Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism

By Clémence Boulouque

Another Modernity is a rich study of the life and thought of Elia Benamozegh, a nineteenth-century rabbi and philosopher whose work profoundly influenced Christian-Jewish dialogue in twentieth-century Europe. Benamozegh, a Livornese rabbi of Moroccan descent, was a prolific writer and transnational thinker who corresponded widely with religious and intellectual figures in France, the Maghreb, and the Middle East. This idiosyncratic figure, who argued for the universalism of Judaism and for interreligious engagement, came to influence a spectrum of religious thinkers so varied that it includes proponents of the ecumenical Second Vatican Council, American evangelists, and right-wing Zionists in Israel.

What Benamozegh proposed was unprecedented: that the Jewish tradition presented a solution to the religious crisis of modernity. According to Benamozegh, the defining features of Judaism were universalism, a capacity to foster interreligious engagement, and the political power and mythical allure of its theosophical tradition, Kabbalah—all of which made the Jewish tradition uniquely equipped to assuage the post-Enlightenment tensions between religion and reason. In this book, Clémence Boulouque presents a wide-ranging and nuanced investigation of Benamozegh's published and unpublished work and his continuing legacy, considering his impact on Christian-Jewish dialogue as well as on far-right Christians and right-wing religious Zionists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781503613119

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ANOTHER MODERNITY

Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism

CLÉMENCE BOULOUQUE

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

© 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on request.

LCCN 2020937846 | ISBN 9781503612006 (cloth)

ISBN 9781503613119 (ebook)

Cover design by Rob Ehle

Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 10.25/15 Adobe Caslon Pro

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture

To my parents

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

INTRODUCTION

PART I. BENAMOZEGH’S TEXTS AND CONTEXTS: MOROCCO, THE RISORGIMENTO, AND THE DISPUTED MANUSCRIPT

1. The Moroccan World of a Livornese Jew

2. An Italian Jewish Patriot in the Risorgimento

3. The Banned Author and the Oriental Publisher

4. Expanding His Readership: Benamozegh’s Turn to French

5. The Afterlives of a Manuscript

PART II. UNIVERSALISM AS AN INDEX OF JEWISH MODERNITY

6. Situating Benamozegh in the Debate on Jewish Universalism

7. Normativity and Inclusivity in Modernity: The Role and Limits of the Noahide Laws

8. Cosmopolitanism and Universalism: The Political Value of Judaism in an Age of Nations

9. Universalism in Particularism: Benamozegh’s Legacies, between Levinas and Religious Zionism

PART III. BEYOND BINARIES: KABBALAH AS A TOOL FOR MODERNITY

10. Kabbalah: Reason and the Power of Myth

11. Beyond Dualism: Kabbalah and the Coincidence of Opposites

12. Kabbalah as Politics

PART IV. PAST ENMITY: MODES OF INTERRELIGIOUS ENGAGEMENT AND JEWISH SELF-AFFIRMATION

13. Religious Enmity and Tolerance Reconsidered

14. The Iron Crucible and Loci of Religious Contact

15. Self-Assertion and a Jewish Theology of Religions

16. Modes of Interreligious Engagement: From Theory to Social Practices

EPILOGUE

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is a daunting task to turn my immense gratitude into an exercise in brevity.

It all started when the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University gave a chance to an unorthodox applicant for their PhD program. My adviser in the Hebrew and Judaic Studies Department, Elliot Wolfson, gave me both guidance and space to grow. The sheer magnitude of his scholarship, his enduring presence, and his dedication have been an inspiration. I also thank Zvi Ben Dor Benite, David Engel, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Elli Stern on my committee, whose judicious observations helped me make sense of Benamozegh’s voices and to start thinking of the book that could emerge from the abundance of Benamozegh materials. I am grateful to Marion Kaplan and Dan Fleming who morphed from teachers into friends, as well as Larry Wolff, Michah Gottlieb, Hasia Diner, and Adam Becker.

