History of the Jews (59 page)

That was in some ways a most attractive prospect. But it was not Judaism. The pious Jew—and there could be no other—did not admit the existence of two kinds of knowledge, sacred and secular. There was only one. Moreover, there was only one legitimate purpose in acquiring it: to discover the exact will of God, in order to obey it. Hence the ‘science of Judaism’, as a dislocated academic discipline, was contrary to Jewish belief. Worse, it was the exact reversal of the true Jewish attitude to studying. As the Rabbi Hiyya put it in the fourth century
AD
: ‘If a man learns the Law without intending to fulfil the Law, it were better for him had he never been born.’
⁴⁷
A real Jew did not see Jewish history as a self-contained bit of world history, on a parallel with that of other peoples. To them, Jewish history
was
history. They believed that, without Israel, there would have been no
world and therefore no history. God had created many worlds and destroyed them as unsatisfactory. He made the present one for the Torah, and so it gave him pleasure. But if Israel, when offered by him the Torah, had rejected it—and some talmudic scholars thought it nearly had done—then the world would have simply reverted to its previous formless state. Hence the destruction of the Second Temple and the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt were episodes not in Jewish, but in total history, with God saying (according to the tannaim): ‘Woe to the children on account of whose sins I have destroyed my house, burned my temple and exiled them among the peoples of the world.’
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The Jews had ceased to write history from then on because there was no history, as they conceived it, to write. It had stopped. History would be resumed with the coming of the Messiah. All that had happened in the meantime would be quickly forgotten, rather like, as the Rabbi Nathan put it, a princess-bride forgets the storms of her sea-voyage once she arrives in the country of the king she is to marry.

Hence, though Zunz’s ‘scientific’ presentation of Jewish history and learning as a contribution to the world stock might make some impression on gentile society, it involved almost by definition a severance from a great part of Judaism. It was subjected to devastating, and in religious terms unanswerable, criticism by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-88), the brilliant spokesman of nineteenth-century Orthodoxy. This Hamburg Jew who served as rabbi in Frankfurt for thirty-seven years was not an obscurantist. To begin with, he wrote beautiful German. His presentation of the Jewish faith, designed for young people, which was published under the title
Nineteen Letters on Judaism
(1836), was immensely effective. He had no objection to secular education; quite the contrary. He used to quote the Rabbi Gamaliel that both Torah knowledge and worldly knowledge were proper objects of study. The ideal ‘man of Israel’, he said, was ‘an enlightened Jew who observes the precepts’.
⁴⁹
Nevertheless, there was all the difference in the world, he argued, between Jews making use of secular knowledge and secular knowledge absorbing Judaism. Israel was not a secular community but a divine one. So any science dealing with the Jews as a community was a form of theology, and necessarily so. The history of what Jews do, and what happens to them, cannot be part of secular history as such because it is the unfolding of God’s will and rightly therefore part of Revelation. General culture and Jewish culture are not in conflict: they are quite different. By confusing the two, you can only damage Judaism. If you merge Jewish with secular history, you desacralize it and kill the living idea which is its theme.

In a bitter and forceful passage, Hirsch explained what this would mean:

 

Moses and Hesiod, David and Sappho, Deborah and Tyrtaeus, Isaiah and Homer, Delphi and Jerusalem, Pythian tripod and Cherubin-sanctuary, prophets and oracles, psalms and elegy—for us, they all lie peacefully in one box, they all rest peacefully in one grave, they all have one and the same human origin, they all have one and the same significance—human, transitory and belonging to the past. All the clouds have dispersed. The tears and sighs of our fathers no longer fill our hearts but our
libraries
. The warmly pulsating hearts of our fathers have become our national
literature
, their fervent breath of life has become the dust of our bookshelves…. Do these departed spirits rejoice in the literary gratitude of our present generation? Whom do they recognize as their true heirs? Those who repeated their prayers but forgot their names, or those who forget their prayers but remember their names?
⁵⁰

 

Later in the century, the point was to be made still more decisively by Nietzsche: once it became possible to study scientifically the history of a religion, he said, it is already dead.

