Review of John Connelly's From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012)
ISBN 9780674057821
Reviewed by Gene Zubovich
It may seem strange that a nearly four-hundred page book would be dedicated to fifteen sentences of the proclamation Nostra Aetate, a Vatican II document of 1965 dealing with the relationship between Catholics and other religions. But the subject matter is by no means small: these paragraphs changed the official Catholic teaching on the Jews that had prevailed for 1,700 years. Indeed, John Connelly does not shy away from the word “revolution” in the title of his book, From Enemy To Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933-1965.
Connelly, an historian of East-Central Europe whose first book dealt with the transformation of higher education under Stalinism in Poland, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany, began this research a decade ago, setting out to find Catholic resistance to Hitler's persecution of the Jews during the 1930s. Much to his surprise he found Catholic critiques of antisemitism largely absent. When appeals on behalf of the Jews did appear they lacked a concrete moral language and were full of anti-Judaic assumptions.[1] Catholics, particularly German-speaking Catholics, were part of an intellectual tradition that could not accept Jews as anything other than a cursed people who were destined to suffer for their historical rejection of Jesus.
Connelly does not claim that Catholics didn't help Jews during the 1930s and 1940s, but he does argue that those who helped Jews most—like women's groups—were farthest removed from theological disputes (42). It was the theological absence, the lack of clear statements by bishops or the Vatican, that Connelly sees as the church's biggest failure.
What, then, happened between the 1930s and the Vatican II proclamation of 1965 that declared the Jews to be the “older brothers” of Christians who ought not be converted to Christianity? Connelly argues that the roots of the proclamation came from a small group of Catholics in 1930s Vienna who were concerned with the treatment of the Jews in Nazi Germany. [2] Vienna proved to be a fertile ground for men like Karl Thieme and Johannes Oesterreicher, who formulated a specifically Catholic argument against antisemitism. Thieme, Oesterreicher, and nearly all of the other anti-racist activists in their circle were converts to Catholicism from Judaism and Protestantism. They eschewed nationalisms and freely moved about from place to place without a feeling of rootedness. Without such border-crossers, as Connelly calls them, Catholicism could not have found a new language to speak about the Jews. Without them, he argues, “the Catholic Church would never have 'thought its way' out of the challenges of racist anti-Judaism” (287).
Connelly's early chapters discuss the prevalence of antisemitism within the Catholic Church during the first half of the twentieth century. He points to German-speaking lands as particularly prone to racist assumptions. The border-crossers of Vienna had to contend with a German-language theological tradition in which words—like “Volk” and “Erbsünde” (“inherited sin” instead of “original sin”)—trapped theologians in a biological and racial understanding of theological problems. The chief task of the border-crossers was to root a critique of antisemitism in Catholic theology and to provoke Catholic officials to speak clearly on behalf of the Jews.
At the moral and intellectual center of the battle against racist acquiescence to Nazi policy was an Austro-Jewish convert named John (“Johannes” prior to 1940) Oesterreicher, who became the primary architect of the Vatican II statement on the Jews. Here the book approximates a bildungsroman, as we follow Oesterreicher's (and by extension the Catholic Church's) intellectual and spiritual growth. We witness his quixotic attempt to get Pious XII to speak out clearly on behalf of the Jews during the late 1930s (he asked the Pope to free Catholic soldiers from their oath to Hitler) and his desperate attempt to formulate a Catholic anti-racist theology based on the sparse statements of past popes and councils. He broadcast sermons into Nazi territory that referred to Hitler as the anti-Christ and called on Germans to oppose the Nazi “enemies of the Lord” (161). All the while he continued to believe that the Jews were a people destined to suffer until they turned to Christ. In fact Oesterreicher continued his missionary activities to the Jews until he narrowly escaped arrest and near-certain death by boarding a ship to New York City in 1940.
His parents were not so lucky. His father died in a concentration camp, “thank God, of pneumonia,” he wrote to a friend. “My poor mother, however, was taken to Poland; I need not tell you what that implies” (232-3). This profound personal loss moved Oesterreicher to search for new ways to talk to and about Jews, but the basic missionary impulse remained. Six months after he arrived in the US, Oesterreicher was preaching in New York City and began missionary work amongst New York Jews. Many of the harsh words like “curse” “deicide” and “enemies of God” that had been used by Catholics, including Oesterreicher, in the prior decades disappeared from Catholic discourse during the 1940s and 1950s along with much of the racist antisemitism, but the missionary impulse and anti-Judaism remained intact.
During these years little was said by Catholic theologians on Christian-Jewish relations. The few statements that were made came mainly out of interfaith conferences organized by the American occupation forces and were based on the model of the National Conference of Christians and Jews. For the first time, at least in the twentieth century, Catholic and Jewish leaders in Europe began talking to one another. And it would be through dialogue with Jews that men like Oesterreicher would change their views. His friend and sparring partner Karl Thieme, for example, would ultimately call for an end to a mission to the Jews after a Jewish author pointed out the antisemitic language he had used his book published in the 1930s (198). But these conversations had limited impact on the Church at the time—those who engaged in conversations with Jews did so despite Vatican warnings against interfaith conferences.
