Not in The Heavens: The Premodern Roots of Jewish Secularism

2008 The Author
Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340364, 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 Enlight-
enment rationalism and the scientific revolution adopted the medieval
2008 The Author Religion Compass 2/3 (2008): 340364, 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2008.00070.x
Not in the Heavens: The Premodern Roots of Jewish Secularism 341
scholastic divine attributes Gods omniscience, omnipotence and
providence and invested them with earthly meaning. The desacralization
of the world was accomplished with the tools of theology (Lwith 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 Gods continued presence in the world. Only Christianity,
in its doctrine of incarnation, postulated Gods radical otherness, which
required the mediation of Gods 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.
342 David Biale
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). Elishas 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 pre-
scribed 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.
Secularism often became a way of resisting their minority status, some-
thing 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 mentalit
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
344 David Biale
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
Funkensteins 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 secular-
ization, 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 unclenephew 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 conven-
tionally 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 Funkensteins secular theology.
God
As if to confirm Gauchets 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
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 Gods
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
346 David Biale
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
heavens 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 interpre-
tation 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 Joshuas 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. 3463).
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.
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 philos-
opher Moses Maimonides (11381204) 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 anthropo-
morphisms, 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
348 David Biale
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 Gods 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, repre-
sents Gods 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 (16321676; the choice of first
name already gives away ones 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
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 Spinozas 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 seventeenth-
century 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 Spinozas 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
350 David Biale
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 Gods 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 characteri-
zation, 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. Spinozas 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
(17541800), 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. Maimons 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
Maimons 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, Spinozas
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
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 Maimons 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, philo-
sophical 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 Gods existence are self-contradictory, the philosopher
cannot be an atheist (see Maimons entry for Atheist, 1971, pp. 257).
But, by the same token, he or she cannot be a believer, at least not in the
traditional sense of the word.
Maimons 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 theol-
ogy, 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 Spinozas 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 proclama-
tions 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 Spinozas 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.
352 David Biale
Torah
Jonathan Sheehan has shown how the Enlightenment, far from negating
religion altogether, recuperated it under new terms. In particular, Enlight-
eners 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).
Sheehans argument raises the question of whether a Jewish parallel
existed to the Enlightenment Bible. Moses Mendelssohns 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 Enlig-
htenment, an attempt to bridge between rationalism and Jewish tradition
without betraying either. If nineteenth-century German Jews anachro-
nistically 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, Spinozas 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 Gods 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
Spinozas attention than critical, historical readings as provided by Abraham
Ibn Ezra (1092/31167), 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, pre-
sumably 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.
Ibn Ezras radicalism does not only rest on his discovery of interpola-
tions 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 Ezras view, such allegories often demon-
strated 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 Bibles 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 astron-
omers. 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 Mai-
monides, although he rejected Ibn Ezras 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. 13744; Socher 1999,
pp. 629). Many of the commandments have the particular form that
they have, not because they are arbitrary, but because they are specifically
354 David Biale
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 Gods
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 gen-
erations 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 Reforms 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.
Spinozas reading of the Bible went far beyond Ibn Ezra and Maimo-
nides, but they are of great significance for understanding his relationship
to the religious tradition that he rejected. Spinoza demolished the Bibles
theology and reduced its message to one of only quaint historical curiosity.
Spinoza exaggerated Ibn Ezras arguments to deny Mosess 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 Israels early theocracy. Instead of its author channeling the
word of God, he was an historian who reconstructed its ancient past.
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 Maimo-
nides, if against Maimonides intent, the Bible instead taught only the
history of ancient Israel and was therefore at once historically contin-
gent 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 Spinozas 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.
Spinozas 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 Mapus 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 Spinozas 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.
356 David Biale
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 communitys
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
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 (horaat shaah), 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 stip-
ulated punishments did not apply. This doctrine bears a remarkable
resemblance to Carl Schmitts 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. 93149). 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
358 David Biale
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 Spinozas 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 hand-
book 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
Spinozas account of the ancient Israelite theocracy demonstrates otherwise.
Although a theocracy, this state actually bears sufficient similarities to a
republic Spinozas 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
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 Spinozas 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
Spinozas 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 Spinozas
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.
Spinozas 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
360 David Biale
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
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: dbiale@ucdavis.edu.
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 Lwith (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 Schmitts
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, 1:5560.
13
No more convincing is Rebecca Goldsteins 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 Maimons 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. 4362).
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).
362 David Biale
19
Mishne Torah, Book of Judges, Law of Kings and Wars, 3.8.
20
Mishne Torah, Book of Judges, Law of Kings and Wars, 3.7.
21
Mishne Torah, Book of Judges, Laws Concerning Rebels, 2.4.
22
On Hess, see Avineri (1985), Volkov (1981, pp. 115) and Koltun-Fromm (2001).
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