An Historical Overview of Jewish Theological Responses to Evolution

ABSTRACT

While a systematic comparison of the similarities and differences between Jewish and Muslim approaches to evolution is beyond the scope of this study, it is possible to note some of the most striking observations. Among the key differences highlighted by an historical perspective on Jewish approaches in the late-nineteenth to present day are the phenomenon of panentheistic tendences among Jewish commentators and the practice of defining the position of Judaism against that of Christianity. In response to Malik’s theological approach, which attempted to identify medieval traditions as potential resources for contemporary Muslim evolutionists, it proved to be an interesting counter-factual exercise to generate a comparable list of pre-modern theological resources for Jewish evolutionists.

KEYWORDS:

• Jews
• Judaism and science
• creationism
• evolutionary theory
• Darwinism
• panentheism
• Jewish-Christian relations

1. Introduction

As someone with research interests in Jewish engagement with evolutionary science, reading Islam and Evolution was a rewarding experience. As a discussion of a non-Christian tradition’s attempt to grapple with Darwinism, there were some very familiar assumptions, concerns, and challenges, but there were also some fascinating differences, the reasons for which were sometimes self-evident and other times remained mysterious to me.

This study will discuss: (1) some general observations about broad similarities and differences between Jewish and Muslim approaches, at least the Muslim approaches presented in Malik’s study, before offering (2) an historical overview of Jewish engagement from the time of the publication of Darwin’s Origins until today, followed by (3) a discussion of the kinds of pre-modern textual resources that could be drawn upon by a Jewish evolutionist. The historical overview or description of a range of different Jewish thinkers over a long period of time will by necessity generate a very different set of observations than Malik’s study of exclusively contemporary Muslim thinkers who were selected for a live theological project; nevertheless, it offers a creative chance to compare and contrast some of the issues deemed significant for these two non-Christian Abrahamic traditions. For example, the listing of texts and traditions that might comprise the kind of theological resources available to Jewish evolutionists was generated here as a creative response to Malik’s endeavours in a Muslim context. For while not typical of an historical approach and counter-factual in that not all were utilized historically, the exercise can helpfully raise questions relating to which texts and traditions were utilized and which were not. Some scholarly benefit should accrue from this comparison of historical apples and theological oranges.

2. General Observations about Similarities and Difference

Malik’s study presents a theological perspective,¹ and is cautious and defensive in tone. In large part this is because, as he observes, the scientific terminology is heavy-laden in emotional terms and often poorly understood. Terms such as “Darwinism” and “evolution” have attained symbolic meanings and represent ideas that are highly controversial in much of the Islamic world²—and of course these remain controversial in many other religious worlds, too, including the Jewish. Malik also reminds us that these religious worlds are multifaceted, and contain many perspectives.³ It is certainly true that Jewish engagements with evolution differ significantly over different times and places, and do not always break down as one might have expected across the religious spectrum covering ultra-Orthodox, modern Orthodox, Conservative, various Progressive, and secular groupings. Especially if one is interested in the topic over time and in different places, then personal theological idiosyncrasies account for much for the creativity, so that one is dazzled by the variety and ingenuity of ways found to relate religion to evolutionary theory, one way or another.

My own work has tended to focus on nineteenth- to mid twentieth-century Jewish responses to Darwin from an historical perspective,⁴ and so I am not comparing like with like when making comparisons with Malik’s fairly contemporary Muslim respondents.⁵ There were and continue to be Jewish critics of Darwinism, of course, but it is striking the extent to which Judaism has congratulated itself vocally in the pages of national newspapers, in sermons, and in extensive publications, for being better able to accommodate the new scientific discoveries than could an allegedly superstitious, anti-rational Christianity, which was viewed as confused and lost in internecine conflict in the face of the Darwinian challenge.⁶

For much of the time, the Judeo-Christian tradition, which really means the Christian tradition, looms large in Science and Religion studies, and it is clear that Islam and Judaism, while sharing much with Christianity, do start from their own subtly different sets of assumptions. For example, the cascade of theological implications that result from Christianity’s doctrine of original sin, traditionally understood to follow from the creation stories of Genesis, simply does not register in Jewish tradition and interpretations. Nevertheless, Jewish interlocutors with Darwin and his followers have tended to write against a backdrop of Christian perspectives on the subject, in opposition to which they worked out their own views. Interestingly, the desire to challenge the Christian dominance of much creationism-evolutionism debate appears historically to have been much more pronounced in the Jewish case than in the Muslim.⁷ This is probably since Jewish life and culture in the West has until recently existed in Christian lands rather than Jewish lands. Jews have had to work out their theological responses to modernity mainly in terms of Christian modernity. While a sensitivity among Jews towards the surrounding Christian religious culture remained deeply ingrained throughout Europe and North America, the relatively new freedoms that had followed legal and political emancipation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had opened up possibilities for Jews to join a wider society, opportunities that had been widely embraced. As a result, there emerged a widespread and profound fear of assimilation or absorption into an increasingly secular society, in addition to the old fear of religious conversion. One way of maintaining Jewish difference from Christianity while at the same time ensuring religious continuity, was to argue that Judaism, rather than Christianity, could be more readily reconciled with the modern world, that is, the rational world of modern science; and in fact this line of polemical argument was an ancient one, with Jewish criticisms of Christianity’s anti-rationalism and superstition ranging back over millennia. Thus for Jews, Darwinism offered an opportunity to critique Christianity by championing the rationalism of Judaism.

One difference between Jewish evolutionists and both Muslim and Christian evolutionists, and perhaps the most significant one, is that of panentheistic tendencies among many Jews, both traditional and progressive, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in contrast to the theistic forms of evolutionism more commonly found among Muslims and Christians.⁸ For our purposes, panentheism conceives of God to encompass the natural world while transcending it, which is to be distinguished from pantheism which identifies God with the totality of nature. Few if any Jewish thinkers are consistently pantheistic or panentheistic, but many do appear to demonstrate pan(en)theistic tendencies as a result of their engagement with evolutionary theory. At times they equate nature and God, or conceive of an immanent God as interwoven into the material cosmos, or express natural laws or processes in the language of the divine; and these are frequently formulated in such a way as to de-anthropomorphise the personal, interventionist deity of the Bible. Panentheistic evolutionism, at least as seen in the Jewish world, views evolution as a self-generating process without interference from an external deity, offering an alternative to theistic evolutionism by addressing the compatibility of religious beliefs with materialistic Darwinism and providing a naturalistic basis for ethics and morality. Panentheistic tendencies can be found in Christian thought, but to a much lesser extent and typically not until after the Second World War.⁹

That said, with the exception of panentheistic theology, it remains broadly the case that the differences between Jewish and Muslim approaches tended to be differences of emphasis. The concern to demonstrate evolutionary exceptionalism vis-à-vis humanity,¹⁰ the fear that evolutionary teaching might threaten morality,¹¹ and the attention given to the Intelligent Design movement¹² appear to be of greater interest to Muslims than to Jews, historically speaking, although these topics undoubtedly do appear in Jewish writings and Charedi or ultra-Orthodox Jews have certainly shown more than a passing interest in these issues more recently, as shown by the Slifkin episode, to which we shall return. Likewise, as already mentioned, the challenge to the Christian-centric focus of much creationism-evolutionism is made by Muslim contributions,¹³ but appears to be a much more pronounced, self-conscious effort in the Jewish case, so much so that when presenting the Historical Overview of Jewish engagement with evolutionary theory, below, it will be necessary to draw connections to Christian developments.

When it comes to similarities between Jewish and Muslim engagement with evolutionary theory, one might begin with Malik’s observation about the need to distinguish clearly between Darwinism proper and those various biological evolutionary theories that often merge with wider cosmological or mystical theories of evolution, even if the proponents often do not make such distinctions.¹⁴ There has been among Jewish as among Muslim commentators confusion about the relationship between evolution and atheism, scepticism and materialism,¹⁵ and there have also been suspicions of unbelief and even on occasion charges of heresy.¹⁶ Shared theological assumptions might include a divine Creator; wide-ranging debates about design and teleology,¹⁷ which are coloured by a distaste for chance or random processes;¹⁸ a cautious interest in the God of the Gaps with regard to the origins of life itself, for example;¹⁹ and the claim that science does not offer final solutions.²⁰

Perhaps the most obvious similarity found between Muslims and the Jewish People of the Book is the incorporation of post-biblical sources and later commentaries, that is, Talmudic, rabbinic, philosophical and mystical literature for Jews, and Quranic and kalamic texts and hadith for Muslims. But even here, there are important differences in emphasis. Malik’s sources were organized according to common themes he observed, namely, the creation of the heavens and earth,²¹ of non-human life,²² and of Adam,²³ and the discussion related to teachings about the Fall,²⁴ the age of the earth,²⁵ and Noah’s flood.²⁶ While there has likewise been a focus among Jews concerning the origins of the world, of biological life in general, and of humankind in particular, there was less interest in other topics, such as specific biblical stories like Noah’s flood; and some other themes of interest to Jews are irrelevant to Muslims, such the tradition of the creation of many worlds, to which we will return. In any case, dependence upon such texts in the construction of theological responses to Darwinism was arguably a less important concern for Jews, whose relationship to such texts and commentaries tended to be freer and less beholden.