Joseph Weiler invited me to become a fellow at what was then the Tikvah Institute at NYU, an autonomous republic in Washington Square Park that he codirected with Moshe Halbertal and where all senior scholars found the time to nurture their junior fellows. Pierre Birnbaum, Jonathan Garb, Marc Hirshman, Lawrence Kaplan, James Kugel, Benjamin Sommer, and Yehoyada Amir among others have broadened my perspectives in so many ways, as has Suzanne Stone and the seminars on legal theory at the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization. Allan Amanik, Ruth Kara-Ivanov, Yehuda and Michelle Sarna have been the best constellation of friends. And Zalman Rothschild has since then become the best interlocutor for impromptu treatises about everything and anything.

This book required archival and manuscript work and provided a beautiful excuse to travel to Tuscany. My dear friend Francesca Bregoli connected me to Liana Funaro, a living memory of Livorno’s Jewish life, passionate researcher, and a delightful person.

I wish to thank Gabriele Bedarida for his kindness and for the pages of Italian Jewish history that he, and his wife, shared with me. I would like to extend my gratitude to the whole team at the Archive of the Jewish Community of Livorno: without their willingness to show me the three volumes of the handwritten version of Israel and Humanity, the project would have lost much of its significance. Upon hearing about my work, the scholar of Benamozegh, Alessandro Guetta, who has now moved on to other research interests, encouraged me and has never failed to be supportive since then.

My postdoctoral year at the Katz Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania was memorable thanks to the staff, particularly Carrie Love and Etty Lassman, and the fellows, gathered around the year’s theme on the "New Boundaries of the Wissenschaft des Judentums." Among other accomplishments, the group took the science of portmanteau to new heights during the weekly post-colloquium Schnappstunden at the renamed MerKatz. I am grateful to the directors of the center: Steven Weitzman for his warmth and attentiveness, and David Ruderman who, before stepping down, selected me to be a fellow. Arthur Kiron, librarian extraordinaire, was an enthusiastic accomplice in all things Benamozegh.

During this postdoctoral year, I had the great fortune of working on a book of interviews with Daniel Boyarin. Our conversations, his insatiable curiosity, and his scholarship have guided me since then in more ways than one.

My colleagues in the Religion Department at Columbia have welcomed me and supported me with unsurpassed generosity and warmth. I am happy to be in their debt and very pleased to get a chance to express it here. Thanks to all of you. And I would like to particularly acknowledge Gil Anidjar, Courtney Bender, Beth Berkowitz, Elisheva Carlebach, Wayne Proudfoot, and Mark Taylor for giving me such detailed and helpful feedback on the manuscript during a formidable workshop convened by Gil—as did Moshe Halbertal, Jay Harris, Nancy Levene, Pawel Maciejko, and Shaul Magid.

I also wish to express my deepest gratitude to Richard Witten for endowing the chair of Israel and Jewish Studies in memory of his parents, Carl and Bernice Witten.

At Columbia, Mark Anderson, Julie Crawford, Marianne Hirsch, Seth Kimmel, Rebecca Kobrin, Agi Legutko, Deborah Martinsen, Christia Mercer, Seth Schwartz, Joanna Stalnaker, Pier Mattia Tommasino, Eliza Zingesser, and Shanny Peer have been a trusted presence.

The Kabbalah study-group workshops at Lehigh have become a cherished rite of spring thanks to Hartley Lachter and the hevrei Ellen Haskell, Nathaniel Berman, Glenn Dynner (who also gave me formidable feedback during a workshop at the Center for Jewish History), Leora Zachs-Shmueli, and Eytan Fishbane.

