277 - The Judaic Factor in Western Culture

The Judaic Factor in Western Culture
By Jacob Neusner

The Judaic contribution to the west cannot be defined, let alone assessed, without close consideration of the role of the Jewish people and their long and coherent history … Israel after the flesh, the bearer of salvation in the ancient dispensation, has yet a role to play in the coming salvation. "

FOR most people, "Judaism" is equivalent to the "Old Testament." Presumably, therefore, if we describe the many and important ways in which the Hebrew Scriptures (which Jews know as Tanakh) have shaped the life of the west, then we will be defining the Judaic factor in western culture.

This widely-held conception is false, for two reasons. First, it ignores the fact that the values of Tanakh are mediated to the west not through Judaism but through Christianity and Christian culture. This is implied, for example, by the very name by which Tanakh is called, that is, the "Old Testament." The "Old" is old in relationship to the "New" Testament, and the latter is understood, by Christians, to complete the message of the former, and, indeed, to impart upon the "Old" its true and authoritative meaning. Furthermore, so far as Tanakh is known in the west, it is known in the way in which it is read through Christian eyes. Accordingly, we cannot claim that the Judaic contribution to western civilization takes the distinctive and particular form of the Hebrew Bible, because the Tanakh is not distinctive to Judaism alone, and it is not mediated by Judaism at all.

Second, the conception that the Judaic contribution is principally the Tanakh ignores the development of Judaism over the past two thousand years. That conception treats the continued presence of the Jewish people in the west as of no account. It takes the position that the only thing of importance about that people is its connection to ancient Israel. This negative assessment of Judaism, of course, is part

Jacob Neusner is University Professor and Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University. A graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Jewish Theological Seminary, Dr. Neusner is a prominent scholar of the influence of the classic Jewish tradition. It often happens, unfortunately, that Christian and humanist scholars discuss western culture as if the Judaic factor didn't exist. Even worse, is the pretension that western culture can accommodate Judaism as a mere "preface" to Christian civilization, designating the Hebrew Scriptures, Tanakh, as the "Old" Testament.

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of the earliest Christian conception that the true Israel continues through the people which was no people, the people of God, the New Israel, the Church of Christ. It, of course, bears within itself an interesting contradiction, since it concedes what it also denies, which is that the Jews do bear some relationship, if not a quite legitimate one, to the religion of ancient Israel portrayed in the Hebrew Scriptures. Accordingly, all that the Jews have contributed is the "Old Testament," but they cannot truly claim to carry forward even that document as they do not constitute its continuators.

If, as I have implied, Judaism and the religion of the ancient Israelites represented by the Tanakh are not one and the same thing, it follows that Tanakh stands behind two great religions of the west, Judaism and Christianity. Neither can claim wholly and completely to exhaust the potential meaning of Tanakh, for the other bears contrary testimony and gives witness to the notion that there are other meanings, legitimately lived out, in alternative communities of faith. Judaism carries the imperatives of Sinai forward through its second Torah, the one claimed to have been revealed alongside the written Torah. This second Torah, alleged also to have been revealed at Sinai, is called the oral Torah, and ultimately finds expression in the Mishnah, a second century document, and in the literature of exegesis and augmentation of Mishnah generated by Mishnah, for example, the Palestinian Talmud, the Babylonian Talmud, and the great legal and theological enterprise built upon the foundations of both. It would lead us far afield to discuss how these modes of Torah complement and complete the written one everyone in the west knows.

Central to my argument is the conception that the Judaic contribution to the west cannot be defined, let alone assessed, without close consideration of the role of the Jewish people and its long and coherent history, inclusive of how Judaism, for its part, also took over and transmitted Tanakh.

I

How, then, shall we define the Judaic component of western civilization, specifically, that component which both is affective in the formation of the world-view of the west and distinctive to Judaism in particular? To answer this question, we must establish two paramount criteria.

First, we want to stress the aspect of distinctiveness. What has Judaism in particular contributed? Second, we emphasize the aspect of the common culture of the west, so we ask what Judaism has contributed to the west? The second question places limits upon the potential answer, but not less than the first. The west has not received its vast code of morality from Judaism in particular. The west does not look to Judaism for its theological-philosophical conception of God, though that conception is shared by Judaism and Christianity in its philosophical formulations, as monotheism is common to the great religious traditions of the west. The radical social perspectives of the

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prophets reach the west through the thought of Christian moralists, beginning, after all, with the teachings of Jesus himself.