In Malik’s study, pre-modern traditions and teachings are treated ahistorically in the sense that the riches of medieval Islamic thought, and in particular Al-Ghazali, are mined for seams of golden assumptions and principles that could be used by contemporary Muslims to weave evolutionary thought into modern Islamic theology.²⁷ Such an approach that draws on medieval theology and ideas like creation-from-nothing²⁸ cannot be said to characterize the works of modern Jewish evolutionists. A key issue, which Malik himself identifies, is the possibility of mistaking pre-modern discussions about the Great Chain of Being, which is in its essence a hierarchical conception of biological life in all its fullness and variety, with the kinds of family trees and evolutionary relationships referred to in modern debates about evolution.²⁹ Such an awareness may in part explain Jewish scholarly reluctance to draw very much upon pre-medieval traditions, other than mystical ones. But I wondered what such a set of pre-modern resources would look like and so in the second part of what follows, an attempt has been made to collate the kinds of theological resources, that is, textual sources and traditions, that might have been used in this way, although it is by no means a comprehensive survey.

3. Historical Overview

Malik’s study does not offer an historical overview of Muslim engagement with biological evolution theory, although he does supply plenty of historical information that throws light on the complicated way that Muslim theistic evolutionism has developed over time. If he had, however, it is unlikely that the two key themes that are addressed below would have featured, that is, the way in which Jews have tended to define themselves against Christianity, and the emergence from early on of pronounced panentheistic tendencies.³⁰

3.1. Early Responses

Early on, neither Jews nor most Christians were terribly concerned about the publication of the Origin of Species. Throughout the 1860s, there was little in the way of official comments from Jewish authorities and the Catholic Church had nothing to say regarding Darwinism. But things changed in the 1870s, beginning with the papacy of Pius IX, so that despite the fact that it made no reference to evolutionary theory, the First Vatican Council (1869–70) felt the need to affirm God as creator of all things, denounce a purely materialistic view of the world, and argue that true knowledge of God could be obtained from observing his Creation. And by the end of the nineteenth-century, the Church appeared orientated against Darwinism, as evidenced, for example, by the treatment of George Jackson Mivart (1827–1900), a Catholic biologist who, after initially supporting the theory of natural selection, offered a rival theory of the mechanism of evolution in The Genesis of the Species (1871), which among other things denied the evolution of humankind; his articles were put on the Index of Prohibited Books and he was excommunicated.³¹ Since, historically, Jews have tended to view the Catholic Church as the Church proper, it was against this apparently anti-science, superstitious, irrational Christianity which they believed they were defining their position. But especially in the UK and US, the Anglican and Episcopalian churches and other Protestants were of interest, too, and these adopted a wider variety of positions on the subject, many embracing the new science.³² Amongst the most influential Christians as far as North American Jewish thinkers were concerned was Henry Ward Beecher (1813–87). Beecher, a high-profile Congregationalist clergyman, wrote a two-volume collection of sermons entitled Evolution and Religion (1885), in which he argued that not only could the world could be viewed as a marvellous machine that had “by inherent laws gradually builded itself,” but that evolution offered an analogy for understanding the progressive development of both religion and human intellectual history. Unusually for a Christian, Beecher espoused a kind of panentheism (he explicitly condemned pantheism) when he presented the world as emanating from God, i.e. in some sense to be regarded as divine in nature, and life as the product of divine natural laws.³³

Jewish responses varied towards the end of the nineteenth century, but whether religious or non-religious, they often engaged directly with Christian views. Thus in 1872 the UK’s Chief Rabbi Nathan Adler (1803–90) addressed Darwinism in the national weekly newspaper The Jewish Chronicle by promoting the rationality of Judaism against the irrationality of Christianity, arguing that “Judaism has nothing to fear from the advancement of science, but everything to gain.” In contrast to the battle between Christianity and science, he went on, “such a contest must be slight or superficial in Judaism, where faith and reason go hand in hand … There is only one theology in existence which is not antagonistic to science—this is Jewish theology.”³⁴ And the first translator of Darwin into Hebrew, the Polish Orthodox writer Naphtali Levy (1840–94), argued in his Toldot Adam (Origins of Man, 1874) that Darwinism could be traced not only in rabbinic sources but in the Torah itself, so that even “those who are not children of our covenant,” i.e. Christians, could be persuaded that Moses had “taught from the observation of nature the evolution of creation, [and] in particular from among animals, the evolution of man.”³⁵ Typical of Levy’s philological approach was to argue that creation should be regarded as a process of continual transformation, as indicated by the fact that the word “formed” in Gen.2:7 was not bri’ah, suggesting creation from nothing, but yetzer, which could be understood to imply the exchange of forms and the repeating change in the nature of the world. Likewise, the biblical phrase Bara Elohim la’asot, literally, “God created to make” (Gen.2:3), was suggestive of the ongoing, continuous divine action, resonant of Darwinian gradualism.³⁶ He was among the first to demonstrate panentheistic tendencies. For example, nature and natural laws appear in his writings to be identified with the divine, as when he wrote of Nature’s—rather than God’s—command “Let there be light!”³⁷ and he applied natural processes to explain moments in evolutionary history typically reserved for divine intervention by theistic evolutionists, such as the transformations of inorganic matter to organic life, of single cellular to multiple cellular forms of life, of an ape-like ancestor to man, and of the solitary amorality of the animal to the social, moral sensibility of the human. Of course, not all Jewish traditionalists were comfortable, but most remained open-minded about how to engage with the new science. In Germany the father of neo-Orthodoxy, Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), made it clear in an essay entitled “The Educational Value of Judaism” (1874) that he was dubious about Darwinian theory. Nevertheless, he maintained that there was nothing inherently problematic for Judaism in allowing that God had created life through the natural law of evolution, bringing forth order from apparent chaos. If indeed “the infinite species that we know today” had its origins in a combination of a single life form and “one single law of adaptation and heredity,” then that would only further glorify the Creator.³⁸ And there certainly were critics. For example, in the 1890s, the head of the Orthodox training Jews’ College in London, Michael Friedlander, drew upon Maimonides to argue that one could not infer the origins of existing natural laws and processes just by studying such natural laws and processes, so that it was perfectly reasonable, and preferable, to study existing lifeforms with their life-cycles that followed natural laws and yet posit their origins in terms of special creation, whereby each species had been created separately by God.³⁹

With a few exceptions, notably the father of North American Reform Judaism, Isaac Mayer Wise, to whom we shall return, Progressive Jewish thinkers were even more likely than the Orthodox to support Darwinism, or at least present a religious conception of evolution, more often than not panentheistic in character, even to the extent of privileging it over tradition. It helped that the twentieth-century interest in phenomena that could not be explained by Newtonian physics appeared to allow for nonmaterial agency in the world. As one of the most influential Reform declarations made clear: “modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domain of nature and history are not antagonistic … [to Judaism since] the Bible reflect[ed] the primitive ideas of its own age” (Pittsburgh Platform, 1885). Among the more radical reformers in the United States was Joseph Krauskopf (1858–1923), whose commitment to evolutionary science in Evolution and Judaism (1887) resulted in his refutation of any attempt to harmonize ancient texts with modern science. For example, he argued that there was no need to try to “twist the Hebrew word ‘Barah’ (‘to create,’ Gen.2:3) into meaning ‘gradual unfolding,’” or to “patch up the Bible into teaching universal solar systems, when it plainly means that the earth is the All.”⁴⁰ For Krauskopf, such an approach was intellectually dishonest and was not much better than the anti-rational, anti-evolutionary stance of popular Christianity; one had rather to privilege scientific discovery over the limited, primitive human beliefs that characterized the scriptural worldview when these clashed. Krauskopf, along with other Reform Jews, was influenced by Henry Ward Beecher’s conception of God as “the life Universal,” which became in Krauskopf’s mind the conception of God as “the Universal life,” that is, the ubiquitous life force behind evolution of life and even the cosmos. Taken together with Reform leaders’ interests in Spinoza’s worldview, often viewed as a form of pantheism, this resulted in the development of US Reform along panentheistic lines,⁴¹ such that rabbis like Kaufmann Kohler (1843–1926) wrote of evolution in terms of an unfolding of Divine life⁴² and Emil Hirsch (1851–1923) wrote of the divine soul of an evolving universe.⁴³

As for Jews coming from non-religious perspectives, such as the British biologist and entomologist, Raphael Meldola (1849–1915), who was a friend of both Darwin and Huxley, the problem was the set of assumptions of natural theology. In writing against a tract by the Catholic Truth Society in 1873 Meldola argued that with Darwinism the scientist dealt with secondary causes rather than a First Cause and that there was no need for divine providence when discussing natural biological laws, so that, in so far as the Catholic author’s attacks asserted the contrary, “his weapon is as a bladder of air against the hide of a hippopotamus.”⁴⁴

3.2. Origins of Species and Biblical Literalism

As the authority of what became known as the modern evolutionary synthesis grew in influence, which combined the views of geneticists, field naturalists and palaeontologists, religious thinkers found themselves having to draw the lines in ways that did not cause violence to their beliefs and their approach to reading scriptures.