Behind the indifference of the Catholic Church toward relations with the Jews was a subtle shift that is described by Connelly but needs further elaboration. Catholics became less likely to read worldly events as providential, demanding acquiescence to God's work. They did not want to say that the Holocaust was God's punishment for the Jews. Instead, “a new way of reading the signs of the times” meant “rejecting as presumptuous the idea that any human can know whether and how God might punish humanity” (173). How this change came about is solely attributed to the Holocaust but there were certainly other developments that helped propel this momentous change, which seems underemphasized in this book. The earlier reading of events was a major theological presupposition of those (including Oesterreicher) who believed that Hitler's persecution of the Jews was part of a curse resulting from deicide. After the Holocaust, Catholics came to see worldly events as something that required ethical action.
But things were slow to change. Oesterreicher founded an institute at Seton Hall University that he described as “missionary” in 1953. Yet, somehow, his attitude began to shift in ways he would never fully acknowledge. By the late 1950s he began describing his work at Seton Hall as “ecumenical” and began turning away entreaties from missionaries interested in working with Jews.[2] He came to emphasize—based on a passage from Romans 9 through 11—that missionary efforts ought to be directed at Catholics themselves and that the eschatological expectations of Jewish conversion en masse would remain mysterious and uncertain. Based on these passages of St. Paul's writings, as well as the thinking of his Austrian cohort, Oesterreicher found new ways to talk about Jews as “older brothers,” words that would find their way into the Vatican II statement on the Jews.
The book concludes with the developments of Vatican II. Connelly makes clear that the new statement was by no means inevitable. In fact, he argues, the theological implications of De Judaeis (the statement on the Jews) went further than many of the bishops who voted for it were comfortable with. Early drafts of the proclamation had absolved Jews of ancient charges of deicide and spoke of the Jews as clearly loved by God. This new way of talking about the Jews was opposed by some Catholic leaders but also by several Arab states in the Middle East. Catholic bishops working in Muslim lands worried about repercussions of the statement. Indeed, the Syrian and Jordanian governments protested against the absolution of Jewish guilt for Christ's crucifixion (250). The conservative Roman Curia, the theological center of Catholicism, shortened the draft to exclude any mention of deicide and expressed hope that Jews would one day join the church. But reports of the early draft had already been leaked to the press and the ensuing controversy, including a statement by Holocaust-survivor Rabbi Abraham Heschel that he would prefer Auschwitz over conversion, meant that backtracking would be impossible without severe humiliation. In the end the statement lacked any mention of the Holocaust or the Church's own responsibility for antisemitism. But the refutation of the deicide charge was reinstated and the statement spoke in positive language that God continued to love the Jews. Many contemporary observers complained that the statement was mild and should have been made long ago. But Connelly is persuasive in showing what a major departure this was from just decades earlier.
Specialists in American intellectual history will note that liberalism plays no role in the story told in From Enemy To Brother. The United States is one of the settings for Connelly's story and he notes the more tolerant atmosphere of US Catholicism in comparison with that of Europe. But the roots of the Vatican II proclamation on the Jews are found in an Austro-fascist context, where many of the protagonists adopted a form of personalism that had much in common with fascist corporatism. Connelly stresses that the conditions of Austria were ripe in creating border-crossers and that there were advantages to thinking through specifically Catholic arguments in that context. But all this begs the question: why did American Catholics and Protestants, who began talking to Jews well before their Europeans counterparts, not develop a more accommodating theology?
The United States, after all, had a strong tradition of religious tolerance that expressed itself in the “tri-faith” or “Judeo-Christian” concepts.[3] And individual figures developed promising ideas about the Jews earlier than in the European context. Reinhold Niebuhr, a major theologian during the middle of the twentieth century, is a particularly good example of someone arising out of the liberal tradition and developing positive attitudes towards Jews. As late as 1923 Niebuhr had argued for a mission to the Jews but just three years later he changed his mind in an article that praised Jews for their ethics and theological tradition. In the same article he sounded like a modern-day pluralist when he disavowed the need for Jews to convert and encouraged Jews to perpetuate their own communities. This would later lead Niebuhr to become one of the first and most prominent religious figures to sound warnings about Nazi treatment of the Jews and to urge government aid. He would also become a life-long supporter of Zionism.
