From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture) - Hardcover

Hoffman, Matthew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804753717 ISBN 13: 9780804753715

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2007

Synopsis

From Rebel to Rabbi establishes how the changes that occurred in Jewish culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stimulated a widespread fascination with the figure of Jesus and with Christian motifs among numerous Jewish theologians, historians, intellectuals, writers, and artists. It illustrates how and why the process of modernization for these Jews involved a radical reevaluation of Jesus of Nazareth. This book analyzes works of Jewish history, theology, Yiddish literature, Jewish visual art, and intellectual debates, in an attempt to situate this phenomenon within the broader context of a cultural history of how Jews have related to and depicted the figure of Jesus in the modern period. It suggests that for writers and artists, such as Sholem Asch and Marc Chagall, refiguring Jesus as intrinsically Jewish and using Christian themes to express aspects of the modern Jewish experience were an integral part of creating a new and distinctive modern Jewish culture.

About this title

About the Author

Matthew Hoffman is Assistant Professor of Judaic Studies and History at Franklin & Marshall College.

From the Back Cover

"From Rebel to Rabbi is a comprehensive exploration of the figure of Christ in Yiddish and Hebrew literature and in modern Jewish art. Matthew Hoffman explores the intriguing and highly controversial ways in which Jewish culture was able to address the ideological fault lines of modernity through considerations of Jesus, the Jew. In representing Jesus to Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, writers and artists often sought to subvert dominant (Christian) European culture while also placing Jews in the very center of that culture." --Anita Norich, University of Michigan

From the Inside Flap

From Rebel to Rabbi establishes how the changes that occurred in Jewish culture during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stimulated a widespread fascination with the figure of Jesus and with Christian motifs among numerous Jewish theologians, historians, intellectuals, writers, and artists. It illustrates how and why the process of modernization for these Jews involved a radical reevaluation of Jesus of Nazareth. This book analyzes works of Jewish history, theology, Yiddish literature, Jewish visual art, and intellectual debates, in an attempt to situate this phenomenon within the broader context of a cultural history of how Jews have related to and depicted the figure of Jesus in the modern period. It suggests that for writers and artists, such as Sholem Asch and Marc Chagall, refiguring Jesus as intrinsically Jewish and using Christian themes to express aspects of the modern Jewish experience were an integral part of creating a new and distinctive modern Jewish culture.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

From Rebel to Rabbi

Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish CultureBy Matthew Hoffman

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2007 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-5371-5

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................ixIntroduction: Jesus and the Jewish Question.............................11. The Quest for the Jewish Jesus.......................................132. The Crucifix Question................................................613. Yiddish Modernism and the Landscape of the Cross.....................1174. The Passion of Jewish History........................................1705. The Artist Crucified.................................................206Epilogue: The Jesus Question Revisited..................................252Notes...................................................................257Index...................................................................285

Chapter One

The Quest for the Jewish Jesus

From Rebel To Rabbi

In his classic book chronicling the origins and development of European critical scholarship on Jesus, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer makes the claim that "there is no historical task which so reveals a man's true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus ... each individual created Him in accordance with his own character." While the distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of dogma was at the heart of this quest for the historical Jesus among European scholars, Schweitzer observes that "each successive epoch of theology found its own thoughts in Jesus." In other words, the "historical" Jesus served contemporary needs as theologians and historians tended to craft an image of him that was in their own likeness; various theories as to who Jesus was and what he taught helped to legitimate modern theologies and movements. Jesus functioned as a valuable device in the creation of modern religious identities and ideologies that reflected the ideals of the European Enlightenment with its emphasis on scientific inquiry and rational religion over against irrational Church dogmas and faith in the supernatural. By means of critical scientific scholarship, European theologians began to search for an image of Jesus that could be meaningful for enlightened Christians, that could serve them as a model of moral piety and religious perfection suitable for their own age.

