciously and deliberately with the Jewish past. Modernity. to the minds of its rabbis and congregants. required a Judaism fundamentally different from what Judaism had been in earlier times. Hirsch and Holdheim represented the touching extremes of Jewish religious modernization. each rejecting an evolutionary model because he was able to find a sufficient norm in a single point of time, whether at Sinai. as for Hirsch. or in the present. as for Holdheim. However. by the end of the nineteenth century these two positions reflected the views of small minorities within German Jewry. Neo-Orthodox and Radical Reform Judaism alike existed organizationally separate from the Gemeinde, which embraced the broad center. both Conservative and Liberal. I t was from this center that the characteristic rewish response to the second stage of modernity emerged. Like Lessing. this new response replaced static reason with dynamic reason.21 Two thinkers were the most prominent exponents of the newly conceived "historical Judaism." the one a Conservative. the other a Liberal. Both were traditionally educated rabbis and university-trained scholars. Both were deeply influenced by the scholarly program of Wissenschaft des Judentums and sought to integrate its results into their understanding of the nature of Judaism. Most importantly. both attempted to present Judaism as a faith that developed out of its own inner dynamic? responding to changes in its environment without sacrificing its essence. Born in Prague. Zacharias Frankel served for a number of years as rabbi of the Jewish community in Dresden before becoming the head of the first modern rabbinical seminary in Germany. in Breslau. in 1854. A conservative religious reformer. Frankel opposed all but minor changes in the liturgy and championed the continued use of Hebrew in worship. H e discountenanced Pentateuch criticism and followed tradition in his insistence that Jewish law, halakhah, was the still firm foundation of Judaism. What set Frankel clearly apart from Orthodoxy was his rejection of the notion that Judaism in its entirety. Written and Oral Law. had been delivered to Moses at Sinai. Jewish law? Frankel insisted, was responsive to the successive historical circumstances in which Jews had lived. T h e ancient Rabbis had shaped and reshaped it to fit changing conditions. Thus Judaism was not at all eternal. in the sense of Mendelssohn and Hirsch, but to a considerable degree the product of its own history. That history, moreover. did not end with the birth of Christianity. And modernity, far from representing an unprecedented situation for Judaism. simply required the reactivation of such modes of adjustment as Judaism had employed when faced by similarly novel historical circumstances in the past. As a Conservative? Frankel thought it wrong to tamper with practices still held dear. and he remained somewhat suspicious of the contemporary Zeitgeist. But in his conception of Jewish law as flexible and adaptive. he created a basis for continuity and made modernity seem more manageable. Abraham Geiger, the Liberal. was a far more turbulent spirit than Frankel. I n his youth he was uncertain whether the rupture of Jewish tradition was not indeed a necessary consequence of the confrontation with modernity. For a time he was persuaded that Judaism could survive only through schism. those Jews who had absorbed the values of modernity separating themselves from their fellow Jews who remained mired in medievalism. As a scholar. Geiger was more radical than Frankel. While he too noted how Jewish law had adapted to its environment. Geiger went further, pointing out how later interpreters of the tradition had not only modified the law but misunderstood earlier texts. Moreover. he did not draw the line of historical criticism at the Pentateuch. For Geiger the Torah too was a product of its history. though it contained divine revelation. Unlike Frankel, Geiger did not make the law the unit of historical continuity. For the law, to Geiger's mind. would not necessarily survive the onslaught of modernity. What would survive was the prophetic conception of God and morality. Ethical monotheism. Geiger argued. along with other Jewish religious reformers, was the core. preserved intact by husks of law and custom. I t was grounded both in revelation and in the religious genius of the Jewish people. T o Geiger's mind, this narrower conception of Judaism. in which theology and morality. rather than the law. became central. assured its viability. For theology and morality were the categories of contemporary individualistic religion that, since I<ant, eschewed heteronomy as unworthy of modern man. However. if Geiger and others who thought similarly had simply reconceived Judaism to make it more like Christianity, it would not have met the particular challenge that modernity represented for Judaism as a minority faith.22 I n Germany the adherents of a Judaism which they might regard as no less modern than Christianity still suffered the consequences of social discrimination or worse. Whatever the Jews' own views. German thinkers into the twentieth century persisted in regarding Judaism as religiously inferior to Christianity. From Mendelssohn onward. therefore. Jewish writers were driven to stronger assertions than the mere compatibility of Judaism with modernity. They insisted that 163 Modernity as Crisis for Jews Judaism, more than Christianity. was in harmony with the ideals of the modern age, and they argued that it was the more likely to survive into the future. It is in this context that we must understand the popularity of a modern notion called the "mission of Israel," which insists upon Judaism's vocation to bring its "purer" conceptions of God and morality to the non-Jew. While this doctrine, as it has usually been expressed. does not imply proselytization, it does imply that Judaism exists not only on account of its value for those born as Jews. It suggests that Judaism is not only a modern religion whose historical development has not ceased, but that it is inherently capable of becoming a model of modern religion for humanity. It is not surprising that German antisemites attacked this particular doctrine as the acme of Jewish arrogance. Yet it struck roots also in American Jewry and remained unchallenged until after World War 11. It was, in effect, the doctrine of the election of Israel turned outward to a universal goal. It was also the sword with which Judaism defended itself against the new form of Christian supersession. HEBREW UNION COLLEGE-CINCINNATI NOTES 1. Charles Whitney, Francis Bacon and Modernity (New Haven, 1986),p. 8. 