Yet if the logic of Hirsch’s criticism was followed, Jews would in effect be back where they started before the enlightenment. They would constantly be forced to make distinctions between two types of knowledge. It would not so much be Gordon’s dichotomy of ‘A man in his town and a Jew in his tent’ as ‘secular knowledge for business (or pleasure), Jewish knowledge for true understanding’. That would be a fatal barrier to Jews ever becoming accepted as a legitimate part of the general community. Was it not possible to reach some kind of half-way house?

The effort was made by a Galician Jew, Nachman Krochmal (1785-1840), who was part of the original
Wissenschaft
movement, but did not share its view that the intellectual integration of the Jews could be easily accomplished. He was a kind of Hegelian too, but rather more influenced by Maimonidean rationalism. Indeed, he sought to update the
Guide of the Perplexed
, though he was very diffident about publishing the results. In the end, his manuscript was worked on by Zunz himself and printed posthumously in 1851. Krochmal believed that the Jewish enlighteners and the unreconstructed Orthodox were alike unacceptable. The first devitalized Judaism, the second made it repellent; both, in nineteenth-century conditions, produced apostasy. The trouble was that neither type of Jew had a sense of Jewish history. The enlighteners thought it was just something you learned as a child, then went on to secular, ‘adult’ history when you grew up. The Orthodox Jews ignored history altogether—as he put it, ‘there is no early or late in the Torah’. What he proposed was to
create a Jewish philosophy of history. He took the Hegelian theory of growth, as Marx was soon to do, but instead of turning it on its head, he Judaized it. He divided Jewish history into three cycles: growth, maturity, then decline-and-fall. This was to show how ‘when the days of disintegration and destruction were fulfilled, there was always renewed in us a new spirit and new life; and if we fell, how we arose and were encouraged and the Lord our God did not abandon us’. This was clearly far from being just secular history. It was not wholly unlike the old medieval wheel-of-fortune style of history, or the cycles of growth and decay to be popularized by Arnold Toynbee in the mid-twentieth century. But Krochmal introduced a Hegelian element by adding an upward progression through all these cycles—the process of human awareness from its roots in pure nature to its ultimate identification with pure spirit. All national histories showed this in some degree, but whereas other peoples were transitory, the Jews were eternal because they had a special relationship with the Absolute Spirit (i.e. God). Hence ‘The history of Judaism is thus properly the history of the education of consciousness’—with a beginning, a middle and an end.
⁵¹

Unfortunately, Krochmal could not satisfy Orthodox Jews with his philosophy of history since he could not, or did not, fit the Messianic Age into his scheme, unless it was seen in some vague metaphorical sense. Still less could his work appeal to the gentile. With Heinrich Graetz (1817-91), on the other hand, the Jews at last produced a historian, and on a massive scale too, who could not only be read and believed by enlightened Jews, but read—and to some extent accepted—by gentiles too. Between 1856 and 1876 he published an eleven-volume
History of the Jews
which is one of the great monuments of nineteenth-century historical writing. In various condensed forms it appeared all over the world and in numerous translations, and it is still of considerable value today.
⁵²
But in structure the work is Judaic rather than secular: it tells Jewish history primarily in terms of the Torah and Torah study. Moreover, his historical dynamic is religious too. In his view, the Jews were emphatically not a people like any other. They were part of a unique politico-religious organic entity, ‘whose soul is the Torah and whose body is the Holy Land’. The Jewish archetype had a central, and dramatic, part to play in the history of the world. In a brilliant passage introducing volume four of his work, Graetz presented the Jew of historical-divine destiny: ‘On the one hand enslaved Judah with his wanderer’s staff in hand, the pilgrim’s bundle on his back, his grim features turned heavenwards, surrounded by dungeon walls, instruments of torture and the glow of
branding irons; on the other, the same figure with a questing look in the transfigured features, in a study filled with a vast library in all the languages of man…a slave with a thinker’s pride’.
⁵³
Graetz made use of a vast number of sources in many languages, but his vision of the Jew was rooted in Deutero-Isaiah, and especially in the ‘Suffering Servant’. The Jews, he argued, had always been ‘powerful and productive in religious and moral truths for the salvation of mankind’. Judaism was (by divine providence) self-created. In that respect it was unlike any other great religion. Its ‘sparks’ had ignited Christianity. Its ‘seeds’ had brought forth the fruits of Islam. From its insights could be traced the origins both of scholastic philosophy and Protestantism.
⁵⁴
Moreover, the destiny of the Jews was continuing. Graetz did not see the Messiah as a person but as a collective. The Jews were a messianic people. Like Hegel he believed in the concept of a perfect state, and he saw the final Jewish task as preparing a religious state constitution, which would somehow inaugurate a golden age.

