For decades, American Jews when confronted by Christianity would proclaim the moral superiority of Judaism as a religion of ethics compared to the emphasize on faith within Christianity. Jews would explain how Judaism is this-worldly compared to Christianity’s concern with other-worldly salvation or romantic flights of pietism. This attitude was fostered against the backdrop of many German thinkers from Kant to Adolph von Harnack and Rudolf Bultmann denigrating Judaism as a religion without ethics, without love of God, and as empty superstition. The popular Jewish response was to turn the tables and proclaim Judaism as the morally superior faith for reasons of both apologetics and self-definition. The widely read works of Leo Baeck, The Essence of Judaism, and Abba Hillel Silver Where Judaism Differed became part of the civil religion of American Jews. But what of the Jewish philosophers?
Robert Erlewine , Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Illinois Wesleyan University, provides the answer in his new book Judaism and the West: From Hermann Cohen to Joseph Soloveitchik (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016) by looking at the philosophic writings of Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Joseph D. Soloveitchik showing how each defined religion and by doing so responded to the challenge of Christianity. Personally, I was attracted just by the title alone as making the book worthy of my interest. But after reading it, I would certainly recommend this thoughtful book for those scholars interested in the topic especially my colleagues in the religion department.
The backdrop of the book is the deep resonance with Marcion thought in late 19th and early 20th century German Lutheran thought. Marcion was the Second century early Church thinker who thought that Christianity was a complete rejection of the God and values of the Old Testament. The 19th century thinkers who followed this line of demarcation painted Jesus as complete break with Judaism, as not really being Jewish rather he was Galilean and they painted Judaism as having a vengeful unethical God compared to Christian love. I must point out that Marion was actually rejected by the Church fathers and that this is not the current position of current mainstream Christian theologians who uniformly are working to recontextualize him within his Jewish context. And certainly Catholic thinkers such as Cardinal Ratzinger or Balthasar rejected it (see my very fruitful interview with Anthony Sciglitano here on the Church’s rejection of Marcion thinking).
Erlewine shows that Hermann Cohen portrayed Judaism the most ethical and rational religion, in turn, Judaism can serve as a model to the world. Cohen was the baseline for much of 20th century Jewish thought.
Franz Rosenzweig thought only the religions of Judaism and Christianity (not Islam) have access to the fullness of reality. And yet, these two religions will be in conflict with one another until the end of history.
Martin Buber considered the hallowed life of I-Thou to be the core of religion, in that, the celebrates the importance of this life, the way of man. Erelwine accentuates how Buber present Jesus as a Jew, a claim in direct contrast to the German thought of his era. And that Jesus never claimed to be anything more than a human being teaching ethics. In contrast, Buber presents Christianity as breaking with the teachings of Jesus. Buber’s distinction between fate and destiny plays a similar role of showing how Jewish thought is about living up to our God given destiny. Parenthetically, and not part of the book’s discussion, Buber had the similar responses to the Neo-Hindu visions of Advaita as the highest religion in which he reaffirmed Judaism as the hallowed highest religion.
Abraham Joshua Heschel receives an interesting treatment focusing on his dissertation on prophecy in which the young Heschel defended Jewish prophecy as greater than other religious phenomena. Erlewine also shows the polemic side of Heschel in his later American essays against Christian thought as having lost its connection with its Biblical roots.Many who quote him leave these important critiques of other faiths and Christianity out of their discussion of Heschel thereby misrepresenting his views.
Erlewine presents Soloveitchik as building on Cohen but moving toward using a scientific model for religion and using Buber’s distinction between fate and destiny. Soloveitchik, however, completely separates Judaism and Christianity from each other, neither can be understood by the other and neither can comment on the other. There is no convergence or common idea and certainly no room for criticism of the other faith.
Erlewine describes his journey to writing this book, his second, came from his time earnestly studying “intellectual historians and theorists like Susannah Heschel, Suzanne L. March and, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Russell McCutcheon. I increasingly came to regard modern Jewish philosophy as embedded in a network of discourses about race, religion, and modernity.” This, along with the 20th century reactions to Hermann Cohen helped him “recognize that there were more fruitful ways of study modern Jewish philosophy than approaching it as a series of rarefied arguments regarding how best to understand what Judaism was… Instead, I began to emphasize how modern Jewish philosophy was an ongoing process of constructing Judaism in relation to Christianity, Europe, and modernity.”