Niebuhr’s thought on the Jews was largely ignored by his peers, much like Oesterreicher’s, and it was not until Vatican II that Protestant denominations would reconsider their positions on Jewish conversion. Indeed the story of Protestant inaction on behalf of the victims of the Holocaust parallels the Catholic one. In the US the leading Protestant journal The Christian Century expressed skepticism toward atrocity stories. The Federal Council of Churches, the united voice of ecumenical Protestantism, sponsored a Day of Compassion in 1942 but it ended in embarrassment because of low participation and general indifference.[4] Moreover, Niebuhr himself did not fully develop his thoughts on the Jews until the 1960s and 1970s, largely in response to Vatican II.[5]
As it turns out, many of the critiques of racism and antisemitism produced by Protestants and Catholics during the mid-century were more often rooted in political liberalism than in theology. Leading protestants often spoke confidently, prior to the 1960s, as spokesmen for the American liberal tradition and they saw little need to tackle issues of pluralism from a theological standpoint.[6] American Catholics had a more tentative relationship with American liberalism prior to Vatican II. But figures like John Courtney Murray were working in the 1940s and 1950s to reconcile the two. And when American Catholics spoke out on behalf of Jews, as they did in the wake of Kristallnacht, they usually spoke the language of political liberalism.[7]
Perhaps recourse to political liberalism created an atmosphere in which difficult theological issues could be avoided. Why bother reconciling the book of John with Romans when you could appeal to the Bill of Rights or the principle of equality of all peoples? Connelly, however, makes it clear that there is a special relationship between Catholics and Jews that could not be done away with through appeals to universal equality (248). One simply could not simultaneously affirm equality of all peoples while believing that Jews lived under a curse.
From Enemy to Brother should become required reading for historians interested in modern religion, cosmopolitanism, and pluralism. The book provokes difficult questions about the American liberal tradition and its relationship to religion. How did American theologians reconcile the affirmation of universal equality with the kinds of theological problems described by Connelly? Were the kinds of arguments against antisemitism produced by American theologians who affirmed the notions of “Tri-Faith” or “Judeo-Christian” America less tenable and convincing than those produced by Oesterreicher and other border-crossers? Did Protestants coexist as easily with the American liberal tradition as they believed they did?
From Enemy to Brother is a powerful and moving account of the origins and passage of the 1965 statement on the Jews that changed centuries of official Catholic teaching. It is a book that pushes historians to explore new avenues in intellectual and religious history. For specialists in American intellectual history in particular Connelly's book raises important questions and opens up new subject matter for discussion.
_____________________
[1] On the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Judaism, a distinction Connelly uses but does not fully accept, see George M. Fredrickson, Racism: A Short History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003)
[2] Connelly acknowledges the scholarship on French Catholic thought on the Jews and discusses the work of Leon Bloy and Jacques Maritain. He contends, however, that the German-language Catholic group went further than the French, since the latter group never moved beyond its anti-Judaic assumptions. He further argues that the German-language thought is more relevant to the discussion of Vatican II
[32] At the time “inter-faith” was the most common way to describe relations between Christians and Jews, which implied a much clearer separation than “ecumenical”. On the notion of “interfaith” see Kevin Schultz, Tri-Faith America: How Postwar Catholics and Jews Held America to Its Protestant Promise (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
[3] Martin E. Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 3: Under God, Indivisible, 1941-1960 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Schultz, Tri-Faith America. William R. Hutchison, Religious Pluralism in America: The Contentious History of a Founding Ideal (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003).
[ 4] On the Day of Compassion, see Marty, Modern American Religion, Volume 3, pp. 61-62. On Protestant indifference toward Jewish suffering see Robert W. Ross, So It Was True: The American Protestant Press and the Nazi Persecution of the Jews; also David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust. The major exceptions were the historical Peace Churches (Quakers, Brethren, etc.) and the Unitarian Church.
[5] On Niebuhr as a product of the liberal theological tradition see Richard Fox, Reinhold Niebuhr: A Biography (New York: Pantheon, 1985) and Gary Dorrien, Social Ethics in the Making: Interpreting an American Tradition (New York: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2008); see also Dorrien, The Making of American Liberal Theology: Idealism, Realism and Modernity, 1900-1950 (New York: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003).
[6] On the interrelationship between political and theological liberalism see Leigh E. Schmidt and Sally M. Promey, ed., American Religious Liberalism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).
[7] John T. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003); American Religious Responses to Kristallnacht, ed. Maria Mazzenga (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
_________
Gene Zubovich is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. He is completing his dissertation on Protestant social thought during the 1940s.
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Jumat, 28 September 2012
Senin, 24 September 2012
Revisiting Leo Strauss's "Why We Remain Jews" (A High Holidays Post)
We're currently in the middle of the Jewish High Holidays: last Monday and Tuesday were Rosh Hashanah; Yom Kippur starts this Tuesday at sunset. I have a fairly complicated, and fluctuating, personal relationship to Judaism. I can't--and don't--claim to be a believer of any sort. Yet I always celebrate Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Since moving to Norman, I've attended a traditional High Holiday minyan that a number of faculty and community members put together at the University of Oklahoma's Hillel. Being essentially a non-believer yet spending all day on Yom Kippur fasting and attending shul both is, and isn't, unusual. It's unusual because, on the face of it, it doesn't make a lot of sense (it puzzled many of my non-Jewish friends in college). Yet, within the Jewish community, it's its own kind of tradition. People like me are often called "three-day Jews," a term that began life entirely pejoratively within the late-nineteenth or early twentieth-century German Jewish community, but now has slightly less negative baggage associated with it.*
Thinking about these issues this year led me to reread Leo Strauss's lecture, "Why We Remain Jews," which was given at the University of Chicago's Hillel half a century ago, on February 4, 1962. This talk has received much attention since its initial publication in the 1990s.** The lecture's appearance in print, and the subsequent interest in it, has reflected a more general reconsideration of Strauss as a Jewish thinker and as a thinker about Jewish things that has taken place in the last two decades or so, and which has led Strauss to be taken more seriously by a variety of academics outside the intellectual circle defined by his students and his students' students.
