POSTSCRIPT

Ein talmudisches Etwas über die philosophische Literatur: A Talmudic Observation on Philosophy¹

KARMA BEN-JOHANAN

Yet, the moment the Talmud becomes generally known to the non-Jewish population, Judea’s rule is irretrievably lost; therefore, every German family should possess a copy of the Talmud just as it possesses the Gospel. Therefore, may every good German take pains to spread the Talmud all around.²

Who mediates between talmud and philosophy? Where do the authors of this book stand, as mediators, between these two words, between these two worlds of meaning? How do they embody the and? Though the ands provided by the authors vary significantly, the project points to a new philosophical-talmudic conversation—complex, polyphonic, not predetermined—a conversation that seems to have become possible only recently. Today’s and is seemingly nothing like the previous ands that accompanied rabbinic literature and rabbinic learning throughout their history in Western thought. Something in the power relationship between talmud and philosophy has changed, destabilizing the relationship and inviting new investigations.

In this postscript, I briefly revisit previous reincarnations of the and, which connects but also separates talmud and philosophy through their bittersweet encounters in the history of the West and, more specifically, the history of Western Christianity. In this history, the mediators play a central role.

THE CRISIS OF DISCOVERY

The moment when the Christian West “discovered” the Talmud was a moment of crisis in European Jewish history.³ At this time, the Otherness of Judaism—or of Jews—began to be seen as intolerable, in contrast to the relative tolerance Jews enjoyed in the early Middle Ages. This transition to intolerance, which emerged from a multitude of changes within European medieval society, was accompanied by a Christian change of perception of Jews from (tolerable) “Old Testament Jews” and (intolerable) “Talmudic Jews.”

The adherence of Jews to the Hebrew Scriptures was acceptable in early medieval Europe and even played a role in the Christian history of salvation. The blind and stubborn Jewish attachment to the “literal” meaning of the Old Testament (OT) was erroneous, of course, but it testified to Christian truth. According to the influential Augustinian perception, the steadfast observance of Jews to the OT Law was a faithful witness to the fact that Christians neither forged their scriptures nor invented them.⁴ This endowed Christianity with the gravity of an ancient religion and a continuity and fulfillment of old prophecies. This testimony also had a political component: the Jewish people’s miserable diasporic existence and especially their scattering among Christendom were fulfillment of OT prophecies that proved that their own interpretation of the OT prophecies was false; their worldly failure was evidence that the prophecies were not fulfilled in the way Jews have read them, while the Christian interpretation was triumphant.⁵

The identification of Jews with the OT was ambivalent. Without the mediation of the Christological reading, a reading that was strongly juxtaposed—at least since the Patristic writings of the second century—with the Jewish reading, the OT was a collection of brutal, abhorrent stories not unlike the Homeric epics, without philosophical mediation.⁶ It was the Christian interpretation that redeemed the OT from its apparent brutality.⁷ The Jewish interpretation—which was traditionally perceived as “literal” by Christian thinkers, was therefore obsolete, but it was also an enduring and powerful symbol of the past, even a persistence of the past within the present of Christianity. In other words, Jews were there to point to the past for the Christian future, to the progress of the emergence from darkness into light, the carnal to the spiritual, the conditional to the eternal, and the particular to the universal. The Otherness of Jews was therefore tolerable as a witness, a remnant, and a phase in a teleological program. It was an Otherness that had to be Christologized and spiritualized in order to become (and remain) meaningful. On their own, the Hebrew Scriptures were repulsing and outdated. But mitigated through a Christian hermeneutic, their true significance was revealed. Christianity provided the hermeneutic framework that made the Jewish tradition and, by extension, Jews tolerable. In this sense, it was this ambivalence, sometimes called “supersessionism,” that enabled the persistence of Jewish life in medieval Christendom.⁸

