Cultural Disjunctions: Post-Traditional Jewish Identities

By Paul Mendes-Flohr

The identity of contemporary Jews is multifaceted, no longer necessarily defined by an observance of the Torah and God’s commandments. Indeed, the Jews of modernity are no longer exclusively Jewish. They are affiliated with a host of complementary and sometimes clashing communities—vocational, professional, political, and cultural—whose interests may not coincide with that of the community of their birth and inherited culture. In Cultural Disjunctions, Paul Mendes-Flohr explores the possibility of a spiritually and intellectually engaged cosmopolitan Jewish identity for our time. Reflecting on the need to participate in the spiritual life of Judaism so that it enables multiple relations beyond its borders and allows one to balance Jewish commitment with a genuine obligation to the universal, Mendes-Flohr lays out what this delicate balance can look like for contemporary Jews, both in Israel and in diasporic communities worldwide. Cultural Disjunctions walks us through the labyrinth of twentieth-century Jewish cultural identities and commitments. Ultimately, Mendes-Flohr calls for Jews to remain “discontent,” not just with themselves but also and especially with the reigning social and political order, and to fight for its betterment. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jul 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226785059

Book preview

Cover Page for Cultural Disjunctions

Cultural Disjunctions

Cultural Disjunctions

Post-Traditional Jewish Identities

PAUL MENDES-FLOHR

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-78486-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-78505-9 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226785059.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mendes-Flohr, Paul R., author.

Title: Cultural disjunctions : post-traditional Jewish identities / Paul Mendes-Flohr.

Other titles: Post-traditional Jewish identities

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020051327 | ISBN 9780226784861 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226785059 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Jews—Identity.

Classification: LCC DS143 .M3834 2021 | DDC 305.892/4—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051327

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For Shalom Ratzabi

Contents

Introduction: Discontinuous Identities, Dialectical Imponderables

1.   Post-Traditional Jewish Identities

2.   Jewish Cultural Memory: Its Manifold Configurations

3.   Jewish Learning, Jewish Hope

4.   Post-Traditional Faith

5.   Within and Beyond Borders

6.   In Praise of Discontent

Coda

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction: Discontinuous Identities, Dialectical Imponderables

Many were the men whose cities he saw and whose mind he learned.

—HOMER¹

I am large . . . I contain multitudes.

—WALT WHITMAN²

I’ve always been aware of being an inconsistent personality. Of, having, a lot of contradictory voices knocking around my head. . . . I’ve never believed myself to have a voice entirely separate from the many voices I hear, read, and internalize every day.

—ZADIE SMITH³

With the dismantling of the ghettos of Europe in the late eighteenth century and their entrance into the modern world, Jews are no longer only Jews. They have acquired multiple identities. These identities are often discontinuous. One’s professional, social, political, associative, and cultural affiliations may engender an identity that might not overlap with one’s ancestral identity. And as much as they may enrich someone, this whirl of discontinuous identities might also yield a destabilizing tension with his or her self-understanding as a Jew. In these opening pages, I consider such dialectical tension as it is manifest in the expansion of the Jew’s cultural horizons beyond those established by rabbinic tradition. Under the rubric of post-traditional identities (which may still be informed by religious sensibilities and concerns, nor are they necessarily indifferent to traditional Jewish teachings and precepts),⁴ I explore the cognitive ramifications of the resulting cultural disjunctions. In the second chapter, I refer to the construction of the modern library as emblematic of this process. The libraries of post-traditional Jews are not constituted exclusively by Jewish sacred literature. The volumes they assemble in their libraries embrace a broad and varied spectrum of accounts of the human experience and reflection. Moreover, although one may still have in one’s collection books of Jewish interest, these writings might or might not retain a particular salience.

The post-traditional Jew is thus not a mere bibliophilic tourist who reads the literary works—and appreciates the art and music—of non-Jews out of mere intellectual curiosity or anthropological voyeurism. In the cultural expressions of communities other than her ancestral inheritance, she encounters testimonies of the universality of the human spirit, which Kwame Anthony Appiah aptly calls the shared search for truth and justice.⁵ We read the literature of ancient Greeks, Renaissance Italians, church fathers, Abyssinian monks, Confucian savants, Sufi mystics, African Americans, feminists, and LGBTQ+ individuals as integral to our humanity and self-understanding. As we would say in Hebrew, shoresh ha-nishamah, the root of the soul, is nourished by many and varied sources.⁶ This implicit cosmopolitan ontology⁷ enhances our sense of belonging to the larger human family. Hence, it is in accord with the promise of the Enlightenment—echoed in the humanistic conception of the self as celebrated on the interpersonal level by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892): In all people, I see myself, not more and not one barleycorn less / and good or bad I say of myself I say of them.⁸