Not only so, but the Jews, a people of one religion, do not play a central role in the formation of western civilization as we know it. Their presence has been on the margins of the normative societies, and their situation upon the frontiers of the acceptable was precarious and parlous. Had they wanted, they could in any case have done remarkably little to affect the values of the majority, whatever the character of that majority. Furthermore, the Jews have always preserved strong links with the non-western world not affected by Christianity, the central bulwark of western civilization. Jews have been not only international within the west but far beyond its limits, in India, Iran, Iraq, and through the Moslem world of North Africa and Spain. In the very centuries in which western civilization was taking shape, the great centers of Judaic creativity were in Islam, whose philosophy, metaphysics, science, and other cultural achievements shaped, and were richly shaped by, Jewish participation and Judaic thought.

And we must take note of that third world of eastern Europe, which has always had one foot in the west, and the other in Asia and the Middle East. Its particular Christianity, to be sure, is shared with the west. But its historical experiences, the shaping of its societies and the complex cultural life of its populations, respond to what happens at least as much in Central Asia as in England, France, and Germany. The Mongols, after all, shaped Russian history long before the Enlightenment, and for a much longer time. Accordingly, so far as the Jews have lived in these three worlds, western Europe, eastern Europe, and the Islamic countries, their distinctive contribution to the life of any one of them cannot be understood to exhaust their role in all of them. When we consider that the majority of the Jewish people lived their lives not in western but in eastern Europe for nearly the whole of the modern history of the west, we realize that the definition of the distinctive Jewish factor in western culture in particular is not going to be easy.

II

I have dwelt upon the problem of definition so that the proposed solution will be understood in context. The way toward defining and then evaluating the Jewish factor clearly must begin in Tanakh, within the stated qualifications. But it must further be a way continuous with the post-biblical history of the Jewish people and of Judaism. And it must finally take account of the perceptions and responses of the civilization of which Judaism formed a small but interesting part, namely, the west. These three conditions are met if we ask, What elements in the biblical heritage of Judaism and Christianity are familiar to the west, but are expressed and carried forward in ways distinctive to Judaism so that the west could perceive the familiar in an unfamiliar way? Let me spell this out, first in a negative way.

We cannot point to the Talmud or its Mishnah as the principal

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expressions of Judaism which have contributed to western culture, because their place and role in the west are of no consequence whatsoever, and this despite their centrality in the definition of Judaism from the second century to the present. But we also cannot ignore Mishnah (to persist in a single example), for, if we do, we miss what is at the heart of Judaism. We cannot point to biblical morality as the distinctive contribution of Judaism in particular, but we also cannot ignore the fact that Judaism does carry forward the biblical morality in interesting and particular ways. And, as I shall now propose, there are elements of the biblical perception of the world and its definition of society that: (1) are familiar to the west; (2) are worked out in an unfamiliar way in Judaism; and, (3) are known in this peculiar and alien Judaic guise just as widely as these same elements are known in their friendly and familiar Christian one.

III

To meet the stated condition, we had best begin with the one fact which the west knows and responds to in Judaism, which is the existence of the Jewish people. People who know nothing whatsoever about the Jews or about Judaism do know, both from direct observation and from cultural "conditioning," that Jews exist as a group, that they have existed for a long time, and that they continue to exist in the very centers of western culture. In what measure does the existence of the Jews as a persistent group carry forward an element in the common biblical heritage, and in what ways does the existence of the Jews constitute an important and distinctive expression of that common heritage?