The discovery of the Talmud in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries subverted the foundations of the supersessionism of the two testaments. One of the reasons for the crisis in Jewish-Christian relations at that time was the Christian realization that Jews carried their Otherness in a different direction than the route paved to it within Christendom and the Christian imagination. The Talmud was perceived as a Jewish rebellion against the Augustinian model, which provided the intellectual framework for the toleration of Jews as witnesses to the truthfulness of Christianity. It was a change, but not progress since progress was only possible in the direction leading from the OT to the New Testament, not from the OT to another textual corpus and another hermeneutical system. So Jews could no longer faithfully represent the past, but they were not oriented to the future either. Their place in history became indeterminate, and their role in the history of salvation was also diminishing. This gives another meaning to the status of the Talmud as a “diasporic” corpus, as a diaspora of sacred Christian time. The moment of the Talmud’s discovery was also the moment when the toleration of Jews—or, at least, of so many of them—was no longer readily justified in Christian terms.⁹

The preoccupation of Christian intellectuals with postbiblical Judaism first occurred with a growing sophistication in Christian learning. Those scholars (most prominently Peter the Venerable and Peter Alfonsi, a Jewish convert) who carried out the turn to philosophy in the twelfth century were also the first to acknowledge and study Talmudic texts. The critical and intellectual faculties at work in philosophy were also involved in facilitating the Christian interest in postbiblical Judaism, which those Christian scholars saw as profoundly irrational and full of contradictions, errors, and absurdities. By the thirteenth century, however, the accusations against the Talmud had diversified. If, in the twelfth century, Christians considered irrationality to be the problem with the Talmud, in the thirteenth century, the Talmud was seen as an outright heresy, a Jewish deviation from the OT, and a replacement of the Law of the Torah with another.¹⁰ Thus the rationalization of Christianity and the centralization of Western Christendom coincided with a sharp decrease in the tolerance toward Jews.¹¹ Imaginary Jews, or ‘Jews of the past,’ were better accepted in the Christian society than actual, present ones who centered their lives on the Talmud. Talmud was therefore discovered as the opposite of Christian reasoning and teleology.

The medieval mediators who drew Christian attention to the Talmud were often converts from Judaism. It was the and of thirteenth-century Christians like Nicholas Donin and Pablo Christiani that formed the Christian gaze on the Talmud as heretical and anti-Christian, provoking the famous public polemics on the Talmud that culminated in its burning¹² and its banning or confiscation, and in the long tradition of the Talmud’s Christian censorship. Talmudic subjectivity was thus perceived as anti-Christian, Christian subjectivity—as anti-Talmudic. The tradition that saw these two intellectual horizons as incommensurable, further evolved by Protestant thinkers from Luther on, persisted into the twentieth century.¹³

INCLUSION AND AMBIVALENCE

Yet the Talmud was not only burned, despised, and confiscated. Rabbinic literature was not only unbearable beyond toleration. Christian scholars (and convert Pablo Christiani is credited for that trajectory as well) soon found ways to incorporate the Talmud into Western subjectivity, applying the guarded ambivalence toward the OT to rabbinic literature as well. The Talmud was perceived not only as a demonic text but also as containing proofs and hints to the Christian truth and as useful for the Christian understanding of the New Testament. It was also a tool in the hands of missionaries, who labored to understand the rabbinic corpus in its original languages in order to lead Jews to Christianity by means of their own literature.¹⁴ The Christian learning of postbiblical Jewish literature increased, and, with the emergence of early modern print shops in Europe, rabbinic literature was printed for both Jewish and Christian consumption. Print facilitated the flourishing of Christian learning of Jewish texts, which was an essential component in the evolution of the humanist sciences of philology, religion, and ethnology, to name only a few.¹⁵

However, not unlike in the case of the Hebrew bible, the affirmation and legitimacy of the Talmud necessitated a mediation and adaptation of the texts to Christian sensitivities. This was largely the work of printers, editors, and censors, who had to ensure that the transmission of the Talmud would not transgress the limits of Christian good taste. In other words, the fascination of the West with the Talmud has both threatened the Talmud and given it a place within Western civilization. Christian censorship, often accompanied by authoritative ecclesiastical approvals of the printing of censored editions, has partially assisted in turning the Talmud into a sympathetic Other, exotic, unthreatening, and unoffensive to Christian sensibilities. Clear distinctions between gentiles of the Talmud and Christians of the time, and the omission of the few ascetic Talmudic slanders against Jesus and Mary had formed the foundation of the legitimation of the Talmud as well as its integration into Christian learning. Moreover, as Raz-Krakotzkin has shown, these revisions were not done by Jews only to appease the Christian authorities; they were internalized into Jewish culture and seen by Jews as reflective of their own values and attitudes toward European culture. The joint labor of Jews and Christians in the production and printing of the Talmud created new synergies and a common cultural and ethical worldview shared by both communities. This commonality also informed Jewish learning and was an essential part of the construction of Jewish studies.¹⁶