The book assumes that the reader already has a basic familiarity with the canon of modern Jewish philosophy. For my readers, who want a basic familiarity, the only decent introductory secondary source remains: Eugene Borowitz’s Choices in Modern Jewish Thought: A Partisan Guide. For more academic introductions for those with philosophic background, there is The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy edited by Michael Morgan and Peter Gordon and The Cambridge History of Modern Jewish Philosophy, edited by Martin Kavka, Zachary Braiterman and David Novak. For an introduction to reading Hermann Cohen, for someone who is not ready for his other works, one should start with Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen edited by Eva Jospe or the pieces in Simon Noveck’s Contemporary Jewish Thought: A Reader.
In each chapter Erlewine generally only picks one or two representative works, so for example he focuses on Heschel’s dissertation and Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Mind but does not deal with their later works nor does he go beyond their German influence into their later influences from William James, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Existential thought. If he is moving into intellectual history, then it still reads too close to a rarified philosophic question. I have a personal pet peeve about his using the term Christianity when he only means German Lutherans. Many aspects of the conversation does not apply to Catholics, Calvinists, or Biblical centered Protestants. Finally, to turn to my own field, the philosopher of religion could make use of the widely used current categories of theology of religions in the post Vatican II era. (I recommend my own books (here and here) which dealt with some of these same thinkers on related issues.) These comments are not to deflect from his valuable contribution to the discussion and his goal of bringing Jewish thought into discourse with scholars of religion.
1.What was the novel thesis of this book?
I argue that modern Jewish philosophy, especially 20th century German Jewish philosophy, should be understood as a response to developments in the conception and study of religion and its political implications.
One of the major goals of this book is to incorporate recent scholarship in religious studies into the study of modern Jewish philosophy. While scholars of modern Jewish philosophy (or modern Jewish thought) are often housed within religious studies departments there is not always a fruitful exchange between these respective fields. This book is an attempt to help build bridges between the two as they have much to contribute to each other.
- How did early 20th century German Theologians and Historians portray Judaism?
In the early 20th century, there was a great deal of interest in “world religions” and the religions of the Ancient Near East. German theologians who wanted to show that Judaism really was not the source out of which Christianity emerged and that Jesus was not really Jewish used these new fields of study to make their arguments. In Europe, much of the scientific or scholarly study of religion was motivated by this desire to free Christianity from any essential connection with Judaism. Indeed, during this period we see a resurgence of positive interest in Marcion a heretic from early Christianity, who declared that the God of the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament is different from the God of the New Testament.
In 1920, Adolf von Harnack, an eminent scholar of Christian history and liberal Christian theologian, wrote his major study of Marcion translated as Marcion: The Gospel of an Alien God. This work was hugely influential on many leading scholars of his time, But even before this, important scholars, including Ernst Troeltsch and Julius Wellhausen, were using new developments in historical scholarship to sharpen the distinction between Judaism and Christianity. In this distinction Judaism always came out the loser, as no longer possessing life, as an anachronism that should no longer exist. In this way, even if Christian theologians at that time did not literally believe there were two different Gods as Marcion did, they often believed that the God of the Old Testament was qualitatively different from the God of the New Testament. The former was a harsh tyrant demanding strict obedience whereas the latter was full of mercy and grace and allowing for moral autonomy.
Christian theologians and scholars (who were also often theologians) sought to differentiate Judaism from Christianity, to argue that Christianity was fundamentally different from Judaism. In many ways this was a continuation from the Enlightenment as a period in which philosophers were trying to figure out how to characterize modernity and why it was different than what came before. Non-Jewish thinkers used Judaism and Christianity as useful symbols in this effort. They cast Judaism as the epitome of all that was pre-modern, unfree and unenlightened as opposed to Christianity, which was supposed to embody all the virtues of modernity.
- How did Modern Jewish Philosophy Respond?
Taking such developments into account, I show that modern Jewish philosophy is very much an attempt to construct or recast how we are supposed to think about and understand Judaism in ways that makes Christianity inferior or derivative of it, and to show how Judaism is an essential component of European modernity.
