Jewish Heteronomy

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© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012 JJTP 20.1Also available online – brill.nl/jjtp DOI: 10.1163/147728512X629835

THE HETERONOMY OF MODERN JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

Michael Zank

Boston University

Abstract

Proceeding from Jewish philosophy’s origins in the convergence and divergence of

Greek and Jewish thought and the resulting possibilities of construing Judaism andphilosophy as heterogeneous or homogeneous, and ranging across the three major

“ages” or linguistic matrices of Jewish philosophizing (Hellenistic, Judeo-Arabic,

and Germanic), the essay describes Jewish philosophy as an unresolvable entangle-

ment in a dialectic of heteronomy and autonomy.

Keywords

Judaism and philosophy; homogeneity and heterogeneity of; Modern Jewish

philosophy; heteronomy of; Jewish philosophy; academic study of; Torah and nomos

I. “Philosophy, Jewish”: A Preliminary Consideration

“Jewish philosophy,” an ancient pursuit and a modern academic

field, is dif ficult to define.1 Let me begin with a preliminary explora-

tion of the character of the modern academic field. I proceed from

something simple and straightforward, namely, the fact that Jewish

philosophy is a bibliographic term of classification. Certain books

are classified as “philosophy, Jewish,” and the term appears in many

book titles. A “Worldcat” search for items classified as Jewish phi-losophy yields more than eleven thousand items. Curiously, when

searching the same database for “Judaism, philosophy,” the yield is

only about half that number.2 The difference between the search

1 I thank the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy and my assistant, Ms. Theresa Cooney, for their incisive comments and questionson earlier drafts of this essay. I also thank the editors of this issue of the journal

for their patience and encouragement.2 On May 25, 2011, 9:14am EST, an OCLC/Worldcat (http://www.worldcat.org) search for “philosophy, Jewish” yielded 11,383 results in 0.21 seconds. A searchfor “Judaism, philosophy” only yielded 5,720 results in 0.19 seconds.


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100 michael zank

parameters is that, in the first case, philosophy is the genus and

Judaism the species, whereas in the second case the relation is

reversed. The differences in genre classification and hence in thekind and number of books yielded by each search are not just the

result of the switch in the major and minor terms but also of an

ambiguity in the term “philosophy.” “Philosophy” may refer to

anything resembling a “worldview,” but it can also refer to the more

specific academic discipline or intellectual pursuit rooted in, or related

to, classical Greek thought. The first use is generalizing and cultur-

ally unspecific; the latter derives from a confined and named intel-

lectual tradition (e.g., “Socratic philosophy”) that we are able to trace

in a more or less complete genealogy of filiations.Though specific in its Greek cultural origin, “philosophy” in this

latter sense is supposedly universal in its character and scope, simi-

lar to mathematics, geography, or psychology, disciplines still known

by their Greek terms without assuming any cultural specificity or

limitation. The assumption of this usage of the term is that phi-

losophy (like mathematics, geography, psychology, etc.) may have

found its “classical” expression in the Athens of Socrates and Plato,

but that what rendered it classical as well as universally applicable

was the potential of the reasoning it represented to transcend its

original linguistic boundaries. Paradoxically speaking, the particular

idea of a transcending of all cultural limitations is exactly what

makes Greek philosophy and science universal.

Let us remain a moment longer with the transcending aspiration

of philosophy. As the “queen among the sciences” and from its very

inception, Greek philosophy aimed at a theory of everything, a

contemplation of “one and all,” in other words, of viewing all as

one. But the formation of any such theory is troubled by the realiza-tion, sometimes represented in an opposition between Plato and

Aristotle, that we cannot be certain whether unaided reason is

capable of resolving the duality of mind and matter into a common

first principle or a unified whole. Reason reaches for, but has no

absolute recourse to, a principle in which “the many” are “one,”

and the classical philosophers differ as to whether or not the aspira-

tion of articulating “the one” even ought to be considered part of

philosophy. To many, especially in the Aristotelian tradition, the

desire to impose one logos or reason on everything inevitably leadsto a metabasis eis allo genos, a leaving of the firm ground of philo-

sophical knowledge, and a transition to, and borrowing from, the


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the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy 101

likes of poetry or politics. It is the point at which the dialectic of

reason almost inevitably turns to mysticism and revelation.

The desire of the Platonic academy to articulate a coherenttheory of everything, a theory tantalizingly located in an unwritten

doctrine of Plato, entered into a peculiar competition with the

revealed traditions whose Hellenizing savants, in turn, drew inspira-

tion from the vocabulary and imagery of the Greek philosophers.

The symbols of the Abrahamic-Mosaic tradition could be perceived

as having anticipated, in symbolic terms, the intuitions of Greek

philosophy. Moses could be seen as superior to Plato in that he not

only intuited the One but also founded a society based on a perfect

law and a demotic system of representation of the truth in symbolicform, as a means of education for the many. This was Philo’s way.

The Greeks themselves, or rather the Macedonian colonists of the

East, had been disposed toward “syncretic” cultural formations in

the interest of forging an ecumenical system of governance. The

Christian movement, finally, produced a myth that assured Greeks

and Jews of the power and benevolence of the divine logos incarnate.

The product of two very specific cultural formations, the reasoning

of Athens and the symbolism of Jerusalem, thus became the mutu-

ally supporting pillars of several major civilizations that have lasted

until today.

There are at least two ways of thinking about the origins of “phi-

losophy, Jewish,” namely, in terms of historical genesis and in terms

of constitutive principles. One may look at the cultural particulars

of the circumstances under which Jewish philosophy came about

and flourished in the Hellenistic world of late antiquity; or one may

think about origin more in categorical terms, namely, by asking

whether something as historically specifi

c as Judaism, the laws andcustoms of an ancient Near Eastern society, can be entirely compat-

ible with the goals of philosophy in the Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian,

or other major Greco-Roman traditions, such as Stoicism and

Epicureanism.

The idea of a classical philosophical tradition is itself perhaps an

illusion produced by modern, historically informed, and somewhat

purist perspectives that dismiss the more syncretic Hellenistic forma-

tions of Greek-language philosophizing in the “East” as derivative

and bastardized forms of a more “classical” Athenian tradition. Butin fact, Greek philosophy is philosophy precisely to the degree that it

can be conducted by non-Greeks (the same is true of mathematics,


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geography, historiography, etc.), even though what philosophy means

in these new contexts may change in the processes of adaptation

and transformation and make us long, in hindsight, for the purer or“classical” formation of philosophical ideas.

Something similar may be said of Judaism. Judaism’s perennial

appeal and perhaps a reason for its entanglements with Greek phi-

losophy arises from the fact that Judaism, too, produced certain

conceptions of transcendence, including the Jewish idea of a single,

true deity and the concept of time implicit in messianic eschatology.

The Jewish doctrines of creation, revelation, and redemption may

be mythic, symbolic, and metaphoric in character, they may be

rooted in ordinary Canaanite summodeism, but the same is true,mutatis mutandis, of the stories Plato uses to speak of fundamental

matters such as the origin of the natural order or the human ability

to intuit eternal truths, such as the laws of mathematics. The ancients

always communicated wisdom in the form of stories. While biblical

law and prophecy and Platonic philosophy proceed toward transcen-

dence from different problems (though not exclusively or completely

so) and arrive at different terms in which they articulate their respec-

tive doctrines about “truth” and “the One,” both are equally preoc-

cupied with problems of transcendence. This complicates any

simplistic and neat separation between the Greek and the Jewish

elements that became synthesized in the prophetic-philosophical

hybrids of our Abrahamic theological-political formations.

Given the millennia of meetings between various eastern Mediter-

ranean cultures that preceded the formation of our “Abrahamic”

scriptures, it may even be more accurate to speak of Christian,

Jewish, and Muslim philosophy as more of a second-order attempt

to reconcile the merely apparent incongruities in the mythic formsof an always already more or less congruent set of traditions shaped

by cultures far more involved in exchange with one another than

existing in autochthonous solitude.

In purely historical terms, setting aside all possible or actual “elec-

tive af finities” that may be invoked as a kind of predisposition for

Jewish and Greek culture to enter into a deeper relationship, the

existence of “philosophy, Jewish” hinges on a historical accident,

namely, on the cultivation of a Jewish Hellenism in Ptolemaic and

Roman Alexandria. This culture remains present today in two ofits major productions, namely, the first Greek translation of the

Pentateuch (the Septuagint) and the commentaries on this translation

and other writings by Philo, “the Jew.”