In 1909 the Catholic Church’s position began to thaw with a Pontifical Commission decree, ratified by Pius X, entitled “Concerning the Historical Character of the First Three Chapters of Genesis.” This authoritative statement asserted that “special creation” applied only to humankind, but offered no specifics on how God created the world and its lifeforms. As a result, evolutionary hypotheses for the origins and development non-human life were widely understood to be acceptable to the Catholic Church. Early twentieth century Protestantism in the US, however, took a different tack that would have profound implications for future debate. Largely in reaction to the growth of liberalism and the inroads of science within the school curriculum, the 1920s saw the emergence of the “fundamentals movement” which stressed the importance of biblical literalism and the inerrancy of scripture. The famous Scopes “Monkey Trial” of July 1925 saw a high school teacher from Dayton, Tennessee, named John Scopes charged with violating the Butler Act of the same year, which had sought to outlaw the teaching of evolutionary theory in the classroom. The debates between the high-profile lawyers Clarence Darrow (defending Scopes) and a former presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan on how to relate science and scripture proved internationally sensational. At one point, the defence team (which included the Jewish lawyer Arthur Garfield Hayes) telegrammed the Reform Jewish training college, Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, for an authoritative view on the translation of specific biblical passages; this resulted in the collaboration of Rabbi Jerome Mark of Temple Beth El, Knoxville, who happened to be in attendance at the trial. Another Jewish observer commented in private correspondence during the trial that he had never seen “such a prejudiced crowd of people as Dayton” for whom “Bryan is their idol and as he sits there looks like a Spanish inquisitor” and as someone who regarded anything other than biblical literalism as “heresy” and the defence lawyers as “infidels.”⁴⁵

At around this time, it would be fair to say that Orthodox Jewish views in the US were fragmented, with some beginning to view an acceptance of Darwinism as a capitulation in some sense to Reform Judaism, which was regarded as the greater threat to legitimate Jewish continuity, while others were keen to demonstrate their commitment to Americanization with a continued willingness to engage with the Torah creatively in order to reconcile it with the science.⁴⁶ Of the many examples of Jewish reluctance to adopt a literal approach to the scriptures from around that time, one of the most interesting was Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), the first Ashkenazic Chief Rabbi of Israel, a position he held during the pre-State Mandate period 1919–1935. Kook is one of the best-known Orthodox Jewish religious authorities to have engaged positively with evolution. From as early as 1910, it is clear from his writings that while maintaining the higher authority of Torah over science, Kook nevertheless refuted any claim that evolutionary science threatened a traditionalist reading of the Torah, especially with regard to the alleged challenge of deep geological time versus biblical time. For him, the Genesis account of creation was in harmony with the findings of modern science since the six days could be justifiably understood to refer to vast periods of time. He readily admitted that millions of years separated mankind’s origins and the moment when humanity realized that it was separate from the rest of the animal kingdom with the emergence of family life and, ultimately, civilization itself. For Kook, the Genesis account was focused on the idea of the development of man’s self-understanding of his special nature and inter-relationships, and not the specifics of the timeframe of creation or a literalist reading.⁴⁷

3.3. Human Evolution

It is probably not coincidental that the growing interest among religious authorities in the 1870s after a decade of relative indifference was the 1871 publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man. A key dividing line in the religion-science debates vis-à-vis evolution has been the question of human evolution ever since. Even scientists such as Alfred Wallace (1823–1913), an agnostic at the time of his co-discovery of the theory of natural selection in parallel to Darwin, struggled to understand how human intelligence might have evolved naturally and he came to reject a purely materialistic conception of evolution.⁴⁸ Thus theistic formulations of evolution, whereby God had used the natural laws to bring about humanity as the zenith of his created world, were often regarded as much more plausible than the alternative, and proliferated. Someone who spoke as much to Christian concerns as to Jewish concerns, sensitive as he was to the views of Christian commentators, was the father of American Reform Judaism, Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900). As early as 1876, Wise had argued in The Cosmic God that all life had evolved except for humankind and as such he was dismissive of what he called Darwin’s theory of “homo-brutalism,” for the human mind and morality obviously lay beyond the reaches of material biology.⁴⁹

Others, however, came to shift their position over time. A case in point was the Italian rabbi Elijah Benamozegh (1823–1900), whose interest in Christian writings led to charges of heresy at one point, and who came to believe that biological evolution was only a subset of a more universal or cosmic evolution. Regarding the question of human evolution, his initial position in the 1860s had been that while biological evolution was plausible in general terms, it could not apply to humankind since a close reading of the Genesis account of creation showed that le-minah (“according to its kind/species”) was applied only to plants and animals and not to humans. But over time, and after re-reading Darwin, his position shifted. Biological evolution, as he saw it, was part of a greater cosmic evolution, and he drew upon Jewish mystical traditions to argue for what appeared to be a panentheistic conception of the divine as the most plausible, least inconsistent explanation for understanding the phenomenon of life, such that a supernatural force, at once beyond nature and one with it, was directly responsible for all species in their original forms. By 1877 he had come to accept at least the possibility of human evolution and even of its corollary, the evolution of human morality.⁵⁰ The Anglo-Orthodox Chief Rabbi Joseph Hertz (1872–1946) would write in a commentary on Genesis in 1929 that “While the fact of creation has to this day remained the first of the articles of the Jewish creed, there is no uniform and binding belief as to the manner of creation.” He went on to argue that there was “nothing inherently un-Jewish in the evolutionary conception of the origin and growth of forms of existence from the simple to the complex,” as long as it was understood that each stage represented an act of Divine Will rather than being the result of chance. And while he preferred to speak of the ascent of man in its “spiritual kindship with God,” he acknowledged the descent of man as “cousin to the anthropoid ape.”⁵¹ Such views became commonplace among progressive Jewish thinkers and by the 1930s and 1940s Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), whose teachings led to the establishment of Reconstructionist Judaism in the US, could write about evolution as the method by which the divine creation, including humankind, had been achieved. He championed the idea of transnaturalism, which refused to admit the dichotomy of a natural world and a supernatural divine being, and rather conceived of the natural world in terms of chaos and the ordering of this chaos as divine; his panentheistic solution was expressed in terms of a divine immanence such that God could be defined as “the sum of the animating, organizing forces and relationships which are forever making a cosmos out of chaos.” While he insisted that humans could themselves shape the evolution of social ethics, an ability that was reflected in the claim in Genesis that man was made in the image of God, he entirely accepted the fact of the evolution of the human animal.⁵²

One corollary of the idea of human evolution was that of eugenics, an idea that found widespread support throughout Europe and the United States in the first half of the twentieth century, despite the fact that in hindsight it was clearly a misapplication of a biological theory to human society and policy. Proponents claimed that human evolution could be helped along by deliberate intervention to ensure successful breeding among the healthy or eugenic individuals (positive eugenics) and to prevent breeding among the unhealthy or dysgenic individuals (negative eugenics)—to the extent of sterilization or worse. The goal of eugenicists was to eradicate hereditary disorders and ensure racial hygiene and purity. So widespread were such ideas that many Episcopalian Churches in the US offered eugenic licences for marriage purposes. There were even examples of Jewish eugenicists in Palestine in the 1930s, concerned to improve the Jewish stock as part of Zionism’s nation-building exercise; these latter included Abraham Matmon (n.d.) who published articles and pamphlets with titles such as “Racial Improvement and Control of Marriage” (1933) and “The Racial Improvement of the Human Species and Its Value for Our Nation” (1933),⁵³ and Yisrael Rubin (b.1890) who wrote an article entitled “The Ingathering of the Exiles from a Eugenic Point of View” (1934).⁵⁴ The notorious culmination of the eugenics movement lay in the Nazi programme to eradicate the Jewish people (and others) as sub-humans, and while the Catholic Church in particular publicly opposed the German T4 programme for euthanatizing physically and mentally disabled people, and protested the disappearance of Jewish converts to Christianity, traditional Christian anti-Judaism undoubtedly undermined the Churches’ opposition to racial antisemitism in the guise of its eugenic programme. After the War the eugenics movement was entirely discredited.

Despite its clear opposition to materialistic philosophies, the post-War period also saw a softening of the Catholic Church’s suspicion of the idea of human evolution. Pope Pius XII’s encyclical “Of Mankind” (1950) accepted (or, more accurately, did not forbid) that the origin of man’s body was a legitimate area of research for the natural sciences, although the Church maintained that the human soul was created by God, and that through common decent from Adam all men had inherited original sin. This encyclical appeared to suggest that, despite doubts about some scientific claims on the subject of evolution, the Church retained special teaching authority only with regard to the non-materialistic, spiritual aspects of human life. It is worth noting that this idea of the separate teaching authorities (or magisteria) of religion and science, while not common, has certainly been made on occasion by Jewish evolutionists, a prominent example being Isaac Mayer Wise.