I do this by reading major works in the canon of twentieth century Jewish philosophy by Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Joseph Soloveitchik. In different ways, these thinkers are engaged with discussions about the role of Judaism in relationship to the West, with most (but not all) of these thinkers arguing that Judaism is absolutely fundamental to the European civilization. In a very powerful way, they offer a counterpunch to the work of the European (and particularly German) theologians and culture makers seeking to exclude Judaism, to deny it any place in modern Europe.
Modern Jewish philosophy then, particularly as it takes shape in the work of the thinkers I discuss in this book, is quite hostile to Christianity. These thinkers go to great lengths to show that Christianity is not only not more rational than Judaism but that it is decisively less rational, that it is not independent of Judaism but derivative, and so on.
In the work of these thinkers Judaism is made central to how we should envision Europe or the ‘West’, at least all that is good and proper in the West. Christianity, in turn, is regularly criticized for retaining idolatrous elements, for failing to be autonomous in its reliance on God to forgive (rather than say taking responsibility for one’s actions) or as being dependent on Judaism for access to God.
I argue that rather than simple, straightforward criticisms of Christianity for its beliefs and practices (although this critical element is certainly present), I think this hostility and bellicosity on the part of Jewish philosophers reflects both the precariousness of the position of Jews and the desire of Jewish thinkers to beat Christian philosophers and theologians at their own game. In order to pull this off, they had to relentlessly criticize and show the problems with Christianity which was just assumed to be more rational and modern, even by many Jews.
- What was Hermann Cohen’s call for reason and demythologization?
Hermann Cohen was a neo-Kantian philosopher who grounded his own work in a firm belief in reason and the rationality of religion. He emphasized that reason was universal to all human beings and could not be limited to any single community.
Ostensibly, his task in Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism, his magnum opus (at least of his explicitly Jewish work), was an attempt to show how the Jewish tradition—like all religious traditions—begins with certain ideas that remain mythological and not fully rationalized. He then traces different layers of the Jewish tradition in order to show how this tradition becomes increasingly rational through continuous interpretation. For example, God is initially depicted as a personal being, indeed even a being with human characteristics. However, in rabbinic interpretation, and then in the medieval philosophers especially Maimonides, we see that the idea of God is increasingly purified of these anthropomorphic traits. For Cohen this is rationalization at its best. God ceases to be modeled on a human a king and comes to increasingly function as the moral exemplar and that which secures the possibility of the moral world order.
But there is another dimension to Cohen’s use of reason. While Cohen claims that all peoples possess the capacity for reason, he does not hesitate to point out where religious traditions such as Christianity and the ancient Greeks go wrong in their notions of God, failing to properly demythologize, and this leads to disastrous moral consequences in Cohen’s opinion. Indeed, Judaism becomes the example of what a rational religion looks like. To the degree that other religions will become rational they will emulate Judaism. In this sense, Judaism becomes the exemplar of rationality in terms of religion.
Cohen was indeed making use of tropes and concepts that would resonate with German culture and Christianity, he even made use of Jesus, because he claimed that Jews understood Jesus better than Christians, and that Judaism was inextricable to German identity. To grasp the power of this argument, one has to recognize that Cohen was writing at a moment when Orientalists, Historians, and Christian theologians claimed that research could show Jesus was not Jewish and that the New Testament should be freed from Jewish moorings. Cohen’s sophisticated arguments, which were widely read and not merely by Jews, were actively making a case for the inclusion of Jews in German culture.
- How was there a shift to direct experience in Franz Rosenzweig and what are its implications for other religions?
Rosenzweig, who was Cohen’s student, was highly critical of what he called ‘philosophy,’ which he argued equated thought with being. Rosenzweig breaks with Cohen’s religion of reason and its strict rejection of anthropomorphism (actually, Rosenzweig claims he is properly interpreting Cohen who he thinks ultimately changes his mind about God, but this is a highly technical dispute). For Rosenzweig, however, God is a person, a being that requires love, and enters into relationship with the religious individual.
Rosenzweig argued that while philosophy claimed to account for all of human experience, there are aspects of it such as death and the fear of death that philosophy cannot and does not try to adequately describe. Indeed, there are dimensions of human existence, but not just human existence, for which philosophy cannot account. Rosenzweig attempts to account for this existence irreducible to philosophical thought.