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The vicissitudes of late ancient Jewish history—i.e., the reorienta-

tion of institutions charged with the perpetuation of Jewish “identity”

at a time following the destruction of the long-standing insignia of Jewishness, namely, the temple and its sacrificial cult, coupled with

resistance to Christian and Gnostic readings of the Judaic heritage—

were not conducive to a sustained engagement with the disciplines

and traditions of Greek or Hellenistic schools of thought. In fact,

given the transformation of Greek philosophy into quasi-religious

formations, including a veritable cult of the leaders of neo-Platonic

schools of thought such as Iamblichus and Plotinus, who, very much

like the Jesus of the Christian gospels, acted as itinerant preachers

and healers and won disciples, it is perhaps quite understandablewhy there was little appeal for the rabbis of late antiquity in this kind

of pursuit. If anything, for these rabbis, both pagan and Christian

formations of religious thought appeared as nothing but pale imita-

tions and faux appropriations of the great Mosaic tradition.

Philosophy in the classical sense was lost to the degree that it was

religionized. This makes the first recovery of classical philosophy in

the Abassid period, especially the revival of Aristotelian science, all

the more remarkable. With Muslim rule over a multiethnic and

multireligious realm firmly established, philosophy was able to

reemerge, though it played a much altered role and occupied a

precarious place in an environment where Greek thought could be

drawn upon to mediate between competing Judaic-type or “biblicate”

civilizations,3 while revelation as such ruled supreme.4

3 By “biblicate” civilization I refer to a communal or political formation thatrelies on biblical revelation (Mosaic law, Israelite/Judahite prophetic literature)directly or (as in the case of the Qur’an) indirectly as a source of legitimate govern-

ment or ordering of society.4 In a lecture manuscript from December 1930, Leo Strauss points out that

Maimonides was the first to have realized that revelation posed an additional chal-lenge to philosophizing that was unknown to the ancients who were aware only of“natural” dif ficulties of philosophizing. See “ ‘Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart’ ” (thequotation marks are part of the original title), in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 2, Philosophie und Gesetz—Frühe Schriften, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart andWeimar: Metzler, 1997), 377–91. The passage on the “natural dif ficulties” of phi-losophizing is on p. 386. A partial English translation of this essay is included inthe introduction to Leo Strauss, The Early Writings (1921–1932), trans. and ed.Michael Zank (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 27–33.

Like Spinoza, Strauss’s Maimonides was interested in the freedom of thought,

and medieval philosophy was the first to struggle not just with opinions, as Socratesdid, but with prejudice, i.e., religious belief in supernatural revelation. In contrastto Spinoza, Strauss’s Maimonides attempted to keep revelation intact as a politicallyexpedient augmentation of philosophy, necessitated by the “natural differences”among “men.” As Shlomo Pines showed in a famous essay on Maimonides, Spinoza,


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Jewish philosophical work is never merely the result of an “inner”

disposition; it also depends on or responds to external social, cultural,

economic, and political circumstances. A few individuals or schoolsmust perceive philosophy as a plausible, useful, and even necessary

pursuit, or else it will remain marginal (“academic” in the weak sense

of the word). In fact, where it is vigorously pursued by some, it is

often perceived as objectionable and even shunned by others. The

rabbis went as far as condemning the father who taught his son

Greek. The development of “philosophy, Jewish” as a discipline or

a pursuit commanding the respect of (some of) the Jews did not

proceed directly from Philo. Greek and Judeo-Hellenistic thought

reentered the Jewish community only after centuries of a flourishingof Christian and Muslim philosophical theologies, leading to a sec-

ond peak of philosophical thought, specifically among the Jews of

Baghdad, who were living in a sphere where philosophical theology

was embraced and cherished by a plurality of cultures and fostered

by the imperial court.

Similarly, philosophy was revived among the Jews of early modern

Central and Western Europe in concert with the processes of

Renaissance, the European Enlightenment, the scientific revolution,

and the emancipation of religious minorities. This third age of Jewish

philosophical writing confirms that favorable circumstances are

required for any inner predisposition toward philosophical thought

to take hold among the Jews and to be perceived as a significantly

Jewish pursuit. Why should it be otherwise? Jewish participation in

the intellectual culture of their environment, the absorption of cul-

tural influences, and the exploitation of opportunities for expansion

and integration—however much it may be resisted by communal

organizations—always depend on external circumstances. Jewishphilosophy thus remains an option, chosen under specific conditions

and Kant that he dedicated to Strauss (“Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,Maimonides, and Kant,” Scripta Hierosolymitana 20 [1968]: 3–54; also in Pines,Collected Works [5 vols.; Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Leiden: Brill, 1979–1997],5:660–711), Spinoza was no less of an elitist who invented an expedient religiouscreed for his own time, one that became more or less the dominant creed of liberalProtestantism. It must be questioned whether religions can indeed be manufacturedin this Machiavellian fashion. In my view, Strauss’s awareness of this role of the

politically expedient manufacture of religion derives from his experience with themanufacture of Zionist propaganda or, rather, from his awareness of the “newscience” of propaganda that was widely debated in Europe following the GreatWar of 1914–1918.


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and as part of the economy of a diasporic society perpetually strug-

gling with the centrifugal and centripetal forces of minority existence.

It would be surprising, therefore, if Jewish philosophy were not todevelop differently in the national center of the modern state of

Israel and in the current Diaspora, especially in the English-speaking

world. Forces of centrifugal embrace of, and centripetal resistance

to, philosophical universality obtain in the culture wars of the mod-

ern Jewish state and its educational and political institutions. In Israel,

the embrace or rejection of “philosophy, Jewish” may well indicate

one’s vision of the Jewishness of state and society, whereas in the

gentile world of the Anglo-Saxon academy, “philosophy, Jewish”

seems to have few if any social or political implications for, or reper-cussions on, Jewish identity. One might say that the absence of

assimilatory pressure has rendered “philosophy, Jewish” in the

Diaspora a purely historical, academic, and hence largely irrelevant

pursuit. But such a broad claim about the fate of Jewish philosophy

in the twenty-first-century Diaspora, in contrast to its Land of Israel

counterpart, requires further study and consideration.

Philosophy proper also has its ups and downs. To breathe new life

into philosophy at a point when science seemed to have rendered it

redundant (philosophy arrived at this point several times in the

modern era), philosophers turned to “life,” politics, or other excres-

cences of the will. In contrast to “science” in the modern sense,

which (following Weber) may be characterized as essentially “disin-

terested,” “philosophy”—especially philosophy in the Socratic tra-

dition—was characterized ( inter alia by Leo Strauss) as always and

necessarily at odds with the interests of the city. It was thus rendered

eminently “political.” This perspective, if embraced, necessarily

pushes “philosophy, Jewish” into the realm of “political” philosophy,calling for an interrogation of Jewish philosophy as to its specifically

political dimensions and rendering the tension between philosophy

and Judaism a particular case of a broader political-theological

problem.5

Though Plato is clearly a political philosopher, the orientation of

his school, especially of middle- and neo-Platonic philosophy, to the

5 Though the political dimension of modern Jewish philosophy is now widely

taken into consideration, which explains the emergence of Leo Strauss as one ofthe most important modern Jewish thinkers, it was still a relatively obscure topicwhen I organized the first conference on this topic at Boston University in 1997(see http://www.bu.edu/mzank/Michael_Zank/mjthconf.html ).


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political realm is not obvious at all. Philo of Alexandria may be the

exception, though his philosophy as such appears at first glance

rather apolitical and hence more in keeping with the general driftof middle Platonism, which—under the influence of Stoicism—was

more interested in the place of the individual in the cosmic order

than in the well-ordered city, unless the latter could be perceived as

a mirror of the former, which is how Philo understands the laws of

Moses. Philo himself was highly involved in the communal affairs

of the Jews of the great city of Alexandria, at the time one of the

most teeming capitals of the Roman Empire. The situation of the

Jews of Roman Alexandria was unprecedented in Jewish history but

became a common experience to the point of being repeated and,in some cases, ritualized in other centers of Jewish life down to the

modern period. What began in Alexandria culminated in the

“Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion”: Jewish “otherness” evoked

suspicion and served as an easy target for the ethnic or political self-

definition of others. Philo’s philosophical defense of the compatibil-

ity of Plato and Moses and hence of theory and law served the

political purpose of persuading young Jews, like his nephew Tiberius

Alexander, that it was possible to embrace the truth of Plato without

dismissing the laws of Moses.