3.4. Creation Science and Later Developments

At around the same time, US Protestants turned in more on themselves with the emergence of the Creation Science movement which would in its basic claims eventually become mainstream among American Christian Evangelicals. A key player was Henry Morris (1918–2006) a committed Evangelical and believer in the inerrancy of the Bible who along with the theologian, John Whitcomb (1924–2020), authored The Genesis Flood (1961) to argue that the scientific evidence (involving fossils and geology) supported the biblical claims about Noah’s worldwide flood and the idea that the earth was less than 10,000 years old.⁵⁵ They also argued that evolutionary biology promoted a particular philosophical worldview, and that unbiased science supported the biblical account of creation. The enormous popularity of the book led to the establishment of the Institute for Creation Research in 1972, which, as a publishing house, generated creationist biology textbooks and led to some legislative successes in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s for “equal time” being given to the teaching of biblical and biological origins accounts.

The claims of Scientific Creationism were not very successful with Jews but rather with young earth Christians and with those members of the general public whose relativism inclined them to regard all perspectives as equally valid. It is true that there was a growing number of Orthodox and Hassidic Jews in the US, Israel and elsewhere with anti-evolutionist agendas, but these were by no means all avowed Young Earthers; at least as important for accounting for such opposition was a tendency to associate Darwinism with Nazi eugenics and a growing realization that the neo-Darwinian synthesis left no room for a divine role in the evolutionary processes, leaving it irreconcilable with traditional Judaism. On the other hand, Scientific Creationism generated a response from civil liberties groups, scientists and liberal Churches and Synagogues arguing that such anti-evolutionist laws were deemed unconstitutional, with the 1987 high-profile ruling of the US Supreme Court against the “Balanced Treatment Act” of Louisiana, arguing that it was indeed promoting religion.

In the 1950s and 60s there was much less interest in attempting to reconcile Judaism with scientific theories, although one can point to the Reform rabbi W. Gunther Plaut (1912–2012) who published a work entitled Judaism and the Scientific Spirit (1962)⁵⁶ and to the renowned philosopher of science Hans Jonas (1903–1993). Jonas’ essay “The Concept of God After Auschwitz: A Jewish Voice” (1968) is particularly interesting, in that he explored the nature of God’s interaction with His creation in evolutionary terms and by drawing upon the mystical metaphor of tsimtsum, whereby an act of divine self-contraction made room for mundane reality. It is a panentheistic account with a God who contained the cosmos but was not to be identified with it, and who had created it by establishing the physical and biological laws that unfolded over time and space without any interference or even foreknowledge of the result. These blind evolutionary forces had eventually generated the human mind, so that the dead cosmos had become the living cosmos, and the living cosmos had become the moral cosmos. According to this account, God had found a partner in creation, in that the universe would no longer develop only according to the amoral natural laws by which it had been established, but could be altered by human action, whether ethical or material; and these deeds that shaped the world also affected God, who contained the changing cosmos within Himself. The Holocaust, a supreme example of evil, was presented as the result of this radical self-limitation of the divine that was necessary for an evolving creation.⁵⁷

Nevertheless, one can see an anti-scientific tradition emerging in the traditionalist camp at this time, with Orthodox figures such as the legal authority Moshe Feinstein (1895–1986) ruling in the 1960s that parents should tear from textbooks any references to heretical views on creation. A little earlier, the Lubavitch movement, a prominent messianic-orientated form of Hasidic Judaism led by the Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902–1994), had from the 1950s waged a war on scientific claims concerning macro evolution, insisting on a young earth creationism that they believed followed the teachings of the Torah; he would go on to influence the Torah Science Foundation, established in 2000, such that its Orthodox proponents would continue this course.⁵⁸ In any case, for many Jewish thinkers in the mid twentieth century, the focus shifted towards the Holocaust, the State of Israel, and interfaith and civil rights developments. But interest picked up again in the 1980s when Reform Judaism could be found opposing (Christian) Scientific Creationism, albeit this was motivated primarily by the potential violation of the boundaries between Church and State. Without espousing the pre-War confidence that evolutionary theory and Judaism could be readily integrated, and without making any comments on the type of evolution envisaged (whether naturalistic, theistic or panentheistic), the progressive Central Conference of American Rabbis had no difficulty taking a stance in 1984 and asserting that “the principles and concepts of biological evolution are basic to understanding science” and calling upon educators to exclude “scientific creationism,” which referred to the young-earth, biblical literalism that was common within Evangelical Christianity. Likewise, the Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America felt obliged to issue a statement entitled Creation, Evolution, and Intelligent Design (2005) that pointed out the diversity of Jewish approaches to the understanding of the biblical account of creation, and argued that “properly understood, evolutionary theory was not incompatible with belief in a Divine Creator, nor with the first two chapters of Genesis.” Of course there remain pockets of anti-evolutionist creationism within the Jewish world, including many within the ultra-Orthodox Charedi communities, as exemplified by the Slifkin Affair of 2005. Natan Slifkin (1975-), a British-born worker at the Jerusalem Zoo, published several books on the topic of Judaism and zoology that appeared to undermine the fantastical Talmudic and rabbinic discussions about creation and natural history, and countenanced the ideas of deep time and evolution by natural selection. Within a short time, these were condemned as heretical by many prominent ultra-Orthodox authorities in Israel and the US, leading to the ending of print runs and the withdrawal of his books by some booksellers.⁵⁹

More generally, however, the positions of both Reform and Orthodox Judaism are actually quite close to those of the mainstream churches, which, historically speaking, have become ever more accepting of the evolutionary science. Thus the 1994 Catechism of the Catholic Church insisted that scientific and theological truth are never actually in conflict, that science enriches our appreciation for God’s creation, and that the meaning of the origin of life goes beyond the remit of science and remains the purview of the Church, while in 1996 Pope Jean Paul II made an address in which he stated that “evolution is more than a hypothesis” even if the gospel “can shed a higher light on the horizon of research into the origins and unfolding of living matter.” And among mainstream Protestants, the Anglican Church has been more explicit still, with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, on record saying that “creationism” should not be taught at school, and with the publication of official statements such as A Catechism of Creation: An Episcopal Understanding (2005) supporting the idea of an evolving creation, encompassing humankind. These developments perhaps help explain why the age-old Jewish polemic against the superstitious, irrational teachings of the Church is rarely heard nowadays in the context of debates about biological sciences.

3.5. Conclusion for Historical Overview

Among Jews, there has been a strong desire to align with the mainstream scientific-evolutionary worldview whenever possible, and to harmonize their beliefs with evolutionary theory, even among many Orthodox Jews, especially early on and again more recently. Jewish commentators have shown great interest in Christian views and have frequently borrowed from them or treated them as foils; from the start, they adopted a deliberate strategy to demonstrate the rationality of Judaism over the irrationality of Christianity, although this is less apparent today. Having said that, the growing ultra-Orthodox Jewish community does tend to view with great suspicion biological claims that appear to conflict with their idea of tradition. It is also worth noting that, historically speaking, many Jews were prepared to define God’s relation to nature and to natural laws by weaving the divine into the workings of the natural world, or by emphasizing divine immanence to a degree that some found disconcerting and suspicious; arguably this panentheistic emphasis among Jewish thinkers is distinctive, at least until after the Second World War.

4. Theological Resources

Malik dedicated part of his study to identify the kind of resources Muslim theologians have at their disposal in terms of religious texts when contemplating Darwinism.⁶⁰ These Quranic texts and hadith are organized in relation to various aspects of creation, including the heavens and earth, plant and animal life, and in particular the special creation of Adam, debates around the Fall, the age of the earth, and Noah’s flood. It is likewise possible to collate some of the biblical, Talmudic and rabbinic, philosophical and mystical texts that have been adopted or adapted by Jewish evolutionists in their attempt to relate their tradition to Darwinism. What follows is a short survey of such textual resources, organized by genre.⁶¹

4.1. Biblical Literature

Historically, Jews have not traditionally read the Torah literally, but allegorically, poetically and mythically, and usually through the lenses of later commentaries that made imaginative connections to other texts within the Tanakh or Bible. Speaking anachronistically and using modern categories, the Bible has been read for legal, religious, ethical, philosophical, and mystical meanings, rather than for strictly scientific meaning, although of course there are many exceptions to which one might point over several thousands of years of Jewish commentary. What has not tended to be questioned until the Enlightenment was the divine authorship of the Torah, which taught basic truths about reality such as that God was the author of creation and that humankind is central to His purposeful plan. With biblical-critical approaches, embraced by Reform and other progressive religious Jews, these kind of certainties have been undermined, but traditionalists remain confident of the Creator’s providential control over nature and history, as assumed in their sacred texts (Torah min ha-shamayim).

