Randi Rashkover, Martin Kavka, eds. Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014. vii + 356 pp. $85.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-01027-8; $35.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-01032-2.
Reviewed by Alexander Kaye (The Ohio State University)
Published on H-Judaic (December, 2015)
Commissioned by Matthew A. Kraus (University of Cincinnati)
Political Theology Out of the Sources of Judaism
Judaism, Liberalism and Political Theology is a study of a century-long critique of liberalism and the role of Judaism in that critique. The volume is an edited collection comprising thirteen chapters and an extensive introduction by the editors. The editors have done a remarkable job of collecting what could have been a diverse group of tangentially connected pieces into a cohesive whole. The chapters deal with a host of Jewish thinkers, most prominently Baruch Spinoza, Hermann Cohen, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud, as well as representative political theologians, including Carl Schmitt, Erik Peterson, Jan Assmann, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou. Each chapter stands well on its own terms but together the chapters constitute a sustained argument about the place of Judaism and Jewish thought in a century of fierce debate between liberalism and its political-theological critics. Rather than present a summary review of the chapters, I will provide an overview of the main arguments of the book as a whole, bringing material from some of the chapters as illustration.
The term “political theology” is widely used today to refer to the complex relationship between religion and politics. Its original sense, however, and the sense with which this book is concerned, is more specific. A word of background may therefore be helpful. The term was coined by Carl Schmitt, a Nazi anti-Semite, in his 1922 essay “Political Theology.” He expanded upon the ideas in that essay in several other works, most notably his 1926 “The Concept of the Political.” Schmitt’s political theology was a set of descriptive and prescriptive ideas about the relationship between religion and politics or, more properly, God and the state. These ideas were intended as a criticism of the liberal understanding of politics and law. Liberal thinkers in Weimar Germany claimed that the authority of the state was essentially secular and that both the liberal state and its law are, and should be, devoid of substantive religious or identitarian content. Thus for Hans Kelsen, a liberal legal positivist, and a major target of “Political Theology,” the authority of the state had to be justified on its own terms, without reference to theology, revelation, or indeed any kind of metaphysics.
Schmitt objected to these claims. For him, the state was not simply the product of the neutral process of law. Rather, it had to be founded on an intense association of its citizens who stood apart from all others, giving rise to what Schmitt called the “distinction of friend and enemy.”[1] Furthermore, against liberal claim that the modern state had left theology behind, Schmitt famously insisted that “[a]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”[2] Modern politics is essentially theological because it has inherited the theological structure of the premodern period; the omnipotence of God as lawgiver has simply been transferred to the omnipotence of the state as lawgiver. With these arguments, Schmitt’s “political theology” attempted to invert Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise (1670), one of the foundational documents of that strand of the Enlightenment that sought to establish a secular basis for modern politics.
This debate was not purely theoretical, of course. At stake was the question of the relationship of the state to its citizens and to the rule of law. Whereas for Kelsen the state has no authority outside of the legal processes that constitute it, for Schmitt the state, like God, is sovereign, and not beholden to any system of law. Schmitt drew an analogy between the miracle, whereby God’s will overrides the laws of nature, and what he called the “exception,” whereby the state acts outside of the rule of law. He claimed that it is the capacity to make exceptions to the law that defines the modern notion of sovereignty. The most infamous application of this principle was his support for Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which granted emergency powers to Hitler and allowed him to seize power in 1933.
The chapters in this book critique the relationship between political theology--as laid out by Schmitt and developed by other thinkers over the past century--and Jewish thought. They do so from two directions. Despite recent “cracks in the marriage between Judaism and liberalism” (Martin Kavka, 108) represented by militant Jewish Zionism and the interest in multiculturalism among some Jewish thinkers like Susannah Heschel, the contributors acknowledge that there remains a close association between Judaism and liberalism. Many of the contributors question the wisdom of this association, “assum[ing] that Schmitt and others might have been (or actually were) correct in pointing out a perhaps fatal weakness or naïveté in the optimism of all liberalism, including Jewish theological liberalism” (Kavka, 108). At the same time, the nature of the engagement between much of political theology and Judaism remains deeply troubling for reasons that I will summarize below. This book, then, attempts to lay out new possibilities of political discourse based on a serious engagement with both Jewish thought and political theology that avoids the anti-Jewish bias implicit (or explicit) in much political theology on the one hand, and the reflexive association of Judaism and liberalism on the other. The hope of the editors is that this will enrich both political theology and Jewish thought.
