Not in the Heavens: The Premodern Roots of Jewish Secularism

Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x

Not in the Heavens: The Premodern Roots of Jewish Secularism David Biale* University of California, Davis

Abstract

The relationship between religion and secularism has become a central question in the study of religion. But secularism is just as diverse as religion. This article treats Jewish secularism as a phenomenon with its own unique characteristics derived in part from the religious tradition against which it revolted. Within premodern Judaism – the Bible, Talmud, and medieval philosophy – one finds precursors to modern secular ideas. The article demonstrates how the cardinal categories of Judaism invented by modern religious thinkers – God, Torah, and Israel – were adopted by secular Jews, such as Baruch Spinoza, emptied of traditional meaning and turned into a ‘secular theology’.

The relationship between the premodern and the modern, in which the first is associated with religion and the second with the secular, remains one of the most fraught for students of religion. According to a common master narrative of the Enlightenment, modernity represented a rupture with the past as innovation was privileged over tradition, science over superstition, and rationalism over faith. In recent years, though, this dichotomous break has come under new scrutiny, especially given the persistence of religion in the modern world (see, among other recent works, Berger 1999; Asad 2003; Martin 2005; Pecora 2006; Scott & Hirschkind 2006; Lilla 2007; Taylor 2007). The resurgence of religion is clearly a complex response to secularism, just as secularism was – and still is – a response to religion. These two mortal enemies are very much defined by and through the other. Indeed, the very terms secularism and religion are now highly contested, their definitions up for grabs. Not only does it appear that religion and secularism in modernity are deeply implicated with each other, but it may well be that their contemporary entanglement owes something to the way the secular emerged out of the religious, not so much its polar negation as its dialectical product. Amos Funkenstein suggested this relationship in his formulation of what he called the ‘secular theology’ of the seventeenth century (Funkenstein 1986).1 According to his argument, the proponents of Enlightenment rationalism and the scientific revolution adopted the medieval © 2008 The Author Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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scholastic divine attributes – God’s omniscience, omnipotence and providence – and invested them with earthly meaning. The desacralization of the world was accomplished with the tools of theology (Löwith 1949). If these scholars found the dialectical origins of modernity in medieval Catholicism in the Counter-Reformation, Peter L. Berger, building on Max Weber, suggested on the other hand that the roots of the secular lay in Protestantism, which had shrunk the medieval realm of the sacred and created a heavens empty of angels (Berger 1967). Berger also observed that this Protestant move in turn had its roots in Old Testament monotheism since the ancient Israelites had already banned the gods from the world: monotheism thus became the first step towards secularization.2 This last argument – albeit without specific reference to Berger – found a thoroughgoing exponent in Marcel Gauchet in his challenging 1985 book, The Disenchantment of the World (Gauchet 1985/1997). In a sweeping account of human history, Gauchet argued that the secular began with what Karl Jaspers called the ‘axial age’, when Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism banished the idols. Thus, the emergence of the ‘major’ or ‘universal’ religions was the first stage in the eventual disintegration of religion: the greater and more transcendent the god, the freer are humans. Religion dissolves the unity of the world into oppositions: the one versus the many, the sensible versus the intelligible. In this way, the modern dichotomy of ‘secular’ versus ‘religion’ is itself a product of religion. For Gauchet, monotheism by itself does not destabilize religion since Judaism and Islam assumed God’s continued presence in the world. Only Christianity, in its doctrine of incarnation, postulated God’s radical otherness, which required the mediation of God’s son. Only Christianity created a religion of interiority and abdicated the world to its secular rulers. This focus on Christianity – and particularly on its Western European expression – fails, however, to acknowledge that secularism has many and varied manifestations. In far-flung places like China, India, and Turkey, modern secular movements reflect in one form or another the religious contexts – Confucianism, Hinduism, and Islam – out of which they sprang. To attend to secularisms in the plural is to attend to the specific traditions out of which they arise and which, in turn, inevitably shape their character (see, among other recent works, Casanova 1994; Bhargava 1998; Jakobsen & Pellegrini 2000). In this essay, I should like to turn to Jewish secularism as a tradition that has its own unique characteristics. As Berger and Gauchet both insist, the Hebrew Bible represented a decisive moment in the prehistory of secularism. But is the appeal to the Hebrew Bible a sufficient explanation for the particular character of Jewish secularism? After all, the strict monotheism that Judaism shares with Islam did not predispose the latter to a secular revolution. It was specifically where the Jews had contact with European modernization – either in Europe itself or in areas under the influence of European colonialism – that Jewish secularism developed. © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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The argument that I am about to make does not preclude these external influences but is aimed at revealing how secular Jewish thinkers also built their philosophies on the religious tradition they sought to replace. I want to acknowledge at the outset that the trajectory I will trace does not exhaust Jewish secularism: the secular took different forms in different places and not all Jewish secularists necessarily grounded their thought in categories from the earlier tradition. I am therefore interested in a particular strand of the modern Jewish secularism, one rooted primarily in the Ashkenazic culture of Central and Eastern Europe. Moreover, instead of defining these fraught terms at the outset, I will allow the definitions to emerge phenomenologically from the arguments of premodern and modern Jewish thinkers themselves. In his famous essay, ‘The Non-Jewish Jew’, the former yeshiva student and socialist revolutionary, Isaac Deutscher, argued that those who rejected both their ancestral religion and people in favor of secular universalism had historical precursors. In a paradoxical formulation that captured something of his own identity, Deutscher wrote: ‘The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition’ (Deutscher 1968, p. 26). The ‘Jewry’ that the heretic transcends is ‘Judaism’, not only the religion, but all of the traditions built up over nearly three millennia. Yet, in transcending Judaism, the heretic finds himself or herself in a different Jewish tradition, a tradition no less Jewish for being anti-traditional. Deutscher starts his essay on an autobiographical note, remembering how, as a child in the yeshiva, he read the story of the heretic Elisha ben Abuya (or Aher – the Other – as he is known). Elisha’s favorite student, Rabbi Meir, became one of the towering legal authorities of his generation, yet he never renounced his wayward teacher. By raising the question of the relationship of the orthodox Rabbi Meir and the heretic Elisha, Deutscher implied that even the heretic remains somehow connected to that which he rejects. And as Rabbi Meir demonstrates, the Jewish tradition never fully drums out its rebels. For Deutscher, Elisha was the prototype of ‘those great revolutionaries of modern thought: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky and Freud.’ They were all heretics, yet their heresy might be understood as a rejection that grew out of the Jewish tradition itself. While Deutscher reached back to this alternative intellectual tradition, it is important to emphasize that, from a sociological point of view, Jews experienced secularization as an abrupt rupture with traditional practice. It was not so much a revolution of ideas as it was the abandonment of traditional communities, rabbinic authority and the daily routine prescribed by Jewish law. This was a rupture facilitated by urbanization, emigration and political persecution. As an oppressed people whose emancipation into modern European societies was often tortuously slow and marked by outbreaks of anti-semitic resentment and violence, the Jews had much to gain from rejecting their religion, indeed, all religion. © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Secularism often became a way of resisting their minority status, something that they shared with other minorities in multi-ethnic empires. A secular world without religion promised liberation from their disabilities by divorcing religion from the state. The uneven success of Jewish emancipation – in which, as Marx put it, political emancipation was not matched by social emancipation – also made young Jews particularly prone to reject their parents’ way of life and to embrace various forms of revolution. In some cases, the ideas that informed these different ideologies were expressed as universalism or cosmopolitanism, but this turn to the universal was a direct product of the perceived parochialism of the Judaism out of which it emerged. Indeed, some claim, if with exaggeration, that cosmopolitanism is itself a kind of Jewish parochialism. As Yuri Slezkine has argued, the Jews seemed especially cut out for modernity (Slezkine 2004). Without claiming that they created the modern world, Slezkine asserts that the characteristics of ‘service nomads’ – intellectual agility, literacy, arcane skills, mobility and tribal solidarity – that the Jews had adopted over many centuries were uniquely adapted to modernity. Not only capitalism, but science, medicine, law, and journalism were all fields of endeavor for which the Jews were highly suited. Even if they did not invent these fields, they were well-prepared to succeed at them. It follows from his argument that the eagerness with which many Jews embraced a world without God or to create their own versions of such a world was something to which their religious tradition may have predisposed them. That the earlier tradition fueled and shaped the particular form of Jewish secularism does not mean that the two were identical. To argue that they are identical, as Gauchet seems to at times, would efface what is new and revolutionary about modernity. But I want to argue that aspects of premodern thought not only anticipate their modern successors, but actually furnish arguments that might be appropriated, adapted, and transformed to fit a secular agenda. Even if these ideas, in their original contexts, were not intended for such a purpose, the social context of modernity cast them in a new light, making it possible to view them as genuine precursors. To use a different metaphor, these premodern ideas were like a gene that required the social and political environment of modernity before it could be expressed. These ideas were not the primary or proximate cause of Jewish secularism but instead provided the mentalité – the language and particular flavor – of that secularism when modern forces caused it to emerge. Since the creators of modern Judaism – and its secular subculture – were intellectuals, often the products of yeshiva education, it was only natural that they would find their inspiration in books, starting with books from within the religious tradition. Later, the books of earlier secularists, notably Baruch Spinoza, fulfilled a similar role. Finally, secular thinkers revolted against the Jewish library by writing their own books, yet these © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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books too often took the form of exegetical texts in the traditional mode. Jewish secularism as an intellectual tradition was therefore the product of the writers of books basing themselves on other books even as they rejected the books on which they were raised. Intertextuality is the key to this literature. What we find here is the Jewish analog to another of Funkenstein’s definition of secular theology: non-theologians practicing theology. These Jewish literati, starting with Spinoza, were not rabbis, indeed many were self-consciously rebels against the rabbis. This literary chain reaction typically had a peculiar character. The creators of Jewish secularism were primarily Ashkenazic (i.e. Northern and Eastern European Jews; the Sephardic world had its forms of secularization, quite different from those described here). Theirs was a revolt of sons against traditionalist fathers. But the tradition in which they found inspiration was often that of the Sephardic (Spanish) Jews, especially the philosophical tradition mediated through Islam (see Sorkin 1996).3 One might argue that in revolting against their fathers, they turned instead to their uncles.4 This uncle–nephew relationship continued with the adoption of Spinoza, the Sephardic son of Marranos, as their radical progenitor. Judaism as a religion is a modern invention. Seeking to distill a set of concepts out of traditional practice, modern religious thinkers conventionally define Judaism around three cardinal principles: God, Torah, and Israel (Trepp 2000, p. 573).5 Without endorsing the claim that the Jewish religion can be reduced to these three ‘essential’ categories, I would argue that they furnish useful heuristic principles for organizing the three dimensions that define modern secularism in general: metaphysics, culture, and politics. Secular Jewish thinkers seized these categories, emptied them of their religious meaning and filled them instead with new, secular definitions, albeit with definitions informed by alternative traditions from premodernity: they declared their independence from the tradition in terms taken from the tradition. The God of the Bible became nature, the Torah became the source for a cultural and historical definition of Jewish tradition, and Israel was redefined from a community bound by covenant with God to a political or ethnic nation. In these transformations, we find the Jewish analog to Funkenstein’s secular theology. God As if to confirm Gauchet’s thesis that monotheism points to a world without God, the Jews of the Greco-Roman world were at times accused of atheism. Of course, this accusation did not mean what it came to mean after the seventeenth century; it was instead based on the fact that the Jews did not worship a god who could be visually represented, which, to the ancient mind, meant no god at all. But if the charge of atheism only made sense in a late antique context, it nevertheless inadvertently pointed © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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to a curious feature of biblical and postbiblical Judaism: its relative lack of interest in describing the deity. The Hebrew Bible is the account of God’s relationship to his people, not his relationship to himself or to other deities. To be sure, he has emotions like jealousy and anger as well as occasional anatomical features (an arm, a mouth, and a backside), but he – even his gender receives little explicit attention – otherwise lacks the rich life of the Greek and Canaanite gods. The breaking of the idols was accompanied by the banishment of other gods, thus precluding the possibility of heavenly drama. One might argue that, absent the doctrine of incarnation, the Gospels are even more devoid of the divine presence. God never speaks to Jesus directly; he is the puppet-master who works entirely off stage. But once Christianity developed its Christology, the inner life of God became central to its teachings and to the emerging definition of orthodoxy. As a religion of faith, correct belief took pride of place in early Christianity. For Christians to become secular required a renunciation of the most basic instincts of their religion. Not so rabbinic – and thus medieval – Judaism. While God certainly appears as a character in rabbinic literature, often in more anthropomorphic ways than in the Bible (such as putting on tefilin), as Peter Berger already noticed, the rabbis were also concerned to construct their legal and exegetical system without prophetic authority. In one of the most famous stories in the Talmud,6 the second-century sage, Rabbi Eliezer, finds himself in a minority of one in opposition to the other rabbis. He invokes various miracles on his side, but the majority is unimpressed. Finally, he insists that if the law is according to his opinion: ‘let the heavens prove it’. Immediately, a bat kol, a heavenly voice, affirms that his reading of the law is the right one. Against this seemingly iron-clad defense, Rabbi Joshua, the leader of the majority, stands on his feet and declares, quoting Deuteronomy 30:12: ‘It (the Torah) is not in the heavens.’ The Talmud asks, ‘what does “it is not in the heavens” mean?’ A later authority, Rabbi Yermiya explains: ‘Since the Torah was given at Sinai, we no longer listen to a heavenly voice.’ Now that the Torah is on earth, it is the majority – a majority of rabbis – who will decide its meaning. The text finds the principle of majority rule in a biblical quotation: ‘according to the majority you shall incline’ (Exodus 23:2). It is thus paradoxically the Torah itself, the divine revelation, that both affirms a secular principle (it is not in the heavens) and teaches majority rule. This story is sometimes cited as evidence of a rabbinic declaration of independence from God. The rabbis enact their independence not only in the story itself, but also in the quotations they bring from the Torah to support their case. The verses from Exodus and Deuteronomy both mean something quite different in their original context from what the Talmud takes them to mean. For example, the verse in Exodus means the opposite of how the rabbis use it. In its original context, it says: ‘You shall © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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not side with the many to do wrong, nor shall you pervert your testimony by following after the many.’ In other words, a witness must adhere to what he believes is right rather than following majority opinion. The rabbis have therefore turned the Bible upside down. It is almost as if to declare their independence from heaven, they needed to radically subvert heaven’s own revelation. Through the lens of this pregnant story, we can witness the tensions in rabbinic thought between divine revelation and human autonomy. But this is hardly secularism avant la lettre. The rabbis seem here to subvert the Torah, but they are far from discarding it altogether. On the contrary, their very legal philosophy is grounded in divine revelation, even if subjected to their own reinterpretations. They clearly believed that some communication from heaven is possible: hence, the bat kol.7 In addition, they argued that their own law – the oral law – was revealed at Sinai together with the written law. Their legislative innovations were not mere human inventions, but were grounded in revelation. It was probably this last idea that undergirds the Rabbi Eliezer story, since if rabbinic interpretation – majority rule – had its origins in Sinai, then a belated heavenly voice must surely count for less. Moreover, no one in this story – or in others – doubts either the existence or the authority of God. Immediately after Rabbi Joshua’s statement, God is said to laugh: ‘My sons have defeated me, my sons have defeated me.’ God thus acquiesces in his own defeat. So, the majority, too, invokes a divine voice, but this time on its own side (for a further argument that the text does not side with ostensible position of the majority, see Rubenstein 1999, pp. 34 – 63). However, we should not be too hasty in minimizing the radical import of our text. The text reveals a sense that the destruction of the Temple created a new world in which human autonomy loomed large, an idea that we might usually associate with modernity. The rabbis asserted that, with the destruction of the Temple, prophecy had ceased, left only to children and fools (on our text and the end of prophecy, see Blenkinsopp 2004).8 The end of prophecy guaranteed their interpretive monopoly, at least if they could suppress other voices. And, then, there is the very legal dialectic itself: the law was not given definitively, but is instead open to contradictory interpretations, each of which, to quote another famous story, is ‘the words of the living God’.9 Indeed, the very legal principles (ha-middot she-ha-Torah nidreshet ba-hen) that the rabbis use to derive their own law from the Bible were not revealed at Sinai, but come instead from Greek legal hermeneutics (see Daube 1953 and, more generally, Lieberman 1942). Just as modern, secular interpretations of the Bible are based on the canons of historical criticism, so the rabbis took their tools of biblical exegesis from the interpretive science of their own day. Whether or not one wants to call these hermeneutics ‘secular’, they demonstrate that the rabbis were reading scripture through the eyes of their contemporary, non-Jewish culture. © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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It is popularly held that Judaism is a religion of practice, not belief, and Naomi Seidman has suggested that the secularization of the Jews was a revolt waged more against traditional practice, such as the system of arranged marriage, than against theological doctrine.10 This is undoubtedly true and therefore Jewish secularization followed a variety of paths not limited to theology or the history of ideas. However, as Menachem Kellner has demonstrated, medieval thinkers developed a discipline of Jewish dogmatics in which they tried to elucidate ‘principles of belief ’ (ikkarei emunah) (Kellner 1986). This discipline was a by-product of Jewish philosophy, which was in turn the product of interaction with Islamic philosophy. For Sephardic intellectuals, theological doctrine did matter and it was to this tradition that modern Ashkenazic intellectuals often turned in search of models for secularism. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the great rationalist philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138–1204) became perhaps the medieval model for modern secularists. Those rebelling against rabbinic authority often surreptitiously read his Guide of the Perplexed as a subversive work. On the face of it, Maimonides is an improbable candidate for this role. As the greatest codifier of Jewish law in the Middle Ages, Maimonides was anything but a rebel against tradition. One of the harshest Jewish critics of astrology, Maimonides had no use for the science that seemingly did away with divine providence. And his guide is perhaps the most thoroughgoing attempt to reconcile faith with reason. On a number of different levels, though, Maimonides’ philosophy contains radical ideas that excited violent opposition in his lifetime and were available for even more radical reinterpretation in the modern age (see Silver 1965). To give a full account of Maimonides’ thought would lie far outside the scope of this essay (the most comprehensive, recent treatment of Maimonides is Davidson 2005), but in this section and the two following, I propose to sketch out briefly several aspects that seem particularly relevant to later secular appropriation: negative theology, nature, historical explanation of the commandments, and political theory. Following other philosophers, Maimonides rejected biblical anthropomorphisms, but he went further by rejecting the attribution of any human or earthly characteristics to God: ‘. . . anything that entails corporeality ought of necessity to be negated in reference to Him and . . . all affections likewise should be negated in reference to Him.’11 God lacks a body as well as all emotions and other human qualities. The only way that Maimonides can find to insulate God from the relative nature of our world is to describe him by negations. The argument through which Maimonides arrives at this negative theology is complicated and need not detain us here.12 What is important for our purposes is the consequence of this theology. Maimonides’ God, who can only be described by negatives, is as far from the God of the Bible as one might imagine. This is a thoroughly transcendent God, one that would appear to be utterly remote © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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from our world, since he cannot share anything with our world and remain God. He is a God who can only be worshipped by philosophers, insofar as such worship consists of meditation on negations. Moreover, a God so transcendent that ‘he’ cannot be described is virtually a God that does not exist. Although Maimonides holds that a chain of negations leads ultimately to the affirmation of God’s unity (albeit in the form of a negative proposition), it could just as well lead to the final negation of atheism. It was perhaps in reaction to the heretical potential in Maimonides’ theology that led the thirteenth-century Kabbalists to run to the other extreme and describe God in the most frankly human terms imaginable, including the erotic. But the Kabbalists’ anthropomorphic myth of the divine confirms in a negative way the atheistic threat of Maimonides’ God. By abstracting God from the world, Maimonides cleared the way for an autonomous realm of nature. Not that nature operates outside of divine providence, but it does so under what medieval scholastics called ‘general providence’, or the laws of nature. The world, says Maimonides, represents God’s ‘attributes of action’, which means that all we can know of God are the effects of his creation. And what are these ‘attributes of action?’ They are apparently the actions of nature, or, in our language, the laws of nature. We can infer nothing about the Creator from these laws except that they are self-evidently the product of a rational Creator. Maimonides thus articulated a medieval version of the modern argument from ‘intelligent design’: since the universe appears to be rationally ordered, it must have been ordered by an intelligent designer who remains otherwise unknown to us. Maimonides’ position on nature attracted supporters and detractors after his death. On the one hand, there were those like Hasdai Crescas who rejected the Aristotelian basis of Maimonides’ philosophy, thus casting doubt on the ability of philosophy to provide the final answers for our questions (see Wolfson 1957). On the other hand, Levi ben Gershon (Gersonides) went even farther than Maimonides by arguing that man can attain complete knowledge of nature and, especially, the constellations (see Freudenthal 1992). These scientific debates among Jews persisted even after the expulsion from Spain, finding new voices in Italy and even among Ashkenazic intellectuals in Northern Europe (see Ruderman 1995). This medieval rationalist tradition is, of course, as different from its secular successor as biblical Judaism is from the Talmud. But just as the rabbis of the Talmud built their edifice on the novel interpretations of the Bible, so secular Jewish thinkers built on the rationalist tradition represented by Maimonides. A prime example is the heretical Dutch philosopher Baruch or Benedict Spinoza (1632–1676; the choice of first name already gives away one’s interpretation of him). Spinoza is frequently referred to as the first secular Jew, but the label may be a misnomer. He certainly saw himself as secular, or, more precisely, his philosophy provides © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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some of the first definitions of secularism. But whether he continued to consider himself Jewish after his excommunication in 1656 is more doubtful, even though Christian thinkers persisted in labeling him a Jew, often combined with still more pejorative adjectives (see Stewart 2006; for an excellent biography of Spinoza, see Nadler 1999). It was, in fact, the non-Jewish world that found Spinoza so troublesome, even though the Portuguese Jewish authorities in Amsterdam were the first to call him a heretic. Spinoza only became a source for Jewish secularism – and thus the ‘first secular Jew’ – only in the nineteenth century (see, for example, Goetschel 2004 and Schwartz 2007). In his great study of Spinoza’s philosophical antecedents, Harry Wolfson argued that ‘we cannot get the full meaning of what Benedictus says unless we know what has passed through the mind of Baruch’ (Wolfson 1934/1962, 1:vii) What passed through the mind of Baruch was not precisely the whole rabbinic tradition, since we know from Yirmiyahu Yovel, as well as other scholars of the Marrano experience, that the Judaism against which Spinoza rebelled was the peculiar construction of those Spanish and Portuguese conversos who had left and then returned to their ancestral faith (Yovel 1989). Wolfson was therefore likely wrong in attributing command of the whole Jewish philosophical tradition to Spinoza,13 but, as Catherine Chalier has pointed out, Spinoza was acutely aware of Maimonides, especially his allegorical method of reading the Bible and his belief that Moses possessed a philosophical understanding of God (Chalier 2006). Although Spinoza rejected these propositions, Maimonides’ radical positions provided ammunition that his seventeenthcentury successor could adopt and adapt for his own purposes. The two were at once diametric opposites, but also dialectical twins, just similar enough to be two sides of the same coin. In this light, Spinoza was as much the last medieval Jewish philosopher – albeit a self-consciously heretical one – as he was the first modern one. Put differently, Spinoza served as the fulcrum between the medieval and the modern. As we have just seen, Maimonides’ God was utterly transcendent in the sense that he was incomparable with anything in the created universe. All that we can know of God in a positive sense is what his ‘attributes of action’, that is, the natural world. Spinoza took over these divine attributes of action from Maimonides and argued that they are all that there is to God. There is no essence outside of them, no transcendence beyond their immanence. God is the universe – and nothing else. One might say that once the transcendent God became so abstract that it could not be grasped, it vanished from sight, leaving only the universe. Maimonides’ negative theology collapsed in on itself with Spinoza, turning into its precise opposite: radical transcendence begat pure immanence. Although Spinoza’s God is quite different from that of Maimonides, these arguments are squarely in the Maimonidean tradition: it is inadmissible to attribute to God any human qualities, since God and humans are © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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literally incommensurable. Finally, by denying biblical miracles and embracing radical necessity, Spinoza simply took Maimonides to his logical conclusion. This philosophy may be secular, but it is not atheistic, if by atheism we mean the denial of God’s existence. Even if we grant with Yirmiayahu Yovel that Spinoza was a ‘Marrano of reason’ who used coded language to conceal his true meaning, he retained theological language for a real purpose. His God does not act on the world from the outside in the form of miracles, yet his immanent philosophy leads, in his view, to a surer ‘love of God’, that virtue taught by the Jewish tradition as ahavat ha-shem, than does any traditional doctrine. As unorthodox as his philosophy was, it was nevertheless, to quote the Romantic poet Novalis’ characterization, ‘God-intoxicated.’ Spinoza was a radical monotheist, in fact, so radical that the oneness of God must contain the world. In revolting against the Jewish God, that is, the God of the Bible, he nevertheless ended up close to home. For all his radical break with the past and heretical rejection of the Jewish tradition, then, Spinoza cannot be understood without reference to that tradition. The universalism of his philosophy had its roots in medieval natural philosophy that paved the way for seeing the world through the lens of science rather than only the Bible. Spinoza’s God is the diametric opposite of the God of the Bible: where the biblical God intervenes from the outside through miracles and divine revelation in the workings of the world, the God of Spinoza is that world itself. Yet, medieval Jewish philosophy prepared the ground for this radical subversion of the biblical God, which explains why later generations of secular rebels would embrace not only Spinoza, but also Maimonides, read as if through the eyes of Spinoza. The first Jewish thinker to do so systematically was Solomon Maimon (1754 –1800), a Lithuanian-born Talmudic prodigy who fled his homeland for Germany where he became a minor but controversial luminary in the firmament of the German Enlightenment. Maimon’s importance for the later Jewish Enlightenment probably lies less in his philosophy than in the influence of his Lebensgeschichte, which provided generations of rebels with an autobiographical model for escape from tradition. But even in his autobiography, Maimon provides the outline for a philosophy at once grounded in medieval Jewish philosophy and pointing to a secular future.14 Maimon’s debt to Maimonides was particularly heavy and he acknowledged it by taking the pseudonym ‘Maimon’ as a gesture to his medieval intellectual ancestor, the Sephardic philosopher thus replacing his own Ashkenazic father. Maimon argued that, far from reducing God to the world, Spinoza’s God actually swallowed up the world. In other words, Spinoza was not an atheist, since he denied not the existence of God, but the existence of the world. Maimon labeled this view ‘acosmic’ and argued that it is the © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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diametric opposite of atheism (Maimon 1995). For the atheist, unity, that is, God, is imaginary and only the multiplicity of the world is real; for Spinoza, unity is real and multiplicity (the world) imaginary. Like Spinoza, Maimon was not an atheist, at least not in the very specific sense that this discussion suggests (for an excellent discussion of Maimon’s philosophy, see Bergman 1967; see also Socher 2006, Chapters 2 and 3). But like Spinoza, he rejected the God of the Bible in favor of an abstract, philosophical God whose roots lie in Maimonides. Using a classically Maimonidean argument, Maimon claimed that the statement ‘God exists’ is no more meaningful than the statement ‘God does not exist.’ We mean by existence something that could or will go out of existence. Such a meaning cannot be applied to God; it is a category mistake like saying ‘the wall does not see’ (an example from Maimonides). The existence of God is beyond rational proof since the very concept of existence cannot be predicated of God. Since both belief and disbelief in God’s existence are self-contradictory, the philosopher cannot be an atheist (see Maimon’s entry for ‘Atheist’, 1971, pp. 25–7). But, by the same token, he or she cannot be a believer, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. Maimon’s philosophy reached backwards to Spinoza and Maimonides, but he also pointed forward. He argued that the world is a creation of our minds, with God serving as the limiting case for such construction and thus anticipated the idealism of Fichte and Hegel, as well as the later Jewish philosopher, Hermann Cohen. If both Spinoza and Maimon assimilated the world into God, theirs was a very peculiar form of secularism (remembering that the original meaning of the word was ‘of the world’). In both cases, they freed philosophy from biblical theology, since, while retaining the language of the divine, they emptied it of its theistic meanings and turned it into a product of the human mind. If Maimon might be called the first Jewish Spinozist, he was hardly the last. The story of Jewish secularism is in surprisingly large measure the story of Spinoza’s intellectual children. As Daniel B. Schwartz had demonstrated, the urge to rehabilitate Spinoza was a project lasting throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with several proclamations that the 1656 herem was nullified as well as numerous biographies, fictional accounts, paintings, and scholarly studies (Schwartz 2007). Schwartz argues that the debate over Spinoza was the touchstone for the boundaries of Jewish identity in the modern era. But it was also the touchstone for the meaning of Jewish secularism and Spinoza’s God served for many Jewish thinkers as the model for an anti-traditional theology. Heinrich Heine, Moses Hess, Albert Einstein, and Mordecai Kaplan, to take four very diverse figures, were all Spinozists in one way or another.15 And, this chain of ‘anti-tradition’ started not with Spinoza, but with Maimonides, if not with the rabbis themselves. © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Torah Jonathan Sheehan has shown how the Enlightenment, far from negating religion altogether, recuperated it under new terms. In particular, Enlighteners in Germany and England turned the Bible from a text of salvation into a cultural monument, a document to be studied, translated, and quoted along with other books of classical antiquity (Sheehan 2005). Sheehan’s argument raises the question of whether a Jewish parallel existed to the Enlightenment Bible. Moses Mendelssohn’s translation and commentary comes immediately to mind as a project designed to teach the Jews German and to offer a rationalist reading of the Bible from a Jewish point of view. But Mendelssohn represented a moderate form of Enlightenment, an attempt to bridge between rationalism and Jewish tradition without betraying either. If nineteenth-century German Jews anachronistically embraced Mendelssohn as the first modern Jew, they did so because of his professed theism, not because he pointed towards secularism. It was once again Spinoza who provided the radical alternative to Mendelssohn by dismissing the Bible as the source of any philosophical truth. Yet, if read with the premodern biblical exegesis that he himself quoted, Spinoza’s interpretation of the Bible can be considered specifically Jewish and thus as the first instance of a Jewish Enlightenment Bible. Of course, to rescue the Bible from theology had some warrant in the text itself. While much of the Bible is the account of God’s relationship to his chosen people, it is also a document of national history. Moreover, some books of the Bible, notably the Song of Songs and Esther, do not mention the deity at all, while other, such as Ecclesiastes and Job, challenge conventional prophetic theology. Here was fruit ripe for the secular picking. But it was less the alternative texts within the Bible that attracted Spinoza’s attention than critical, historical readings as provided by Abraham Ibn Ezra (1092/3–1167), whose biblical commentary eventually became canonical. That it did owe much to its focus on a literal and grammatical reading of the biblical text, but it was these factors that also caused Ibn Ezra to flirt with heresies of his own. Ibn Ezra identified a series of verses that he claims were interpolations by someone other than Moses, the assumed author, according to tradition, of the whole Torah. Nevertheless, Ibn Ezra was hardly prepared to reject Moses’ authorship of the whole of the Torah based on these scattered verses. He attacked in particular Hiwi al-Balkhi (see Sarna 1993; Lancaster 2003),16 a ninth-century Persian Jew, who was arguably the first ‘modern’ Bible critic. Hiwi had argued that the Bible – and therefore the Jewish religion – stands at odds with everything taught by reason. Since the commandments lack reason, presumably a philosopher has no need to fulfill them. But while he rejected radical exegetes like Hiwi, Ibn Ezra included their views in his commentary, thus giving generations of readers a window into the surprising range of opinions in the scholarly Jewish world of his time. © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Ibn Ezra’s radicalism does not only rest on his discovery of interpolations in the Bible. The interpolations were rather the product of a wider theory of literal exegesis, namely, his attempt to understand the text immanently. He rejected the kind of allegorizing of the text that had become standard practice since Saadia Gaon, a practice that resulted from the desire to harmonize the Bible with the conclusions of medieval science and philosophy. In Ibn Ezra’s view, such allegories often demonstrated poor knowledge of both the biblical text and medieval science. The first task of exegesis is to discover the literal meaning of the text. Moreover, this biblical language is not philosophical, but colloquial: ‘the Bible speaks the language of human beings.’ As a result, the Bible contains all kinds of figures of speech that suggest, for example, that God has a body or emotions. These statements are to be taken neither literally nor allegorically. Instead, they are simply everyday, human ways of speaking about God: one should infer no philosophical truths from them. The talmudic dictum that ‘the Bible speaks the language of human beings’ is linked to a larger issue. The purpose of the Bible’s author was pedagogical, not philosophical, and he therefore accommodated his work to the language and understanding of common people. The perspective from which the Bible observes the world is also human. The creation of the world must be understood from an earthly point of view. The Bible is concerned only with the sub-lunar world, which is the world observable by human beings, not the supra-lunar found in the books of the astronomers. Since the Bible not only speaks the language of human beings, but from the perspective of human beings, it does not contain philosophical or astronomical knowledge, a specialized, scientific knowledge found in other books. By limiting the knowledge provided by the Bible, Ibn Ezra made the study of nature – or, at least, the supra-lunar world – a subject independent of the Bible.17 Rather than reconciling science with revelation, which was the project of so many medieval Jewish, Christian, and Muslim philosophers, Ibn Ezra chose to separate them, thus rendering nature a realm autonomous from religion. An equally radical interpretation of the Bible can be found in Maimonides, although he rejected Ibn Ezra’s literalist interpretation. Maimonides had no difficulty in allegorizing biblical verses to reconcile them with philosophy, but his doctrine of the ‘reasons for the commandments’ anticipated modern, critical readings of the Bible in a different way. Already in the Talmud the rabbis attempted to explain why a commandment took the particular form that it did. The rise of Jewish philosophy, starting