Christians were not alone in this quest for the historical Jesus. For European Jews of the Enlightenment era and beyond, scholarly writing about the historical Jesus also became an important part of their own accommodations to modernity. Just like their Christian contemporaries, enlightened Jewish scholars and theologians began to craft an image of Jesus "in their own likeness," which for them meant, almost without exception, depicting Jesus unequivocally as a faithful Jew. In response to the changing intellectual climate brought by the European Enlightenment-and its Jewish offshoot, the Haskalah-and the shifting socio-political realities resulting in their gradual Emancipation, European Jews began to confront a series of profoundly momentous questions about their changing place in the world: What is the new position of Jews and Judaism in modern European society? How are Jewishness and Judaism now defined? How can one be both Jewish and Western at the same time? How is the relationship between Jews and Christians and Judaism and Christianity to be redefined? Accordingly, as Arnold Eisen has observed, "Jewish culture in all its forms in the modern period has been devoted to describing a place for Jews in the new social, political, and economic orders and to imagining forms of Judaism (religious or not) suitable to that place."

One of the significant ways in which modernizing Jews have attempted to "describe a place" for Jews and Judaism in the modern world has been by reclaiming Jesus as a Jew; their new approach to Jesus transformed him from a figure who had been associated with Jewish marginalization and oppression in European Christian society into a vehicle for their own self-transformation and integration into that very society. Indeed, the Jewish reclamation of Jesus aided in the process of redefining Judaism and in the repositioning of Jews and Judaism vis--vis Christians and Christianity in a plethora of ways. For one, stressing Jesus' Jewishness was a way for Jewish scholars to promote Jewish integration into Christian society since they were essentially saying "we're not as other as you think, since your founder was-one of us." Moreover, claiming Jesus as Jewish helped combat Christian anti-Semitism by defusing much of the Christian basis for anti-Semitism, which traditionally drew on the opposition of Jesus to Judaism.

However, Jewish writers who wrote about Jesus as a historical Jew did more than simply strive for acceptance within Christian society, they also tried to improve the status of Judaism in the eyes of both Christians and Jews. Perhaps above all, their scholarly views promoted Jewish cultural dominance within Christian European society by asserting that Jesus' teachings came from Judaism, thereby implying that "they got everything from us" and that "Christian history is background to Jewish history, not the other way around." Thus, reinterpreting the figure of Jesus as a Jew, and viewing him in a sympathetic manner, became a way for modernizing Jews to try to acquire for themselves a more rooted place in modern European society. It provided them with a means of integrating both Jews and Judaism more resolutely into the culture of the West by illustrating that culture's Jewish roots. The reclamation of Jesus as a Jew, and his teachings as inherently Jewish, helped to locate Judaism as central to Western civilization, and many even claimed that Judaism was the foundation of that civilization along with, or in place of, Christianity. In this way, "the negative Jesus of medieval Jewish polemics, created in self-defense, now became the positive Jesus of modern apologetics, created in an act of Jewish self-assertion." The creation of a Jewish Jesus allowed Jewish advocates of Emancipation and integration to elaborate new "strategies of selfhood" both outwardly and internally.

Schweitzer's claim that "each successive epoch of theology found its own thoughts in Jesus" applies equally to modern Jewish writing on Jesus. Reinterpreting the past as a way of asserting modern alternatives to tradition was a dominant feature of the Haskalah movement, and the turn to modernity in general within the Jewish world, and Jesus played an important role in this ideological reconstruction of the Jewish past. As Jews of the Haskalah and its successor movements redefined the essence and meaning of Judaism, Jewishness, and Jewish history for the modern age, they also reconceptualized the place of Jesus within the world of Judaism in ways that conformed to and even embodied such new definitions. Their new assessments of Jesus became an integral part of their various programs for transformation of Jewish life. In the many different works written by modern Jewish intellectuals incorporating Jesus in a positive way, we see this strategy at play. For Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), the leading figure of the Berlin Haskalah, arguing the Jewishness of Jesus functioned as an apologetic for continued Jewish religious observance-in a slightly modified guise-and was part of his argument for the inclusion of Jews in European civil society. The leading scholars of Reform Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany, Abraham Geiger and Samuel Hirsch, fashioned an image of Jesus that could serve as a model for the contemporary Reform Jew in a number of ways. Geiger's historical conception both of Jesus, and of the Pharisaic school to which he claims Jesus belonged is highly revisionist. For him, the Pharisees were not the rigid legalists whom Christian scholars had portrayed so negatively for centuries. They were also not the progenitors of the legally stringent, narrow-minded Orthodox rabbis with whom Geiger quarreled. Rather, the Pharisees, and by extension Jesus, were liberal, open-minded interpreters of the law, true precursors of the Reform rabbis of Geiger's own day. For Geiger and the majority of his Reform contemporaries and disciples, Jesus was the prototypical Reform Jew. Invariably, these Reform writers stressed Jesus' emphasis on ethical doctrines and social action and his flexibility in observing the halakha (Jewish law); like the Reform rabbis of their day, they depicted Jesus as expressing an ethical and prophetic type of Judaism rather than a cultic and legalistic one.