"Why We Remain Jews," in particular, seems to have an appeal for people who have an otherwise ambivalent relationship to Strauss. To take two examples: Eugene Sheppard concludes his critical, but not hostile, intellectual biography of the young Leo Strauss, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile (Brandeis, 2006), with a discussion of "Why We Remain Jews." This leads into the book's two concluding, unusually personal paragraphs, in which Sheppard notes that while he "reject[s] many of Strauss's fundamental convictions about humanity and politics," he sees a "progressive and radical alternative" in Strauss that has been, as yet, too little explored.*** The political scientist and anti-Straussian student of Straussians Anne Norton provides another example. Norton, author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (Yale, 2004), which excoriates the Straussians while attempting to rescue Strauss's legacy from them, gave a talk at a conference I attended on Leo Strauss in Nottingham, England, in which she used "Why We Remain Jews" as the (somewhat, but only somewhat, ironic) basis of a bitterly righteous critique of Guantanamo and the torture and detention policies initiated by George W. Bush. Having largely blamed Straussians for what went wrong in the Bush years in her book, Norton managed to find in Strauss's "Why We Remain Jews" resources with which to attack what she saw as his students' works.
In the broadest sense, Strauss makes a case in "Why We Remain Jews" that Judaism as a religion, very traditionally conceived, remains necessary, even for those Jews for whom religious belief "is not feasible, humanly speaking" (320). Such a message might, in principle, be illuminating for Jews like myself. And it was in this spirit that I reread the text during these High Holidays.
What I found, however, was not a particularly usable Strauss, at least not for me.
Like practically everything written by Leo Strauss, "Why We Remain Jews" is a complicated, multilayered text, and I'm not going to be able to summarize it comprehensively in a blog post (it's available, if you're interested, at the Internet Archive, at the link above). The title as well as the subtitle ("Can Jewish Faith and History Still Speak to Us?") were not chosen by Strauss. Instead, his talk was one of a series of lectures on this theme, which seems to have been chosen by the U of C Hillel Rabbi Maurice Pekarsky. Strauss reframes the theme in terms of "the Jewish Question," which Strauss does not explicitly define, but which he seems to understand very traditionally. And his overall thesis about it is, at first glance, very straightforward: "there is no solution to the Jewish problem" (317).
Much of the talk consists of rejecting a series of potential solutions. Individual acts of assimilation are generally doomed to failure, as people will continue to recognize the assimilated Jew (whether he has assimilated to Christianity or to secularism) as a Jew and will continue to discriminate against him (313-317).**** Collective assimilation "as a sect like any other sect" is also, in Strauss's view impossible, in part because such sects are entirely voluntary, while one's status as a Jew is a matter, in the first instance, of birth (318). A third possible solution is "assimilation as a nation," i.e. Zionism. But Strauss, who had been active in Zionist circles in his youth, rejects Zionism as a solution to the Jewish problem, as well. "Political Zionism," which stressed the creation of a Jewish state was too strictly political: "The mind was in no way employed, or even the heart was in no way employed, in matters Jewish" (319). "Cultural Zionism," created in reaction to this deficit, hoped to supplement political Zionism by making "products of the Jewish mind" central to Zionism. But Strauss suggests that this effort was doomed to fail, as the "rock bottom of any Jewish culture is the Bible, the Talmud, and the Midrash. And if you take these things with a minimum of respect or seriousness, you must say that they were not meant to be products of the Jewish mind"(319-20). This leads, in turn, to "religious Zionism," which runs aground on the fact that some Jews simply cannot return to the faith of their ancestors.
Nonetheless, argues Strauss, "[i]t is necessary to accept one's past. That means that out of this undeniable necessity one must make a virtue. The virtue in question is fidelity, loyalty, piety in the old Latin sense of the word pietas" (320). There follows a long discussion of varieties of anti-Jewish sentiment through the ages, meant to establish both the noble nature of Jewish belief and the heroic nature of Jewish struggle against persecution. After a somewhat ironic side journey to Nietzsche's Morgenröte (The Dawn), aphorism 205 ("Of the people of Israel"), which Strauss uses to suggest that the creation of the state of Israel is, in a positive sense, the fulfillment of Nietzsche's radical vision of Jewish assimilation, Strauss reaches his conclusion: Judaism is a "heroic delusion." After referencing the prayer Aleinu as "the greatest expression" of this delusion, Strauss elaborates: "What is a delusion? We also say a 'dream.' No nobler dream was ever dreamt. It is surely nobler to be a victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and wallow in it." (328)
Strauss concludes with a discussion of the insufficiency of "positivism" and the need for science, too, to strive for the infinite:
In a sense, I think Cropsey has hit the nail on the head, despite the fact that classical philosophy ("Athens") goes virtually unmentioned in the talk. Strauss's theme of "Jerusalem and Athens" consisted of the notion that revealed religion and classical philosophy were in constant tension with each other, and that the vibrancy of the West had historically depended on this tension. But modern political philosophy threatened both sides of this binary.