When the manuscript was still very much a work-in-progress, Sarah Stein suggested that I send it to Stanford upon its completion. Sarah’s energy and scholarship are matched only by her generosity toward her junior peers. At Stanford, Margo Irvin was a thoughtful and soothing interlocutor. Readers #1 and #2 offered extraordinarily detailed comments and were a fantastic help. Gigi Mark made the whole production process seamless, and David Hornik was a wonderful copyeditor. But this manuscript would have been a disastrous piece of abstract expressionism without Paul Sager’s ever-judicious comments and edits along the way.

It is also an honor to acknowledge the institutions that generously supported me through these years: the Annenberg Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Nash Family Foundation—with special thanks to Dr. Judith Ginsberg; the Lenfest Grant at Columbia and the Provost Grant for Junior Faculty who contribute to the university’s diversity; and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University, especially Dana Kresel.

My transatlantic journey owes a lot to Tom Reiss and a conversation started on a Parisian terrace years ago—and uninterrupted ever since. I made the final decision to come to New York with Norman and Cella Manea at a restaurant called Compass—which is what they have been for me.

From the moment I arrived in New York, Helen Nash has been my anchor. And the names of Pascale and Richard Berner, Sharon Elghanayan and Jon Corzine, Mary and Gerry Millman, George and Pamela Rohr, mean family to me. I would also like to thank Stéphanie Abou, Chloe Aridjis, Jacques Baudouin, Katell Berthelot, Dominique Bourel, Pierre Bouretz, Frédéric Boyer, Marie Brenner, Ron Chernow, Christopher Dye, Ed Epstein, Jon Finer, Adrien Jaulmes, Julie Just, Florence and Jacky Heyman, Delphine Horvilleur, Olga Kirschbaum, Patrick Koch, Jean-Claude Kuperminc, Rose Levyne, Martine Mairal, Jessica Marglin, Charlotte Morgan, Ruby Namdar, Gil Rubin, Simon Schama, Brigitte Sion, Toby Freilich, Katalina Rac, James Traub, and Ariel Weil.

I could not have completed this work without Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat who, along with his wife Aude, define what an intelligent heart can be. Our hevruta—four thousand miles apart—has been a constant source of wonder and thankfulness. An insatiable reader and formidable essayist, Pierre-Emmanuel was also the late Tony Judt’s trusted translator, and I cannot but feel Tony’s touch in his luminous presence.

Sunt lacrimae rerum. Tony was my first adviser in the history department at NYU. He passed away of ALS in August 2010. Being his student and assistant was one of the greatest gifts of my life. The memory of his brilliance, humor, and courage will never leave those who witnessed it. Jennifer, Daniel, and Nick—this is for you, too.

I can’t help thinking that the world in which I started this project was a very different place—I miss having Philip Roth and Amos Oz in it. And, as I am putting the final touches to the manuscript in times of pandemics, the notion of—and need for—interdependence as what defines our humanity could not feel more tragic, nor more relevant.

This book is for my parents. I treasure their love and our happy times, cut so short. But the memory of my father’s laughter makes me smile as I am typing these words, and my mother’s ever-gentle presence is another reminder of the Song of Solomon: Love is as strong as death.

ABBREVIATIONS

The following abbreviations are used for certain works of Elia Benamozegh.

INTRODUCTION

HOW DID A RELATIVELY little-known nineteenth-century Livornese rabbi who argued for the universalism of Judaism and for unity among religions come to influence theological and political agendas across a spectrum of religious thinkers so varied that it includes proponents of the ecumenical Second Vatican Council, American evangelists, and right-wing Zionists in Israel? What does it say about interfaith encounters that his efforts to work toward unity among monotheisms have fueled such irreconcilable stances? And how can an idiosyncratic figure who sought a means of overcoming religious divisions—one based on Judaism and, more specifically, on a Jewish theology of Christianity—illuminate broader problems of Jewish modernity? And be coopted by a postmodern thinker like psychiatrist Jacques Lacan? These are a few of the questions raised by the life, work, and legacy of Elia Benamozegh (1823–1900).