Let us begin with the biblical heritage itself. One principal component of the biblical world-view is Israel, the people brought into existence not by natural processes of history, but by supernatural intervention. The participants in the exodus from Egypt are described as a mixed multitude, a non-people, a mass of diverse people. At Sinai they become Israel. And what makes them Israel is that the revelation of the Lord to Moses, the Torah, is addressed, in particular, to their group. The content of revelation is not new in its historical context. The moral rules of the Torah will not have surprised a passing Egyptian, who also knew that one should not murder, steal, or commit adultery. What is new at Sinai is that the law is addressed to Israel, an entire group. And the corning-into-being of the group, now the people, is tied to the revelation itself. This is new: that the nation is bound together as a group through its covenant with God. Rewards and punishments are communal, not solely individual. The entire community suffers for the moral failures of individuals. Not everyone sells the poor for silver, but the entire nation suffers if the poor are oppressed in its midst. Israel is not a natural, ethnic community, but a creation of revelation. Israel becomes a nation through covenant, and its existence and its history depend upon its adherence to that

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covenant. Morality is not a private affair, and the fate of the nation depends upon the behavior of individuals.

A second important component of the biblical heritage is the idea of the kingdom of God, a people ruled by God's will. The monarchy is called into being-that is to say, government exists-by the grace of God, and not through natural evolution. The monarchy to begin with is a national institution and is the work of prophecy, beginning with Saul, a prophet who became king. The king is not the center of the religious life and is not deified. He is anointed of the Lord, a messiah in the simple, old sense.

The third and last component of importance here is the conception that morality determines the fate of the people. What God wants of the people, the criterion by which he judges the people, is not rite but right, not cult but the shape of society and culture. Seek justice, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. What the prophets reject is not the cultic act of the individual who is wicked, but the cult of the nation Israel as a whole. History is decided by morality. Accordingly, Israel's history is the principal arena for the working out of morality, and the condition and character of the people determine its fate.

The history of the people is central, because what that history reveals-the intersection between the moral law and the society which is to keep that law-tells us about what is significant in what happens, and because we know the reason for what is significant. Israel's history, moreover, is represented as the center and focus of world history, and world history is moving not aimlessly but toward the end of days. It shall come to pass in the end of days that the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established at the top of the mountains and exalted above the hills, and all nations shall look to it. And many peoples shall go and say, Come ye, and let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob. And he will teach us of his ways and we shall walk in his paths. For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations and decide for many peoples, so that they shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning-hooks. Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. With this vision Israelite religion enters universal history.

These three elements, the conception that Israel is not a natural thing but a matter of choice, divine choice, and human response, the idea of the kingdom of God, and, finally, the principle that the moral condition of the people as a whole is determinative of its fate-these three conceptions of the meaning of "being a group," or, to state matters more elegantly, of the vocation of nationhood, are entirely familiar to us. The reason is that diverse western theories of society (in secular terms) invoke them. The issue, moreover, of who is Israel-who is that unnatural, supernatural people called into being in a covenant and called upon to conform, in their collective being, to the revealed will of

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God (in theological terms)-is vexed. From the formation of biblical Israel to the creation of the State of Israel, diverse groups, taking up the biblical legacy, have declared themselves to be the True Israel, the Israel after the spirit, the saving remnant of Israel, and the like.

Here is a biblical legacy, therefore, contained within a single word, Israel, which links the historical phenomena of western thought about the nature and the calling of a group. There is no point in the formation of the nations of the west and the formulation of nationalism as the definitive character of society in the west at which the biblical legacy, for good or ill, is absent. People is made to define the limits of society. Being of the people places one within the frontiers, and not being one of the people sets him or her outside the bounds.

So far as Israel's heritage is claimed by the church and by diverse churches, moreover, the old theological conception of peoplehood was given a still further interesting nuance. The conception of the nation-church, defined by a common heritage and moving toward a common fate defined by faithfulness to a covenant, stands behind the institutional forms of western religion, on the one side, and the ideological constructs of western nationalism, on the other. This is a massive component of western civilization-one which, to be sure, may in the end turn out to destroy that very civilization which it defines.

But for the present purpose, we must return to the issue, What is the distinctive Jewish factor as expressed in western culture and its appropriation of the notion of the holy, covenanted people? What of Israel after the flesh, the Jewish people? What has the west learned from its distinctive notion of peoplehood?