with Saadia Gaon in the tenth century, vastly expanded this enterprise as part of the larger project of reconciling reason with revelation (Heinemann 1954). The argument Maimonides brings in Part 3 of the Guide of the Perplexed is essentially historical (see Funkenstein 1993, pp. 137– 44; Socher 1999, pp. 6–29). Many of the commandments have the particular form that they have, not because they are arbitrary, but because they are specifically © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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aimed at countering the pagan religion that surrounded the ancient Israelites. God designed the laws of sacrifice to resemble those of the pagan and polytheistic Sabeans, but with the object of worship the true God instead of their false deities. In this way, he might gradually wean the Israelites away from idolatry to the true religion. By the time the Second Temple was destroyed, the Israelites no longer needed sacrifice, since they had sufficiently given up idolatry and could now serve God with prayers. Maimonides seems to hold, at least implicitly, that God designed the sacrificial system with a built-in mechanism to destroy itself. In other words, the sacrifices were merely instruments for a higher goal and once that goal was reached, they became obsolete. Maimonides speaks of God’s ‘divine cunning’, (‘ormat ha-shem u-tevunato) meaning that he operates indirectly, allowing the sacrifices to perform their educational function on their own. True to his argument about miracles, this form of divine intervention takes place within the realm of the possible, the realm of nature. The radical import of Maimonides’ argument has preoccupied generations of scholars. Did he mean that the destruction of the Temple was a positive event, a result of the religious maturation of the Jews? How did he reconcile his commitment in his Code of Jewish Law (Mishne Torah) to the reestablishment of the sacrifices in messianic times with the historical evolution propounded in the Guide of the Perplexed? And if sacrifices became obsolete, could not the same happen to prayer, especially since prayer often involves conceiving of God in human terms? If the true worship of God is by philosophical meditation, then perhaps messianic times might mean, at least for philosophers, ignoring portions of the law? Maimonides himself never articulated such conclusions; the author of the first comprehensive code of Jewish law was hardly a candidate for leading an antinomian movement. Nevertheless, Maimonides’ historical explanation of the commandments is an extraordinary precursor to modern historical scholarship. And just as an historical-critical approach to ancient sources fed modern Reform’s abandonment of the law, so Maimonides’ recourse to a historical argument, long before the rise of modern historicism, provided a medieval source for those modern secularists wishing to overthrow tradition. Spinoza’s reading of the Bible went far beyond Ibn Ezra and Maimonides, but they are of great significance for understanding his relationship to the religious tradition that he rejected. Spinoza demolished the Bible’s theology and reduced its message to one of only quaint historical curiosity. Spinoza exaggerated Ibn Ezra’s arguments to deny Moses’s authorship and give the honor instead to Ezra the Scribe from the period after the return of the Jews from Babylonia (post-38 bce). In doing so, he shifted the Torah from a work of prophecy to a work of history, written long after the fact of Israel’s early theocracy. Instead of its author channeling the word of God, he was an historian who reconstructed its ancient past. © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Where all other contemporary scholars agreed that the Bible, no matter how reinterpreted, was still the word of God, Spinoza struck out on his own in denying this centuries-old belief. For Spinoza, the word of God had to be a timeless, universal truth. Echoing Maimonides, if against Maimonides’ intent, the Bible instead taught only the history of ancient Israel and was therefore at once historically contingent and limited to a particular nation. As such, it had no value as a philosophical text. It did, however, have value as an historical text, although Spinoza’s philosophy left no place for history. In this way, Spinoza’ historical interpretation created a role for the Bible once, by the nineteenth century, history achieved pride of place in the human sciences. Spinoza’s attack on the Bible went beyond the mere critique of its outlandish beliefs. Instead, he subjected it to an entirely new reading (see Preus 2001). In effect, he reduced the Bible from ‘the Book’ to ‘a book’. As just another book on the shelves of the library, the Bible should be read like any other book and its claims of truth subjected to the same scrutiny. Even more: ‘I hold that the method of interpreting Scripture is no different from the method of interpreting Nature, and is in fact in complete accord with it. For the method of interpreting Nature consists essentially in composing a detailed study of Nature from which, as being the source of our assured data, we can deduce the definitions of the things of Nature’ (Spinoza 2001, p. 87). The Bible should be interpreted the way we interpret nature for the simple reason that it is not supernatural, but a part of nature. Desiring to reduce the Bible to an anti-quated book about an anti-quated people, Spinoza thus unwittingly made the Bible thoroughly modern, as the object of historical and literary scholarship as well as the account of the political history of the Jews. Far from consigning the Bible to permanent irrelevance, he laid the groundwork for its later recuperation. It was his historical method that made it possible for those, like Heinrich Heine, who wanted to salvage a non-religious message from between its lines. The door was now open to a variety of non-theological readings: as a document of prophetic social justice, nationalist aspirations, and literary genius. The first Hebrew novel, Abraham Mapu’s Ahavat Zion (1853), was set in biblical times and demonstrated how the maskilim ( Jewish enlighteners) exploited the Bible as a cultural foil against rabbinic Judaism. The modern Jewish Bible includes all of these secular alternatives – which have their origin in Ibn Ezra – and Spinoza’s claim that Scripture does not contain all Truth. Demolishing this metaphysical claim made it possible to claim instead a variety of lesser, if no less significant, truths. And the substitution of a ‘cultural Bible’ for the Bible of traditional rabbinic literature was part and parcel of new definitions of Jewish identity based not on religion but on culture. © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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Israel Biblical Israel was constituted through a covenant between God and the descendents of Jacob. Israel thus presupposes Torah, which in turn presupposes God. With the modern dissolution of a religious identity, the meaning of Israel came unglued. In its place appeared political, cultural, and historical definitions of the Jews as a national, linguistic, or folk community, defined by some historically as a ‘community of fate’ and by others, more radically, as a ‘community of descent’. One could find ancient warrants for all of these identities. Biblical Israel may have had its own god, but it was also an ethnos, a tribal nation based on descent from the patriarchs and matriarchs. The Israelite state (or states) resembled the modern nation-state in that it was a state of a specific national or ethnic group. The contentious nature of modern Jewish identity – are the Jews a religion, a people, or a race? – therefore owes much to Jewish origins. However, the premodern roots of a secular, political definition of Israel are more specific than these conventional observations. Side by side with the language of divine covenant, one can find, starting in rabbinic literature, quasi-secular theories of the Jewish polis. With the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce, the Jews lost political sovereignty. Over the many centuries, though, the rabbis gradually established themselves as non-state authorities, at times competing with lay leaders for communal power. Rabbinic literature developed two theories of Jewish politics devoid of a state, one religious and one secular (see Biale 1986, Chapter 2). According to the political theory grounded in revelation, the rabbis were surrogate kings, legitimated by the biblical institution of monarchy. A ‘secular’ theory of Jewish politics, on the other hand, might find its legitimacy outside of divine sanction, either in popular consent or some