Benamozegh was born in Livorno, Italy, in 1823 to a family of Moroccan descent. A toddler when his father passed away, he was raised by his mother and his uncle, a renowned kabbalist. After a short stint as a merchant, he enrolled in the rabbinic seminary and was ordained in his late twenties. But it is his formative years, spent as an autodidact, that explain his remarkable intellectual voracity. Although he never left Livorno, Benamozegh corresponded with a number of religious or intellectual figures in France, the Maghreb, and the Middle East. In addition to his responsibilities as a rabbi and a teacher—and a self-described Orthodox one—he became a publisher, a prolific writer, and a transnational thinker who authored exegetical analyses, historical studies, and a variety of newspaper contributions in Hebrew, Italian, and French. Intellectually ambitious, he aimed to reconcile such fundamental binaries as East versus West, Christian humanism versus nineteenth-century concepts of progress, Jewish universalism versus singularity, mysticism versus reason, and humankind versus nations.

The rabbi influenced Christian-Jewish encounters in twentieth-century Europe through his magnum opus, Israël et l’humanité (translated as Israel and Humanity). The work was published posthumously in 1914, thanks to the efforts of his Christian disciple and former seminarian Aimé Pallière, who edited the work and sought to disseminate his mentor’s ideas. Nevertheless, as much as Benamozegh presented his study as the solution to religious quandaries, the book bequeathed a raft of irresolvable tensions owing largely to his use of conceptual tools such as the Noahide Laws (the seven edicts that offer salvation to non-Jews, according to the rabbinic tradition) and Kabbalah—usually defined as the mystical Jewish tradition—which have lent themselves to ethnocentrism as well as to the universalism he advocated.

His idiosyncrasy makes him unrepresentative yet illuminating, and the challenge is thus not only to make sense of Benamozegh’s complexities and contexts but also to reconstruct his views as a starting point for questioning established narratives.

Benamozegh stood at many crossroads; his life and writings can thus tell many stories. They help us map out intellectual networks in the Mediterranean and geographies of a Sephardic Enlightenment, upend Orientalism by reclaiming the term Oriental as a badge of honor, understand his publishing endeavors as a cultural and political intervention on behalf of his coreligionists in the Maghreb and Middle East, reassess the meaning of Italian humanism and Christian Hebraism from a Jewish standpoint, resuscitate Kabbalah both within and beyond Judaism, and grasp its contribution to the nascent field of the psychology of religion. Each of these threads constitutes a rich narrative, but the story to which the rabbi best contributes, it seems to me, pertains to the complexities of Jewish modernity.

What the rabbi proposed was unprecedented in his time and still relevant to our understanding of strategies by which religions adapt to modernity: (1) that the Jewish tradition had the capacity to solve contemporary quandaries, (2) that kabbalistic concepts enabled it to take part in a larger, transnational conversation about societal changes and progress, (3) that Jewish ideas constituted a stock of tools relevant to religious coexistence, and (4) that greater particularism made for greater universalism. Before him, the most trodden path for making a case for the legitimacy of Judaism had been to demonstrate its rationality. But Benamozegh sensed a modern, cross-denominational need both for reason and for a mythical realm that stood beyond reason—yet without advocating for the irrational or breaking the grand narrative of progress sustaining modernity; he contended that the Jewish tradition could satisfy human aspirations and not tear apart the fabric of society as a whole or of religious communities in particular. And he often invoked a distinct, Oriental modernity—independent of the European experience—in order to exemplify this method.

Most of the scholarship on Benamozegh pertains to his universalism, his efforts to foster a dialogue with non-Jews, and his reconciliation of philosophy and Kabbalah, but does not address the ways in which he engaged with modernity.¹ My work builds on the only previous scholarly monograph, Alessandro Guetta’s Philosophy and Kabbalah: Elijah Benamozegh and the Reconciliation of Western Thought and Jewish Esotericism (2000).² Guetta’s is a rich and detailed analysis of the philological and philosophical strategies used by Benamozegh to repudiate the long-standing opposition between the rational and esoteric aspects of Judaism.