The enlarged ambit of our respective cultural identities not only highlights our shared humanity but may also have the centrifugal effect of decentering our primordial, inherited sense of self, inducing what Richard Rorty labels a self-critical irony. Being impressed by [the] vocabularies of other faith and cultural communities, which they take as final, engenders a cognitive and axiological dissonance, which cannot but cast a shadow of doubt about the truth of our inherited cultural sensibilities and values.⁹ The consequent epistemic modesty, as discussed in chapter 1, may also lead to a cultural ambivalence and deracination. In chapter 2, I draw from theories of the sociology of knowledge and cultural hermeneutics to explore what Simone Weil (1909–1943) calls rootedness (l’enracinement), the need to participate in the life of a particular community but such that it enables multiple relations beyond its borders. A human being has roots by virtue of his real, active, and natural participation in the life of a community, which preserves in living shape certain particular treasures of the past and certain particular expectations for the future.¹⁰ And Weil laments that the loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy.¹¹

Without referencing Weil, Appiah advocates a rooted cosmopolitanism.¹² Our particular loyalties—be they constituted by interpersonal, political, ethnic, or religious affiliations—need not compromise our ethical compass. On the contrary:

The realm of the ethical . . . encompasses what you must do as an embedded self with thick relations to others. The interests that entrain the ethical self are those of specific, encumbered human beings who are members of particular communities. To create a life . . . is to create a life out of the materials that history has given you. Identity is always articulated through concepts (and practices) made available to you by religion, society, school, and state, mediated by family, peers, and friends.¹³

As this citation indicates, Appiah’s concern is primarily that of the ethics of identity.¹⁴ Although I share his—and Weil’s¹⁵—wariness that as much as they are to be acknowledged and even affirmed, particularistic identities are prey to ethically myopic parochial fidelities, the overarching issues I wish to address are, as it were, from the opposite direction. I thus seek to fortify a Jewish identity as spiritually and intellectually engaging yet honoring an individual’s equally passionate affiliation with other cultural and cognitive communities.¹⁶

Accordingly, chapter 2—Jewish Cultural Memory: Its Manifold Configurations—argues that Judaism as a religious culture is in continuous, evolving conceptual and axiological revision. This ever-spiraling process is illustrated by a famous midrash, which relates that word of a renowned rabbinic teacher, Rabbi Akiva (d. 135 CE), reached Moses in heaven. His interest was so piqued that he decided to leave his supernal abode, where he had resided for nigh on two millennia, and attend one of Rabbi Akiva’s classes in Jerusalem. Sitting quietly in the rear row, Moses listened attentively to the rabbi expatiate on an arcane exegetical issue of a biblical verse: Moses did not understand the discussion and was dazed. When [Akiva] came to a certain point, his students asked him, ‘Whence, do you know this?’ Akiva replied, ‘[This is] a law [given] to Moses from Sinai’ (Halakhah l’Moshe miSinai).¹⁷

The midrash explains that Rabbi Akiva’s reply calmed Moses; his anxiety was further allayed when God reassured him that the teachings of the venerable rabbinic sage were in accord with God’s will. The point is that the Torah given to Moses at Sinai is subject to recurrent interpretation, refracting new experiences and insights.¹⁸ Employing the concept of cultural memory as expounded by Aleida and Jan Assmann, I consider the hermeneutic grammar that would allow for the integration of new intellectual and cultural experiences into Jewish tradition. These experiences are often in dialogue with non-Jewish cultures. Indicative of this process is the intracultural diglossia, such as Judeo-German (Yiddish) and Judeo-Spanish (Ladino), and some dozen and more dialects Jews have spawned, especially in the Diaspora.¹⁹ Their interaction with other cultures was, to be sure, not purely linguistic but also symbolic and intellectual. Indeed, as the late Amos Funkenstein (1937–1999) cogently argued, traditional Judaism is intrinsically a hybrid culture.²⁰ The literary critic and anarchist Gustav Landauer (1870–1919) extolled Diasporic Jewry’s ability to live symbiotically with multiple cultures as a unique virtue, which they should jealously nurture and thus resist the allure of a self-enclosed nationalism and ethnic identity:

[Whereas other peoples] have drawn political boundaries about themselves and have neighbors beyond their borders who are their enemies, the Jewish nation has its neighbors in its breast, and this friendly neighborliness creates peace and unity with anyone who is complete within himself, and who acknowledges that this friendly neighborliness creates harmony and unity. Is not this a sign of the mission that Judaism ought to fulfill in its relation to humanity?²¹

Within the post-traditional context, this hybridity—its distinctive structure and dynamic—warrants an adumbration of a strategy whereby Jews may reconfigure their cultural identity as Jews, an identity that would, to cite Simone Weil, not prevent them from ever becoming capable of perceiving that there are treasures of pure gold to be found in [other] civilizations.²² Taking delight in those treasures need not lead to jettisoning the cultural and religious inheritance of one’s community; on the contrary, it may induce a critical revaluation of that legacy and its revalorization as an intellectually and spiritually engaging culture.²³

