Abstract
Sarah Hammerschlag’s essay “Nearly Neighbors: Reflections on Philosophy of Religion and its close encounters with Modern Jewish Thought” considers the role of Modern Jewish Thought in the history of the Philosophy of Religions and by way of three examples shows how the encounters between Judaism and philosophy in the modern era have served as sites of negotiation. In the process, Hammerschlag proposes that philosophy of religion should be considered less as a discipline focused on the validity of concepts and more as one that investigates their historical emergence and evaluates their subsequent usage and dissemination.
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Notes
- 1.
See in particular Willi Goetschel, The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought (2013) which tracks the relationship between the development of philosophy’s disciplinarity and the development of Modern Jewish Thought, showing in particular how this relationship reveals the necessary failure of philosophy’s universal aspirations. Equally important for thinking about the relationship between modern Judaism and the category of religion is Leora Batnitzky’s How Judaism became a Religion (2011).
- 2.
“It is true that I recognize no eternal truths other than those that are not merely comprehensible to human reason but can also be demonstrated and verified by human powers. Yet Mr. Morschel is mislead by an incorrect conception of Judaism when he supposes that I cannot maintain this without departing from the religion of my fathers. On the contrary I consider this an essential point of the Jewish religion and believe that this doctrine constitutes a characteristic difference between it and the Christian one” (Mendelssohn 1983, 89).
- 3.
Mendelssohn makes this point in two places: first in section I, describing how misunderstandings with friend produces tolerance (67) and then again in the final pages of section II where he contrasts such an understanding of tolerance, predicated on disagreement with a vision of accord that would “confine within narrow bounds the now liberated spirit of man” (137). For more on Mendelssohn, pluralism and tolerance, see Erleweine 2010 and Zager 2015. My thinking on Mendelssohn and tolerance owes much to conversation with Sarah Zager on Mendelssohn.
- 4.
To make the later point we turned to Aamir Mufti’s brilliant book, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (2007) which effectively uses Mendelssohn toward these ends.
- 5.
As well as in his refusal to accept the exemption from anti-Semitic legislation offered to him by the Vichy government.
- 6.
- 7.
Little known in this country, but an important Jewish intellectual in postwar France with a growing influence in Israel, even today, 20 years after his death, Askénazi spoke to an audience of young Jews in Paris, learning about their Jewish heritage but equally immersed in the philosophical culture of Paris in the 1950’s. His claim, quite at odds with Mendelssohn’s and far more radical than Levinas’s, was that Judaism and philosophy represent two very different streams of tradition, both particularist in their origins and universalist in their aspirations. While philosophy is characterized by the human question, “the nostalgia of man without God,” the Hebrew bible is characterized by wisdom “offering itself to man.” The response of the Jewish tradition, while often overlapping in its concerns with philosophy, is fundamentally different in so far as it is a response to God’s word. Askénazi did not deny that there had been historically a dialogue between Judaism and philosophy one represented by thinkers such as Judah Ha-Levy and Maimonides who spoke across traditions. But as representatives of the tradition of Jewish wisdom, he claimed, they spoke from a place of certitude, grounded in the tradition. It was this positioning via the status of revelation that made them Jewish thinkers. This could not be said for Spinoza, Bergson, or even Hermann Cohen. While this perspective is not fundamentally original or innovative, and represents a familiar perspective within the Orthodox strands of the tradition, what is worth noting about Askénazi is the function of such an argument in relation to his audience. He was not speaking from within a Jewish community to a congregation, but to an audience of university students in Paris, just as likely to be studying at the Sorbonne as they were to be attending one of Askénazi’s lectures, to a group of students seeking to argue for the contribution of Judaism to the post-World War context, to find a means to critique the philosophical tradition or at the very least to argue for Judaism’s unique contribution to it (Askenazi 1999).
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Hammerschlag, S. (2021). Nearly Neighbors: Reflections on Philosophy of Religion and Its Close Encounters with Modern Jewish Thought. In: Eckel, M.D., Speight, C.A., DuJardin, T. (eds) The Future of the Philosophy of Religion. Boston Studies in Philosophy, Religion and Public Life, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44606-2_12
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