Here, too, the mediators had a central role.¹⁷ Those mediators usually came in the role of censors, and the censors were, once again, often converts to Christianity who were personally acquainted with both worlds of meaning. Both the Christian censor (whether a convert or not) and his Jewish counterparts were required to reflectively read the Talmud through a Christian lens. Both sides were leaning on a close acquaintance with rabbinic literature on the one hand and, on the other hand, on a critical distance from which they could look into rabbinic texts from outside their faith community, interpreting them differently from their traditional reading in a way that corresponded to the sensibilities of the Christian—and the enlightened—milieu.¹⁸

In other words, the Talmud was included in the Western milieu (by both Jews and Christians) as an object of thought, not as a way of reasoning. The price of that new and, which came to represent the compatibility of rabbinic Judaism with modernity, necessitated the creation of a differentiation between—to use Lapidot’s terminology—talmud and Talmud, that is, between talmud as a way of thought and Talmud as an object of thought, the object of Western subjectivity.¹⁹

This differentiation was epitomized in Leopold Zunz’s “Etwas über die rabbinische Litteratur”—the first work by a Jewish scholar that applied historicist methods to rabbinic literature. Zunz’s work was deliberately intended to legitimize the rabbinic tradition by measuring it according to the standards of Enlighted German reasoning and, in particular, contemporaneous Protestant theology.²⁰ Zunz’s move, and the evolving discipline of Wissenschaft des Judentums, enabled an overcoming of Jewish Otherness and particularity by looking at them from the point of view of Western sameness, yet still regarding Otherness as useful and important in the self-establishment of this sameness. Needless to say, this move was supersessionist in its own right.

CONVERTING PHILOSOPHY TO TALMUD

Following Carlo Ginzburg, Raz-Krakotzkin has depicted Jewish historians of Judaism as still standing—perhaps with Zunz—behind the ear of the early modern censor, fossilizing the Talmud as an object of thought, as a remnant of the past that no longer makes any normative, existential, or cognitive demands. But is this still the case today, at least for the and of this current anthology? Do we also want to say something, an Etwas, über die rabbinische Litteratur, as the spiritual descendants of Jewish converts to legitimize the Jewish tradition as a partner in the “sameness” of the West? Or is the current task of mediation no longer to legitimize the Talmud by converting it to Western thought but rather the obverse—to legitimize philosophy by converting it to talmud? Could there be a conversation between the two that does not surrender the one tradition to the logic of the other?

The flexible and that Dolgopolski chose as the organizing principle of the book leaves the horizon of the relationship between talmud and philosophy entirely open. Yet what enables the reexamination of the talmud and philosophy relationship—and perhaps not only an examination but an actual renewal as well—is that philosophy has acquired in the last decades an eagerness to examine its cultural conditions of possibility, to no longer assume its neutrality and universality, and to relativize its very foundations. Contemporary philosophy is, to a great extent, a critique of philosophy, and this critique necessitates an ability to look at philosophy from the outside, to confront philosophy with another kind of reasoning and another tradition of thought. Contemporary philosophy is attempting, in a sense, a self-Othering in order to transcend its tedious Western sameness and reencounter its cognitive Others in new analogies and synergies. Philosophy seeks to turn itself from philosophy to Philosophy, to turn philosophical subjectivity against the Western philosophical tradition as an object of thought. In the overall project of the current anthology, there is an underlying exploration of the ways talmudic thought can assist philosophy in reflecting on itself and understanding and perhaps transcending its boundaries. Reexamining the and may help philosophy to further shake its traditional binary divisions between self and other, between universal and particular, between the rational and the irrational, between West and East, between the past and the future, and so forth. It is therefore useful for philosophy to think with and about talmud.