The book has two major arguments. First, it argues that the association between Judaism and the secular liberal state is a lot more complicated than both the likes of Schmitt and many Jews assumed. Second, it argues that political theology’s interplay with Jews and Judaism was and remains central to the development of political theology as a field of thought but that the “Judaism” with which the rhetoric of political theology has long engaged is often an essentialist, simplistic, and sometimes patently anti-Semitic caricature.
Parts 1 and 2 of the book’s four parts develop the first of these arguments. Part 1 forcefully undermines the “facile conceptions of Judaism’s commitment to modern liberalism” (introduction, 21). For example, Spinoza is often taken as the earliest thinker to decouple Judaism from politics, paving the way for Jews to become “Germans of the Mosaic faith.” And yet we learn that, in the understanding of Leo Strauss, Spinoza was deeply aware of how difficult it would be to for Judaism to retain its particularity while embracing the modern state (Jerome E. Copulsky, chapter 1). Similarly, Hermann Cohen, frequently portrayed as the epitome of the Jewish liberal theologian, was actually, again in the eyes of Strauss, a valuable source for thinking through the association between politics, prophecy, and revelation, a perennial preoccupation of political theology (Dana Hollander, chapter 2). It is commonly understood that political theology is intrinsically conservative. After all, at its core it is a critique of secularizing trends of modernity. These chapters, however, like others in the collection, implicitly challenge this understanding by pointing to the many points of contact between the themes and ideas of political theology on the one hand and of liberalism on the other.
Using the canon of modern German Jewish thought, part 2 shows that it is possible to take Schmitt’s critique of liberalism seriously without accepting his solutions to that critique. Like Schmitt, for example, both Rosenzweig and Arendt brought the notion of the miracle to bear on the problems of modernity. But whereas Schmitt translated the idea of the miracle (the will of God overriding the laws of nature) into support for the fascist abrogation of democracy (the will of the sovereign overriding the rule of law), Arendt and Rosenzweig used it to think about the human capacity for new beginnings and the uniqueness of every human birth (Daniel Brandes, chapter 7). Similarly, Buber, like Schmitt, compared the sovereignty of the polity with that of God but nonetheless asserted that there is also a space for independent human action in politics. Indeed, unlike Schmitt, who imagined that the state’s sovereignty gave it the authority to wield violence against the “enemy,” Buber maintained that God’s ultimate sovereignty requires us to remain vigilant about employing violence for political ends. The implication is that we can recognize, along with Schmitt, the lingering echo of theology in modernity without embracing the troubling conclusions that he thought followed from that recognition (Gregory Kaplan, chapter 5).
Another underlying message of parts 1 and 2 is that, from the beginning, political theology developed in opposition to Judaism. Schmitt, for example, associated liberalism--the problem that his political theology was designed to solve--with Judaism and the Jews. What is more, his ideas were refined in conversation with, and in opposition to, specific Jewish thinkers. These include Hans Kelsen, who was born a Jew (Kelsen’s conversion did not stop Schmitt referring to him as “the Jew Kelsen”), and Leo Strauss. Indeed, Strauss’s comments on Schmitt’s early work led to various refinements in his later output, as discussed here by Hollander (chapter 2). The book demonstrates that from Schmitt onwards, Judaism has played a pivotal role in the construction of theories of political theology: “The rhetoric of ‘political theology’ at its inception is also a rhetoric about Judaism” (introduction, p. 3). Furthermore, the book convincingly argues that the “Judaism” with which political theology has always grappled has often been essentialized as a static and monolithic phenomenon, dismissed as “overly particularistic, legalistic and antithetical to the work of political theology” (introduction, p. 10). In this respect, the relationship between political theology and its imagined Judaism can be understood as an instantiation of the argument of David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism that “across several thousand years, myriad lands, and many different spheres of human activity, people have used ideas about Jews and Judaism to fashion the tools with which they construct the reality of their world.”[3]
The rest of the volume delves into more recent varieties of the conversation between political theology and Judaism. Part 3 engages primarily with contemporary European philosophers, including Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek (Zachary Braiterman, chapter 9), and Alain Badiou (Sarah Hammerschlag, chapter 8). Part 4 comprises responses to the work of Jan Assmann, a German Egyptologist whose Moses the Egyptian argued that Moses (as a “figure of memory” if not of history), influenced by the monotheistic revolution of Akhenaten, propagated among the Israelites a new kind of religion that stood against the polytheism of the ancient Near East.[4] This constituted the “Mosaic distinction,” whereby monotheistic religions distinguished themselves by declaring all other religions as false. This, in Assmann’s view, gave birth to the possibility of intolerance, which became foundational to political and religious ideas in the Western tradition.