form of contract. In the Middle Ages, rabbinic courts were the central legal authorities in most Jewish communities. These courts had the right to enforce their decisions by fining those against whom they ruled. This procedure was called hefker bet-din ( judicial expropriation). Medieval theorists extended this power to the community as a whole by arguing that the community was the functional equivalent of a rabbinic court and could therefore expropriate the property of its members. This expropriation, originally a means of punishment, became here the authority to levy taxes. Along the same lines, the rabbis also held that the community’s authority came from an implied contract between all its members.18 This contract gives the community the right to compel individuals to share in the cost of building the door to a courtyard around which they live or to participate in building or repairing the wall of a town since they all receive protection from it. Medieval Jewish theorists preferred this contractual language, which was also common in non-Jewish political © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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theory, rather than arguing that the communal authority was grounded in the covenant at Sinai. By using the language of contract, Jewish political theory in the Middle Ages distanced itself from its biblical roots and created the possibility of a communal government grounded in a secular language. Maimonides contributed to this secular political theory in his Mishne Torah. As Menachem Lorberbaum has shown, he articulated both an ideal political theory and a realistic one (Lorberbaum 2001; see also Blidstein 1983 and Kriesel 1999). The king possesses powers to enforce obedience that exceed those stated in the Torah, such as executing anyone who rebels against him.19 In addition, the distinction he makes between the Kings of David and the Kings of Israel looks like a distinction between constitutional and absolutist monarchy: the former can be judged by the Sanhedrin, the latter not.20 Although Maimonides clearly preferred a king who is bound by law, as a realist, he recognized that ‘secular’ kings – including non-biblical Jewish kings like the Hasmoneans – might exercise unlimited power. Maimonides developed a doctrine of emergency decrees, literally ‘requirements of the hour’ (hora’at sha’ah), that might be detached from revealed law: Even as a physician will amputate the hand or the foot of a patient in order to save his life, so the court may advocate, when an emergency arises, the temporary disregard of some of the commandments that the commandments as a whole may be preserved.21

What follows from this concept is that the rabbis are empowered to impose ‘floggings for rebelliousness’ (malkot mardut) when legally stipulated punishments did not apply. This doctrine bears a remarkable resemblance to Carl Schmitt’s ‘state of exception’ that he used to define sovereignty: the sovereign is he who can suspend the rule of law (Schmitt 1985). Maimonides therefore laid the groundwork for a secular politics based on exigency and power rather than divine commandment. Although he preferred rabbis to exercise this power, a thirteenth-century school of Spanish thinkers, located originally in Barcelona, applied the notion of an autonomous politics to lay leaders, thus secularizing Jewish politics much further. As described by Lorberbaum, Moses Nahmanides, Solomon ibn Adret and Nissim Gerondi were the main innovators of this secular politics (Lorberbaum 2001, pp. 93–149). Perhaps under the influence of Ashkenazi legal traditions, Nahmanides recognized the validity of local custom and communal ordinances that were enacted outside of the framework of Torah law. Adret went further, allowing the use of force in order to ‘preserve society’ (tikkun ha-medinah), even when it is forbidden by the Torah. Gerondi completed this process by stating that the laws to preserve society are not temporary, emergency regulations, but are a legal © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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system complementary to that of the Torah (this dual system of laws may be compared very roughly to the courts of equity and law in the English legal system). For Gerondi (and his contemporary in Southern France, Menachem Meiri), the power of the king – or any government, for that matter – is grounded in what we would call secular law, which exists side-by-side with the law of God. Torah law may be perfect, but it is perhaps too perfect for governing a state. Hence, the need for a secular or political law whose sources of authority are human rather than divine. As halakhic authorities, none of these medieval Jewish writers could be called secular. All were writing within the framework of the legal system that they believed to be divinely inspired. But their recognition of an autonomous realm of politics and law resembles in many ways Christian doctrines of religious and secular spheres, the first that of the Church, the second that of the King. Just as the existence of this secular sphere in the Middle Ages provided a necessary source for modern secular politics, so, too, medieval Jewish political thought carved out a secular political realm that could be appropriated and transformed in the modern Jewish world. Departing from these medieval predecessors, Spinoza thoroughly rejected the political authority of the postbiblical Jewish community, which, of course, had excommunicated him. But he implicitly followed their lead, while also exceeding them greatly, by defining the Jews in purely political terms. The Jews were ‘chosen’ by God when they established their ancient, theocratic state, which, in Spinoza’s language, meant that they expressed their essential nature, which was purely political: what the Israelites lacked in theological acumen they made up for by creating a long-lived state. A secular historical reading of the Bible thus convinced Spinoza that while the founding scripture of ancient Israel taught nothing about philosophical truth, it could serve as a handbook of politics. This was an astonishing argument in the seventeenth century, when the Jews were seen as the most politically hapless of all peoples. Spinoza made it clear that the Bible could not serve as a model for contemporary politics, a view made pressing by the view of reformers like John Calvin that it could do exactly that. Yet, while such an argument would seem to relegate the Bible to irrelevance, a closer reading of Spinoza’s account of the ancient Israelite theocracy demonstrates otherwise. Although a theocracy, this state actually bears sufficient similarities to a republic – Spinoza’s preferred form of government – so that examples from the Bible, which he brings in profusion, can serve to illuminate contemporary political theory (my analysis here is similar to that of Smith 1997, Chapter 6). The creation of the Israelite polity followed the same course as the formation of a democracy (Spinoza 2001, p. 213). The members of the community made a social contract in which they ceded some of their © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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rights to the sovereign. In this analysis of the Israelite covenant as a social contract, Spinoza anticipated twentieth-century studies that showed how the biblical covenant was modeled on suzerainty treaties in the ancient Near East (see Mendenhall 1973). In the case of ancient Israel, that sovereign was God, but this transfer was ‘notional rather than practical’, by which Spinoza means that philosophically speaking, God was a fictional sovereign, a ‘place holder’ for the real sovereign, which was the people themselves (Spinoza 2001, pp. 190, 214). Indeed, God cannot serve as a sovereign, except through the agency of human beings (Spinoza 2001, p. 213). As in a true democracy, ‘no man served his equal’ (Spinoza 2001, p. 199). All possessions were shared equally – a reference here to the biblical Jubilee – and this created social solidarity. The ceremonial laws turned life into a long training in obedience, yet for the Israelites, obedience was not bondage, but freedom (Spinoza 2001, p. 199). These formulations sound very close to Spinoza’s own philosophy; although the Israelites mistakenly understood eternal necessities as divine commandments, they rightly concluded that freedom lies in acquiescing to necessity. The Bible itself, though, should not be taken as the source for granting separate political power to churches, despite the way the biblical priests assumed such power. The priests originally received their power from Moses, that is, from a secular sovereign (secular