From early on, debates about the extent to which Darwinism challenged tradition tended to revolve around discussions of Bereshit or Genesis, in particular chapters 1–3, which in effect contains two accounts of creation. The first in 1:1–2:3 explains the origins of the material world, of time, of living things in general, and of human beings in particular. The second in 2:4–3:24 outlines the special creation of Adam in the “image” and “likeness” of God and of his subordinate helpmate Eve, their placement in the Garden of Eden, their disobedience with regard to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and their punishments and expulsion from the Garden. These two stories are very different and modern scholarship assigns them to different documentary sources, but historically religious Jews have regarded them as compatible and have sought to harmonize them.

From the plain sense reading of Genesis, a foundational teaching is that the material world was brought about by divine fiat. In later centuries, as we shall see, there would be debates about whether or not the world came about from nothing rather than something, depending on whether the meaning of Veha-aretz haitah tohu va-bohu (“the earth was without form and void,” Gen.1:2) referred to pre-existent matter or not. The religio-cultural milieu from which these writings emerged appears to have assumed that the order of heaven and earth was imposed upon pre-existent chaotic matter, which is presented as a kind of stormy sea with a mighty wind sweeping across it while the act of creation or bara has the root sense of “to hew, to cut out, to shape” (Gen.1:1). Living creatures appear from out of inanimate matter; plants, animals and birds from the earth, and fish and other sea creatures from the water. These creatures possessed the ability to self-replicate, producing offspring of the same kind, lo-mino, “each according to its kind” (Gen.1). Since this idea of fixed species would likely have been regarded in the Ancient Near East as an aspect of the order that creation had brought about, it is worth noting that any idea of change within a species would likely have represented a lessening of the order and a return towards chaos.

While humankind was similar to the animals in that it was created gendered, male and female, there was a clear line of demarcation drawn between animals and humans, made explicit in the two Genesis accounts. In the first (Gen.1), Adam comes about as the result of divine consultation and is specially created in the image of God (b’tzalmenu, “in our image”), rather than emerging spontaneously from the earth or the waters. Interestingly, while formed from “the dust of the earth,” Adam becomes “a living soul” (nefesh chayyah) by God breathing into him “the breath of life” (nishmat chayyim), a kind of life-force; this implies a dualism of a material body and an immaterial animating principle, which, when combined, results in a living human soul. One implication of this is that death means the end for both the body and the soul; in this context it is noteworthy that Genesis makes no mention of sheol or the underworld, describing death rather as a return to the ground: “for you are dust and to dust you shall return” (Gen.3:19). In the second account (Gen.2), Adam’s role is defined as “working” and “keeping” the garden, as if human agency is required to maintain the divinely-created natural world (Gen.2). The importance of Adam’s origins for later commentators is at least partly explained by the presentation of Adam and his “helper” Eve (who was created directly by God and formed from Adam), being the original pair from whom the rest of humanity is descended (Gen.3:10); thus Adam’s origins had profound implications for the origins of humankind in general. The story in which Adam and Eve lose their innocence by eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, tricked by the serpent, is the moment in which humans become moral beings, knowing both good and evil, and aware of their inevitable death (the point being reinforced when God bars the way to the Tree of Life, which also grew in the garden), something that once again differentiates them from all other biological life forms.

4.2. Talmudic and Rabbinic Literature

Among the Rabbis of late antiquity, midrash became the default form of Torah interpretation. The classic Rabbinic midrashim are traditionally regarded as part of the Oral Torah, and so are authoritative and influential for later Jewish writers of all persuasions. Amongst the most extensive and important in relation to Gen.1–3 is the fifth-century CE Midrash Bereshit or Genesis Rabbah, which offers in effect a mythic extension of Genesis, often explaining obscure biblical texts or filling in apparent gaps. One interesting idea that it offers is that the world came about through an extended, selective process rather than a single and once-for-all creation. According to Gen.Rabbah 3:7, God “went on creating worlds and destroying them, until he created this one and declared, ‘This one pleases me, those did not please me’.” The extraordinary claim that there were worlds that preceded the present one is justified by an appeal to Gen.1:31, “And God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good,” or alternatively Eccl. 3:11, “God has made everything beautiful in its time.” These are understood to imply that if God saw the present world as “good” and “beautiful,” then there must have been other worlds that he saw as “not good” and “not beautiful.” Whatever this idea of the creation of many worlds is meant to teach, it certainly suggests that the present world was not inevitable, and implies the process of creation was wasteful, in that many worlds were rejected before God was satisfied. We will return to this strange doctrine later, when we come to Jewish mysticism.

In fact this is only one of many teachings from the Talmudic and rabbinic literature that later commentators could have pointed to in support of evolutionary claims. A common claim by traditionalists has been that biological evolution had in some sense been recognized in Jewish antiquity, and that it was assumed that such transmutations had been ordained by heaven. Illustrative texts might include, for example, Baba Kama 16a:

It was taught: A male zabua (viper) becomes an atelef (a kind of bat) after seven years; after seven years the atalef becomes an arpad; the arpad after seven years becomes a thistle; a thistle after seven years becomes a briar; a briar after seven years becomes a demon. The human spine after seven years becomes a serpent.

Or YT Shabbat I:3f,3b:

R. Jose the son of R. Bunin the name of R Zabid said that: Once in seven years God changes his world; the chameleon becomes a great serpent … the head-louse after seven years becomes a scorpion … the horse worm becomes a human worm … the ox worm is changed into another species of vermin … the male hyena becomes a female … . The field mouse becomes a wild boar … the fish vertebra turns into a centipede … The human vertebra turns into a serpent, that is, if the owner has failed to bow at the Modim [prayer].

Despite the general consensus that fixed species were established in the six days of creation, there is a recognition that new types can emerge through cross-breeding. References are made not only to well-known animals such mules, but also to imaginary hybrids such as the Arvad, a mixture of snake and tortoise (BT Hullin 127a).

For those in centuries to come who combed the commentaries for prooftexts that they could relate to evolutionary theory, texts concerning Adam’s creation, and thus the origins of humankind, were perhaps of greatest interest. For example, there was the claim that there had been 974 generations prior to Adam, which had been destroyed due to their sins (BT Shabbat 88:2). And there were intriguing references about Adam’s bestial origins. Gen.Rab 7ff suggested that the life of man came into being at the same time that animal souls were created:

And God said [Gen.1:24]: “Let the earth bring forth the living creature (nefesh chayyah) after its kind, cattle … ” on which R. Eleazar observed “Nefesh chayyah means the life of Adam; and thus it is written, and the man became a nefesh chayyah”. (Gen.2:7)

And Gen.Rabbah 14 even painted for some a striking picture of what it meant for Adam to have been such a living creature, a pre-human of sorts:

“And man became a living soul” [l’nefesh chayyah] (Gen2:7). Said R. Judah: This teaches that He made man with a tail, which He subsequently removed for the sake of his dignity.

Several texts presented the idea of stages in human development. For example, Sanhedrin 38b suggested that man existed in some form before he was endowed with a soul or intelligence:

In the second hour he [Adam] was fashioned into a crude shape; in the third his limbs were formed; in the fourth, life was breathed into him.

And a similar idea of change over time could be identified in Avot de-Rabbi Nathan 1, in this case maintaining that Adam’s upright stance was preceded by a time when, presumably, he moved like an animal on all fours:

How was the first man created? The first hour, his earth was gathered; the second, his form was created; the third, he was made into a crude shape; the fourth, his limbs were joined together; the fifth, his body passages were opened; the six, he was given life; the seventh, he stood on his feet … 

Other intermediary stages before man was human, so to speak, include the idea that Adam was created double-faced and only later separated into two independent male and female sexes (BT Berachot 61a, BT Eruvin 18a); that he was created intersex (Gen.Rabbah 8:1); that human fingers were joined or webbed until the time of Noah (Midrash Avkir on Gen 5:29); and that his progeny were non-human until Seth was born to Eve (BT Eruvin 18b). It is even possible to find references to what sounds like an missing link: YT Kilaim 8:4 discusses the term adnei ha-sadeh (“wild men” or “men of the field”) as referring to “a man of the mountain.”

When it came to the origins of morality, one rabbinic idea that would become important to later commentators and is found throughout the rabbinic literature is that of the evil impulse, an innate, natural desire, which sounds at times like a kind of deep-seated biological foundation for a moral impulse. In the midrash there is clearly a struggle between an inclination towards evil (the yetzer ha-ra) and an inclination towards good (the yetzer ha-tov). The midrash tend to emphasize humanity’s ability to curb the evil impulses and to do good; the study of Torah is deemed particularly effective in this regard, and since it lies within a man’s power as to whether or not he devotes himself to that study, he can tame it by his own efforts. A key question is whether or not the evil inclination was part of the original creation. In BT Bava Batra 16a it is categorically stated that God created the yetzer ha-ra, and, since the yetzer ha-ra is often linked with sexual desire, it is hard to see how, without it, humanity could ever fulfil the creation ordinance to “be fruitful and multiply” (Gen.Rabbah 9:7; BT Yoma 69b). On the other hand Avot de-Rabbi Nathan 42 lists the yetzer ha-ra as one of the punishments imposed on Adam, which suggests that it was implanted in humanity only after the exile from Gan Eden. But either way, humanity’s behaviour is in part determined by ethical impulses that are intrinsic to human nature, installed at or near the time of creation, and one of which, at least, is associated very closely with the drive to procreate, a biological drive shared by all other forms of life.