This summary does not do justice to Graetz; but then it is not easy to do justice to him because his views about what exactly it was the Jews would accomplish changed substantially, as his enthusiasm for a ‘Jewish solution’ to the world’s problems waxed and waned. Sometimes he seemed to think Jews would provide actual world leadership. At others it was to be merely ethical example. But in either event he presented the Jews as a superior people. He was not a Zionist. But he was certainly a Jewish nationalist of a kind, and he put forward Jewish claims not, like Disraeli, in an attractive spirit of romantic paradox, but in a tone of voice which even other Jews found aggressive, and which was bound to repel gentiles, especially Germans. So Graetz’s work, though of permanent importance in Jewish historical studies, did not supply an answer either to the problem of bridging Judaism and the secular world. As history it was useful; as a philosophy it was not in the end acceptable to any group. Indeed, German nationalists were not the only ones to be offended. Graetz seems to have known little about Jewish mysticism. For the kabbalah and the
hasidim
he had nothing but contempt. Contemporary students of haskalah were dismissed as ‘fossilized Polish Talmudists’. He called Yiddish ridiculous. Hence he could have no real message for the great masses of eastern Jewry. But he did not satisfy the enlightened Orthodox either. He began as a disciple of Hirsch. As a young man in 1836, his faith had been saved by reading the Rabbi’s
Nineteen Letters
. He saw his own beliefs as essentially Jewish. But Hirsch rejected his work as ‘superficial and fantastical’. Was there no pleasing anyone? It seemed so.

If no satisfactory solution could be found to the problem of how to
relate Jewish to secular culture, was it possible to bring the practice of Jewish religion into harmony with the modern world? That too was attempted. Reform Judaism, as it came to be called, was the product of the second decade of the nineteenth century when the first full effects of emancipation and enlightenment were felt on Jewish communities. Like every other effort to bring Judaism into a new relationship with the world, it was primarily a German initiative. The first experiments were conducted at Seesen in 1810, at Berlin in 1815, then in Hamburg, where a Reform Temple was opened in 1818. These took place against a background of what contemporaries saw as Protestant Triumphalism. The Protestant nations appeared to be doing well everywhere. Protestant Prussia was becoming the most powerful and efficient state in Germany. Protestant Britain was the first industrial power, the conqueror of Napoleon, the centre of the richest commercial empire the world had ever seen. The United States, also Protestant, was the rising power in the West. Was not this link between the reformed Christian faith and prosperity evidence of divine favour—or at least a valuable lesson in religious sociology? Many political writers in Catholic countries, especially France, voiced their fears that Protestantism was taking over the world, and their anxiety that Catholicism should adopt the most socially useful Protestant characteristics. But which? Attention focussed on the outward and visible signs of a religion: its services. Most Protestant services were solemn but seemly, impressive in their simplicity, marked by readings in the vernacular and well-argued sermons. Catholicism, by contrast, retained the embarrassing religiosity of the medieval world, indeed of antiquity: incense, lamps and candles, fantastic vestments, relics and statues, a liturgical language which few understood. All this, it was argued, needed to be changed. But these calls for reform went unheeded within the Catholic Church itself, where authority was centralized and severely imposed. Besides, the traditional mode of Catholicism had its own powerful defenders, such as Chateaubriand, whose
Le Génie du Christianisme
(1802) laid the basis for a new Catholic populism. In England, the Protestant citadel, the Oxford Movement, was soon to turn to Rome for guidance, not vice versa. The truth is, Catholicism did not on the whole suffer from any inferiority complex, at any rate in the countries which mattered, where it was the overwhelming majority religion. So the changes were delayed for 150 years, to the 1960s, when Rome too would be in manifest disarray.