This book takes a different approach by considering how the rabbi expands our understanding of religious modernity and by gauging the impact of his thought to this day. Its central contention is that Benamozegh’s use of Kabbalah in a public discourse, as a stock of political or intellectual references, and his insistence on the theological necessity of interreligious engagement from an assertive Jewish perspective constitute significant markers of a religious modernity that was routinely signaled by rationalism and universalism. This characterization of modern and modernity by Benamozegh is descriptive, and similar to Weberian categories; however, attending to his frustration with such binaries and to his general critique of modernity makes alternative modalities of the modern emerge: nondualistic, nonsecular, yet not a proponent of the Counter-Enlightenment,³ and vocally embracing the notion of progress as well as a political and social liberal agenda.

In teasing out the multiple facets of the concept, I will first focus on the uses of the term modernity that Benamozegh might have encountered and that defined the conversation during his lifetime. The French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), often credited for coining the term in 1859, described modernity as the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable⁴ while calling on artists to extract the beauty it might contain. This characterization featured modernity as immediate and transient, even though Baudelaire called for finding a sense of the sublime in the mundane, thus elevating the finite into the infinite. Nevertheless, modernity is here essentially contingent, impermanent, and seems to preclude any sense of continuity. While Baudelaire should be credited for popularizing the notion, the word had in fact already appeared in the writings of a few of his contemporaries with a vaguer definition, if any. Modernité, the translation of Modernität in Heinrich Heine’s 1827 Reisebilder (Travel Pictures), published in French in 1856, captured a tension between the old and the new, most acutely felt by the nobility and the bourgeoisie, where the cozy, narrow ways of the forefathers are supplanted by a wide-spreading, unpleasant modernity. The text further lamented the loss of national originalities that disappear in the uniformity of modern civilization.⁵ Modernity came across as a disrupting and leveling force.

Other nuances can be found in the work of Theophile Gautier, who used modernity as a descriptor of English painting and asked: Does the substantive [form of the word] even exist? The feeling that it expresses is so recent that it might not be featured in dictionaries yet.⁶ He later used the term in his tribute to the work of his fellow novelist Honoré de Balzac, who is credited with ushering in realism in literature and whose novels exuded modernity as something that owes nothing to the antiquity.⁷ An ability to capture the spirit of the age and a self-generating capacity defined Gautier’s positive outlook on modernity.

Conversely, in his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave (Memoires d’outretombe), the Romantic writer François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) evoked modernité to describe the triteness of his time compared to the dignified past, now out of reach, that alienates the individual.⁸ While Chateaubriand’s conservative doctrine would be at odds with Benamozegh’s attempt at reconciling the past and present, and while avant-garde aestheticism was far from Benamozegh’s taste, all of these authors assemble a picture of modernity as an antagonism between the old and the new, a case of disruption and impermanence, all of which Benamozegh was keen on remedying through a fresh understanding of religion, and religious unity, to prevent any possible alienation.

This sense of disruption, affecting the relation to religion, is what prompted Benamozegh to write Israël et Humanité (1885),⁹ a short book he envisioned as the introduction to the broader work that he never completed. In the unfinished manuscript of the latter, the rabbi sketched the conundrum of his time: Once religion proper is dismissed for good, it cannot be long before metaphysics, too, is sent packing, since the demise of religion would lead in turn to the subversion of law, justice, moral beauty, virtue, freedom, heroism, and sacrifice, which are nothing but applied metaphysics.¹⁰ Drawing on the nascent psychology of religions, he deemed such a societal model unfit to fulfill the metaphysical needs of the mind and contended that the devolution of society into self-interest and materialism would ultimately endanger freedom.¹¹ He placed the onus on institutionalized religion for being unable or unwilling to address political and societal changes other than by rejecting them.