The contributors generally take a critical stance towards these thinkers. Their criticism is of two varieties. First, they argue, political theologians for whom an engagement with Judaism is fundamental to their own thinking tend to present Judaism as an essentialized, unchanging, monolithic tradition. A more nuanced approach to Judaism, they claim, would produce a richer political theology. For example, Jan Assmann associates Judaism with the foundations of intolerance based on his reconstruction of the figure of Moses in Jewish memory and his rejection of polytheism. But even if Assmann’s basic position is accepted, it fails to recognize that developments within Judaism itself complicate a straightforward association between an essential “Judaism” and the ancient idea of Moses. Can it really be said that the Jewish approaches to Moses have not changed and that the idea of monotheism has remained static throughout Jewish history? Does not the idea of monotheism develop even within the Hebrew Bible itself? Hermann Cohen, by contrast, did take account of the historical unfolding of Jewish thought. In his study of the history of monotheism, and in particular what he took to be the gradual softening of the prohibition of idolatry within the historical layers of the Hebrew Bible, Cohen found not the foundation of intolerance but the very basis of ethics and the responsibility for the other (Robert Erlewine, chapter 10).
The second, and graver, criticism of some of these thinkers is that they not only essentialize Judaism but set it up as a straw man, and often nothing more than an anti-Semitic caricature. This criticism is particularly apt with regard to the work of Alain Badiou, the contemporary French philosopher (Hammerschlag, chapter 8). For Badiou, the “Jew” represents a chauvinistic particularism obsessed with “difference.” Resorting back to Paul, Badiou writes that the particularistic Jew (law) needs to be redeemed by being superseded by the universal (grace). Badiou associates the “Jew” with Jewish philosophers (Emmanuel Levinas in particular), with the iniquities of global capitalism, and with the State of Israel, which must be saved from its focus on difference by ceasing to be a Jewish state and becoming instead a universal one. The editors are surely correct that “the encounter with Judaism and its diverse concepts of monotheism and election are key tools for exposing the groundlessness of the anti-Jewish effects of the rhetoric of political theology, whatever its authors’ intents may be” (p. 14).
The editors hope that the volume’s chapters “offer well-examined hypotheses concerning matters of religion, freedom, order, and law emergent from the much-needed engagement between political theology and Jewish thought” (introduction, p. 29). They believe that such an engagement will help Jewish political thought be weaned from its inherent liberal assumptions by providing “tools for conceiving of alternative models for Jewish political existence.” They also believe that taking political theology to task for its facile characterization of Judaism will help to challenge its reflexive embrace of polarized categories of analysis (like reason/revelation, grace/law, particular/universal, etc.) and will ultimately make it more successful at analyzing the intersection between religion and political thought.
By and large, the volume achieves its stated goals. It is particularly successful in bringing to light the constitutive, and deeply problematic, relationship between political theology and Jewish thought and in offering alternative models for that relationship. Almost without exception, it draws these models from the established canon of German Jewish thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus anyone interested in German Jewish thought and its particular idioms would benefit from a close reading of these chapters.