in the sense that, in Spinoza’s account, it was the people who empowered him) (Spinoza 2001, p. 217). But the Hebrews never doubted that the sovereign retains absolute power over religion. That is why the Jewish religion necessarily lost the force of law once the Jews lost their state. It was only Christianity that injected this doubt into its political theology: an autonomous Church is a Christian artifact. This was because Christianity was invented by those without power, while Judaism was in essence a state religion. Therefore, ancient Israel provides a model, even if one not realized in practice after the time of Moses, of the proper subordination of religion to state. In this sense, Judaism is closer to a modern religion, in Spinoza’s terms, than Christianity. Stripped of belief in the fictitious God, the Bible might serve after all as the inspiration for a republic in which religion provides only moral instruction and the affairs of state are left to the state. Just as the ancient Israelites formed a polity in which no one subjugated his equal, so a modern republic might be formed by a social compact between its freely acting members. Spinoza’s argument that the Jews lost their political identity when they lost their state contradicted something that he himself experienced: the exercise of political power by diaspora Jewish communities. But his definition of the Jews as a political community, at least when they had a state, offered to modern Jews a bold alternative to the religious identity embraced by reformers in the nineteenth century. It is no surprise that Moses Hess, one of the forerunners of Zionism, was to sign his first philosophical work in 1837 as ‘a young Spinozist’ (a riposte to the © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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‘young Hegelians’ with whom he was associated) (Hess 2004).22 When he came to write Rome and Jerusalem in 1862, Hess would repeatedly refer to Spinoza – often with wild inaccuracy and anachronism – in his argument for the Jews as a race and for the reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty. Hess was a pioneer of political Zionism, which was only one of the late nineteenth-century movements to define Israel in secular, political terms. Such a definition was clearly a response to the modern Jewish condition and to the rise of European nationalism. Even without the tradition of political thought that I have traced here from the Middle Ages through Spinoza, it is likely that Jewish nationalism would have taken the same trajectory. Yet, the religious tradition furnished a set of arguments that might be seen as preparations for those nationalist ideologists who stood, however unwittingly, on the shoulders of their precursors. The idea of a politics grounded in this world rather than God was not that remote from the effort of modern Jews to recreate Jewish self-government in a nation-state. Conclusion Secularism, in its metaphysical, historical, and political doctrines, is a modern development, yet its roots lie in ancient philosophical and religious soil. I have tried to demonstrate that for the three cardinal theological principles of Judaism – God, Torah, and Israel – modern Jewish thinkers could find antecedents in the premodern tradition for secular reinterpretations of these principles. By mining this tradition, the creators of modern Jewish secularism left a singular stamp that distinguished the Jewish formation of the secular from the formations of other cultural and religious groups. Although their fate was intertwined with European history and their modernization would not have taken place without that history, the Jews nevertheless experienced and articulated the secular in ways distinctive to their tradition. And while Peter Berger and Marcel Gauchet were on the right track in locating the origins of Jewish secularism in biblical monotheism, it was even more in the precise ways this theology played itself out in rabbinic and medieval literature that we find the intellectual roots of its later secularization. Acknowledgement I wish to thank Naomi Seidman for her incisive comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Short Biography David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Professor of Jewish History at the University of California, Davis. He is the author most recently of Blood © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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and Belief: The Circulation of a Symbol Between Jews and Christians (University of California Press, 2007) and the editor of Cultures of the Jews: A New History (Schocken Books, 2002). He currently completes a book on Jewish secular thought and is editing the Judaism section of the Norton Anthology of World Religions. Notes * Correspondence address: David Biale, Department of History, University of California Davis, 1 Shields Ave., Davis, CA 95616, USA. Email: [email protected]. 1

Hans Blumenberg formulated this relationship somewhat differently by arguing not so much for a dialectical progression as for modern ideas occupying the places vacated by medieval theology. See Wallace (1983). Similarly, Karl Löwith (1949) proposed that the secular idea of progress owes much to the secularization of Christian apocalypticism. And Carl Schmitt (1985, George Schwab, trans.) argued that modern ‘political theology’ secularized the power of a transcendent God in the power of the state, a process that ultimately led in Schmitt’s philosophy to the ‘total’ state of the Nazis. For a more recent treatment of political theology, albeit unaccountably without any mention of Schmitt, see Lilla (2007). 2 Berger has partially renounced his own secularization thesis in recent years, yet it still stands as an influential, if tattered, monument. 3 Sorkin shows how the Andalusian traditions of exegesis were the ones particularly influential for Mendelssohn, but the point can be generalized. 4 Naomi Seidman suggested this metaphor drawn from literary theory. 5 See, for example, the German-born Reform rabbi, Leo Trepp, who recently wrote: ‘The Covenant unfolds through the interaction of God, Israel and Torah. They are one and inseparable: God has an ongoing direct relationship with Israel, structured by Torah.’ 6 b. Baba Metzia 59b. 7 For the partial substitution of the bat kol for the prophet, see b. Yoma 9b. 8 b. Baba Batra 12b. 9 b. Eruvin 13b. 10 Naomi Seidman, ‘Secularization and Sexuality: Theorizing the Erotic Transformations of Ashkenaz’ (unpublished paper). I thank the author for sharing this very stimulating paper that is the basis for a forthcoming book. 11 Guide, 1:55. The translation here is that of Shlomo Pines (Chicago, 1963). 12 The argument is to be found in the Guide, 1:55–60. 13 No more convincing is Rebecca Goldstein’s speculation that the Kabbalah furnished the problems to which Spinoza offered heretical solutions. See Goldstein 2006. Just how learned he was in Kabbalah remains unknown, although this did not stop certain later Jewish writers from rehabilitating Spinoza as a Jew by claiming that he knew the Kabbalah. See Daniel B. Schwartz, ‘Spinoza as a Middleman between Jewish Enlightenment and Jewish Mysticism’ (AJS paper, 2006). I thank the author for sharing this unpublished paper with me. 14 Maimon (1995, p. 156) for his conversion to Spinozism and p. 163 for his views as a ‘free thinker’. For a superb analysis of Maimon’s autobiography, see Socher (2006, Chapter 1). See also Weissberg (1997) and Moseley (2006). 15 Kaplan, the twentieth-century pioneer of Reconstructionist Judaism, scarcely refers to Spinoza but his identification of God with nature can hardly be read apart from the heretic of Amsterdam. 16 Ibn Ezra on Exodus 14:27, 16:13, 34:29. 17 He did not, however, separate them entirely. He points out a few verses in the Bible that do hint at the supra-lunar world. The Bible, it turns out, must be read from a dual perspective, human, and divine. See Biale (1974, pp. 43 – 62). 18 m. Baba Batra, 1.5. See also the more extensive discussion in the Tosefta Baba Metziah, 11. These texts and many others relevant to this discussion can be found in Walzer et al. (2000, vol. 1, Chapter 8). © 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

362 David Biale 19 20 21 22

Mishne Torah, Mishne Torah, Mishne Torah, On Hess, see

Book of Judges, ‘Law of Kings and Wars,’ 3.8. Book of Judges, ‘Law of Kings and Wars,’ 3.7. Book of Judges, ‘Laws Concerning Rebels,’ 2.4. Avineri (1985), Volkov (1981, pp. 1–15) and Koltun-Fromm (2001).

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© 2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340–364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd