History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

Luria postulated the thought that Jewish miseries were a symptom of the breakdown of the cosmos. Its shattered husks, or klippot, which are evil, none the less contain tiny sparks, tikkim, of the divine light. This imprisoned light is the Exile of the Jews. Even the divine Shekinah itself is part of the trapped light, subject to evil influences. The Jewish people have a dual significance in this broken

cosmos, both as symbols and as active agents. As symbols, the injuries inflicted on them by the gentiles show how evil hurts the light. But as agents they have the task of restoring the cosmos. By the strictest observance of the Law, they can release the sparks of light trapped in the cosmic husks. When this restitution has been made, the Exile of the Light will end, the Messiah will come and Redemption will take place.

The attractiveness of this theory to ordinary Jews was that it enabled them to believe they had...

By their very piety, they could accelerate and resolve the crisis,

Most rabbis were cool towards messianism, since it was not at all clear what part, if any, the rabbi would play in the Messianic Age.

It was the sages who let the devils into Judaism.

Kabbalistic literature written by Luria’s disciples was full of stories about these disgusting creatures, which in the ghettos of Ashkenazi Jewry, especially in Poland, came to be known as dybbuks. The literature also taught how they could be exorcised by a learned, holy man, or ba’al shem, who redeemed the possessed soul by using one of Luria’s ‘sparks’.

To combat these devils, an army of angels came into existence.

Letter combination magic, performed by using the secret names of God and the angels in special formulae, was known as ‘Practical Kabbalah’.

The most stupendous piece of magic was the creation of a golem, an artificial man into which a ba’al shem, or Master of the Name, could breathe life by pronouncing one of the secret divine names according to a special formula.

Hence from the start, the Jews in America were not organized on communal but on congregational lines, like the other churches. In Europe, the synagogue was merely one organ of the all-embracing Jewish community. In North America it was the only governing body in Jewish life. American Jews did not belong to ‘the Jewish community’, as they did in Europe. They belonged to a particular synagogue. It might be Sephardi or Ashkenazi; or, of the latter, it might be German, English, Holland, Polish, all of them differing on small ritual points. Protestant groups were divided on comparable lines. Hence a Jew went to ‘his’ synagogue, just as a Protestant went to ‘his’ church.

The trouble with Spinoza’s pantheism, however, was that he pushed it to the point where it was impossible to make valid distinctions between it and atheism.

He states in terms that to credit God with such attributes as ‘will’ or ‘intellect’ would be like asking Sirius to bark, just because we call it the Dog Star.

Ba’al Shem Tov

He was responsible for two new institutions. The first was his revival of the ancient concept of the zaddik, or superior human being–superior because of his special capacity to adhere to God.

Secondly, he invented a revolutionary form of popular prayer. This was important because it enabled ordinary, humble Jews to contribute.

He stressed that prayer was not so much a human activity as a supernatural act, in which man breaks down the barriers of his natural existence and reaches into the divine world. How does man do this? He takes the prayer-book and concentrates all his mind on the letters. He does not read, he wills. As he does so, their actual shapes dissolve and–this is a typical kabbalistic idea–the divine attributes concealed in the letters become spiritually

visible.

The Besht taught that, in order to enter in, the man has to annihilate his personality and become nothing.

In Elijah ben Solomon Zalman (1720-97), the

gaon of Vilna, the early hasidics found a dedicated enemy.

He did not despise kabbalah, but everything had to be subordinated to the demands of the halakhah. He regarded hasidism as an outrage. Its claims to ecstasy, miracles and visions were, he said, all lies and delusions. The idea of the zaddik was idolatry, worship of human beings. Most of all, its theory of prayer was a substitute

for, an affront to, scholarship–the be-all and end-all of Judaism.

The orthodox attempt to destroy it failed. Indeed it was soon abandoned, as both scholars and enthusiasts united in the face of a new and common enemy–the Jewish enlightenment or haskalah.

Although the haskalah was a specific episode in Jewish history, and the maskil or enlightened Jew is a special type peculiar to Judaism, the Jewish enlightenment is nevertheless part of the general European enlightenment. But it is, more particularly, linked to the enlightenment in Germany, and this for a very good reason. The movement in both France and Germany was concerned to examine and readjust man’s attitude to God. But whereas in France its tendency was to repudiate or downgrade God, and tame religion, in Germany it sought genuinely to reach a new understanding of and

accomodation with the religious s...

For perhaps the first time Jews in Germany began to feel a distinct affinity with German culture, and thus sowed in their hearts the seeds of a monstrous delusion.

