David Biale is Emanuel Ringelblum Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and Chair of the Department of History at the University of California, Davis. His books have won the National Jewish Book Award three times and he has been awarded fellowships by the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Lady Davis Foundation. Most recently, he won the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. He is currently the Project Director of an international team writing a History of Hasidism.
This exchange focuses on Professor Biale’s book Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought, which was recently released on paperback by Princeton University Press. (Click here for part one.)
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Dear Professor Biale,
Thank you for a very interesting first response. I’d like to continue from where you left off. In the final paragraph you wrote the following:
Jewish secularism possesses a deep intellectual tradition of its own that needs to become known today to those determined to carve out a Jewish identity independent of religion. But I argue that this tradition is not detached from the three-thousand-year-old library of Judaism but is rather a dialectical product of it. And, therefore, to construct a secular ideology for today requires deep immersion in Jewish texts, which, in my view, contain not only the sources of the Jewish religion but also the sources of Jewish secularism.
Now, the idea that the same texts are the source for both Jewish religion and Jewish secularism raises some curious questions. Early in your book you point out that the latter parts of the Bible itself (Job, Ecclesiastics) present texts that are very appealing to people harboring doubts about God and religious beliefs.
Curiously, though, the religion itself has always been very accommodating towards people with these very tendencies. Moreover, there are significant strands of the tradition that have encouraged that type of thinking without endorsing an explicitly secular view of the world. There are even plenty of practicing rabbis who would accept what you refer to as “secular definitions of the three categories of Judaism – God as nature, the Torah as an historical book and Israel as a secular nation” – while still seeing themselves as religious.
My question: can the “deep intellectual tradition” that you attribute to secular Judaism not be seen simply as the tradition of Jewish skepticism? And is it independence of religion that fuels and unites it, or simply the rejection of dogmatism and/or orthodoxy?
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
Terms like “religion” and “secularism,” even though they originated before the modern period, are really modern inventions. The Orthodox today – and especially the ultra-Orthodox – are modern phenomena, since they bear at most a family resemblance to premodern Jews. So, too, secular Jews, while they may find inspiration in certain texts from the Jewish tradition, cannot be called the products of those texts. It is just as misleading to claim that what we call the Jewish religion today can be projected back into history, as it is to say that the roots of Jewish secularism are traceable to the Bible or the Talmud.
That said, there are nevertheless features of the Jewish textual tradition that have perhaps shaped what is peculiarly Jewish about Jewish secularism. First, even though Judaism invented the idea of monotheism, there is very little of what might be called theological thinking in the Bible or the Talmud and certainly not of the sort that obsessed Christians. Only once we get to medieval Jewish philosophy, which arose under the influence of Arab thought, and medieval Jewish mysticism, which bears traces of Christian mysticism, can one speak of Jewish theology. And even then, absent a centralized rabbinical hierarchy, like the Vatican, there was never a successful attempt to enforce theological orthodoxy (the Maimonidean controversy is a good example of how such an attempt failed).
This brings me to the second point: where Christianity created the distinction between orthodoxy and heresy, rabbinic Judaism preserved minority opinions, at least if they were the opinions of rabbis. One can always elicit a laugh from American Jews with the old saw “two Jews, three opinions,” but there is a certain truth to this saying that is grounded in talmudic discourse. Now, the range of these opinions was, of course, circumscribed by that discourse. It did not included true heterodox opinion. However, the rabbis, who did have a language for heresy (minut, apikorsut, etc), interestingly never totally banished rabbinic heretics from the fold. The stories about Elisha ben Abuya are fascinating not only as sources for Elisha’s Epicurean beliefs, but also for the efforts his rabbinic opponents made not to banish him completely.
All of this does not make premodern rabbis – or even some of them – “proto-secularists.” I’m not even sure that it makes them skeptics, which, like secularism, is also modern. But it may well be that some of those Jews who became secular after the eighteenth century did so because the Jewish textual tradition predisposed them in that direction. I use a genetic metaphor in my book to explain this: if secular ideas are like a recessive gene in the Jewish tradition, they could only be “expressed” under the influence of modernity.
One could say the same about ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Its rigid traditionalism, in which even the slightest custom has the force of law, cannot be found in the same way in premodern Judaism. But in reaction to the challenge of modernity, the haredim have activated subterranean tendencies from the historical tradition and radicalized them.
So, I would say that the Kulturkampf that has characterized the relationship between Orthodox and secular Jews for the last two centuries – and that continues unabated especially in the State of Israel – represents the polarization of tendencies whose roots are in the earlier Jewish tradition. Yet, it is only from our vantage point in history that we can see these roots and recognize that they could only sprout and flower in the modern world.
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