Classical philosophy's most significant appearance in "Why We Remain Jews" is Strauss's invocation of the virtue of pietas as underscoring the need for Jews who cannot believe to nonetheless remain loyal to the faith of their ancestors. Strauss, it should be said, was such a Jew: an atheist by belief, but willing to affirm the importance of the most traditional understanding of Jewish religion as revealed, divine law. Strauss himself embraced neither of the possibilities that he invokes at the end of his talk, science and revealed religion. Then again, the careful listener will have noted that these are all that can be expected of "people in general." And, in Strauss's view, those fit for philosophy are, by definition, not "people in general."
For all its intellectual interest and occasional elegance, "Why We Remain Jews" remains rather unappealing to me, for the same reason that I find most of Strauss's political and philosophical conceptions unappealing. At its heart is a rather pessimistic and deeply hierarchical understanding of human possibilities. Whatever else it may mean, my fasting on Wednesday will not be an attempt on my part to forestall nihilism by publicly reaffirming a necessary, noble delusion.
To all our Jewish readers: G'mar chatima tovah!
____________________________________________
* In the interest of full disclosure, like many contemporary American "three-day Jews," I actually only celebrate one day of Rosh Hashanah, but I also celebrate Hanukkah and Passover. Yet the old German epithet remains.
** "Why We Remain Jews" first appeared in print in Kenneth Deutch and Walter Nicgorski (eds), Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), pp. 43-79. It was subsequently reprinted in Leo Strauss (Kenneth Hart Green, ed.), Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought (Albany: SUNY, 1997), pp. 311-356. Page numbers above reference this second work, which is also what I have linked to above.
*** Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, pp. 119-130.
**** This point is accompanied by a rather Friedmanite discussion of the impossibility of preventing discrimination in a liberal society, complete with warnings that the USSR is a fine example of a country that has tried to legally prohibit discrimination. Like his fellow German-Jewish émigré Hannah Arendt, Strauss was skeptical about the advisability--or even the possibility--of attempting to legally end racial discrimination.
UPDATE (5:36 pm CDT, 9/25): I've corrected the title of the Norton book above. I had mistakenly repeated the (very similar) title of the Sheppard book when originally posting this.
Thinking about these issues this year led me to reread Leo Strauss's lecture, "Why We Remain Jews," which was given at the University of Chicago's Hillel half a century ago, on February 4, 1962. This talk has received much attention since its initial publication in the 1990s.** The lecture's appearance in print, and the subsequent interest in it, has reflected a more general reconsideration of Strauss as a Jewish thinker and as a thinker about Jewish things that has taken place in the last two decades or so, and which has led Strauss to be taken more seriously by a variety of academics outside the intellectual circle defined by his students and his students' students.
"Why We Remain Jews," in particular, seems to have an appeal for people who have an otherwise ambivalent relationship to Strauss. To take two examples: Eugene Sheppard concludes his critical, but not hostile, intellectual biography of the young Leo Strauss, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile (Brandeis, 2006), with a discussion of "Why We Remain Jews." This leads into the book's two concluding, unusually personal paragraphs, in which Sheppard notes that while he "reject[s] many of Strauss's fundamental convictions about humanity and politics," he sees a "progressive and radical alternative" in Strauss that has been, as yet, too little explored.*** The political scientist and anti-Straussian student of Straussians Anne Norton provides another example. Norton, author of Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (Yale, 2004), which excoriates the Straussians while attempting to rescue Strauss's legacy from them, gave a talk at a conference I attended on Leo Strauss in Nottingham, England, in which she used "Why We Remain Jews" as the (somewhat, but only somewhat, ironic) basis of a bitterly righteous critique of Guantanamo and the torture and detention policies initiated by George W. Bush. Having largely blamed Straussians for what went wrong in the Bush years in her book, Norton managed to find in Strauss's "Why We Remain Jews" resources with which to attack what she saw as his students' works.
In the broadest sense, Strauss makes a case in "Why We Remain Jews" that Judaism as a religion, very traditionally conceived, remains necessary, even for those Jews for whom religious belief "is not feasible, humanly speaking" (320). Such a message might, in principle, be illuminating for Jews like myself. And it was in this spirit that I reread the text during these High Holidays.
What I found, however, was not a particularly usable Strauss, at least not for me.
Like practically everything written by Leo Strauss, "Why We Remain Jews" is a complicated, multilayered text, and I'm not going to be able to summarize it comprehensively in a blog post (it's available, if you're interested, at the Internet Archive, at the link above). The title as well as the subtitle ("Can Jewish Faith and History Still Speak to Us?") were not chosen by Strauss. Instead, his talk was one of a series of lectures on this theme, which seems to have been chosen by the U of C Hillel Rabbi Maurice Pekarsky. Strauss reframes the theme in terms of "the Jewish Question," which Strauss does not explicitly define, but which he seems to understand very traditionally. And his overall thesis about it is, at first glance, very straightforward: "there is no solution to the Jewish problem" (317).