2. Some recent views: Jurgen Habermas, "Modernity versus Postmodernity," New German Critique, No. 22 (Winter 1981), pp. 3-14; Michel Foucault, "What is Enlightenment?" (1984), in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (New York, 1984), pp. 39-50; and Lawrence E. Cahoone, The Dilemma ofModernity: Philosophy, Culture, and Anti-Culture (Albany, 1988),pp. 1-31. 3. This account of the case is based on Jacob Katz, "Rabbi Raphael Kohen, the Adversary of Moses Mendelssohn", Tarbiz, Vol. 56 (1987), pp. 243-64 [Hebrew]. 4. Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789 (Grand Rapids, 1964), pp. 12, 95-97; Reinhart Koselleck, "Aufklarung und die Grenzen ihrer Toleranz," in Trutz Rendtorff (ed.),Glaube und Toleranz: Das theologtiche Erbe der Aufkliirung (Giitersloh, 1982),pp. 256-58. 5. Michael A. Meyer, "The Orthodox and the Enlightened: An Unpublished Contemporary Analysis of Berlin Jewry's Spiritual Condition in the Early Nineteenth Century," Leo Baeck Institute Year Book, Vol. 25 (1980), pp. 101-30; G. Schnapper-Arndt, "Jugendarbeiten Ludwig Borne's iiber judische Dinge." Zeitschrift fiir die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, O.S., Vol. 2 (1888), p. 379. 6. Michael A. Meyer, The Ori@ns of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749-1824(Detroit, 1967),pp. 85-114; Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, 1770-1870 (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), pp. 104-123. 7. Adolf Strodtmann, H . Heine's Leben und Werke (Hamburg, 18843), Vol. I, p. 326. 164 Michael A. Meyer 8. [Wilhelm] Friedenthal, "Dr. I. M. Jost: Eine biographische Skizze," Jahrbuch fur Israeliten, Vol. 19 (1861),p. 152 note. 9. John Locke, Treatise of Civil Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Charles L. Sherman (New York, 1937),pp. 175, 179. 10. Christian Wilhelm Dohm, Ueber die burgerliche Verbesserung der Juden, 2 Vols. (Berlin and Stettin, 1981-83),Vol. I, p. 124. 11. Manasseh Ben Israel, Rettung der,Juden . . . Nebst einer Vorrede won Moses Mendelssohn (Berlin and Stettin, 1782),pp. xxxvi, 1-li. 12. Shmuel Ettinger, "Jews and Judaism in the Eyes of the English Deists in the Eighteenth Century," Zion, Vol. 29 (1964), pp. 182-207 [Hebrew]; Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (University, Ala., 1973), pp. 202-203, 492; Katz, Out ofthe Ghetto, pp. 80-103. 13. Johann Gottfried Herder's samtliche Werke: Zur Philosophie und Geschichte, X (Tiibingen, 1809),pp. 105-106. 14. Kosellek, "Aufklarung und die Grenzen ihrer Toleranz," pp. 269-71. 15. Nathan Kotenstreich, The Recurrent Pattern: Studies in Anti-Judaism in Modern Thought (London, 1963),pp. 23-47. 16. Within the great wealth of Kantian influences on Jewish writers that have been noted, it has remained unnoticed, I believe, that Abraham Geiger's essay, "Die zwei verschiedenen Betrachtungsweisen. Der Schriftsteller und der Kabbiner," Wissenschaftliche Zeitung fur jiidische Theologie, Vol. 4 (1839), pp. 321-33 follows the distinction between scholar and priest laid down by Kant in his famous essay "Was ist Aufklarung?" 17. This is perhaps best evident in the Lessing-Mendelssohn Gedenkbuch. Zur hundert/iinfiigy'iihngen Geburtsfeier von Gotthold Ephraim Lessing und Moses Mendelssohn, sowie zur Siicularfeier won Lessing's "~X'athan"(Leipzig, 1879). 18. See especially Paragraphs 16,26, 27, 38-40, 50-53. 19. Hannah Arendt-Stern, "Aufklarung und Judenfrage," Zeitschrifi fur die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland, n.s., Vol. 4 (1932),pp. 65-77. 20. Part of the following is based on my Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in,Judaism (New York, 1988),pp. 62-99. 21. These terms are from Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston, 1951),p. 195. 22. In 1833 the young Geiger wrote in a letter: "Furthermore, Judaism as the religion of a minority must contain a far more powerful content [than Christianity] since any exclusiveness-though it be purely religious-must always have its special justification in turning me away from the majority, which is, after all, everywhere regarded as embodying the norm of human truth.. . . [The Jew] must more adequately support his religious conviction precisely because he differs from the majority. If he does not do that and cannot do it, he is asserting that [Judaism] is a moribund residue of former times whose dissolution has only been delayed." Ludwig Geiger, "Abraham Geigers Briefe an J. Dbrenbourg (1833-42)," Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, Vol. 60 (1896),p. 104. http://www.jstor.org LINKED CITATIONS - Page 1 of 1 - You have printed the following article: Modernity as a Crisis for the Jews Michael A. Meyer Modern Judaism, Vol. 9, No. 2. (May, 1989), pp. 151-164. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0276-1114%28198905%299%3A2%3C151%3AMAACFT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-3 This article references the following linked citations. If you are trying to access articles from an off-campus location, you may be required to first logon via your library web site to access JSTOR. Please visit your library's website or contact a librarian to learn about options for remote access to JSTOR. Notes 2 Modernity versus Postmodernity Jürgen Habermas; Seyla Ben-Habib New German Critique, No. 22, Special Issue on Modernism. (Winter, 1981), pp. 3-14. 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