IV

The first thing to establish is that the west has learned not solely from the Scriptures, but from the living example of Israel after the flesh, the Jewish people. The presence of the Jews in the west is a relatively recent phenomenon. But Jews lived in western countries in their formative years, and the world of the west knew full well that there were Jews in the world. What they learned from that fact is that there was and always would be an alternative to the dominant mode of religiosity, Catholic Christianity. The appeal of Judaism, through its Scriptures to its living being, never wholly escaped Christian eyes. "Judaizers" in the church were feared specifically because they could, and in some interesting instances did, become Jews. While conversion to Judaism is not a major social fact, the possibility and potentiality of conversion occupies Christian minds, and not only in a negative way.

The persistence of Israel after the flesh thus is a well known fact. And conclusions drawn from that fact were not wholly adverse. For the reformers within the church and the Reformation, when it came, saw and grasped the possibility of a community formed of God and sustained against the majority by faith. Israel after the flesh proved an inspiration to the Reformation, even leading to the admission of living Jews to England and the extension of human rights to Jews in Holland.

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New England was shaped by a vision of a city upon the hill, and Israel among the nations, deriving not solely from Scripture but from the fact of the persistence of that old, stubborn, and enduring Israel.

Yet the old, the Catholic Church, in its insistence upon a moral law among human society, a bond, joining society, consisting of more than this-worldly accidents, cannot be thought to have departed from the biblical ideal. In its relationship to Israel after the flesh, moreover, the "official church" insisted that the Jewish people must endure, for theological purposes to be sure, and made possible Israel's persistence in Europe, while also making miserable Israel's life in Europe. What is important in the history of the west and its consciousness is the recognition, accorded by the church, to the importance of the persistence of Israel after the flesh. That fact underlined the original, biblical conviction in its then-contemporary mode. It further made possible the very persistence of the alternative to Christianity, the example of loyalty to an alien and unpopular ideal and way of life, constituted by the Jewish people.

V

What, above all, the west learned from the extraordinary life of Israel is that what is unpopular and alien, what stands against the will of the majority, can survive and will endure. And the attitudes toward Israel in the west, furthermore, formed the paradigm for the restraint of the diverse majorities of the west in the face of unpopular minorities. The rights of individuals and of dissenting groups, by reference to the continuing toleration of Israel in Europe, could be no less than those of Israel. The reason such rights had to be extended was to be spelled out. But I am inclined to think that beyond all reason was hidden the small doubt that perhaps the dissenting group had something to contribute, and that Israel after the flesh, bearer of salvation in the ancient dispensation, has yet a role to play in the coming salvation.

Israel, for its part, had to account for its condition of toleration as subjugation. How can the people of God take a place among the least and most despised of the peoples? This question, asked by Judah Halevi, found its answer in the conception that Israel, while despised, was to serve as the heart of humanity, just as the Scriptures had said, and that worldly power and glory bear no relationship to supernatural truth. On the face of it, this is the other side of the coin of toleration on the part of the church-even against the state-in the formative centuries of western civilization. And, as I said, it also served to inspire the Reformers, particularly of the left, and to legitimate and justify their dissent.

I leave matters at the end of the Reformation, because not much new happened thereafter. The west had taken shape. Its conceptions of the individual and the group, the nation and society, were formed. The most current ideas of the higher calling of society and the importance of attaining justice and morality in the community are to be traced back in a continuous line to the Scriptures and to the Roman Catholic

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Church and the Reformation. The respect accorded to dissent-the toleration of the alien, the capacity to accord rights and respect to the opposition, and the restraint exercised by the majority in the protection of the minority-these distinctive and precious commitments of western civilization in its confrontation with its own disagreeable varieties of opinion and belief, to begin with were worked out, not with invariably happy results but commonly with truly dreadful ones, in the encounter with Israel. But, it must be said, the problematic of the encounter-the issue of coping with diversity and dissent begins in the conception, born in ancient Israel and nurtured within the Jewish people thereafter, that the character and conscience of society as a whole do make a difference.

It will follow that the community cannot be indifferent to the conduct and beliefs of its constituents. And the balance between concern for the character of society as a whole and the capacity to tolerate, and ultimately accord full human rights to people who do not share the common conception of the right character of society as a whole-the need to find that balance begins in the presence of enduring, dogged, and terribly stubborn Israel. That is why I offer, as the principal and most interesting Judaic factor in western culture, the Jewish people itself.