In his 1885 introduction, Benamozegh explained:

On the one hand, [you have] the Syllabus [of Errors],¹² in which all the conquests of civilization are anathema; on the other, the unquenched thirst for religious beliefs, the madness of pride and egoism, the wanderings of reason with neither guide nor compass, the eternal trials and errors of a philosophy without principles, the absolute lack of any respected authority in matters of religion—and thus the individual who falls prey to himself, as though God had never revealed himself.¹³

A similar analysis opens Benamozegh’s posthumously published major work, Israel and Humanity:

This crisis is nothing other than the struggle between faith and reason, whether this latter, in trying to evaluate the world and society, finds itself at grips with traditional beliefs, or whether it undertakes to study the contradictory claims of various religions in the light of historical criticism, exegesis, and science—or, finally, whether, in penetrating to the core of each religion, it induces free scrutiny, and, unable to settle for the old formulas, drives the investigating mind to search for new ones that will allow it to become reconciled with faith.¹⁴

Having listed the various impasses confronting religions, Benamozegh introduced his solution with a preliminary, rhetorical question: Have all religions, which free-thought today declares fallen, fully revealed their potentialities?¹⁵ In his view, it was both the conservatism and the lack of assertiveness of religions in general and of Judaism in particular that were to blame for the dwindling relevance of faith across Europe.¹⁶ Benamozegh wrote against the backdrop of the so-called modernist crisis within Catholicism, a controversy that began in the 1890s in France, Italy, and England, and that reacted against the authoritarian leanings of the Papacy and sought to draw on the historical study of the Bible to reshape traditional Catholic dogma and teaching.¹⁷ The movement stood against the prevailing neo-scholasticism, which was predicted on an essentially static view of the world and opposed any evolution of the doctrine. Yet, faced with similar challenges regarding the compatibility between faith and science, instead of calling for a reform, Benamozegh called for a return to the Jewish tradition—a return, he argued, that would benefit Christianity, too.

Benamozegh’s Hebraism: The Jewish Tradition as Inclusion

In one of the paradoxes from which his reasoning often proceeded, Benamozegh laid out a novel scheme for reconciling reason and faith—science and religion—through a conscious return to tradition. Tradition had to be reclaimed. And, in order to do so, it had to be comprehended anew by reexamining all of its sources, including the marginalized ones. Benamozegh’s perspectives echo the way Gershom Scholem expressed the paradox of tradition and innovation implied in the term Kabbalah, which means reception in Hebrew and thus implies the transmission of a text and the participation of its readers in order for them to make sense of it in their own time.¹⁸ Some of Benamozegh’s interpretations, such as his vision of ancient Israel as a proto-pluralistic society, might have taken these innovations a little far, and seem at times designed to meet the expectations of an emerging liberal readership.¹⁹

Benamozegh’s choice of the word Hebraism to describe this arguably inclusive and expansive understanding of Judaism, which included both Talmud and Kabbalah, is central to his argument because he saw these as a repository for the textual polyphony, an aspect ignored by philosophy and Reform Judaism—which explained his hostility to the budding movement.

In renaming Judaism, as part of an effort to reshape its perception, the rabbi was not alone. Alternative designations for Judaism, such as Hebraism or Abrahamism, gained currency across Europe in the late nineteenth century, aiming to oppose a narrow Jewish legalism and a new focus on race—as in French scholar Ernest Renan’s critique of Semitism.²⁰ In French, the term Israelite was also the word of choice in order to replace the term Jew (juif) and avoid a terminology loaded with centuries of prejudice.²¹ Benamozegh used Israelite in this sense, for instance in his preface to Zikhron Yerushalayim.²²