If Jewish philosophy is a remedy, what is the illness, and what are

the remedy’s side effects? At what point does it turn into a poison?

In the Hellenistic age, the illness might have been the temptation of

apostasy, of an abandoning of the signs of difference. The remedy

was to represent Jewish history and tradition in a manner that was

appealing to a society steeped in Greek culture. A philosophical

interpretation of the law was achieved through allegorical exegesis,

a method honed in the interpretation of dreams and applied by theAlexandrian grammarians to the interpretation of sacred texts, such

as the epics of Homer. Applied to the Torah, this method yielded

evidence of the high age and the superior wisdom of the Mosaic

legislation. The unanticipated side effect was the creation of a new

tradition, independent of Jewish institutions and beyond their control.

The absorption of the Septuagint and of the works of Philo into

the library of Christian theological works speaks for itself. In the

Middle Ages, philosophical argumentation was used to support the

rationality of theological beliefs but also the value of particulartraditions against their competitors. Here the side effect is that the

study of philosophy tended to overpower the study of the law, and


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exegetical sophistication was used in order to defend the pursuit of

philosophy against the suspicion of the lawyers that the study of

philosophy would lead to an attenuation of commitment to legalpractice.

In the modern age, philosophy, history, and exegesis were employed

to defend the humanity of Judaism. The post-Catholic atheism of

the radical Enlightenment as well as the moderate rationalism of

the Protestant Enlightenment conspired to expose the Jews and

Judaism to the contradictory charges of supporting religious tyranny

and sustaining a lack of true religion. It is specifically in the liberal

Protestant context that Judaism is cast as a heresy not just against

divine revelation but against fundamental human values. Philosophyalone could not answer these charges, as is evident from Mendelssohn’s

failure to satisfy either the enlightened detractors of the Jews or the

disenfranchised Jews themselves. It required a thorough historiciza-

tion of Judaism—and of religion more generally—aided by Herderian

romanticism, Hegelian dialectic, and the rigorization of philological-

historical methods, for the Jewish question to be posed anew and in

philosophical terms that were sophisticated enough to recognize

Judaism’s particular qualities as well as to guide the articulation of

principles of Judaism in terms that could persuade Jews as well as

sympathetic non-Jews that Judaism did not, in fact, deserve the

renewed odium humani generis. The resulting historico-philosophical

notions of Judaism as “ethical monotheism,” or as a “mother reli-

gion” of Christianity and Islam, no longer command wide accep-

tance, even though they may still echo in a few sermons of an older

generation of Reform theologians. But it was not the decline of the

neo-humanistic paradigm in general education that caused the demise

of the typically modern conception of Judaism. Rather, once again,it was the unanticipated and unprecedented major changes in the

Jewish situation that eroded the plausibility of humanistic Jewish

thought: mass migration, genocide, and the establishment of a Jewish

state in Palestine. Large-scale historical upheaval effectively rendered

obsolete the modern philosophical conceptions of Judaism that had

been conceived under radically different historical circumstances.6

6 The three major ages of Jewish philosophy are also characterized by the dif-

ferent major non-Jewish languages in which Jewish philosophy was conducted ineach case (Greek, Arabic, German) as well as the geographical centers where thepursuit took root (Hellenistic Alexandria, Spain/Baghdad/Cairo, and Central andWestern Europe). In all three cases, Jewish contributions to philosophy spilled over


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In the following, I explore construals of Judaism and philosophy

as homogeneous or heterogeneous before turning to the question of

a heteronomy of Jewish philosophy. I argue that modern Jewishphilosophy is particularly characterized by a heteronomy that arises

from its historicity, a historicity no longer grounded in revelation as

such (i.e., not as an ephapax ) but in a particularly modern wrestling

with the opposition between revelation and reason.7

II. Homogeneity or Heterogeneity of Plato and Moses

If one begins the inquiry into the character of Jewish philosophy bylooking at the components of this concept, one quickly realizes that

neither “Jewish” nor “philosophy” has a stable or certain content.

Raising the question “What is Jewish philosophy?” therefore means

to begin with something diffuse and indeterminate.8

Since the individual components of this hybrid concept are diffuse

and indeterminate, philosophy and Judaism can be associated with

into the non-Jewish realm. Philo’s writings became the foundation of Christiantheology. The Jewish origin of Salomon ibn Gabirol’s work Fons Vitae was entirelyforgotten until it was rediscovered in the nineteenth century. And contributions bymodern Jewish philosophers from Spinoza to Levinas are an indelible part of theWestern canon.

7 My approach is informed by Leo Strauss who, in several lectures from around1930, posed the question whether it was possible for a philosopher to extricate him/herself from wrestling with history and thereby attain what to Strauss and othersmay have appeared as a natural (rather than historical ) starting point for philosophyitself. To Strauss and other members of what Dieter Henrich has called the “Marburgconstellation” (in an interview with Matthias Bormuth and Ulrich von Bülow, “ ‘Wasist verlässlich im Leben?’ Gespräch mit Dieter Henrich,” Marburger Hermeneutik

zwischen Tradition und Krise, ed. Bormuth and von Bülow [Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag,2008], 13–64), a group of young philosophers centered on Rudolf Bultmann,including Karl Löwith, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gerhard Krüger, and Strauss, phi-losophy itself had become entangled in the history of revelation, an entanglementthat was rendered more rather than less inextricable by the modern critique ofreligion. This seems to suggest, however, that far from achieving a clear and radicalbreak between Judaism and philosophy, Strauss inadvertently remains beholden totheir modern synthesis even as he tries to think his way out of it. For the Jewishphilosopher that he was, perhaps despite himself, the conditio Iudaica thus remainedcoeval with the conditio philosophica.

8 The original version of this paper also claimed that terms such as “Jewish” or“philosophy” were “empty concepts.” But I must agree with Paul Franks who kindly

pointed out to me that this usage would be misleading since, in Kant’s First Critique,“empty concepts” have a clearly and distinctly different meaning from what I amdescribing here. Since I have not found a better alternative, I decided to drop thephrase altogether. The description works just as well without it.


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meanings that are either completely or partially heterogeneous or

completely or partially homogeneous. Judaism and philosophy can

therefore be perceived as anywhere between essentially the same orat least commensurate, and radically opposed to one another or

incommensurate.

Diffuse though the concept may be, as a literary genre Jewish

philosophy has a distinctive origin in the works of Philo of

Alexandria.9 Philo marks the beginning for us even though other Jews

before him surely wrote and thought about the Jewish scriptures in

Greek. Philo’s prerogative consists in the fact that it is through his

works that we have received the possibility of reconciling Greek and

Jewish traditions—specifically, on the Greek or Hellenistic side,Platonism and Stoic philosophy, and, on the Jewish side, the

Septuagint version of the Pentateuch and various other literary and

oral traditions.10

If “Jewish philosophy” commences with Philo of Alexandria, our

field arises from a perception of an af finity between Moses and

Plato.11 Mediated by the Greek translation of the Torah and infused

with a heavy dose of Stoic philosophy (popularized among Hellenistic

Jews; to wit: 4 Maccabees ), Philo’s homogenization of Platonism and

Mosaism served as the basis for much of Western philosophical

theology which found its way back into the Jewish context, after a

9 According to H. A. Wolfson, Philo was not just the beginning of Jewish phi-losophy as a literary genre but the beginning of a distinctive mode of philosophyof religion that pervaded Western civilization until Spinoza, who effectively broughtit to an end. Others have argued that the meeting of philosophical reasoning and Judaic tradition antecedes Philo. This interesting question is beyond the argument

of this paper, insofar as we are dealing with Jewish philosophy as a distinct literarygenre and a tradition and discipline of thought in its own right that presupposes Jewish and Greek writings as distinct traditions in need of reconciliation.

10 The retrieval of the long and complex prehistory and the conditions for theplausibility of Philo’s work—including the important question of a philosophicaldimension of Scripture acquired before, as well as through, its translation intoGreek—are beyond the scope of this writing. Strictly speaking, Philo’s allegorizingof Scripture is contingent on the Greek translation of Scripture, which is alreadyan “allegory” in the sense of saying something otherwise. When all is said and donewe will have to conclude that the Septuagint marks the beginning of Jewish phi-losophy, namely, of the okhmah of Shem in the tents of Japheth.

11 In the discussion of this paper, someone suggested that one might rather begin

the history of Jewish philosophy with Ecclesiastes rather than with Philo. Thisquestion deserves a thorough investigation in its own right that cannot be offeredhere. It should be noted, however, that the sentence in question is formulated as amere hypothesis.


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detour of nearly a millennium, via the Christian and Muslim theo-

logical traditions.

If one then fast-forwards to the twentieth century, one is struckby two radically opposite assertions about the relation between Plato

and Moses. According to Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), philosophy

and Judaism are heterogeneous, but reconcilable. They are heteroge-

neous because prophetism—which for Cohen is the primary source

of Judaism—has no conception of nature, whereas Plato lacks the

pathos of prophetic messianism. To Cohen, this does not mean that

the two pursuits are incommensurate or irreconcilable, and the task of

reconciling philosophical reason and the sources of Judaism is in fact

exactly what drives him as a Jew and a philosopher. The overarchinggoal of Cohen’s philosophy was therefore to reconcile Judaism and

“cultural consciousness.”12 To Leo Strauss (1899–1973), on the other

hand, Judaism and philosophy are not just heterogeneous but irrec-

oncilable, at least on the theoretical level.13 Judaism requires belief

and submission to revelation whereas philosophy requires withholding

belief. One can therefore only be a Jew or a philosopher.14

Both Cohen and Strauss draw on Maimonides to attest to the

pedigree of their respective positions on the possibility or impossibility

of a Jewish philosophy. Maimonides argues against philosophy when

he refers to the pursuit of the falasifa, but he also argues that the

Law of Moses our master demands the pursuit of truth. In Philosophy

and Law (1935), Strauss begins to work out a political approach to

the resolution of what at first seems like a paradox, namely, the fact

that Maimonides offers a “believing” justification of an “unbelieving”

pursuit. Strauss was to argue that the impression of a fideist paradox

is generated by the “art of writing” that philosophers developed to

12 Dieter Adelmann (z”l ) was the first to see the “unity of the cultural conscious-ness” as the focus of Cohen’s philosophical attention. See Adelmann, “Einheit desBewusstseins als Grundproblem der Philosophie Hermann Cohens” (PhD diss.,Heidelberg, 1968). My PhD thesis on Cohen, “Reconciling Judaism and ‘CulturalConsciousness’ ” (Brandeis, 1994), elaborated on Adelmann’s intuition. Cf. morerecently Michael Zank, The Idea of Atonement in the Philosophy of Hermann Cohen(Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2000).

13 On Strauss, see my “Politische Theologie als Genealogie. Anmerkungen zuSchmitt, Strauss, Peterson und Assmann,” in Fragen nach dem einen Gott: Die Monotheismusdebatte im Kontext , ed. Gesine Palmer (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007),

229–50.14 See Leo Strauss, “How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed ,” in MosesMaimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed , trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols. (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1963), 1:xi–lvi.


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hide the fact that their “believing” justification was grounded in an

unstated decision in favor of unbelief.15

To be sure, Strauss’s construal of historically and culturally remotephilosophical projects in terms of absolute opposites comes at the

peril of willful distortions and reductions. Strauss’s approach is dia-

lectical. In contrast to Strauss, Cohen describes Plato and Maimonides

as, very much like himself, devoted to the idea of the good, in other

words, to the idea of God. This vantage point “beyond being” allows

Cohen to work out an af finity between Platonic and Maimonidean

philosophizing that prevails in spite of their differences and attests

to the possibility of reconciling the deepest impulses of Judaism and

philosophy. To be sure, the construal of such af finities across time,language, and culture comes at the peril of obscuring profound dif-

ferences. Cohen’s approach is synthetic.

It is instructive that Philo, Maimonides, Cohen, and Strauss neither

agree on what they mean by philosophy—all four are “Platonists,”

but this means something different in each case—nor on what they

refer to as Jewish or as divinely revealed. Philo was a Middle Platonist

whose conception of Mosaism preceded or paralleled the formation

of rabbinic law and exegesis; Maimonides attempted to reconcile

rabbinic law and medieval neo-Aristotelianism; Cohen was a neo-

Kantian in an age of Jewish reform; Strauss was a post-liberal Zionist,

a professed atheist, and a participant in a concerted deconstruction

of any synthesis of Plato and Moses. Yet despite these striking con-

trasts, the impulse to relate Plato and Moses prevailed in the work

15 As a caveat: every simple assertion of what Strauss taught or believed is prob-lematic because he may have changed his mind on such issues as the relation

between reason and revelation at important junctures. He asserts, for example, that“a change of orientation” occurred in the late 1920s, i.e., after completing hisSpinoza book and before writing Philosophy and Law. But Strauss later dismisses theposition he presented in Philosophy and Law as a “Thomistic detour.” (See his letterto Gershom Scholem of June 22, 1952, quoted by Meier, “Vorwort,” in Strauss,Gesammelte Schriften, 2:xxv, n. 29.) Interpreters of Strauss differ widely as to Strauss’strue or ultimate position, not least because Strauss never offered a systematic accountof his thought (very much in imitation of his master, Plato) but merely offered his views in the guise of comments on the work of others. Strauss, I submit, not onlyaspired to retrieve the classical philosophical teaching but to instantiate or representit in his own writing, namely, in the manner of his writing. More recently, DanielWeiss has argued (in his 2009 University of Virginia dissertation, “Paradox and the

Prophets: Hermann Cohen and the Indirect Communication of Religion”) thatCohen similarly represents the heterogeneity of philosophy and Judaism in a pecu-liar writing style Weiss shows to be embedded in Religion of Reason. (Weiss’s book isforthcoming in 2012, published by Oxford University Press).


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112 michael zank

of all four of these thinkers, even if—as in the case of Strauss—such

relating of Plato and Moses was rendered problematic in the

extreme.“Homogeneous” means arising from the same origin, “heteroge-

neous” means arising from a different origin. When looking at rea-

son and revelation, for example, one may either think of them as

both originating in God’s mind, which would predispose one to think

of them as homogeneous; or one may think of them as originating

in different human faculties, such as reason and imagination, that

are perceived as potentially at odds. Thus the striving of the rational

mind for order seems frequently opposed to the irrational appetites

of our animal souls that conjure the narcissistic figments of ourimagination. Accordingly, the question of origin may be considered

as falling either in the domain of metaphysics or epistemology, or

as falling into anthropological domains such as sociology, psychology,

or politics. As an example of the latter, the classical theory of religion

formulated by Varro ( theologia tripartita ), transmitted by Augustine of

Hippo, distinguishes between the religion of the poets (myth), the

religion of the rulers (public ritual ), and the religion of the philoso-

phers (doctrines derived from, grafted onto, or associated with myths

and rituals).16

The question of origins is related to the question of truth, includ-

ing the true nature and origin of the many that is hidden behind

the veil of appearances. The gesture of philosophy is always toward

the one behind the many. This is evident in the underlying meaning

of philosophical terms such as “concept” and “idea.” The traditional

etymology of the word theoria (often derived from a “seeing of the

divine,” suggesting a cultic festive or oracular setting) further attests

to a possible af fi

nity between the goals of philosophy and religion.The way we divide the pie between religion and philosophy is usu-

ally that we think of religion as myth and ritual, while philosophers

are usually perceived as interpreters rather than as inventors of myths

and ritual. But it may also be otherwise. Religious myths may be

veiled allusions to abstract ideas; stories about the gods may be

allegories to begin with (as Maimonides points out in the introduc-

tion to the Guide ); and rituals may be guides to contemplation, as

16

Note that Varro, who introduced the schema of a theologia tripartita, has noconception of a religion of the jurists. This alone has seriously derailed the Westerndiscussion of Judaism as a religion. The discussion of Islam in Western categorieshas also been problematic but for different reasons.


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Philo, and later Mendelssohn, argued. In the realm of philosophical

writing, Plato stands out as an inventor of myths; and the panegyrics

offered to great thinkers, such as Lucretius’s hymn to Epicurus, showthat there is a religious veneration of the philosopher as the libera-

tor of mankind.