4.3. Jewish Philosophy

Jewish philosophy in the medieval period was concerned with questions about creation that generated answers that went beyond plain readings of, or mythic additions to, the Torah. If any scriptural text appeared to be incompatible with reason or observation, it was customary to view this as sufficient evidence to justify reading it in non-literal fashion, whether figuratively, allegorically, or poetically. One question in particular would have long-term implications, and that was whether creation had been brought about from nothing or from something that had existed before creation. The answer would establish a philosophical and theological framework for understanding the nature of the relationship between the divine Creator and His material creation. Arguably, certain ideas established within the Jewish tradition, or at least made conceivable, the possibility of panentheistic conceptions of God.

Despite the claim of Genesis 1:2 that the world was “without form and void” before God’s first act of creation (“Let there be light!”), Saadia Gaon (882–942) argued in The Book of Beliefs and Opinions that God must have created the world out of nothing rather than pre-existent matter. His reasoning was that since time is not infinite, as Aristotle argued—for if it stretched back infinitely it could never have reached the present—then it must have begun at some point, that is, the moment of creation; and thus the world, which was created at that moment, had not existed eternally. The consequence was that Saadia emphasized the distinction between the divine creator and created matter, and thus God is portrayed as transcendent, and the existence or otherwise of the world has no bearing upon His existence.

Solomon Ibn Gabriol (1021/22–1058/70) likewise argued for creation from nothing, but in a way reminiscent of Neoplatonism, that is, highlighting descending levels of reality from the divine transcendent to the material world. Neoplatonism taught an eternal and unchanging divine source from which emanations flowed all the way from purest form down to physical matter, which was evil and with which the divine source had no interaction, and from which the human soul strove to free itself. In contrast, Ibn Gabriol conceived of the emanated world as a composite of matter and form and to be permeated with the divine; he understood God to interact directly with His creation, empowering, supporting and maintaining it, with the consequence that the matter from which the divinely suffused world was composed could in no sense be regarded as evil, quite the opposite (as suggested by Gen 1:31: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.”). The conception of the transcendent God was replaced with that of an immanent God, and the material, natural world was envisaged to be divinely infused.

Writing in the twelfth century, Bahya ibn Pakuda, argued in Instruction in the Duties of the Heart that nothing creates itself, since the act of creating necessitates its existence and that all composite beings have a beginning, and a cause must necessarily be created, with the exception of the divine First Cause. This was a particularly clear articulation of a way of thinking among many Jewish philosophers that intellectually ruled out any idea that creation could create itself. He also argued in relation to the structures and activities of biological lifeforms in the world, that there was “a uniformity in its effects and parts” despite “all the differences in substance and elements” that demonstrated a level of integration and consistency of design principles that suggested a unified origin, that is, the wise Creator. (Chovot Ha-Levanot, Ha-Yichud 7).

The most influential medieval Jewish philosopher of all, Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), insisted that the account of the first chapter of Genesis should not be read according to its plain sense, maintaining,

The account given in scripture of the creation is not, as is generally believed, intended to be in all its parts literal … It has been outlined in metaphors so that the masses can understand it, according to their mental capacity, while the educated take it in a different sense. (Guide to the Perplexed, Introduction and 2:29)

He considered a variety of modes of creation, including those offered by the Torah of Moses, the Islamic kalam, Plato, and Aristotle, before concluding that there was no rational final answer to the question of the origins of the world. His reading of the Mosaic account was his preferred option until science could demonstrate otherwise, when he would be prepared to correct his interpretation (Guide for the Perplexed 2:24ff). Like others before him, he read Genesis to teach the creation of the world (and time) from nothing, with the consequence of a profound ontological gap between the Creator, whose existence is eternal and self-sufficient, and the created, whose existence is entirely dependent on the Creator. He also implies at times in the Guide that humans were not the goal of creation (“humankind and other animals form only an infinitesimal portion of the permanent universe”), but that there was a wider more cosmic goal of an ordered creation in which God’s knowledge would be manifested. (Guide to the Perplexed 3:12).

Gersonides (Levi ben Gershom, 1288–1344) took issue with Maimonides, however. A philosopher with expertise in mathematics and astronomy, he argued in Wars of the Lord 6 that although Maimonides was correct that time was not eternal and must have begun at some point, that did not rule out the possibility that there had been pre-existent matter before creation and time. For Gersonides, it must have been that God had created the world from the formless and chaotic matter mentioned in Genesis 1:1, for, logically, not even God could create something from nothing. While his theory appears both to be more rational and to follow a closer reading of Genesis, it does raise the theological problem of dualism, at least in the sense that Gersonides appears to be claiming that primitive matter was co-external with and presumably independent from God (for the tohu va-wohu is mentioned before God begins His acts of creation). This is a problem for theism, whereby God is understood to be the source of all. But Gersonides believed that matter required constant divine intervention to sustain and prevent it from reverting from creation’s ordered structure to its pre-existent chaotic form, and so was highly dependent upon Him. God therefore appears to be in immanent relationship with the material, natural world, and the extent to which one can describe it as truly independent from God is questionable. Few Jewish thinkers until modern times followed Gersonides down this path, which has obvious pan(en)theistic implications.

The philosopher Joseph Albo (1380–144) is of interest primarily here, in that he recognized intermediate species of the sort that would later be used as evidence in support of evolutionary theory, in a discussion about different levels of intelligence in living beings in Sefer Kalkkarim 4:11:

Coral is an intermediate between inanimate matter and plants. We also find the sea sponge, which only has the sense of touch, and is an intermediate between plant and animal. We also find the monkey to be intermediate between animals and man.

Of course Albo himself would have assumed a rich, diverse and perfectly complete creation that was fixed and unchanging, and it would not have occurred to him to that that these intermediaries pointed to any kind of transmutation of species.

Medieval Jewish philosophy bestows two important gifts to later Jewish thinkers: firstly, several authoritative precedents are established for a willingness to set science above scripture, that is, to recognize the limitations of one’s interpretation of scripture in the face of reason. Maimonides and even more so Gersonides made it clear that reason trumped scripture when it came to the mystery of creation, in the sense that both claimed to be prepared to change their interpretations of scripture if new light could be thrown on the subject by science. Otherwise, Jewish philosophers tended to follow tradition, which offered in the main allegorical readings of the Genesis 1–3. Secondly, the idea of a profoundly immanent deity, a deity interwoven into the fabric of material reality and acting as its foundation, is presented and justified not in terms of biblical stories of divine intervention but rather by way of philosophical, rational abstractions, at least by Ibn Gabriol and Gersonides. There are also hints in the writings of Maimonides that humans are not the goal of creation, which foreshadows arguments to unseat humankind as the pinnacle of evolution.

4.4. Biblical Commentaries

Three of the most celebrated medieval Jewish commentators included Rashi (1040–1105), Avraham Ibn Ezra (1089–1167), and Nachmanides (1194–1270). All three recognized that the Torah could not be read literally, although they did not doubt the basic truth of God’s authorship of creation as set out in the Torah. For example, Nachmanides assumed a divine creation but argued in his commentary on Genesis the word yom (day) did not refer to any particular period of time, whether a literal day or a thousand years, and went on to explain that “The process of creation is a deep mystery not to be understood from the verses and it cannot be known except through the tradition going back to Moses … [T]his cannot be wholly understood from the Scripture.” Of course, none of this prevented speculation on mysterious references in the Torah, such as the taninim (“sea creatures,” Gen.1:21), which were described in the Talmud as huge animals (BT Baba Batra 74b); Nachmanides’ estimation of their enormous size would lead later commentators to muse about the possibility that this referred to extinct animals, perhaps even dinosaurs.

Philosophical arguments could be brought in by the commentators to justify slight deviances from the plain reading of the biblical account of God’s relation with the world. All three insisted that God had crafted the world from pre-existent matter. As Nachmanides put it, “The Holy One, blessed be He, created all things from absolute non-existence.” He went on to explain that what God had created from nothing was what the Greeks called matter (hulē) and the Bible called tohu (citing Gen 1:2 where the earth was described as tohu va-bohu or “without form and void”) and that after that first stage He did not create anything but rather “formed and made things with it [matter].” The implication was that the process of creation was entirely dependent on God’s governance, and that the details of the Genesis account needed to be interpreted with the deeper truths of creation in mind.