Much of the talk consists of rejecting a series of potential solutions. Individual acts of assimilation are generally doomed to failure, as people will continue to recognize the assimilated Jew (whether he has assimilated to Christianity or to secularism) as a Jew and will continue to discriminate against him (313-317).**** Collective assimilation "as a sect like any other sect" is also, in Strauss's view impossible, in part because such sects are entirely voluntary, while one's status as a Jew is a matter, in the first instance, of birth (318). A third possible solution is "assimilation as a nation," i.e. Zionism. But Strauss, who had been active in Zionist circles in his youth, rejects Zionism as a solution to the Jewish problem, as well. "Political Zionism," which stressed the creation of a Jewish state was too strictly political: "The mind was in no way employed, or even the heart was in no way employed, in matters Jewish" (319). "Cultural Zionism," created in reaction to this deficit, hoped to supplement political Zionism by making "products of the Jewish mind" central to Zionism. But Strauss suggests that this effort was doomed to fail, as the "rock bottom of any Jewish culture is the Bible, the Talmud, and the Midrash. And if you take these things with a minimum of respect or seriousness, you must say that they were not meant to be products of the Jewish mind"(319-20). This leads, in turn, to "religious Zionism," which runs aground on the fact that some Jews simply cannot return to the faith of their ancestors.
Nonetheless, argues Strauss, "[i]t is necessary to accept one's past. That means that out of this undeniable necessity one must make a virtue. The virtue in question is fidelity, loyalty, piety in the old Latin sense of the word pietas" (320). There follows a long discussion of varieties of anti-Jewish sentiment through the ages, meant to establish both the noble nature of Jewish belief and the heroic nature of Jewish struggle against persecution. After a somewhat ironic side journey to Nietzsche's Morgenröte (The Dawn), aphorism 205 ("Of the people of Israel"), which Strauss uses to suggest that the creation of the state of Israel is, in a positive sense, the fulfillment of Nietzsche's radical vision of Jewish assimilation, Strauss reaches his conclusion: Judaism is a "heroic delusion." After referencing the prayer Aleinu as "the greatest expression" of this delusion, Strauss elaborates: "What is a delusion? We also say a 'dream.' No nobler dream was ever dreamt. It is surely nobler to be a victim of the most noble dream than to profit from a sordid reality and wallow in it." (328)
Strauss concludes with a discussion of the insufficiency of "positivism" and the need for science, too, to strive for the infinite:
the object of science is everything that is--being. The belief admitted by all believers in science today--that science is by its nature essentially progressive, and eternally progressive--implies, without saying it, that being is mysterious. And here is the point where the two lines I have tried to trace do not meet exactly, but where they come within hailing distance. And, I believe, to expect more in a general way, of people in general, would be unreasonable. (329)After Strauss finished, Joseph Cropsey, Strauss's old friend and colleague, who had introduced the talk, noted "Dr. Strauss is known to have spoken other times on the theme of 'Jerusalem and Athens.' My only observation tonight is, I believe he has done it again." (329)
In a sense, I think Cropsey has hit the nail on the head, despite the fact that classical philosophy ("Athens") goes virtually unmentioned in the talk. Strauss's theme of "Jerusalem and Athens" consisted of the notion that revealed religion and classical philosophy were in constant tension with each other, and that the vibrancy of the West had historically depended on this tension. But modern political philosophy threatened both sides of this binary.
Classical philosophy's most significant appearance in "Why We Remain Jews" is Strauss's invocation of the virtue of pietas as underscoring the need for Jews who cannot believe to nonetheless remain loyal to the faith of their ancestors. Strauss, it should be said, was such a Jew: an atheist by belief, but willing to affirm the importance of the most traditional understanding of Jewish religion as revealed, divine law. Strauss himself embraced neither of the possibilities that he invokes at the end of his talk, science and revealed religion. Then again, the careful listener will have noted that these are all that can be expected of "people in general." And, in Strauss's view, those fit for philosophy are, by definition, not "people in general."
For all its intellectual interest and occasional elegance, "Why We Remain Jews" remains rather unappealing to me, for the same reason that I find most of Strauss's political and philosophical conceptions unappealing. At its heart is a rather pessimistic and deeply hierarchical understanding of human possibilities. Whatever else it may mean, my fasting on Wednesday will not be an attempt on my part to forestall nihilism by publicly reaffirming a necessary, noble delusion.
To all our Jewish readers: G'mar chatima tovah!
____________________________________________
* In the interest of full disclosure, like many contemporary American "three-day Jews," I actually only celebrate one day of Rosh Hashanah, but I also celebrate Hanukkah and Passover. Yet the old German epithet remains.
** "Why We Remain Jews" first appeared in print in Kenneth Deutch and Walter Nicgorski (eds), Leo Strauss: Political Philosopher and Jewish Thinker (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1994), pp. 43-79. It was subsequently reprinted in Leo Strauss (Kenneth Hart Green, ed.), Jewish Philosophy and the Crisis of Modernity: Essays and Lectures in Modern Jewish Thought (Albany: SUNY, 1997), pp. 311-356. Page numbers above reference this second work, which is also what I have linked to above.