To intellectuals in Christian society, the question posed by the enlightenment was really: how large a part, if any, should God play in an increasingly secular culture? To Jews, the question was rather: what part, if any, should secular knowledge play in the culture of God? They were still enfolded in the medieval vision of a total religious society.

What the awesome example of Spinoza had shown, to the satisfaction of most Jews, was that a man could not drink at the well of gentile knowledge without deadly risk of poisoning his Judaic life. So the ghetto remained not merely a social but an intellectual universe on its own.

For Christian Europe there had always been a ‘Jewish problem’. In the Middle Ages it had been: how to prevent this subversive minority from contaminating religious truth and social order? No fear of that now. For gentile intellectuals, at least, the problem was now rather: how, in common humanity, to rescue this pathetic people from their ignorance and darkness.

Mendelssohn was driven, despite himself, into a rationalist defence of Judaism; or, more precisely, into a demonstration of how Jews, while remaining attached to the essentials of their faith, could become part of a general European culture.

For the first time a new archetype, who had always existed in embryonic form, began to emerge from the shadows: the revolutionary Jew.

The events of 1789 were a product of the French enlightenment, which was strongly anti-clerical

and, at bottom, hostile to religion as such. This posed a problem. Much was permitted to clever writers in eighteenth-century France, but direct attacks on the Catholic Church were dangerous. It was at this point that they found Spinoza’s work particularly useful. Concerned to develop a rationalist approach to Biblical truth, he had inevitably exposed the superstitions and obscurantism of rabbinical religion. He had pointed the way to a radical critique of Christianity too, but in doing so he had assembled the materials for an indictment of Judaism. The French philosophes were willing to follow him in the first, but they found it safer to do so by concentrating on the second. Thus they turned on its head the old Augustinian argument that Judaism was a witness to the truth of Christianity. It was, rather, a witness to its inventions, superstitions and sheer lies. They saw Judaism as Christianity taken to the point of caricature, and it was on this ugly travesty that they concentrated. Here, they insisted, was an example of the distorted effects that the enslavement of religion can produce on

a pe...

Hence the French enlightenment, while helping Jewish aspirations in the short term, left them with a sombre legacy. For these French writers, above all Voltaire, were widely read throughout Europe–and imitated. It was not long before the first German idealists, like Fichte, were taking up the same theme. The works of Voltaire and his colleagues were the title-deeds, the foundation documents, of the modern European intelligentsia, and it was a tragedy for the Jews that they contained a virulently anti-Semitic clause. Thus yet another layer was added to the historical accumulation of anti-Jewish polemic. On top of the pagan

plinth and the Christian main storey there was now placed a secular superstructure. In a sense this was the most serious of all, for it ensured that hatred of the Jews, so long kept alive by Christian fanaticism, would now survive the decline of the religious spirit.

Moreover, the new secular anti-Semitism almost immediately developed two distinct themes, mutually exclusive in theory but in practice forming a diabolical counterpoint. On the one hand, following Voltaire, the rising European left began to see the Jews as obscurantist opponents to all human progress. On the other, the forces of conservatism and tradition, resenting the benefits the Jews derived from the collapse of the ancient order, began to portra...

Hence when the ghetto walls fell, and the Jews walked out into freedom, they found they were entering a new, less tangible but equally hostile ghetto of suspicion. They had exchanged ancient disabilities for modern anti-Semitism.

in wartime, Jewish creativity comes to the fore and gentile prejudice goes to the rear.

Between 1827 and 1839, largely through British efforts, the population of Jerusalem rose from 550 to 5,500 and in all Palestine it topped 10,000–the real beginning of the Jewish return to the Promised Land.

But among the second generation of the maskilim there were those who were both enlightened and learned in Judaism, faithful to their creed yet skilled in secular methodology.

Leopold Zunz

Zunz and his friends of the immediate post-Napoleonic period called their work the Wissenschaft des Judentums, the Science of Judaism.

In 1819 German Jews were only half-emancipated. To what extent could you pursue a life of secular study and remain a Jew?

But his work raised a second objection to ‘Jewish science’: was it not contrary to the true spirit of Judaism? What he really envisaged was an encyclopaedia of Jewish intellectual history. In this, Jewish literature, for instance, would be presented alongside the other great literatures of the world, a giant among peers. He said he wanted to emancipate Jewish writing from the theologians and ‘rise to the historical

viewpoint’.

Like everyone else in Germany, Zunz was influenced by Hegelian ideas of progression from lower to higher forms, and inevitably applied this dialectic to Judaism.

Zunz thought that a kind of Hegelian climax of world history would eventually occur in which all historical development would come together–that was what he understood by the Messianic Age.

they had the job of ensuring that the distilled legacy of Jewish ideas became part of the common property of enlightened mankind.46