To carry out his attempt at this “New Thinking” based on human experience, Rosenzweig uses a very complicated method that is part mysticism and part negative theology rooted in Cohen’s philosophical mathematics. He unearths three elements, namely, God, Human Being, and World that are part of our raw experience but beyond the reach of philosophy. These constitute the crucial elements of his system, which relate to one another in in creation, revelation, and redemption. One lives or experiences creation and redemption in one’s life.
However, Rosenzweig’s philosophy associates philosophy with German Idealism and then associates Idealism with paganism. He is also very critical of Indian and Chinese religions which he thinks fail to grasp these three elements of life- God , the human being, and world and in turn, creation, revelation, and redemption.
Only the religions of Judaism and Christianity (not Islam) have access to the three elements of reality: God , the human being, and world. Only Judaism and Christianity are not idolatrous. And yet, these two religions will be in conflict with one another until the end of history because they cannot recognize each other as partners of truth, although they very much are partners.
Many scholars have been critical of Rosenzweig’s depiction of other religions, particularly Islam. What I want to suggest is that his account of these religions had a lot more to do with what was going on in the German intellectual culture at that time and its fascination with Orientalism (at Judaism’s expense) than with any actual engagement with these other religions.
Rosenzweig is engaging these traditions not so much as they actually are but rather as they exist in the European imaginary (whether he knows it or not). By emphasizing experienced revelation, Rosenzweig hopes to link Judaism and Christianity and distinguish them from all other traditions. He wants to secure Judaism’s privileged metaphysical status in a European world that was increasingly rejecting it.
- How does Buber embrace and not embrace other religions?
Martin Buber devoted a great deal of attention to the study of other religions. Indeed, I and Thou was meant, at least originally, as a sort of foundation for the study of religion, what you might call a phenomenology of religion. He readily drew examples from Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity and Judaism. But he would treat these religions and stories and parables from them in idiosyncratic ways. He would often either show certain shortcomings in these traditions, as for example, faulting traditions that did not to his mind sufficiently celebrate the importance of this life, or read them in a way that made them support Judaism in some tacit way. Perhaps the most obvious example is his account of Jesus as a Jew who never claimed to be anything more than a human being.
In I and Thou Buber tries to show certain patterns that not only spoke to the crises of the present moment, the possibility of redemption, but also to the structure of religious experience as such. For example, he has a notion of the renewal of spirit, which is a version of teshuva. In German, the word he uses is Umkehr.
In Buber’s famous account of the I-It and I-Thou, where the I-It relation is one of use, and the I-Thou is a living relation that cannot be quantified, the I-Thou cannot last forever, and will inevitably become an It. As history progresses, the world of Its, of things, accumulates and increases. However, there is the possibility of a renewal of spirit, of return, of teshuva to the Eternal Thou at the heart of all I-Thou relationships. There is the possibility of renewing all living relations, even those that have become inert, that have become Its.
In many ways, I and Thou reflects the world in which it was written, a time of spiritual uncertainty and crisis. But it also holds out the hope that the world of It relations can be reclaimed, brought back into the world of spirit, into the world of the Thou. A life of use and objects can be made spiritual and full of living relationships once more.
- What is Buber’s distinction of faith and destiny?
Religion, for Buber, is not about belief, but about the manner in which one approaches the world. Genuine religion is a matter of one’s basic disposition towards the world. Faith and destiny correspond to Buber’s distinction between the I-It and the I-Thou. However, they are grounded in how these modes are in turn related to God or the Eternal Thou, that which undergirds all relationships.
For Buber, God is inextricably bound up with this world—although never reducible to it. Therefore, to understand the human relationship with the divine means one must study different ways in which human beings live in the world.
In Book II of I and Thou Buber sets up a juxtaposition between the person of destiny, who believes that the course of the world needs him or her but does not yet know how, and the person of fate, who believes in objects and mastery.
The person of destiny both pursues and embodies the Thou perspective, stands open and ready for relationship, realizes that the world order stands in need of him or her even if he or she does not yet know how. The person of fate seeks to use, to organize, to control. For Buber, this latter mode of being is It-being, it shuts out, it closes off the world to the Eternal Thou and the ability to return, the ability to harness Thou relationships that have grown rigid, that have become sedimented in culture. However, it is the path of the person of destiny to reopen, to recover and harness these sedimented Thous, to recover their salvific potential and let them flow once again. God is not outside or beyond this world. God is within this world, if hidden and covered over, lying dormant, waiting to be recalled and engaged once more.