There is, however, one way in which the volume falls short of its own ambitions. The editors argue that “contemporary analyses of Judaism’s relationship with any political system, including but not limited to the liberal modern nation-state in the diaspora and in Israel, can and ought to avail themselves of the full range of resources provided by the Jewish tradition together with the multiplicity of possible inferences gleaned from reflection upon this tradition” (introduction, p. 29). Nothing could be more true. It cannot really be said, though, that a handful of German Jewish thinkers from Hermann Cohen to Leo Strauss, (even if we throw in Maimonides, Spinoza, and Levinas for good measure,) constitute “the full range of resources provided by the Jewish tradition.” The concerns of political theology and its critique of liberalism and modernity would surely also be deepened by reflecting upon Nissim of Gerona, Isaac Abravanel, Moses Sofer, Abraham Isaac Kook, Aaron David Gordon, Isaiah Leibowitz, J. B. Soloveitchik, and many others. Even with its scope limited to a certain strand in modern Jewish thought, the book remains a substantial achievement. Still, an extended engagement with a wider selection of Jewish thinkers would have added important dimensions to the study.
One chapter does expand its horizons beyond the canon of modern German Jewish thought. Zachary Braiterman attempts “to reposition Jewish thought out of Germany and away from the theoretical contexts specific to the Weimar period” (p. 242). In a fascinating discussion, he brings the rabbinic laws of kila’im (the laws of mixed seeds planted in a single field) to bear on political theology. He resists any trite translation of rabbinic discourse into modern idiom, allowing the rabbis to speak for themselves in their own contexts, but still manages convincingly to place them into a virtual conversation with Buber and Žižek. It is rare for contemporary scholars to possess both a firm command of traditional Jewish sources and of contemporary philosophy and political thought. Certainly, more scholarship of this kind would be refreshing and appreciated.
Despite the limitations in its scope, the book remains a very welcome contribution. Anyone interested in modern Jewish thought and political theology would benefit greatly from all its chapters and from the valuable introduction by the editors. The collection’s sharp and nuanced insights into the role of Judaism (real or imagined) in the discourse of political theology, and its corrective to the ways that in which Judaism has been misrepresented and abused by this important stream of modern thought, are urgent, enlightening, and highly recommended reading.
Notes
[1]. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab, 1st ed. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2006), 26.
[2]. Ibid., 36.
[3]. David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2013).
[4]. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
Judaism, Liberalism and Political Theology is a study of a century-long critique of liberalism and the role of Judaism in that critique. The volume is an edited collection comprising thirteen chapters and an extensive introduction by the editors. The editors have done a remarkable job of collecting what could have been a diverse group of tangentially connected pieces into a cohesive whole. The chapters deal with a host of Jewish thinkers, most prominently Baruch Spinoza, Hermann Cohen, Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig and Sigmund Freud, as well as representative political theologians, including Carl Schmitt, Erik Peterson, Jan Assmann, Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou. Each chapter stands well on its own terms but together the chapters constitute a sustained argument about the place of Judaism and Jewish thought in a century of fierce debate between liberalism and its political-theological critics.
Rather than present a summary review of the chapters, I will provide an overview of the main arguments of the book as a whole, bringing material from some of the chapters as illustration.
The term “political theology” is widely used today to refer to the complex relationship between religion and politics. Its original sense, however, and the sense with which this book is concerned, is more specific. A word of background may therefore be helpful. The term was coined by Carl Schmitt, a Nazi anti-Semite, in his 1922 essay “Political Theology”. He expanded upon the ideas in that essay in several other works, most notably his 1926 “The Concept of the Political.” Schmitt’s political theology was a set of descriptive and prescriptive ideas about the relationship between religion and politics or, more properly, God and the state. These ideas were intended as a criticism of the liberal understanding of politics and law. Liberal thinkers in Weimar Germany claimed that the authority of the state was essentially secular and that both the liberal state and its law are, and should be devoid of substantive religious or identitarian content. Thus for Hans Kelsen, a liberal legal positivist, and a major target of “Political Theology”, the authority of the state had to be justified on its own terms, without reference to theology, revelation, or indeed any kind of metaphysics.