*** Sheppard, Leo Strauss and the Politics of Exile, pp. 119-130.
**** This point is accompanied by a rather Friedmanite discussion of the impossibility of preventing discrimination in a liberal society, complete with warnings that the USSR is a fine example of a country that has tried to legally prohibit discrimination. Like his fellow German-Jewish émigré Hannah Arendt, Strauss was skeptical about the advisability--or even the possibility--of attempting to legally end racial discrimination.
UPDATE (5:36 pm CDT, 9/25): I've corrected the title of the Norton book above. I had mistakenly repeated the (very similar) title of the Sheppard book when originally posting this.
Senin, 25 Juli 2011
The Frankfurt School, Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories, and American Conservatism
 |
| Max Horkheimer (left) and Theodor Adorno |
But while I think I have a fairly good grasp of the Frankfurt School and its legacy, in reading coverage of this weekend's terrorist attack in Norway, I discovered that there was one aspect of that legacy of which I was utterly unaware: the role that the Frankfurt School plays in right-wing conspiracy theories about a Jewish, Marxist attempt to destroy Western civilization.
In a story on the website Crooks & Liars, David Neiwert, an award-winning independent journalist and blogger who tracks the far right and its connections to mainstream conservatism, writes that the 1,500 page manifesto of Anders Breivik, the right-wing extremist who perpetrated the Norwegian attacks, largely focuses on the threat of "Cultural Marxism." Neiwert quotes Chip Berlet, another investigative journalist who tracks right-wing networks:
Breivik championed opposition to "Cultural Marxism," a right-wing antisemitic concept developed primarily by William Lind of the US-based Free Congress Foundation, but also the Lyndon LaRouche network.Neiwert goes on to note that the idea of "Cultural Marxism" has already filtered into much more mainstream conservative circles in this country. In particular, Republican dirty trickster Andrew Breitbart has become a major vector for the idea of "Cultural Marxism" and the supposed iniquity of the Frankfurt School.
... The idea is that a small group of Marxist Jews who formed the Frankfurt School set out to destroy Western Culture through a conspiracy to promote multiculturalism and collectivist economic theories.
Breitbart's recent book Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! goes into some detail about the Frankfurt School, and has received much notice in the conservative media for doing so.
For example, in a favorable review of Breitbart's book that appeared in the Washington Times, Wes Vernon notes that:
Mr. Breitbart fingers the people who later would aid and abet the importation of cultural and political poison to our shores. He “names names” of those in this drama who arguably were serious threats to the nation’s security.
The chapter’s 21 pages track an in-depth research on the influence of such intellectual rogues as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Wilhelm Reich and their ilk.
The “Breakthrough” chapter is at its best when it traces the transfer to the United States of the German-hatched Frankfurt School, or the Institute for Social Research (ISR) funded by Felix Weil, a young radical from Frankfurt, Germany, who used money from his rich grandfather while preaching the downfall of the capitalist system.
The Frankfurt School “was really a precursor to John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, funded by the Hungarian-born George Soros.”
The Frankfurt School, from its new American home at Columbia University, soon repaid America’s hospitality by unleashing “critical theory” among the populace. That term was coined by Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer. Mr. Breitbart describes it as encompassing the idea of “criticizing everyone and everything everywhere,” or making “society totally unworkable by making everything basically meaningless.”
This book further informs us that the late, famous broadcaster Edward R. Murrow “helped ship in many of the Frankfurt School’s greatest minds.”
“They walked right into our cultural institutions,” according to Mr. Breitbart, “and [when they] advanced their leadership, their language, their lexicon,” too many ignored them. That is the most dangerous thing you can do with “a driven leftist intellectual clique.”
Vernon's review gives you a sense of the extraordinary scope of this particular conspiracy theory.
A glance at the terrorist Anders Breivik's 1,500-page, English-language manifesto reveals other links to mainstream American conservative rhetoric, as well. "Political correctness" is an important Breivik theme. He associates this idea, too, with the Frankfurt School:
Just what is “Political Correctness?” Political Correctness is in fact cultural Marxism (Cultural Communism) – Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. The effort to translate Marxism from economics into culture did not begin with the student rebellion of the 1960s. It goes back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. In 1923, in Germany, a group of Marxists founded an institute devoted to making the transition, the Institute of Social Research (later known as the Frankfurt School). One of its founders, George Lukacs, stated its purpose as answering the question, “Who shall save us from Western Civilisation?” The Frankfurt School gained profound influence in European and American universities after many of its leading lights fled and spread all over Europe and even to the United States in the 1930s to escape National Socialism in Germany. In Western Europe it gained influence in universities from 1945.There are obviously a lot of threads that one might pull in this story, regarding, among other things, the relationship between mainstream conservatism and the violent radical right, the strong base of antisemitism that (often silently) underwrites a lot right-wing rhetoric, the deep anti-intellectual and anti-academic tendencies in these modes of thought, and the peculiar role that Lyndon LaRouche and his minions have played in encouraging conspiracy theories of all sorts (they are also an important source for left-wing conspiracy theories about Leo Strauss and the Straussians).