- How was Heschel a Scholar of Religion? How did Heschel have a critique of Christianity?
Heschel’s Die Prophetie, which was the book that was published from his dissertation in 1936, was a scholarly work on the phenomenon of Israelite prophecy in a broad, comparative context.
His study is very much an attempt to show the ways in which the unique contours and structure of Israelite prophecy have been forgotten or distorted through false equivalences.
Heschel was particularly eager to distinguish prophecy from ecstatic modes of religion, where one approached the divine by means of departing one’s consciousness whether through narcotics, breathing exercises or elaborate rituals designed to induce a trance. Heschel insisted that Israelite prophecy was predicated upon and emphasized God’s agency, a God who chooses to make known his emotional life, his pathos, to the human being.
Heschel’s book, while it seems like it is merely descriptive, is also a critique of the Christianity of his time, particularly the manner in which Christian historians were treating Judaism. Christian scholars of religion (again, at this time, religious studies was part of seminaries and thus it was almost always confessional) attempted to blur the uniqueness of the Israelite prophets, to show that they were merely part of a much larger phenomenon in the Ancient Near East. This was done, at least in part, to undercut the importance of the Old Testament and thus to diminish the importance of Judaism for Christianity.
Heschel is particularly concerned with the rising Marcionism in Germany, a tendency that cast God as detached and unconcerned with human history. Rather, Heschel emphasizes that the prophets insisted upon God’s pathos, that God cared about human history, about human beings, about justice. Divine anger is not a scandal but testifies to God’s concern about human history, God cares about every day life.
Heschel was very critical of Christianity in Germany, which he thought was turning its back on its ethical commitments by downplaying the importance of the prophets of the Old Testament (indeed, often rejecting the Old Testament altogether). He felt it had lost touch with the Hebrew Bible and the prophetic sense of justice. It had lost sense of a God who had pathos, of a God who cared about human beings, about what transpired in history. Indeed, his work to build bridges with Christian theologians in the US aimed at emphasizing to Christian leaders the shared investment of Jews and Christians in the prophets of Israel and their God who could be angry and disappointed by human beings. Should Christianity lose its connection to the Old Testament and thus the prophets, Heschel insisted, it would forfeit its relationship to the divine.
- How is Soloveitchik not just an Orthodox version of Cohen?
While Soloveitchik was decisively influenced by Cohen, I think it is safe to say he is by no means just an Orthodox version of Cohen. I would rather characterize him as someone who had some shared concerns with, but also who had some fundamentally different sensibilities from Cohen, including, as you mention, with which branch of Judaism he would affiliate.
Soloveitchik, particularly in The Halakhic Mind, shows an appreciation for Cohen’s attempt to use the sciences, at least as they were understood at the beginning of the twentieth century, as a foundation for a system that held culture to rational standards.
However, The Halakhic Mind was written several decades after the death of Cohen and much had changed in regard to the understanding of science. Where Cohen was operating with a unified notion of science rooted in infinitesimal calculus, Soloveitchik highlights that science has become increasingly pluralistic such that no one method or approach can be all encompassing, and as a result philosophy must adjust, must embrace an “epistemological pluralism.” This does not mean there is no reality, but that reality has many faces. There is no one foundation for all of reality, no one basis for rationality. Rather, just as chemists and physicists apply different methods to understanding reality, Soloveitchik thought this meant we should also study religion according to its own unique methodology.
This is a major break from Cohen. Cohen refused to grant religion autonomy, as possessing its own sort of logic, but insisted that it was related to the other members of the system—logic, aesthetics, and particularly ethics. Soloveitchik, in contrast, rejects this, and thinks the best way to understand religion in its own terms, which for Soloveitchik means treating religion through the cultic, through practice, Halakhah. This leads Soloveitchik to very different conclusions from Cohen regarding religion.