The most common means of harmonization and hence homog-

enization of religious myth and philosophical meaning is allegory.17

Allegory in fact instantiates the overall goal common to so much of

the Western philosophical and religious tradition, which is to tran-

scend the world of appearances, a world of falsehood, illusion, and

transience, and to intuit the world of truth, reality, and permanence

that lurks, so to speak, between the lines. The medievals frequentlyallowed for the temporal realm to enjoy a certain amount of freedom

that made it less pressing to reconcile or homogenize the temporal

with the eternal. Revelation pertained to the true, real, and perma-

nent realm, but reason was allowed to frolic in the sublunar sphere,

without too many worries. This peaceful distinction between two

realms or two truths is no longer available to modern philosophy.

Instead, the moderns aspired to reveal what revelation really “is,”

namely—in case of a destructive unveiling of the essence of reli-

gion—illusion, pious fraud, opiate for the masses, or—in case of a

constructive unveiling of religion’s essence—a metaphoric represen-

tation of ethics, a feeling and taste for one’s dependence on the

universe, a symbolic anticipation of the rationality of the real that

is fully comprehended only when translated into philosophical terms,

or a projection of human love for one another onto the screen of

heaven. If this sketch is more or less correct, we might say that

the ancients overcame the temporal for the sake of the eternal while

the moderns attempted to overcome the eternal for the sake of thetemporal. To be sure, moderns like Kant and Cohen felt that the

illusion of eternity could be dispensed with because it was part of

the fragmentation of reality inherited from the scholastics, a frag-

mentation now perceived as dishonest. It was this illusion that needed

overcoming, not the true idealism of the ancients, which the moderns

felt they were retrieving in a nonmythological form.

Against the modern critique of (medieval ) religion and the mod-

ern gesture of understanding-religion-better-than-it-understands-itself

17 Cf. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: MarinerBooks, 2002).


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114 michael zank

arose a powerful counter-critique that was in equal parts philo-

sophical and religious in its motivation.18 It was also in equal parts

a progression beyond the philosophical reduction of religion toanthropology and a return to ancient mythological and poetic forms

of language. The counter-critics no longer found it fully persuasive

when philosophical reason (or “science”) was claimed to be suf ficient

to determine the tenability of the doctrines of a religion, such as

the claim to prophetic knowledge and belief in miracles. Meanwhile,

in broader cultural terms, the emphasis has shifted away from phi-

losophy and back to religion.

Responding to the overall crisis of tradition, critics and counter-

critics engaged in an intense debate on the true intention of theancients. The key question in all of this was whether what Philo

did was adequate and justifiable, in other words, whether Plato

and Moses can be reconciled or whether they must be separated

once again in order to begin to even understand what it really is

we claim to be doing when we speak of a reconciliation of Greek

philosophy and Judaic religion. Philo resolved the problem of the

apparent heterogeneity of Plato and Moses in epistemological terms

that were rooted in ancient anthropology. In antiquity, the human

being, like society and religion, is conceived as a whole made up

of the sum of its distinct parts. Here, too, the structure is tripartite

(body, soul, mind), corresponding to the three types of religion (body:

ritual; soul: poetry/myth; mind: philosophy), whose unification in a

single system was, to Philo at least, the great achievement of Moses.

The success of Moses, according to Philo, consisted in his ability to

imitate the principles of cosmic harmony and to embody them in a

system of rules of behavior and representation attuned to the forms

he beheld with his mind. Medieval philosophy followed suit in thatit considered the human being as endowed with a plurality of facul-

ties, of which the intuition or receptivity for divine revelation was

the highest. (Even Spinoza reserves room for the intuitive faculty of

the mind!) For Philo, philosophy and Mosaic revelation arise from the

same source, namely, the mind and its ability to intuit the rational

cause of things. Here as elsewhere, the knowledge value of revelation

18 Frye, without reference to Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, has Vico predict thehistorical mechanism that leads to a recurrence of the mythic after the allegoricaland the demotic phases of religion. See The Great Code, 5–30.


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is closely connected with insights into the different kinds of human

knowledge and into the range and limitations of human language.

The modern critique of the epistemological homogeneity of rea-son and revelation begins with Spinoza, who denies that prophetic

and scientific intuitions arise from the same source or are somehow

reconciled and integrated in the Mosaic Law. Spinoza thus reduced

prophetic intuition to political inventiveness, a faculty that—when

wielded by a lawgiver—may yield path-breaking constitutions, but—

when wielded by prophets or pundits—may cause stasis and, ulti-

mately, a failure of the state.19

Looking at the question of homogeneity or heterogeneity of phi-

losophy and Judaism, then, we discern two very different positions.One position, here represented by Philo and Cohen, construes

Judaism and philosophy as essentially harmonic and epistemologi-

cally reconciled. The other position construes them as essentially

distinct and unrelated, or as contraries that can be united only

apparently, not essentially, and merely for pragmatic or political

reasons. Let us call the former position “philosophical theology” and

the latter position “political theology.” Ancient philosophical theology

derives its intuition of a harmony between reason and revelation

from a correspondence theory between human and divine mind, an

idea that became popular again in early modernity, with the notion

of the human being as a microcosm corresponding to a universal

macrocosm. Modern philosophical theologians no longer approach

human knowledge from a cosmological and quasi-mystical point of

view but rather from a critical epistemological one. The ancient

intuition of a unity emanating from the divine mind is here trans-

posed into the mode of a critical or methodological unity emanating

from the human mind. (To be sure, Hegel’s philosophy of religionattempts to reconcile these two approaches.) Medieval philosophical

theology sometimes maintains and sometimes only appears to main-

tain a system of two realms that, while reconciled in the mind of

God, are nevertheless divided in their appearance to us. It was this

19 For Strauss the difference between Spinoza and Maimonides is this: Spinozamerely spells out openly what Maimonides asserted covertly, namely, that prophecyis limited to the imagination and hence of no truth value. More precisely, Strauss’sMaimonides hides the irreconcilable opposition between philosophy and prophecy

under the guise of the conception of a Torah that speaks to both philosophers andnonphilosophers. Spinoza, unconcerned with the perpetuation of the Mosaic reli-gion, tears philosophical reason and prophetic revelation apart, at least on thesurface.


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116 michael zank

promontory of an epistemic dualism that allowed modern critics of

the unitive approach, among them Leo Strauss, to argue that the

modern reconciliation of revelation and reason was merely basedon a misreading of the medieval as naïve. Medieval philosophy,

especially in the Judeo-Arabic context, was—according to Strauss—

political philosophy of the finest, namely Platonic, kind. At first

glance, this is a rather dazzling analysis of what went wrong in the

history of metaphysics and religion. But political theology of this

sort may have its own blind spots. The gesture of cultural pessimism

(emanating from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) may be appealing to

“realists,” but it is nonetheless open to the charge of being dogma-

tism in the guise of skepticism. In any case, it appears to me thatthe claim of political theologians that reason and religion are irrec-

oncilable amounts to a dogmatic position.

III. Autonomy vs. Heteronomy

We turn to the question of a heteronomy of Jewish philosophy. What

I mean is the sense in which Jewish philosophy is unfree to choose

either its subject or the manner of pursuing its business, and hence

potentially limited, from the outset, in its outcomes. The challenge

to Jewish philosophy associated with the problem of heteronomy is

this: If a pursuit is driven by the “extra-philosophical” concerns of

Judaism and the Jews, can one still call it “philosophy”?

To be sure, all philosophy arises from compulsions and givens

beyond our control or making, but it arises in the attempt of rising

above these compulsions and givens. The idea of philosophy is that

we are capable of overcoming these compulsions and free to choosewhat we think, even though we may not always be at liberty to state

our opinions openly. Let us consider the question of Judaism and

heteronomy first.

Since the success of Kantian philosophy, Judaism has often been

tarred as a “heteronomous” religion, cast in opposition to the

autonomy or self-determination championed by liberal thinkers,

including the liberal Protestant theologians. No doubt, Judaism entails

“heteronomy” to the degree that the fiction of a commanding other

must be maintained in order to have—in Jacob Neusner’s parlance— “a Judaism.” This does not rule out the possibility of assent, as David


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Novak has shown in his book on the election of Israel.20 But, as

Hermann Cohen argued against Moritz Lazarus,21 assent and what-

ever else we can marshal in the attempt of mitigating the harshimpression of a revealed legislation is a far cry from moral autonomy.