The exact image of Jesus that emerges from these various works depends on the precise religious/ideological orientation of the writer creating that image. In effect, as Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus has claimed, "there is nothing else but ideology in the Jewish study of Christian origins." This formulation applies not only to writers within the Reform movement of the nineteenth century, but also to representatives of varying Jewish movements in the modern period, each relating to Jesus in a way that is relevant and meaningful within the particular ideological context of the movement concerned. In historical studies from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by I. M. Jost, Joseph Salvador, Heinrich Graetz, Simon Dubnow, Joseph Klausner, and many others, asserting the Jewishness of Jesus and the Jewish roots of Christianity is both part of the process of (re)claiming the writing of history as a legitimate Jewish pursuit, and of declaring Jewish history as central to the history of the West in general. Moreover, Zionist thinkers like Klausner (as well as other Zionist/Israeli historians) presented Jesus as an ardent Jewish nationalist, and sought to reclaim him as a "native son" of Israel, part of a great Jewish national legacy that belonged to Jesus' own people-the Jews. For Jewish socialists like Moses Hess in Germany, and a whole generation of Jewish revolutionary socialists in Russia in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s, Jesus was seen as a proto-socialist whose teachings, the Socialist Gospel, provided them as Jews with a natural link to the socialist movement of their day. Also as cosmopolitans who espoused a more universal way of looking at the world and often worked side by side with Christians, embracing Jesus, even their own particular Judaized conception of him, was a means of attaining common ground with their Christian comrades. These diverse Jewish reclamations of Jesus became a constitutive feature of the larger process of carving out a new self-definition, a new identity, and a new essence, for the modern Jew.

As Alan Mittelman has astutely observed, the reclamation of Jesus that formed part of this process of modern Jewish self-definition has been fundamentally linked to the emergence of historical consciousness that inspired modern Jewish historiography: "[T]he Jewish rediscovery of Jesus ... is rooted in a new appreciation of Jewish history.... The `homecoming of Jesus,' therefore, is an aspect of the modern Jew's act of historically oriented self-discovery, or of self-recovery. It is an aspect of the modern Jew's search for essence and definition."

Indeed, the earliest Jewish authors who began to focus on Jesus in the modern period did so in the context of a nascent Jewish historiography, which was influenced both by developments in general European historiography and by the new atmosphere of Enlightenment and Emancipation. In the nineteenth century, I. M. Jost, Abraham Geiger, and Heinrich Graetz (and, to a lesser extent, Joseph Salvador) included assessments of Jesus within larger projects of writing comprehensive histories of the Jewish people. They were all affected by the general German cultural environment in which the writing of history was gaining a new importance, namely historicism-the movement to chronicle past events "as they actually happened" ("wie es eigentlich gewesen ist"); specifically, the scholarly impulse to reconstruct the "historical Jesus" that arose in Western Europe at the end of the eighteenth century had a powerful and lasting impact on the Jewish historical recovery of Jesus. As Samuel Sandmel suggests, the focus of Protestant scholarship on the Jesus of history "made some Jews feel compelled to give serious attention to him, and, indeed, there arose in some of them the tendency which has properly been called the `Jewish reclamation' of Jesus."