Soloveitchik’s position is open to pluralism, where each religious tradition must be understood according to its own sensibilities as grounded in its own practices, whereas Cohen thinks since all human beings share reason and ethics, ultimately their religions should converge in these areas. While Soloveitchik did believe that Judaism would ultimately be vindicated in the eschaton, he does not explicitly criticize Christianity, at least regarding its theology. His philosophy does not so much justify Judaism against Christianity as to show why Judaism should remain distinct and unique even as it participates in the larger ‘Western’ world. In this respect, he represents a distinct voice among these thinkers, attempting to secure Judaism’s apartness, that it is a stranger and sojourner in the Christian West, not its foundation.
- For our era of late-modernity and pluralism, what is most enduring and valuable in these thinkers?
I think what is most enduring and valuable about these thinkers, at least when we take them as a whole, is the way the use philosophy to interrogate and revitalize various aspects of the Jewish tradition. They turned to philosophy as a way to explain Judaism to their cultured despisers but also to use it to fight back and critique those who would exclude and reject them.
What these thinkers accomplished that remains relevant for us is that they made Judaism vital and exciting at a time when it had very few friends and was by no means popular in the broader European culture. They made, in different ways and in different capacities, the tradition speak to their present moment and not just liturgically but in regard to culture and broad social movements. Our concerns may not be theirs (although I do think we share a lot with them) but more than anything, what is enduring in their work is the ability to use philosophy to think about traditions and practices that many take for granted, to think about them in a new light and in relation to the larger culture or cultures in which we live.
Their work demands that we never just accept the tradition but that we constantly inquire why and what place it has in the modern world. When I look at contemporary religious life in the US and not just Jewish life, I see very little of this intellectual rigor. I see a lot of self-satisfaction. I think this aspect of these philosophers remains a great gift when religion is so often couched in terms of feeling or authority.
- From your earlier work: How does Cohen point the way for combining tolerance and religion without having to reject religion? How can we have absolute truth and be tolerant? How is he better than Habermas and Hick?
In my previous, Monotheism and Tolerance: Recovering a Religion of Reason (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), I examine current discussions of monotheism by scholars such as Jan Assmann, Regina Schwartz and Martin Jaffee which highlight the tension between notions like election or chosenness and current, liberal sensibilities such as tolerance and pluralism.
Christian theologian John Hick and philosopher Jürgen Habermas both require that all religious communities learn to treat each other with equal respect. That is, all claims of being special, to having a privileged relationship with God must be rejected in favor of viewing all traditions as more or less equal. However, this is in conflict with the way concepts like chosenness or election traditionally function in the Abrahamic monotheisms.
I found that our current sensibilities about tolerance were rooted in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and his treatment of religion. However, the works of Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen offer better ways forward.
After studying the respective philosophies of religion of Mendelssohn, Kant, and Cohen, I conclude that Cohen figured out a way to retain a notion of election but in a way is grounded in an ethical universalism. For Cohen the Jews continue to insist on their uniqueness and their chosenness, but only for the purpose of highlighting the universality of the ethical ideal of the human being that continues to go unrealized. That is, Cohen links the particular religion of Judaism to the universal ethical ideal of the human being.
What Cohen accomplishes that Habermas and Hick do not, is that he finds a way to maintain the particularity of a religious tradition while also linking it in a way that remains firmly grounded in ethics to the universal. He allows a religious community to retain a link between the particular to the universal.
For Hick and Haberamas, tolerance requires that all traditions become only particular, that they relinquish any conception of themselves that would grant their particular community universal importance. In this way, I think, Cohen offers a method of thinking about how we might more realistically bring religious traditions to think about religious diversity without requiring that they forfeit notions like election or chosenness that are often perceived to be absolutely essential to their self-identity.
- It seems that Gershom Scholem as a philosopher and historian of religion is essential for many of your arguments, but was not covered in the book.
Gershom Scholem is a thinker I struggle with a great deal. In particular, I find much of my scholarship geared toward combating his highly influential, post-Holocaust critiques of German Jews and German Jewish thinkers as self-negating, lacking dignity and failing to adequately defend themselves. To be sure, Scholem’s account is not without nuance or pathos, which I think is what makes his work so powerful. And yet, I think another part of the power of his depiction is that it is still very much haunted by the immediate aftermath of the Shoah and it tends to see it as an inevitability and that this should have been evident to others. In making this assumption, his depiction downplays the subversiveness, the boldness with which Jewish thinkers challenged their Christian contemporaries.
The Book of Doctrines and Opinions: 