And yet, in what we may call “classical Judaism,” the goodness of

the Law rests on belief in the unity and identity of the Creator of

the universe and the Revealer of the Law. Since the Law is given

by the Creator, it must be an embodiment of truth and, despite all

appearances to the contrary, the expression of divine providence

and benevolence.22 The subordinate clause inserted in the preceding

sentence (“despite all appearances to the contrary”) makes all the

difference. It implies that the unity of Creator and Lawgiver alsoentails the one who has always already reconciled the world of what

appears to us with how things truly are. The God of Judaism is also

the Redeemer. Depending on where we come from and depending

on our frame of reference and interpretation, we can either read

these dogmatic statements as expressions of a faith in our complete

dependence on divine intervention or we can read them as state-

ments encouraging us to think through the implications of the Judaic

worldview and translate them into a mandate for human agency and

action. Both views can be found in rabbinic midrash, and both have

their champions today. In other words, for reasons beyond the pres-

ent consideration, the language of revelation can be interpreted in

either fashion, which means it is open to both literal and figurative

interpretations.

The skeptical or political theological point of view dismisses

the literal interpretation of divine redemption as naïve or exoteric

(i.e., intended only for the masses and for the sake of maintaining

public order), and it dismisses the “liberal” interpretation of divine

20 See David Novak, The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995).

21 Hermann Cohen, “Das Problem der jüdischen Sittenlehre. Eine Kritik vonLazarus’ Ethik des Judentums,” Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 43 (1899): 385–400 and 433–49 (also in Jüdische Schriften, 3 vols., ed. Bruno Strauss[Berlin: Schwetschke, 1924], 3:1–35).

22 Kalman Bland raised the concern, in the concluding discussion of the confer-ence where this paper was first given, that none of us had paid suf ficient attentionto the Law as a source of Jewish philosophy. I hope that the printed version of mycontribution, which in this respect is identical with the one I read, will persuademy esteemed colleague that I share his concern. See especially below, on nomos.


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118 michael zank

redemption as a prompt for human action as ignorant or forgetful

of “human nature” and its abysses. Proceeding from the observation

that the major biblical prophetic text is a body of legislation (i.e.,the Torah or Mosaic Law) and af firming that this Law is good in

the Aristotelian sense, namely suitable to its purpose, the question

is, what is the purpose of the Law? The medieval answer is that

this Law is suitable to the purposes of governing different kinds of

people and leading them to individual perfection, to the degree that

they are capable of attaining it. The perfect Law (and it is indeed

an ideal that, in hindsight, is shown to have been realized by one’s

own respective revealed tradition) addresses different kinds of intel-

ligences at once without giving offense to any one of them. Modernreaders, beginning with Spinoza, rejected the notion that the Law

intentionally contains a plurality of meanings (because it wishes to

address a plurality of audiences) or provides for a plurality of read-

ings. The medieval interpretation is dismissed as a fraudulent imposi-

tion of alien principles on the ancient biblical corpus. Sensitized by

Nietzsche’s critique of the Enlightenment, Strauss’s counter-critique

of the critique of religion and its concomitant Bible science raises

the question of what gave rise to this modern critique. For Strauss,

it was essential to render doubtful the generally shared assumption

that the modern critique of religion was simply rooted in a scien-

tific turn of mind and a concomitant attitude of intellectual probity

and to demonstrate that it was, instead, a neo-Epicurean impulse

that employed science in the service of the promotion of a quest

for freedom from the disturbing qualities of a heteronomous divine

Law.23 In other words, the scientific aspects of the scientific study of

the Bible were not what drove modern critics of revelation to subject

the Bible to “scientifi

c” or critical study. What drove modern Biblescience was the hedonistic interest in happiness, disguised as a quest

for political freedom from ecclesiastical tutelage, as a scientific quest

for truth, or as an argument for the political harmlessness of the

philosophical freedom of thought. Strauss went on to recognize the

superiority of the medievals not because of their faith in or convic-

tion about the insuf ficiency of reason (this Strauss later dismissed

as a “Thomistic detour” of his own) but because they were able

23 This, in a nutshell, is the program of Strauss’s first book, Die ReligionskritikSpinozas als Voraussetzung seiner Bibelwissenschaft (1930) [English: Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken, 1965)].


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to maintain the external force of the Law while emasculating its

hold on the philosophical mind itself. According to this reading, the

medieval solution to the heteronomy imposed by the Law was todistinguish the external sense of the Law that imposes conformity

on our actions from the internal sense that imposes on us the duty

to philosophize and hence requires us to challenge the petrification

of cognitive aspects of the Law.24

The opposite of heteronomy is autonomy or self-legislation. The

Cartesian turn in philosophy involves the displacement of the author-

ity of received knowledge by the certainty of self-knowledge. The

self as the source of certainty establishes itself as the source not just

of the knowledge of nature but also as the source of the laws of thestate. In other words, just as the mind discovers the laws of nature

by which the body is recognized as a determinate object, the mind

recognizes itself (i.e., self-determination) as the source of the law by

which its own happiness as a political being is determined. This

entanglement of theoretical discovery and practical legislation is

characteristic for the course of modern philosophy. The mind—in

somewhat Kantian terms: the transcendental unity of its own pro-

ductions in the form of a system coordinating theoretical and prac-

tical knowledge—is henceforth the most important subject matter

of philosophy, just as God was the most important subject matter

of medieval philosophy, and World or cosmos was the most impor-

tant subject matter of ancient philosophy. If modern philosophy

is—to a large extent—a philosophy of mind, its postmodern critique

arises from the unraveling of the unity and authority of mind.

If the above statement about the similarity between medieval

interpreters of the Law and modern critics of religion is correct,

one may further say—again, with Strauss—that the differencebetween premodern and modern philosophy is not freedom of

thought but the genuine or feigned philosophical belief that all

humans are on principle susceptible to freedom of thought and

freedom of speech. This entails a shift in values: from theory as a

form of happiness attainable only by few to a democratization of

thought and speech, and from a society based on the “natural dif-

ferences among men” to a society based on human rights, social

24 Moses Mendelssohn came to the same conclusion, but he made it public,which led to an inevitable erosion of the authority of halakhah.


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120 michael zank

justice, and universal equality as realistic goals we are obliged to

pursue.

Modern philosophy is propelled by the confidence that the dis-covery of laws of nature entails liberation from preconceived notions

such as that the sun rises in the east and other assumptions stipulated

by perception and imagination and reinforced by linguistic conven-

tion. The liberation of science from assumptions arising from per-

ception and imagination is directly related to the liberation of

society from prejudice.25 The beginning of political modernity is

thus coeval with the beginning of philosophical modernity or mod-

ern scientific empiricism. The age of political revolution is tied to

the scientific revolution by virtue of the problem of human nature.In the question of human nature, necessity (in the form of eternal

laws of nature) meets and unites with contingency (the freedom of

self-determination within the limits of nature). The token of “free-

dom” or “autonomy” is scientific or philosophical reason itself, which

is capable of discovering the laws of nature and hence of knowing

itself. From its very beginning, modern philosophy is therefore not

just natural philosophy but political philosophy.

In the act of founding philosophy anew on the basis of the critical

self-knowledge of reason, philosophy becomes “historical” in that it

progresses from prejudice to true knowledge, from dogmatic assertions

to critique, and from a naïve “experience” guided by our imagina-

tion to critical self-awareness of the epistemological ground of valid

judgment. This progress is purchased at the expense of the loss of

certainty with respect to the highest objects of knowledge, namely,

the existence of God (indicating the unity of thought and will, neces-

sity and freedom, natural and historical teleology), the immortality

of the soul, and freedom itself, which are now classifi

ed as ideas,i.e., according to Kant, mere “intelligibles” or, in Cohen’s term, “fic-

tions” rather than empirical facts. Yet the move that limits scientific

knowledge and philosophical certainty to the “objects of possible

experience” also allows practical reason to extend the power evident

in the “spontaneity of the intellect” in the direction of moral self-

determination. As a result, modern philosophical thought construes

25 Strauss distinguishes between prejudice, by which he means the modern syn-

thesis of reason and revelation that gave rise to the assumption that the equality ofall people was a rational ideal, and the Socratic fight against opinion. See, e.g.,“ ‘Religiöse Lage der Gegenwart’ ” (1930), as in n. 4, above, and cf. Strauss, The Early Writings, pp. 29–33.


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IV. Concept and Functions of nomos

The concept of nomos has a long and eminent history in its originalGreek context, in Judaism, and in the history of philosophy. Its

meanings range from custom to law to the comprehensive determi-

nate order of being as cosmos or physis.