Schmitt objected to these claims. For him, the state was not simply the product of the neutral process of law. Rather, it had to be founded on an intense association of its citizens who stood apart from all others, giving rise to what Schmitt called the “distinction of friend and enemy.”[1] Furthermore, against liberal claim that the modern state had left theology behind, Schmitt famously insisted that “[a]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”[2] Modern politics is essentially theological because it has inherited the theological structure of the pre-modern period; the omnipotence of God as lawgiver has simply been transferred to the omnipotence of the state as lawgiver. With these arguments, Schmitt’s “political theology” attempted to invert Spinoza’s Theological Political Treatise, one of the foundational documents of that strand of the Enlightenment that sought to establish a secular basis for modern politics.
This debate was not purely theoretical, of course. At stake was the question of the relationship of the state to its citizens and to the rule of law. Whereas for Kelsen the state has no authority outside of the legal processes that constitute it, for Schmitt the state, like God, is sovereign, and not beholden to any system of law. Schmitt drew an analogy between the miracle, whereby God’s will overrides the laws of nature, and what he called the “exception”, whereby the state acts outside of the rule of law. He claimed that it is the capacity to make exceptions to the law that define the modern notion of sovereignty. The most infamous application of this principle was his support for Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which granted emergency powers to Hitler and allowed him to seize power in 1933.
This chapters in this book critique the relationship between political theology – as laid out by Schmitt and developed by other thinkers over the past century – and Jewish thought. They do so from two directions. Despite recent “cracks in the marriage between Judaism and liberalism” (Kavka, 108), represented by militant Jewish Zionism and the interest in multiculturalism among some Jewish thinkers like Susannah Heschel, the contributors acknowledge that there remains a close association between Judaism and liberalism. Many of the contributors question the wisdom of this association, “assum[ing] that Schmitt and others might have been (or actually were) correct in pointing out a perhaps fatal weakness or naïveté in the optimism of all liberalism, including Jewish theological liberalism” (Kavka, 108). At the same time, the nature of the engagement between much of political theology and Judaism remains deeply troubling for reasons that I will summarize below. This book, then attempts to lay out new possibilities of political discourse based on a serious engagement with both Jewish thought and political theology that avoid the anti-Jewish bias implicit (or explicit) in much political theology on the one hand, and the reflexive association of Judaism and liberalism on the other. The hope of the editors is that this will enrich both political theology and Jewish thought.
The book has two major arguments. First, it argues that the association between Judaism and the secular liberal state is a lot more complicated than both the likes of Schmitt and many Jews assumed. Second, it argues that political theology’s interplay with Jews and Judaism was and remains central to the development of political theology as a field of thought but that the “Judaism” with which the rhetoric of political theology has long engaged is often an essentialist, simplistic, and sometimes patently anti-Semitic caricature.
Parts 1 and 2 of the book’s four parts develop the first of these arguments. Part 1 forcefully undermines the “facile conceptions of Judaism’s commitment to modern liberalism” (Introduction, 21). For example, Spinoza is often taken as the earliest thinker to decouple Judaism from politics, paving the way for Jews to become “Germans of the Mosaic faith”. And yet we learn that, in the understanding of Leo Strauss, Spinoza was deeply aware of how difficult it would be to for Judaism to retain its particularity while embracing the modern state (Jerome E. Copulsky, chapter 1). Similarly, Hermann Cohen, frequently portrayed as the epitome of the Jewish liberal theologian, was actually, again in the eyes of Strauss, a valuable source for thinking through the association between politics, prophecy and revelation, a perennial preoccupation of political theology (Dana Hollander, chapter 2). It is commonly understood that political theology is intrinsically conservative. After all, at its core it is a critique of secularizing trends of modernity. These chapters, however, like others in the collection, implicitly challenge this understanding by pointing to the many points of contact between the themes and ideas of political theology on the one hand and of liberalism on the other.
Using the canon of modern German Jewish thought, part 2 shows that it is possible to take Schmitt’s critique of liberalism seriously without accepting his solutions to that critique. Like Schmitt, for example, both Rosenzweig and Arendt brought the notion of the miracle to bear on the problems of modernity. But whereas Schmitt translated the idea of the miracle (the will of God overriding the laws of nature) into support for the fascist abrogation of democracy (the will of the sovereign overriding the rule of law), Arendt and Rosenzweig used it to think about the human capacity for new beginnings and the uniqueness of every human birth (Daniel Brandes, chapter 7). Similarly, Buber, like Schmitt, compared the sovereignty of the polity with that of God but nonetheless asserted that there is also a space for independent human action in politics. Indeed, unlike Schmitt, who imagined that the state’s sovereignty gave it the authority to wield violence against the “enemy”, Buber maintained that God’s ultimate sovereignty requires us to remain vigilant about employing violence for political ends. The implication is that we can recognize, along with Schmitt, the lingering echo of theology in modernity without embracing the troubling conclusions that he thought followed from that recognition (Gregory Kaplan, chapter 5).