Like the philosophers, then, Jewish biblical commentators in the main tended towards an immanent God, and were surprisingly unconcerned that a deity who acts and intervenes continuously in His creation effectively changes, which suggests something different from the perfect, unchanging, transcendent God of Christian philosophical theology. God had not only created the world by an act of divine will, but the Torah suggested He controlled and maintained it through laws of nature which were themselves understood to constitute God’s will and were in nowise independent of that will. The power of the Torah, with its personal, interventionist God, ultimately held sway over the majority of Jewish thinkers, philosopher and commentator alike.

4.5. Mystical Literature

Medieval Jewish mystical ideas, flourishing towards the end of the middle ages, were brought together in the late thirteenth- or early fourteenth-century Spanish work The Zohar. In its cosmological teachings, it appears to have been influenced by Jewish philosophy, especially in its neo-Platonic tendencies relating to emanations of the divine godhead. Such kabbalistic mythologizing did lead to some striking schemas, the doctrine of the Four Worlds being perhaps the most interesting of all. The four worlds are not fully articulated until the fourteenth-century, although are hinted at in early texts, and are understood to relate to four stages of creation that emerge from the Ein Sof, the indefinable God: the world of Emanation (Atzilut), the highest stage which involves the seferot or ten attributes of the Ein Sof, which interact with the lower worlds; the world of Creation (Beriah), the heavenly realm; the world of Formation (Yetzirah), the world of angels; and the world of Making (Asiyyah), the lowest stage and the world of the cosmic spheres and the material world. Three of the verbs (beriah, yetzirah, and asiyyah) are found in the Genesis creation account, although the fourth, atzilut, was a new word for the new medieval concept of emanation (and centuries later would be used to refer to evolution by some commentators). Such a scheme of complex emanations created a sense of a transcendent deity, unknown and only indirectly connected to the lower worlds. There was little consistency in these mystical articulations of reality but there are fascinating suggestions such as the idea that the heavens, earth and water, which were created directly by God from nothing, acted as intermediaries to go on to create the world as we know it; the implication is that they produced what they were commanded to produce out of their own substance (Zohar Chadash, Bereshit 12d–13a). In this way, some Jewish mystical traditions agreed with some Jewish philosophical traditions that God created the substance of reality, whether matter or some basic forms of matter, which went on to generate the rest of creation, resulting in vision of a sort of self-creating creation.

Furthermore, one can point to the Lurianic kabbalistic account of God’s self-limiting or withdrawal from the world (tsimtsum) that was accompanied by the shattering of the vessels of creation and a sprinkling of divine sparks that are to be restored to the godhead through mystical practices. This attractive mytho-poetic origins story has had the power since medieval times to explain suffering and evil within a world profoundly in need of redemption, and must appear to some modern eyes to be in some ways compatible with a natural world that has been shaped by the unimaginable suffering, pain and wastage of natural selection.

4.6. Conclusion for Theological Resources

A consideration of the pre-modern textual resources that are potentially available to a Jewish theologian concerned to take biological evolution seriously, sets out a tantalizing range of possibilities.

While the Biblical accounts of creation tend to reinforce the idea of fixed species and the special creation of humankind in the divine image and thus distinct from the rest of animal life, there are ideas of interest to budding Jewish evolutionists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Creation is conceived as the establishment of order emerging from disorder; living organisms are understood to emerge from inanimate matter; all of humanity shares a pair of common ancestors; and, despite the complicated dualism inherent in Adam as a living soul, his material body, created from the dust of the earth like other animals, potentially allows for a bestial dimension to human nature.

Among the many traditions first established in the Talmudic and rabbinic literature is the doctrine of many worlds, all but one discarded, which allows for a wasteful aspect to the process of creation; of the transmutation of animals over time; of pre-Adamic generations; of Adam’s bestial origins, including the possibilities of a tail and movement on all fours before he adopted an upright posture; and of Eve’s pre-human progeny. With regard to morality, there is the idea of instinctual good and evil drives, the latter associated with the biological drive to procreate.

Jewish philosophy and biblical commentary alike conspired to teach that deeper truths lay behind some of the literal teachings of Genesis. While the personal God of the Bible who intervened to bring about the rains and seasons would remain dominant in Jewish tradition, yet some of the more controversial ideas that were seeded included a profoundly immanent God who infuses the world and who could, in some sense, be identified with the world; that humans may not be the goal of creation; and that creation was maintained through laws of nature that did not require divine intervention.

The divine emanations of Jewish mysticism offered a similar sense of immanence, although it was closer to neo-Platonism in that rather than an encompassing of the cosmos within the divine, the two being inseparable, reality is rather conceived of as a hierarchical structure through which the divine influence moves from a transcendent realm down through emanations to our physical world. In any case, the grounds for a panentheistic view of the cosmos, even before Spinoza, were clearly established. And while Jews have never accepted the Christian doctrine of the Fall, Lurianic kabbalistic mysticism did offer a myth that taught of a shattered, suffering world and hinted that perhaps the Genesis account of God’s assessment of the natural world as “good” was not the entire story.

5. Conclusion

As scholars, we find the study of a religious tradition’s engagement with evolutionary theory rewarding for many reasons. First among them, if we’re being honest, is the spectacle of a battle for the hearts and minds of religious believers, a clash of civilizations of sorts, with the evolution-creation debate remaining one of the most important frontlines in the religion-science conflict, regardless of other models of interaction that can and do exist. The subject compels us to think about the idiosyncratic beliefs of individuals, their creative readings and misreadings of texts, and how these relate to religious and scientific authorities, to the ideological debates between conservatives and progressives in their faith communities, and to broader systems of thought, whether brash materialistic philosophies or enigmatic religious traditions—systems of thought that often seem to take on a life of their own, barely constrained by their own internal systems of logic. The evolution-creation debate is the challenge of modernity for religion in microcosm, all the more beguiling in its focus on questions concerning the origins and purpose of the cosmos, and of human nature and of morality, which have likely haunted our species since it first emerged and sought to distinguish itself from the natural and supernatural worlds which it perceived around it.

Among the most intriguing questions raised is: to what extent does engagement with evolutionary theory change a theology that would otherwise not have changed? The question is not whether a tradition’s theology can adapt or absorb the implications of evolutionary science, since it palpably can. Religion has a way of evolving, even as many of its followers deny change. The more interesting question is how and why an individual believer would come to a place where it is more important to incorporate some or all of Darwin’s ideas than not to do so, despite the potentially challenging implications for their own and others’ perceptions of their tradition. In my own researches, it seems to me that the emergence of a Jewish evolutionism that was frequently panentheistic in character is highly suggestive, since it is difficult to make a case that such a development was a prominent feature of Jewish thought outside of the engagement with Darwinism, even if the ground had been prepared somewhat by earlier philosophical and mystical traditions. But for many believers such a question is redundant, even offensive, and Malik’s cautious study, a fascinating and creative study that seeks to provide resources from within the Islamic tradition that might facilitate a Muslim reconciliation with Darwin without doing violence to that tradition, reminds us of how high the stakes remain.

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Notes on contributors

Daniel Langton

Daniel Langton is Professor of Jewish History and Co-director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester, UK. Among his publications on Jewish engagement with evolutionary theory is Reform Judaism and Darwin (2019).

Notes

1 Shoaib Ahmed Malik, Islam and Evolution (Oxford, New York: Routledge, 2021), 1, 6, 8, 13.

2 Malik, Islam and Evolution, 22–23.

3 Ibid., 5–6, 66ff.

4 My studies of Jewish engagement with evolutionary theory include: Daniel R. Langton, Reform Judaism and Darwin: How Engaging with Evolutionary Theory Shaped American Jewish Religion (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019). Daniel R. Langton, “Elijah Benamozegh and Evolutionary Theory: A Nineteenth Century Italian Kabbalist’s Panentheistic Response to Darwin,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 10:2 (2016). Daniel R. Langton, “Jewish Evolutionary Perspectives on Judaism, Anti-Semitism, and Race Science in Late Nineteenth Century England: A Comparative Study of Lucien Wolf and Joseph Jacobs,” Jewish Historical Studies 46 (2014). Daniel R. Langton, “Jewish Religious Thought, The Holocaust, and Darwinism: A Comparison of Hans Jonas and Mordecai Kaplan,” Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 13:2 (2013); Daniel R. Langton, “Abraham Isaac Kook’s Account of ‘Creative Evolution’: A Response to Modernity for the Sake of Zion,” Melilah: Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies 10 (2013). See also Daniel R. Langton, “Naphtali Levy’s Divine World: Jewish Tradition, Panentheism and Darwinism,” Theology and Science 21:3 (2023 forthcoming).

5 Malik draws on the work of 20 Muslim scholars, prioritizing contemporaries who offered both a significant contribution and a distinctive perspective. Malik, Islam and Evolution, 106–154.