But rather than elaborate on any of these thoughts, I'll stop at this point, having noted this peculiar, poisonous meme which shows no sign of dying off, even after it has been connected to this weekend's deadly attacks.
The Frankfurt School, Right-Wing Conspiracy Theories, and American Conservatism
|
| Max Horkheimer (left) and Theodor Adorno |
But while I think I have a fairly good grasp of the Frankfurt School and its legacy, in reading coverage of this weekend's terrorist attack in Norway, I discovered that there was one aspect of that legacy of which I was utterly unaware: the role that the Frankfurt School plays in right-wing conspiracy theories about a Jewish, Marxist attempt to destroy Western civilization.
In a story on the website Crooks & Liars, David Neiwert, an award-winning independent journalist and blogger who tracks the far right and its connections to mainstream conservatism, writes that the 1,500 page manifesto of Anders Breivik, the right-wing extremist who perpetrated the Norwegian attacks, largely focuses on the threat of "Cultural Marxism." Neiwert quotes Chip Berlet, another investigative journalist who tracks right-wing networks:
Breivik championed opposition to "Cultural Marxism," a right-wing antisemitic concept developed primarily by William Lind of the US-based Free Congress Foundation, but also the Lyndon LaRouche network.Neiwert goes on to note that the idea of "Cultural Marxism" has already filtered into much more mainstream conservative circles in this country. In particular, Republican dirty trickster Andrew Breitbart has become a major vector for the idea of "Cultural Marxism" and the supposed iniquity of the Frankfurt School.
... The idea is that a small group of Marxist Jews who formed the Frankfurt School set out to destroy Western Culture through a conspiracy to promote multiculturalism and collectivist economic theories.
Breitbart's recent book Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World! goes into some detail about the Frankfurt School, and has received much notice in the conservative media for doing so.
For example, in a favorable review of Breitbart's book that appeared in the Washington Times, Wes Vernon notes that:
Mr. Breitbart fingers the people who later would aid and abet the importation of cultural and political poison to our shores. He “names names” of those in this drama who arguably were serious threats to the nation’s security.
The chapter’s 21 pages track an in-depth research on the influence of such intellectual rogues as Herbert Marcuse, Theodor W. Adorno, Wilhelm Reich and their ilk.
The “Breakthrough” chapter is at its best when it traces the transfer to the United States of the German-hatched Frankfurt School, or the Institute for Social Research (ISR) funded by Felix Weil, a young radical from Frankfurt, Germany, who used money from his rich grandfather while preaching the downfall of the capitalist system.
The Frankfurt School “was really a precursor to John Podesta’s Center for American Progress, funded by the Hungarian-born George Soros.”
The Frankfurt School, from its new American home at Columbia University, soon repaid America’s hospitality by unleashing “critical theory” among the populace. That term was coined by Frankfurt School philosopher Max Horkheimer. Mr. Breitbart describes it as encompassing the idea of “criticizing everyone and everything everywhere,” or making “society totally unworkable by making everything basically meaningless.”
This book further informs us that the late, famous broadcaster Edward R. Murrow “helped ship in many of the Frankfurt School’s greatest minds.”
“They walked right into our cultural institutions,” according to Mr. Breitbart, “and [when they] advanced their leadership, their language, their lexicon,” too many ignored them. That is the most dangerous thing you can do with “a driven leftist intellectual clique.”
Vernon's review gives you a sense of the extraordinary scope of this particular conspiracy theory.
A glance at the terrorist Anders Breivik's 1,500-page, English-language manifesto reveals other links to mainstream American conservative rhetoric, as well. "Political correctness" is an important Breivik theme. He associates this idea, too, with the Frankfurt School:
Just what is “Political Correctness?” Political Correctness is in fact cultural Marxism (Cultural Communism) – Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms. The effort to translate Marxism from economics into culture did not begin with the student rebellion of the 1960s. It goes back at least to the 1920s and the writings of the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci. In 1923, in Germany, a group of Marxists founded an institute devoted to making the transition, the Institute of Social Research (later known as the Frankfurt School). One of its founders, George Lukacs, stated its purpose as answering the question, “Who shall save us from Western Civilisation?” The Frankfurt School gained profound influence in European and American universities after many of its leading lights fled and spread all over Europe and even to the United States in the 1930s to escape National Socialism in Germany. In Western Europe it gained influence in universities from 1945.There are obviously a lot of threads that one might pull in this story, regarding, among other things, the relationship between mainstream conservatism and the violent radical right, the strong base of antisemitism that (often silently) underwrites a lot right-wing rhetoric, the deep anti-intellectual and anti-academic tendencies in these modes of thought, and the peculiar role that Lyndon LaRouche and his minions have played in encouraging conspiracy theories of all sorts (they are also an important source for left-wing conspiracy theories about Leo Strauss and the Straussians).
But rather than elaborate on any of these thoughts, I'll stop at this point, having noted this peculiar, poisonous meme which shows no sign of dying off, even after it has been connected to this weekend's deadly attacks.
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