Judaism is a religion or a practice founded on a body of texts and

a set of customs and laws that are conventionally referred to as the

Mosaic Law or the Torah of Moses. The term torah can refer to, or

is shaped by, various shades of meaning of nomos, including custom,

law, and determinate order. However, though Torah translates as

nomos, nomos does not translate as Torah.29

What we call “normative Judaism” is to a large extent determined

by the rabbinic tradition, the Judaism of the “dual Torah,” as Jacob

Neusner has called it, though given its complexity, rabbinic tradition

is surely not to be reduced to any catchphrase. But there may be

certain nonnegotiable foundations that apply to all rabbinic

“Judaisms.” Thus, for example, while from any rabbinic perspective

the authority of Torah is absolute as revelation, the actual contents

or meanings of this revelation are quite fluid; that is, they are deter-

mined by interpretation and decision.30 This means that the author-

ity of Torah is a formal or abstract principle of the Law in its

constitutive function for rabbinic Judaism. But this may be saying

too much already. Rabbinic Judaism is not simply determined by

the authority of Torah as such, but rather by what Jews believe, by

what communities do, and by what certain rabbis and courts of law

decide in light of circumstance, need, and tradition. It is a legal

principle that, in some areas of Torah, local custom overrules rab-

binic halakhah, though, this being a principle of Torah, it does notsuspend the Law as such. Judaism is not ultimately determined by

Torah, but by the Jews who read or interpret or neglect it and draw

democratic and Jewish. The general erosion of Jewish liberalism, the turn of Jewishpolitical thinkers to neoconservative skepticism on questions of equality, is directlyrelated to the realization that the rule of law and genuine democracy underminethe legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.

29 In rabbinic parlance nimus (= nomos) refers to custom and it is never used asa substitute of or equivalent to Torah. In modern Hebrew, nimus refers to conven-

tional rules of conduct or good manners.30 This openness of the process of rabbinic law has been aptly described byMenachem Fisch in Rational Rabbis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).See Noam Zohar’s review in Textual Reasoning 10 (2001), online at http://etext.virginia.edu/journals/tr/archive/volume10/RationalRabbis.html (accessed June 16, 2009).


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on other, nonlegal sources of orientation, including, on occasion,

philosophy; though again, this does not necessarily contravene Torah,

which commands the love and knowledge of God, a commandmentthat, as has been argued, may be taken to be coeval with the pursuit

of philosophy.

By philosophy we either mean a discipline communicated orally

or in writing, similar to the study of Torah, or a practice of thought

exercised by particular individuals, whether communicated to others

or not, a pursuit that is perhaps more akin to mystical contempla-

tion. To the degree that Torah study and philosophical thought

involve reflection on communication and rules of logic, interpreta-

tion, and so forth, Torah study and philosophy may be subject toidentical or similar hermeneutical rules.31 More recently, hermeneu-

tics (rooted in Renaissance symbolism and Enlightenment aesthetics)

has emerged as a kind of Leitwissenschaft , namely, as methodical

attention to the symbolic forms of reality as representation in need

of decoding. Far from substituting for the pious command to “take

and read,” the early modern scientific turn was initially more of an

application of this command to the “book of nature,” at least in its

initial self-understanding.

It is precisely this gentle humanistic rhetoric of receptivity that is

displaced by homo faber who “can because he ought” and whose

intellect is the author of categorical imperatives. To think for oneself

( sapere aude ) displaces (at least ideally speaking) any proceeding from

opinions stated in texts, dismissing all tradition as heteronomous and

aiming to replace sensory perception (“Hear!”) with thought, an

activity that produces law rather than intuiting it.

The point of the Cartesian Enlightenment was certainty and how

to attain it. The path to certainty required calling into question anyand all tradition. Everything had to be subjected to doubt and noth-

ing could be accepted on faith. In this light, the Torah could no

longer claim submission since anything recognized as binding

required not just common assent but certain knowledge. Spinoza

hints at the difference as well as at the possibility of a law to be

grounded in more than mere assent, namely, in a moment of truth.

Thus he sees the Mosaic constitution as initially the expression of

31

On the theoretical and quasi-philosophical underpinnings of rabbinic herme-neutics, see the by now classic work of Max Kadushin, e.g., The Rabbinic Mind (NewYork: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1952), and more recently AlexanderSamely, Forms of Rabbinic Thought and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2007).


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the idea of a radical equality and immediacy of every Israelite (i.e.,

every person then present) before God. This lasted only for a moment

before it gave way to a more conventional form of government basedon fear and mediation, namely, when the Israelites shied away from

speaking to God directly and on an equal footing with Moses.

Although, from a Jewish perspective, life in accordance with the

commandments may be rather unrelated to the pursuit of scientific

truth, modern idealist philosophers, looking to homogenize theory

and practice, felt that Judaism was a perfect example of what pre-

vented people from achieving a unified sense of self. Philosophy,

conceived as the pursuit of certainty by means of casting doubt on

the truth of received religious nomoi , produced a perception of Judaism as the other of philosophy, i.e., as a received religious nomos

blindly accepted. This misperception could only be righted—in the

eyes of Jews as well as non-Jews—if it was addressed using the same

philosophical means that first produced it. Modern Jewish philosophy

thus commenced in the face of a critique of Judaism as heteronomy

par excellence, and the subsequent course of Jewish philosophy was

determined by the particular constellation of a modernity that

criticized its own Christian authorities by means of a critique of the

Mosaic Law, using Judaism as a theological-political cipher and a

whipping boy. Jewish students of philosophy and Judaism undertook

their defense of Mosaism in the name of a reconciliation of Judaism

and the new science of philosophy. The pursuit of this defense is

what we know as modern Jewish philosophy.32 Defending Mosaic

Law in the face of philosophical “autonomism” either took the form

of a historicization of the Law (as expressive of Judaism or the spirit

of the Jewish people), or it took the form of a hermeneutical anal-

ysis of the Jewish symbolic forms as essentially open to reinterpreta-tion as required by shifting philosophical paradigms predicated on

a historicization of philosophy, often invoking Maimonides as a

premodern and hence authentically Jewish authority in order to

authenticate this move as homogeneous with what was claimed to

be the Jewish philosophical tradition. The Jewish nomistic tradition

could thus be maintained as an outward nomos that included the

32

On this conception of Jewish philosophy see my essay “Jüdische Religions-philosophie als Apologie des Mosaismus,” Archivio di fi loso fi a 71, nos. 1–3 (2003):173–82; and see my forthcoming monograph (in German), Jüdische Philosophie als Apologie des Mosaismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck).


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commandment of the pursuit of knowledge rather than exhausting

itself in the conveyance of dogmatic assertions.33

V. The (Homogenizing) Tyranny of Autonomy

In the modern period, as philosophy shifts from the notion of a

timeless (divine) mind to a historical paradigm of thought, academic

philosophy remains widely engaged with classical texts but authority

shifts to the reader who must determine what it is in those classical

texts that still contributes to the problem and problems of philosophy.

Philosophy became historical when reason stepped away from theheteronomy of any philosophical or other tradition to the autonomy

of thought. As a doctrine, the narrative of progress, if considered

irreversible and absolute, constituted a new heteronomy. What served

as the evidence of the truth of this new doctrine, just as miracles

had served as evidence of the truth of Scripture, was evident prog-

ress in science, mathematics, and technology.

The notion of progress still rings true with respect to theoretical

philosophy, at least to the degree that it is identified or associated

with our knowledge of “nature.” When it comes to practical phi-

losophy, i.e., our knowledge of values or of the good, modern phi-

losophy is not just divided but also widely considered bankrupt. This

popular impression really means that, when it comes to our knowl-

edge of nature, we are satisfied to hand it over to specialists and

thus relieve philosophy of its task; after all, most of us no longer feel

the need to reconcile a determinist universe with the notion of free-

dom or belief in the existence of God. But when it comes to the

one thing necessary, the question of the value of human life, we feelthat philosophy has been letting us down.

According to English and French Enlightenment views on natural

right (from Hobbes to Rousseau), rationality and sociality arise as

second-order phenomena, following the primordial order of nature.

The rational decision to enter into a social contract follows upon

the experience of threat that characterizes the state of nature; the

33 Hermeneutical philosophy (e.g., Gadamer, Ricœur) could well be enlisted in

this struggle for a new justification of Judaism, not least because hermeneuticsmakes us aware of our dependence on tradition and language more generally, adependence temporarily obscured by Cartesian philosophy. And yet, even heretradition remains deprived of its erstwhile nomic quality.