According to this logic, the authors play a complex role. On one hand, they are still standing “behind the ear of the censor,” extracting from the Talmud what can be useful for their intellectual tradition. Yet, on the other hand, it is not the legitimization of the Talmud they are seeking but that of philosophy; if anyone requires conversion, it is no longer the Talmud that has to be philosophized, Christianized, and systematized but the obverse: philosophy has to become more talmudic to liberate it from its rigidity when unmediated by the non-Western, nonlinear reasoning of the talmud—the Jewish diasporic tradition. It is the tradition of Western thought that seems to have lost its hold on the ground, at least ethically, because of its encompassing efforts to submit all of its Others to its logic, a system whose greatest embodiment was, of course, the obliteration of Jewish Otherness in the Holocaust (or the shoah, as the converted term has it). The current and strives to appropriate the Talmud no longer only as an object of thought but as a paradigm shift. It is philosophy’s time to prove its compatibility with modernity by demonstrating its openness to Otherness, indeed, its becoming Otherness. Philosophy strives to turn itself into the wandering Jew, into Ahasver in order to find a new foothold.

Yet as newcomers, as converts from philosophy to talmud embarking on it from within the break of the Western universal, we are bound to imprint the philosophical past onto our talmudic future. What would a supersession of a supersessionist tradition with a stubbornly unsupersessionist way of thinking look like? In this anthology, both traditions question themselves in light of their respective other, looking for new ands that will be intelligible without teleology.

KARMA BEN-JOHANAN is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and author of Jacob’s Younger Brother: Christian-Jewish Relations after Vatican II.

NOTES

1. As will be shown in this chapter, the title of this postscript indicates a reversal in Leopold Zunz’s approach to rabbinic literature in Zunz’s essay “Etwas über die rabbinische Litteratur.” See Zunz, “Remarks on Rabbinic Literature.”

2. An excerpt from the “Talmud-Auszug,” disseminated in Berlin in May 1892. Quoted in Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse, 110.

3. Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 172–200; Cohen, Friars and the Jews, 51–76.

4. Augustine, De civitate Dei, xviii: 46.

5. Cohen, Friars and the Jews, 14–15; Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, 226, 286.

6. Buffiere, Les Mythes de Homere.

7. Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho. For example, chapters 29, 34, 67. See also Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism, 87–134.

8. See here the controversy between Frederiksen and Cohen over the positive significance of the Augustinian doctrine of the witness to medieval Jewish life: Cohen, “Review Article,” 77–78.

9. Cohen, Friars and the Jews, 76.

10. See ibid., 322. Cohen’s discussion of Gregory IX’s decrees against the Talmud.

11. In this postscript, I follow Jeremy Cohen’s argumentation in Living Letters of the Law, which relates the discovery of the Talmud by Christians and its perception as heretical, with the decrease in Christian tolerance toward Jews in the High Middle Ages.

12. For a completion of Cohen’s narrative, see Chazan, Daggers of the Faith.

13. Though one among many, the most famous Protestant attack on the Talmud is the Entdecktes Judenthum by Andreas Eisenmenger (1711). On the Protestant discourse on the Talmud in Wilhelmine Germany, see Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse, 109–22.

14. Cohen, Living Letters of the Law, 334–42. See the various contributions in Coudert and Shoulson, Hebraica Veritas?; Dunkelgrün, “The Christian Study of Judaism,” 316–48; Raz-Krakotzkin, The Censor, the Editor, and the Text, chapter 4; Abulafia, Christian-Jewish Relations 1000–1300, 210–12; Burnett, From Christian Hebraism to Jewish Studies; Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse, 109–58; Golling and von der Osten-Sacken, Herman L. Strack.

15. On the inappropriateness of the word Hebraism for this, see Dunkelgrün, “The Christian Study of Judaism,” 345; see also Grafton and Weinberg, I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue, 290.

16. Raz-Krakotzkin, The Censor, the Editor, and the Text, 198–200. See also Miller, “Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.”

17. On the complex and ambivalent role of converts in Jewish-Christian relations, as “bridge builders” on the one hand and as inciters against Jews and Judaism on the other, see Stuczynski, “Converso Paulinism and Residual Jewishness”; Yisraeli, “Constructing and Undermining Converso Jewishness”; Carlebach, Divided Souls.

18. See the extensive study of van Boxel, Jewish Books in Christian Hands.

19. This distinction is close to Sergey Dolgopolski’s differentiation between The Talmud and, simply, Talmud. See Dolgopolski, What Is Talmud.

20. Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse, 79–81.