Another underlying message of parts 1 and 2 is that, from the beginning, political theology developed in opposition to Judaism. Schmitt, for example, associated liberalism – the problem that his political theology was designed to solve – with Judaism and the Jews. What is more, his ideas were refined in conversation with, and in opposition to, specific Jewish thinkers. These include Hans Kelsen, who was born a Jew, (Kelsen’s conversion did not stop Schmitt referring to him as “the Jew Kelsen”) and Leo Strauss. Indeed, Strauss’ comments on Schmitt’s early work led to various refinements in his later output, as discussed here by Hollander (Chapter 2). The book demonstrates that from Schmitt onwards, Judaism has played a pivotal role in the construction of theories of political theology. “The rhetoric of ‘political theology’ at its inception is also a rhetoric about Judaism” (Introduction, 3). Furthermore, the book convincingly argues that the “Judaism” with which political theology has always grappled has often been essentialized as a static and monolithic phenomenon, dismissed as “overly particularistic, legalistic and antithetical to the work of political theology” (Introduction, 10). In this respect, the relationship between political theology and its imagined Judaism can be understood as an instantiation of the argument of David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism that “across several thousand years, myriad lands, and many different spheres of human activity, people have used ideas about Jews and Judaism to fashion the tools with which they construct the reality of their world.”[3]
The rest of the volume delves into more recent varieties of the conversation between political theology and Judaism. Part 3 engages primarily with contemporary European philosophers, including Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek (Braiterman, chapter 9) and Alain Badiou (Hammerschlag, chapter 8). Part 4 comprises responses to the work of Jan Assmann, a German Egyptologist whose Moses the Egyptian argued that Moses (as a “figure of memory” if not of history), influenced by the monotheistic revolution of Akhenaten, propagated among the Israelites a new kind of religion that stood against the polytheism of the Ancient Near East.[4] This constituted the “Mosaic distinction,” whereby monotheistic religions distinguished themselves by declaring all other religions as false. This, in Assmann’s view, gave birth to the possibility of intolerance which became foundational to political and religious ideas in the Western tradition.
The contributors generally take a critical stance towards these thinkers. Their criticism is of two varieties. First, they argue, political theologians for whom an engagement with Judaism is fundamental to their own thinking tend to present Judaism as an essentialized, unchanging, monolithic tradition. A more nuanced approach to Judaism, they claim, would produce a richer political theology. For example, Jan Assmann associates Judaism with the foundations of intolerance based on his reconstruction of the figure of Moses in Jewish memory and his rejection of polytheism. But even if Assmann’s basic position is accepted, it fails to recognize that developments within Judaism itself complicate a straightforward association between an essential “Judaism” and the ancient idea of Moses. Can it really be said that the Jewish approaches to Moses have not changed and that the idea of monotheism has remained static throughout Jewish history? Does not the idea of monotheism develop even within the Hebrew Bible itself? Hermann Cohen, by contrast, did take account of the historical unfolding of Jewish thought. In his study of the history of monotheism, and in particular what he took to be the gradual softening of the prohibition of idolatry within the historical layers of the Hebrew Bible, Cohen found not the foundation of intolerance but the very basis of ethics and the responsibility for the other (Erlewine, chapter 10).