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126 michael zank

social contract is based on the wizened decision of individuals to

establish protections against violent death34 rather than on a natural

inclination toward bonding together and mutuality. In contrast, inthe German philosophical tradition (Mendelssohn, Kant, Fichte, but

especially Hegel ), the “empirical” and the “intelligible” are conceived

as coeval. As a result, the natural-right tradition tended to have

recourse to an authoritarian imposition of religion (as an expression

of the sovereign will either of God or of the king or, in Rousseau,

by the volonté générale ), whereas if sociality emerges from within an

immanent and dialectic unity of will and intellect, matter and spirit,

the empirical and the intelligible, then the service rendered by rev-

elation in generating individual morality and obedience to the stateappears as immanent and always already anticipated from within.

In this view, religion itself is not really the expression of a heter-

onomous (political or transcendent) imposition but may count as

evidence of an autonomy that both af firms and perpetually struggles

with human nature as we find it.35

There appears to be no conflict between Torah and natural right,

if by the latter we refer to a Hobbesian construal of the state as the

expression of a shared interest in self-preservation. The individual

enters into a contractual aggregation of human beings in the form of

a society, modeled on the Sinaitic covenant, that requires a superior

power to monitor this contract, be it God or the Leviathan, i.e., the

state. The space of a highest moral order is taken by the common-

sense interest in preserving life and liberty for as many as possible

or, where this appears as an insuf ficient obligation, by a dominant

state-religion. In a Hobbesian society, this religion may be Jewish,

Christian, Hindu, or Muslim, etc., and the only thing curtailing the

power of the dominant religion is the functional limitation the liberalstate imposes on religion within the liberal state, such as limiting it to

34 I follow Leo Strauss in this interpretation of Hobbes. See Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1996), a book first published in 1935.

35 What I describe here, somewhat schematically, suggests also that Continentalphilosophy was more profoundly affected and guided by Spinoza’s monistic intuitionthan were the French philosophes or the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment; or if bothwere “Spinozistic” in some respect, the Continental school tended toward resolvingthe duality of nature (heteronomy) and spirit (autonomy) in the direction of spirit,

whereas the alternate Enlightenments of France and Britain tended to resolve themin a materialist direction that did not become prominent in Germany until themid-1830s, where it triggered radically diverse responses, ranging from F. A. Lange’sneo-Kantianism to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power.


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the private or communal sphere and imposing limits on its political

power. Thus we have modern states with a dominant religion (e.g.,

the Church of England) that espouse the toleration and protectionof religious minorities. This toleration comes with the desire to

assimilate the minority religions to the moderation exerted by the

majority religion within the liberal state. The well-known conflicts

arising from this system need not be rehearsed. (Think of the discus-

sion of the Muslim veil in French, but also in Turkish, society.) The

contemporary debate on religious fundamentalism is very much an

indication of the threat religious commitments pose to this liberal

conception of the state. Radical religion has emerged as the most

effective threat to liberal society.The major modern attack on Judaism, rather than on religion in

general, arose from within the Spinozist tradition of Continental

philosophy. The merging of the empirical and the intelligible required

a reconciliation of natural self-interest and the state in such a way

that morality and the law no longer remained opposite or adjacent

spheres but appeared identical. The state as the highest form of the

spirit, the manifestation of the intelligible good, represents, or strives

to represent in the form of law, the very attitude that constitutes the

state within the intelligible individual to begin with. This reciprocity

of the individual and the state, one and all, this humanity within, is

not imposed from without but striven for from within. The indi-

vidual from which all sociality proceeds is not sinful or egotistical

(or not merely or completely sinful or egotistical ) and hence in need

of correction, but produces sociality by striving for its realization in

the form of justice.

This modern semi-Pelagian idea of the state—a state of always

already or potentially redeemed individuals, a City of God immanentin the City of Man, though not yet fully manifest (since it is merely

intelligible rather than empirical), i.e., an idealist conception of the

state—contrasts with a realism that construes morality as the after-

thought of a primordial fear of violent death and as conditioned by

an externally imposed authority. From the idealist position, Judaism

appears to negate the full human potential, projecting a deficient

morality, and thus comes to represent a kind of “radical evil” (Kant)

where the good (the highest intelligible) is chosen for the seemingly

inferior purpose of preserving the body, i.e., empirical life.Whatever else one may understand modern Jewish philosophy to

be, its most eminent and philosophically profound representatives


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128 michael zank

have been those who struggled with this Spinozistic idealism and

attempted to defend the Mosaic law and the legitimacy of a per-

petuation of a Jewish way of life in the face of this particular philo-sophical challenge. Philosophically mindful Jews found themselves

compelled to defend “Judaism” against a completely new attack

that consisted in a new theory of the state that became regnant at

the very moment when the Jews were invited to join the modern

state as citizens. Contrary to their reputation among Christians

enmeshed in their own anticlerical polemics, many philosophically

minded Jews may have been attracted by the idealistic moralization

of the political sphere that harbored the promise of a full, complete,

and innerlich or “sincere” amalgamation of Jew and Christian in thenew humanistic conception of the state. But the deeply anti-Jewish

disposition of modern Continental philosophy that I have tried to

sketch above made modern Jewish philosophy a tragic enterprise.

The compulsion nevertheless to articulate Judaism, Jewish religion,

and Jewish philosophy in reconciliation with the idealist conception

of the Christian state is what I call the “heteronomy” of modern

Jewish philosophy.

In the nineteenth century, the problem of Jewish citizenship was

debated across Europe. But opposition to the admission of the Jews

to the republic took different forms in different places, and nowhere

did it impact more strongly on Jewish self-definition than in societies

that adopted the new idealism of German philosophy. The much-

debated problem of assimilation is misunderstood if one considers

it merely a matter of dress, speech, and habit. In Germany, integra-

tion required evidence on the part of the Jews that they were

capable of producing the Gesinnung that maintained, sustained, and

not only produced the state but constituted the nation. For this rea-son, it was in Germany that anti-Semitism took root in particular

in and through the agency of a humanistically or romantically

transformed intellectual and academic culture. To the degree that

the assumptions of German idealism penetrated the wider world of

European intellectual culture, the same suspicion of the assimilabil-

ity of the Jews could be found elsewhere, including the Jewish intel-

lectual elite itself, where this theory penetrated perhaps more deeply

than anywhere else.36

36 From a social-psychological perspective, hostility and suspicion of the Jews asunassimilable preceded the rise of modern philosophy and merely adopted a new,


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VI. The Great Escape or “Exodus from ( Jewish) Philosophy”

The Germanic philosophical tradition, if indeed it was a tyranny inthe disguise of freedom, was a recipe for the rule of the commis-

sariat and the spiritual cause of an anti-Judaism more vicious and

profound than was thinkable under the presupposition of the prin-

cipled admission of a natural inequality among human beings. After

its demise, Judaism appears free to return to its own sources of cer-

tainty and to re-establish itself on the basis of its own nomoi , its

customs and traditions, and within the formal and absolute frame-

work of the Law.

The possibility of a return and reaf firmation of the Law, in theform of collective or individual teshuvah, mirrors a general return of,

and to, religion that has been sweeping the intellectual and political

world across the globe, a movement that rose to the level of philo-

sophical reflection among the educated classes of the West around

the time of the First World War. A precursor to this intellectual

return to religion was the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment.

It is thus almost as old as the Enlightenment itself and hence a first-

order phenomenon of modern intellectual history, rather than just

an afterthought or merely a current fad. It is greatly enhanced by

the possibility of reading modern political history as the becoming

explicit of the brutality and violence inherent in the presuppositions

of modern philosophy itself.

Concurrently with the demise of “the German idealism of the

Jewish philosophers” ( Jürgen Habermas), or its receding into the

past, we discern something like an “exodus from ( Jewish) philosophy”

(Margarete Susmann) and the search for new modes or practices of

refl

ection. Put differently, in the attempt to extract themselves fromthe heteronomy of Jewish philosophy, students of Jewish philosophy

took refuge in a variety of alternatives, a process that is still ongoing

or that keeps repeating itself. This exodus from “Jewish philosophy”

turned into a rout with the destruction of European Jewry and a

more philosophical, justification where such was on offer. Whether Jews could becitizens and act in solidarity with non-Jews, as required by the republican idea, wasfamously de

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Jewish Heteronomy