Two of Benamozegh’s contemporaries, both of whom loom large in his thinking, also used the term Hebraism. Abraham Geiger (1810–74), a rabbi, scholar, and one of the founders of the Reform movement, used Hebraism when trying to convey Judaism’s openness to other religions, whereas it had previously been invoked with negative overtones.²³ Samuel David Luzzatto, a more conservative scholar and exegete, and a towering figure of Italian Judaism, coined the term Abrahamism, using it to emphasize Jewish ethics. Benamozegh’s case is distinctive: what could have merely been a translation of ebraismo (Italian for Judaism) was designed to link it to the Church Father Eusebius and his Preparation for the Gospel. In that fourth-century apologetics, the term referred to the acceptable, universal part of Judaism, the one defined by the Decalogue, in opposition to the Judaism of the Talmudic period, which was defined more ethnically and narrowly.²⁴ Being attuned to the patristics, and being in conversation with non-Jewish thinkers in general, were integral to Benamozegh’s efforts toward greater unity.

This is one of the instances in which Elia Benamozegh was both in conversation and in conflict with his interlocutors, in Italy and beyond—one instance among many when he was both untimely and of his time. Indeed, it was the articulation of the two that defined his vision of modernity.

Grasping Modernity

Although he did not employ the noun, Benamozegh often resorted to the adjective modern, mostly as a temporal marker²⁵ (modern reason, modern consciousness,²⁶ modern exegesis).²⁷ He did, however, juxtapose it with nouns or clauses conveying rationalism, the decline of traditional religious worldviews and belonging, the scientific explanation of natural phenomena, new forms of normativity, and the rise of individual subjectivity and nation-states, thus effectively asserting the essence of that modernity. At first blush, Benamozegh’s insights on the criteria of modernity vindicate what would become the markers of rationalization and secularization associated with Max Weber. Yet, while he acknowledged the characteristics of his age, he simultaneously rejected them, deeming them unsustainable for building a harmonious society. I argue that, in effect, the alternative path he charted for modernity foreshadows more recent developments in the scholarship of modernity that attempt to complicate our understanding of nineteenth-century religious thought, and I situate my work within this trend.

Benamozegh proposed alternative paths to solve what he viewed as a religious crisis of his time, and the notion of multiple modernities, as developed in the work of Shmuel Eisenstadt,²⁸ is a productive way to examine his thought. This multiplicity can be conceptual—a nonsecular understanding of modernity, or an expanded articulation of the dialectics of old and new—as well as geographic, inviting approaches that differ from the narratives of a Western European Enlightenment. In fact, Benamozegh’s modernity does not fit into the category of Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) or Counter-Enlightenment:²⁹ his is a critique of the dualisms between reason and science, tradition and modernity, which he considered to be a Western European problem, whereas an Oriental, nondualistic worldview would warrant an alternative modernity in which reason would not be dismissed and religion would be a convincing and not an imposed proposition. Hence, his statement: The Enlightened religion, the one that takes into account the state of science, the one that seeks to persuade and not merely to have partisans, comes from [ . . . ] the Orient.³⁰ Benamozegh’s work prompts us to displace the Enlightenment altogether and to reassess the dynamics of modern Jewish thought, just as Olga Litvak, Eliyahu Stern, or Jonatan Meir³¹ have done recently with Eastern Europe in their reevaluation of the Haskalah. My narrative complements theirs. Meir, for example, shows that the early attempts at a scholarly study of Kabbalah took place in the East and were subsequently effaced by Western scholars who claimed to have made the first inroads into the study of Kabbalah as a legitimate scholarly object. However, demonstrating that these pioneering efforts and novel ideas came from the East effectively displaces the center(s) of Jewish Enlightenment. Instances abound in which Benamozegh questioned the hegemony of the German-speaking thought and scholarship of which he was an avid reader (as attested in his journal contributions, where he cited and engaged with such thinkers as Graetz, Frankel, Lowy, and Geiger) and made a case for Italian and Oriental Jewish thought.