The primary Jewish manifestation of these new developments in European scholarship and historiography coalesced in the Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism) movement-a major by-product of both historicism and the Haskalah-which originated in Berlin in 1819 at the inception of a long period of reaction against Jewish emancipation within German/Prussian society. This movement's desire to treat Judaism as a legitimate academic subject worthy of historical exploration must be seen as part of an overall plan of integrating Judaism into general Western culture and history, and making Judaism seem less foreign to Christian scholars. Indeed, this "new historiography-based on the respectable and objective methodology of Wissenschaft-would be their [the maskilim's] principal weapon to battle the venomous calumny against Judaism ... Wissenschaft des Judentums, in other words, would facilitate Jewry's integration and honorable assimilation into Europe." Furthermore, this turn toward the scientific exposition of Jewish history can be viewed as "a collective act of translation, a sustained effort to cast the history, literature, and institutions of Judaism in Western categories," and render "the Jewish experience in terms comprehensible to the Western mind." As such, the link between the Jewish turn to history and the Jewish recovery of Jesus allows us to situate the trend of the Jewish reclamation of Jesus within this broader attempt to integrate and assimilate Jews within the culture of Western Europe.

However, besides facilitating a new mode of integration into Western civilization, the burgeoning historical awareness expressed in the Haskalah in general, and in the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement in particular, also effectively served to increase Jewish pride-part of the "historically oriented self-discovery" that Mittelman speaks of. As Ismar Schorsch notes, "the heady recovery of the Jewish past filled Jews with pride and self-confidence. Their growing appreciation for the pathos of Jewish history, for the power of Jewish values and ideas, and for the persistence of the Jewish people countered the blandishments of assimilation." This assertion not only reveals the importance of writing Jewish history as a means of creating Jewish self-esteem and a sense of belonging in modern Western civilization, but it also suggests that this process worked as a countermeasure to assimilation, functioning as a justification for continued Jewish existence in modern European society. However, somewhat ironically, this type of Jewish scholarship was also intended to promote acceptance of Jews by Christian society in order to accelerate assimilation. Proponents of Jewish Wissenschaft believed that the academic study of Judaism by Jews would serve as a corrective to previous Christian scholarship on Judaism, which had propagated anti-Jewish sentiments in Christian society, and would thereby help to secure Jewish emancipation and civil rights.

The presence of chapters on Jesus and the origins of Christianity within works of Jewish history emerging from Wissenschaft circles, especially the generally positive treatment accorded Jesus in comparison to premodern Jewish accounts of him, affirms the paradoxical nature of the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. On the one hand, it bespeaks an attempt to "integrate and assimilate" Jewish history into the canon of the West. However, as is the case with most manifestations of modern Jewish writing on Jesus, the direction of this assimilation and integration is ironically inverted. Despite vastly different theories as to the precise nature and position of the historical Jesus, these Jewish historians all situate Jesus firmly within the context of Jewish history. His story is part of the Jewish story, and his life and teachings can only be explained within the context of the various Jewish sects and schools of thought extant in first-century Palestine. This assumption seems to contradict the primary goal of assimilation and acculturation by the Wissenschaft des Judentums and Haskalah in general, since, in effect, the history of Christianity is portrayed as flowing out of Judaism. Reclaiming Jesus as part of Jewish history, not as a traitor or a rebel, and asserting the Jewishness of his life and teachings were a way of Judaizing Christianity and, by extension, Western civilization. Jews could integrate into the culture of the West not by grafting themselves on to the fully grown tree of Western civilization, but by showing Judaism to be the seed from which this civilization sprang. In many ways this historiographic trend was strongly permeated with a modern form of anti-Christian polemics, which was part and parcel of the Jewish reclaiming of Jesus from the outset. This polemical subtext reflected the ongoing religio-cultural conflict that persisted between Christianity and Judaism, even in the age of Enlightenment and Reason.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0804753717
• ISBN 13: 9780804753715
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304