The second, and graver, criticism of some of these thinkers is that they not only essentialize Judaism but set it up as a straw man, and often nothing more than an anti-Semitic caricature. This criticism is particularly apt with regard to the work of Alain Badiou, the contemporary French philosopher (Hammerschlag, chapter 8). For Badiou, the “Jew” represents a chauvinistic particularism obsessed with “difference”. Resorting back to Paul, Badiou writes that the particularistic Jew (law) needs to be redeemed by being superseded by the universal (grace). Badiou associates the “Jew” with Jewish philosophers, (Levinas in particular,) with the iniquities of global capitalism, and with the State of Israel, which must be saved from its focus on difference by ceasing to be a Jewish state and becoming instead a universal one. The editors are surely correct that “the encounter with Judaism and its diverse concepts of monotheism and election are key tools for exposing the groundlessness of the anti-Jewish effects of the rhetoric of political theology, whatever its authors’ intents may be” (p. 14).
The editors hope that the volume’s chapters “offer well-examined hypotheses concerning matters of religion, freedom, order, and law emergent from the much-needed engagement between political theology and Jewish thought” (Introduction, 29). They believe that such an engagement will help Jewish political thought be weaned from its inherent liberal assumptions by providing “tools for conceiving of alternative models for Jewish political existence”. They also believe that taking political theology to task for its facile characterization of Judaism will help to challenge its reflexive embrace of polarized categories of analysis (like reason/revelation, grace/law, particular/universal etc.) and will ultimately make it more successful at analyzing the intersection between religion and political thought.
By and large, the volume achieves its stated goals. It is particularly successful in bringing to light the constitutive, and deeply problematic, relationship between political theology and Jewish thought and in offering alternative models for that relationship. Almost without exception, it draws these models from the established canon of German-Jewish thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries. As such, anyone interested in German-Jewish thought and its particular idioms would benefit from a close reading of these chapters.
There is, however, one way in which the volume falls short of its own ambitions. The editors argue that “contemporary analyses of Judaism’s relationship with any political system, including but not limited to the liberal modern nation-state in the diaspora and in Israel, can and ought to avail themselves of the full range of resources provided by the Jewish tradition together with the multiplicity of possible inferences gleaned from reflection upon this tradition” (Introduction 29). Nothing could be more true. It cannot really be said, though, that a handful of German-Jewish thinkers from Hermann Cohen to Leo Strauss, (even if we throw in Maimonides, Spinoza and Levinas for good measure,) constitute “the full range of resources provided by the Jewish tradition”. The concerns of political theology and its critique of liberalism and modernity would surely also be deepened by reflecting upon Nissim of Gerona, Isaac Abravanel, Moses Sofer, Abraham Isaac Kook, Aaron David Gordon, Isaiah Leibowitz, J. B. Soloveitchik, and many others. Even with its scope limited to a certain strand in modern Jewish thought, the book remains a substantial achievement. Still, an extended engagement with a wider selection of Jewish thinkers would have added important dimensions to the study.
One chapter does expand its horizons beyond the canon of modern German-Jewish thought. Zachary Braiterman attempts “to reposition Jewish thought out of Germany and away from the theoretical contexts specific to the Weimar period” (p. 242). In a fascinating discussion, he brings the rabbinic laws of kila’im (the laws of mixed seeds planted in a single field) to bear on political theology. He resists any trite translation of rabbinic discourse into modern idiom, allowing the rabbis to speak for themselves in their own contexts, but still manages convincingly to place them into a virtual conversation with Buber and Žižek. It is rare for contemporary scholars to possess both a firm command of traditional Jewish sources and of contemporary philosophy and political thought. Certainly, more scholarship of this kind would be refreshing and appreciated.
Despite the limitations in its scope, the book remains a very welcome contribution. Anyone interested in modern Jewish thought and political theology would benefit greatly from all its chapters and from the valuable introduction by the editors. The collection’s sharp and nuanced insights into the role of Judaism (real or imagined) in the discourse of political theology, and its corrective to the ways that in which Judaism has been misrepresented and abused by this important stream of modern thought, are urgent, enlightening and highly recommended reading.
References
Assmann, Jan. 1998. Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism. Harvard University Press.
Nirenberg, David. 2013. Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. W. W. Norton & Company.
Schmitt, Carl. 2006. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Translated by George Schwab. 1 edition. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press.
———. 2008. The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition. University of Chicago Press.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-judaic.
Citation:
Alexander Kaye. Review of Rashkover, Randi; Kavka, Martin, eds., Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology.
H-Judaic, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43210
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