Judaism and Religion

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Notes

1. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Man (1944; Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society, 1983).

2. In her book Batnitzky also covers Jewish ultra-orthodoxy, a topic not addressed in this review.

3. Yehezkel Kaufmann, Christianity and Judaism: Two Covenants (1929–30; Jerusalem: The Hebrew University Magnes Press, 1996), 20.

4. Kaufmann, Christianity and Judaism, 178. Kaufmann uses here an argument which was later reiterated in a different context, referring to the spread of higher education institutions and ideas; see Joseph Ben-David, Centers of Learning: Britain, France, Germany, United States (McGraw-Hill, NJ: Transaction, 1977).

5. Kaufmann, Christianity and Judaism, 181.

6. Jewish theology normally rejects such notions. Mitzvot, for instance, are generally subdivided into two categories, mishpatim, i.e., commandments whose logic, or purpose, is apparent; and khukim which are elusive from a functionalist perspective and are accepted as divine decrees. The functionalist perspective which sees reason in dietary laws, the Sabbath norm, the command not to mix wool and linen, etc., is disaffirmed: “the profound religious mind would undoubtedly resent such platitudes,” writes Joseph B. Soloveitchik in The Halakhic Mind: An Essay on Jewish Tradition and Modern Thought (1944; New York: The Free Press, 1986), 97. Batnitzky cites Yeshayahu Leibowitz, who opposes the anthropological, functional, perspective: “The purpose of the Torah is not social improvement, and the ultimate ground for the mitzwot is not concern for man’s needs in his social existence.” Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, ed. Eliezer Goldman, trans. Yoram Navon, Zvi Jacobson, Gershon Levi, and Raphael Levy (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 62.

7. Hyam Maccoby, ed. and trans., Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian Disputations in the Middle Ages (1982; Oxford: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006).

8. In a way this mirrored Mendelssohn’s mission: instead of using the Latin alphabet, he used the Hebrew alphabet so that his audience, familiar with Yiddish and Hebrew, could read the Bible and be introduced to the German language.

9. Monika Richarz, Der Eintritt der Juden in die akademischen Berufe, volume 28 of Schriftenreihe wissenschaftlicher Abhandlungen des Leo Baeck Institutes (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck], 1974); and Leon Botstein, Judentum und Modernität: Essays zur Rolle der Juden in der deutschen und österreichischen Kultur 1848 bis 1938 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1991).

10. Wilhelm von Humboldt, “Ü̈ber den Entwurf zu einer neuen Konstitution für die Juden,” in Schriften zur Politik und zum Bildungswesen (1809–1834), vol. 6 of Werke (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft [Cotta], 1964).

11. Jakob Wassermann, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 1921), and Reichsbund Jüdischer Frontsoldaten, ed., Die jüdischen Gefallenen des deutschen Heeres, der deutschen Marine und der deutschen Schutztruppen, 1914–1918: Ein Gedenkbuch, 2d ed. (Berlin: Der Schild, 1932).

12. Botstein, Judentum und Modernität, 13.

13. Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich: Wer war was, vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt a.M.: S. Fischer Verlag, 2003). In Judentum und Modernität, Botstein draws a clear line vis-à-vis other minorities, such as Afro-Americans in the United States (which were needed as a labor force); the experience of Native Americans comes closer to that of the Jews.

14. In response to the massacres at Charlie Hebdo and the kosher supermarket in Paris, 7–9 January 2015, and to counter the specter of a massive outmigration of French-Jewish citizens to Israel, corresponding statements included: “France is proud to hold the largest population of Jews in Europe” (Ségolène Royal) and “France [would] no longer be France” (Manuel Valls)—Washington Post, 13 January 2015.

15. This stance was visible during the past millennium and appears to be a sine qua non of Christian self-understanding. As an example, I referred earlier to the Jewish-Christian disputations of the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. A second example is Johann Caspar Lavater’s 1769 challenge to Moses Mendelssohn to refute the treaties regarding Christianity, authored by Carl Bonnet, which Lavater had translated and dedicated to Mendelssohn, or else to accept its verdicts and “proofs” and to convert. In Mendelssohn’s subsequent Jerusalem, his answer to Lavater, he affirms the traditional notion that Judaism is primarily a matter of practice, rather than faith; but he also professes the separation of religion and state. See Moses Mendelssohn, Phädon oder Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele; Jerusalem oder Über religiöse Macht und Judenthum (1783; Leibzig, F.A. Brockhaus, 1869).

16. Leonhard Ragaz to Margarete Susman, 9 April 1943, in Leonhard Ragaz in seinen Briefen: 1933–1945, ed. H. U. Jäger, M. Mattmüller, and A. Rich (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1992), vol. 3, 136f.

17. “Writing after the Holocaust, Soloveitchik retains Cohen’s notion that self-sacrifice is central to Jewish religiosity, but he makes no claims about a specific Jewish mission to suffer for the sake of the nations of the world” (Batnitzky, 63).

18. Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, 137.

19. Götz Aly, Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust, trans. Jefferson Chase (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), and Christopher R. Browning’s review of the book, “How Envy of Jews Lay Behind It,” New York Review of Books 62.5 February 2015, 44–46.

20. Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, 133, 135.

21. Leibowitz, Judaism, Human Values, and the Jewish State, 136, 140.

22. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind, 40.

23. Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind, 46, 52, 40, 46.