6 For treatments of Jewish engagement with evolution and creationism in general, see the short survey Marc Swetlitz, “Jews, Judaism and Evolution,” in The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Darwin and Evolutionary Thought, ed. Michael Ruse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); the collection of studies by Geoffrey N. Cantor and Marc Swetlitz, eds., Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); (in Hebrew) Jehuda Reinharz and Yaacov Shavit, Darwin and Some of his Kind: Evolution, Environment and Culture: Jews Read Darwin, Spencer, Buckle and Renan (Tel Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 2009); and Michael Shai Cherry, “Creation, Evolution and Jewish Thought” (PhD Doctoral thesis, Brandeis University, 2001). For the case of Reform Jews in the US, see Marc Swetlitz, “American Jewish Responses to Darwin and Evolutionary Theory, 1860–1890,” in Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender, ed. Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). For the experiences of Orthodox Jews in the US, see Rachel S.A. Pear, “The Kiss and the Slap: Modern Orthodox Ambivalence Towards Evolution 1980s–2010s,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 21:3 (2021); Rachel. S.A. Pear, “Agreeing to Disagree: American Orthodox Jewish Scientists’ Confrontation with Evolution in the 1960s,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 8:2 (2018). Rachel S.A. Pear, “Differences Over Darwinism: American Orthodox Jewish Responses to Evolution in the 1920s,” Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 15:2 (2015); Rachel S.A. Pear, “Arguing about Evolution for the Sake of Heaven: American Orthodox Rabbis in the 1930s–50s Dispute Darwinism’s Merit and Meaning,” Fides et Historia 46:1 (2014). Insofar as biblical criticism and evolution were related challenges for North American Jews, see Naomi W. Cohen, “The Challenges of Darwinism and Biblical Criticism to American Judaism,” Modern Judaism 4:2 (1984). Another specialist survey, which is focused on a discourse analysis of the Russian press, includes Joakim Philipson, “The Purpose of Evolution: The ‘Struggle for Existence’ in the Russian-Jewish Press, 1860–1910” (PhD Stockholm University, 2008).

7 A case has been made for Sunni Muslim modernists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries following a similar approach with regard to Islamic rationality and compatibility with the empirical sciences, although this changed in the twentieth century when Darwinism came to be regarded increasingly as a Christian aberration and fabrication. Uriya Shavit, “The Evolution of Darwin to a ‘Unique Christian Species’ in Modernist-Apologetic Arab-Islamic Thought,” Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations 26:1 (2015).

8 Arguably, there is an overlap between panentheistic and neo-platonic tendencies, which has some relevance for the Islamic context and Al-Ghazali. Malik, Islam and Evolution, 10. Malik addresses theistic evolution directly in Malik, Islam and Evolution, 76–77, 78, 109.

9 Michael W. Brierley, “Naming a Quiet Revolution: The Pantheistic Turn in Modern Theology,” in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2004).

10 Malik, Islam and Evolution, 12, 45, 54, 111, 13, 31, 237–264.

11 Ibid., 12, 45, 54, 237–264.

12 Ibid., 73–75, 78, 212–236.

13 For example, Malik dedicates a chapter to Christian responses to evolution as a back-drop to the Muslim experience. Malik, Islam and Evolution, 66–84.

14 Malik, Islam and Evolution, 22–23, 29–30.

15 Ibid., 53–54, 194–197.

16 Ibid., 5.

17 Ibid., 43, 197–199, 200–203.

18 Ibid., 27, 52–53, 197.

19 Ibid., 52.

20 Ibid., 50–51. Malik addresses the related ideology of scientism in Malik, Islam and Evolution, 3–4, 192, 204, 97, 300, 6.

21 ibid., 89.

22 Ibid., 51–52, 91.

23 Ibid., 7, 112, 88, 94–99, 12–13, 301–325, 17.

24 Ibid., 100.

25 Ibid., 100–101.

26 Ibid., 102.

27 Ibid., 56.

28 Ibid., 79.

29 Ibid., 39, 155–173.

30 This section draws primarily from Daniel R. Langton, “Evolution,” in Encyclopedia of Jewish-Christian Relations, ed. AJ. and P. Schäfer Levine (De Gruyter, 2023), and Swetlitz, “Jews, Judaism and Evolution.”

31 St. George Mivart, The Genesis of the Species (London: Macmillan, 1871).

32 For the classic study, see James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America 1870–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).

33 Henry Ward Beecher, Evolution and Religion, 2 vols. (New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1885).

34 Nathan Adler, The Jewish Chronicle, November 21, 1872, 167.

35 The letter, translated by a Cambridge University librarian, Henry Bradshaw, is reproduced in Francis Darwin, ed., More Letters of Charles Darwin, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1903), 365–366.

36 Naphtali Lewy, Toldot Adam [The Origins of Man] (Vienna: Spitzer & Holzwarth, 1874), 36.

37 Lewy, Toldot Adam, 30.

38 Samson Raphael Hirsch, “The Educational Value of Judaism (1873),” in The Collected Writings of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, ed. Elliott Bondi and David Bechhofer (New York: Feldheim, 1992), 264.

39 Michael Friedlander, Textbook of the Jewish Religion (London: Kegan Paul, 1890), 30–39.

40 Joseph Krauskopf, Evolution and Judaism (Kansas City: Berkowitz, 1887).

41 Langton, Reform Judaism and Darwin.

42 Kaufmann Kohler, “Evolution and Morality,” Temple Beth-El Lectures (New York), December 4, 1887.

43 Emil G. Hirsch, The Doctrine of Evolution and Judaism, 1903, Reform Advocate library (Chicago: Bloch & Newman).

44 Raphael Meldola, “On a Certain Class of Cases of Variable Protective Colouring in InsectsProceedings of the Zoological Society,” Proceedings of the Zoological Society 2 (1873).

45 For an excellent overview, see Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). For the references to Jews: Jerome Mark, Reminiscences of the Scopes Trial, Dayton, 1925, 1959, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, SC-14940. Ben R. Winick, Correspondence to fiance, c1925, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, SC-14820.

46 Pear, “Differences over Darwinism.”

47 For an overview of Kook’s position as derived from many of his writings, see Langton, “Abraham Isaac Kook’s Account of ‘Creative Evolution’.”

48 Wallace discussed this failure of Darwinism in Albert Dawson, “A Visit to Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace,” The Christian Commonwealth, December 10, 1903.

49 Isaac Mayer Wise, The Cosmic God: A Fundamental Philosophy in Popular Lectures (Cincinnati: Office American Israelite and Deborah, 1876).

50 Elia Benamozegh, Teologia dogmatica e apologetica, per Elia Benamozegh (Livorno: Tipografia di F. Vigo, 1877). Elie Benamozegh, Israël et l’humanité. Etude sur le problème de la religion universelle et sa solution (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1914).

51 Joseph H. Hertz, The Pentateuch and the Haftorahs: Genesis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1929).

52 For an overview of Kaplan’s position as derived from many of his writings, see Langton, “Jewish Religious Thought, The Holocaust, and Darwinism.”

53 Abraham Matmon, Hashbachat ha-Gez’a shel ha-Min ha-Enoshi ve-A’rachav le-Ma’an A’menu [The Racial Improvement of the Human Species and Its Value for Our Nation] (Tel Aviv: 1933). Abraham Matmon, “Hashbachat ha-Gez’a ve-Piku’ach a’l Nisu’im [Racial Improvement and Control of Marriage],” Briut 1 (1933).

54 Y. Rubin, “Kibbutz Galuyot mi-Bechinah E’ugenit [The Ingathering of the Exiles from a Eugenic Point of View],” Moznayim 1:4 (1934).

55 Henry Morris and John Whitcomb, The Genesis Flood (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1961).

56 W. Gunther Plaut, Judaism and the Scientific Spirit, Issues of faith (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1962).

57 Hans Jonas, “The Concept of God After Auschwitz,” in Out of the Whirlwind: A Reader of Holocaust Literature, ed. Albert H. Friedlander (New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1968).

58 Aryeh Carmell and Cyril Domb, Challenge: Torah Views on Science and Its Problems, 2nd rev. ed. (Jerusalem; New York: Association of Orthodox Jewish Scientists Feldheim, 1988). Cantor and Swetlitz, Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism. R.L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Pear, “Agreeing to Disagree.”

59 Jennie Rothenberg, “The Heresy of Nosson Slifkin: A Young Orthodox Rabbi is Banned for His Views on Evolution,” Moment (2005).

60 He includes chapters on Islamic Scriptures and Evolution, Muslim Opinions on Evolution, and Old Texts, New Masks: Misreading Evolution onto Historical Islamic Texts. Malik, Islam and Evolution, 85–176.

61 This section draws primarily from P.S. Alexander and D.R. Langton, “Protology/Cosmology in Judaism,” in The Concept of Protology in Judaism, Christianity and Islam; Key Concepts in Interreligious Discourses, ed. G. Tamer (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2024), and Menahem M. Kasher, “Creation and the Theory of Evolution,” in Encyclopedia of Biblical Interpretation, ed. Menahem M. Kasher (New York: American Biblical Encyclopedia Society, 1953), 221–244. See also Shlomo Glicksberg, “Judaism and Evolution in Four Dimensions: Biological, Spiritual, Cultural and Intellectual,” Origin(s) of Design in Nature 23 (2012).