Seeking to enrich the contribution of religion to society, Benamozegh also claimed that the Jewish tradition was uniquely suited to make sense of changing times because of its intrinsic futurity—based on an arguably counterintuitive understanding of tradition, which he defined as an unceasing continuation of the historic event of revelation. A particularly relevant frame of analysis thus rests with the categories proposed by Jürgen Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, in which he claims that the secular concept of modernity expresses the conviction that the future has already begun,³² if only to ponder the similarities of this mode of temporality with Benamozegh’s nonsecular modernity.

The binaries present in the work of Max Weber and Jacob Katz, for whom tradition and modernity are distinct categories, as well as in Karl Mannheim’s definition of tradition as a tendency to cling to the past and a fear of innovation, thus prove insufficient to account for those conceptions of modernity, which claim to originate from within tradition and to offer a noteworthy synthesis of religion and progress.³³ Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s notion of invented tradition, in which ancient origins are engineered to serve a distinct purpose, especially in the context of emerging nation-states, can shed light on some of Benamozegh’s bold moves to justify Jewish inclusivity. But his defense of tradition, based on kabbalistic hermeneutics, cannot merely be characterized as an invention in Hobsbawm’s sense. It is predicated on seeing a body of revealed texts and interpretations as the germ of the future, as the blueprint of the world waiting to be progressively revealed in the course of time as human capacities eventually develop and come to vindicate a religious construct that predates the modern era. The past is constantly reexamined and projected into the present and the future; tradition is thus a projection and a condition for progress.

Benamozegh’s quest for religious unity bespoke his key conviction: that religion, while anchored in history, had to be both relevant in the present and oriented toward the future. Yet in order to achieve such a goal, one had to make religion acceptable to a post-Enlightenment public reluctant to rely on heteronomy and on revealed laws as the authority for determining morals or regulating behavior. Thus Habermas’s reflection on the imperative of modernity to find normativity within itself³⁴—without recourse to religious imperatives and revelation—also sheds light on Benamozegh’s ambition. He saw modeling religion as a place where normativity is both internal and external as paramount for fostering an appeased relationship with religion. Additionally, the articulation of heteronomy and autonomy is part of the necessity for nondualism that is central to Benamozegh’s edifice and also explains why Kabbalah is so pivotal.

Another central contention of this book is that Benamozegh made use of Kabbalah as a public discourse, as a stock of political, mythical, or intellectual references, and insisted on the theological necessity of interreligious engagement in order to help deconstruct the binaries that he held to be a legacy of an overzealous Western Enlightenment. It was the intransigent primacy of reason that was causing what Benamozegh diagnosed as a source of crisis of both religion and secularism (and what Weber would call the disenchantment of the world). Recent scholarship has been reassessing this narrative, probing the persistence of esotericism, the appetite for myth throughout the nineteenth century, and the strategies of the various faiths to seek a renewed engagement with their own traditions.³⁵ By highlighting the mythmaking quality of Kabbalah, an exploration of Benamozegh’s thought adds to our growing understanding of such non-Weberian modernities.³⁶

If modernity can be understood as the capacity to reimagine social or religious relationships, Benamozegh certainly offered a different narrative of Jewish modernity,³⁷ and a more assertive one in relation to Christianity. Breaking with the long-standing criticism of particularism leveled at Judaism, he professed that, on the contrary, in its fullest expression, its essence was universalist because it contained the seeds of two other universal religions—and laid special emphasis on Christianity—but it also made a case for the necessary role and presence of laity, based on a sense of the organic interdependence of humanity.³⁸

Benamozegh’s rejection of binaries and his creation of a theology of other religions in which assimilation was predicated on the articulation and preservation of differences foreshadow aspects of postmodern thought, specifically that of Levinas and Lacan—with the latter acknowledging Benamozegh’s influence on his thought. However, pondering Nancy Levene’s Powers of Distinction, in which she claims that the seemingly irreconcilable dualisms of modernity should lead us to understand that inclusion is distinction,³⁹ I argue that one can look at interreligious engagement as an aspect of