The late Jerusalem rabbi Adin Steinsaltz (1937–2020) spoke of Jewry as a meta-mishpocha, a family bound by a divine covenant that renders them beholden to a transcendent reality, the God of Creation. Jewish ethnic particularity is thus grounded in a universal ontology. In a similar vein, the German-Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) viewed the cosmopolitan conception of humanity as dialectically inherent in the vision of the biblical prophets and which constitutes the spiritual foundation of modern, post-traditional Judaism. In consonance with his neo-Kantian presuppositions, Cohen spoke of the oneness of humanity as a transcendental (i.e., an a priori) ethical concept that should serve as a regulative principle, prompting society to strive continuously to realize this ideal (envisioned as the dominion of absolute justice) in its political and juridical institutions. Cohen associated this process toward the realization of the unity of humanity—corresponding to the unique oneness of God—with being in accord with the messianic vision of the prophets. It is, said Cohen, the religious responsibility of the Jewish community to hold fast to this vision and proclaim it to all the nations.²⁴ In the incremental pursuit of this asymptotic universal ideal, Israel is God’s Suffering Servant (Isa. 53).²⁵ Cohen thus decried Jewry’s adoption of modernity’s eudaemonistic ethos. Accordingly, he regarded Zionism as betraying the very heart of Judaism’s covenantal vocation, exclaiming, Those bums want to be happy—Die Kerls wollen glücklich sein!²⁶ In the concluding chapter 6, In Praise of Discontent, I expound on Cohen’s anxiety about a facile adaptation of Judaism to pragmatic, this-worldly values, guided by personal ambition and success, material and professional.

Both Rabbi Steinsaltz and Hermann Cohen were alert to the befuddled fortunes of post-traditional Jews who either sever their ties with their ancestral community or who, in choosing to retain their affiliation to the community of their birth or by virtue of conversion, attend well-nigh exclusively to the social and political needs of Jewry, thereby reducing Judaism to an ethnic and national identity.²⁷ Cohen was especially troubled that this tendency would fetter Jewish affirmation to a politics of identity, which could not but vitiate the fundamental religious values and calling of Judaism.²⁸ Having died a decade and a half before the rise of Hitler, Cohen was spared the horrors of the Shoah. The surviving remnant of the Jewish people is understandably drawn to express communal solidarity and seek to secure the people’s pragmatic interests and dignity by political means. Nonetheless, we may question whether communal solidarity justifies ethnic patriotism, even when dressed in the garb of religious fidelity. Here I allow myself to be autobiographical: Born and raised in New York City, I am an Israeli by choice, having made my home and that of my family in the State of Israel, where I have lived for some fifty years. I am thus profoundly distressed that solidarity has been funneled into an ethic of my people, right or wrong,²⁹ blunting not only critical judgment but rendering us (often willfully) blind to the existential reality and political distress of our neighbors, the Palestinians. (Cf. You too must befriend the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt [Deut. 10:19].³⁰)

Alas, ethnic patriotism can yield a defensive xenophobia and worse.³¹ As Appiah sagely notes, one’s particular communal and cultural affiliations need not—nay, should not—blur one’s vision of the Other.³² I am thus wary of the knee-jerk dismissal of criticism of the policies of the government of the State of Israel as solely primed by anti-Semitism or Jewish self-hatred. To be sure, we must protest criticism embellished with opprobrious epitaphs, especially when drawn from the lexicon of anti-Semitism. Nonetheless, criticism is legitimate and, I dare say, often called for. The lyrics of a ballad by Bob Dylan, as sung by the inimitable Joan Baez, inspired the generation of my youth. They still ring true. I cite the last stanza of With God on Our Side:

So now as I’m leavin’

I’m weary as Hell

The confusion I’m feelin’

Ain’t no tongue can tell

The words fill my head

And fall to the floor

What if God’s on our side

He’ll stop the next war.³³

In the third chapter, Jewish Learning, Jewish Hope, I endorse Martin Buber’s philippic against embedding Zionism and Jewish solidarity in sacro egoismo, the view that the jealous pursuit of one’s community’s self-interest is sacred and thus ethically self-evident.³⁴ I thus join Appiah in questioning whether a nation could at all be considered an ethical entity: It could still be that special responsibilities make sense within truly thick relations (with lovers, family, friends) but not within the imaginary fraternity of our co-nationals.³⁵ To be sure, a nation has legitimate political interests to secure the life and dignity of its members. Still, I share Appiah’s doubts about whether the policies designed to pursue those interests should be construed as intrinsically ethical and thus unimpeachable.

Taking heed from Buber (1878–1965) and his colleague Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) that a post-traditional Jewish identity must be neither political nor secular, I explore with them the possibility that Jews, who have expanded their cognitive and axio-normative vista to embrace other cultures, can ground their lives anew in Judaism as a spiritually and intellectually edifying faith community. Noting that as exemplified by the post-traditional library, one’s cultural identity is constituted dialogically,³⁶ Buber and Rosenzweig sought to re-center the intellectual horizons of culturally deracinated Jews in Talmud Torah, the classical mode of Jewish learning. Talmud Torah, they observed, is a form of dialogical study whereby Jews gather communally, generally in the synagogue, to engage in a conversation with sacred texts and their interpretations that have evolved over the millennia.³⁷ So pursued, Talmud Torah attains a sacramental aura.