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From Rebel to Rabbi

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................ixIntroduction: Jesus and the Jewish Question.............................11. The Quest for the Jewish Jesus.......................................132. The Crucifix Question................................................613. Yiddish Modernism and the Landscape of the Cross.....................1174. The Passion of Jewish History........................................1705. The Artist Crucified.................................................206Epilogue: The Jesus Question Revisited..................................252Notes...................................................................257Index...................................................................285

Chapter One

From Rebel To Rabbi

In his classic book chronicling the origins and development of European critical scholarship on Jesus, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Albert Schweitzer makes the claim that "there is no historical task which so reveals a man's true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus ... each individual created Him in accordance with his own character." While the distinction between the Jesus of history and the Christ of dogma was at the heart of this quest for the historical Jesus among European scholars, Schweitzer observes that "each successive epoch of theology found its own thoughts in Jesus." In other words, the "historical" Jesus served contemporary needs as theologians and historians tended to craft an image of him that was in their own likeness; various theories as to who Jesus was and what he taught helped to legitimate modern theologies and movements. Jesus functioned as a valuable device in the creation of modern religious identities and ideologies that reflected the ideals of the European Enlightenment with its emphasis on scientific inquiry and rational religion over against irrational Church dogmas and faith in the supernatural. By means of critical scientific scholarship, European theologians began to search for an image of Jesus that could be meaningful for enlightened Christians, that could serve them as a model of moral piety and religious perfection suitable for their own age.

Christians were not alone in this quest for the historical Jesus. For European Jews of the Enlightenment era and beyond, scholarly writing about the historical Jesus also became an important part of their own accommodations to modernity. Just like their Christian contemporaries, enlightened Jewish scholars and theologians began to craft an image of Jesus "in their own likeness," which for them meant, almost without exception, depicting Jesus unequivocally as a faithful Jew. In response to the changing intellectual climate brought by the European Enlightenment-and its Jewish offshoot, the Haskalah-and the shifting socio-political realities resulting in their gradual Emancipation, European Jews began to confront a series of profoundly momentous questions about their changing place in the world: What is the new position of Jews and Judaism in modern European society? How are Jewishness and Judaism now defined? How can one be both Jewish and Western at the same time? How is the relationship between Jews and Christians and Judaism and Christianity to be redefined? Accordingly, as Arnold Eisen has observed, "Jewish culture in all its forms in the modern period has been devoted to describing a place for Jews in the new social, political, and economic orders and to imagining forms of Judaism (religious or not) suitable to that place."

One of the significant ways in which modernizing Jews have attempted to "describe a place" for Jews and Judaism in the modern world has been by reclaiming Jesus as a Jew; their new approach to Jesus transformed him from a figure who had been associated with Jewish marginalization and oppression in European Christian society into a vehicle for their own self-transformation and integration into that very society. Indeed, the Jewish reclamation of Jesus aided in the process of redefining Judaism and in the repositioning of Jews and Judaism vis--vis Christians and Christianity in a plethora of ways. For one, stressing Jesus' Jewishness was a way for Jewish scholars to promote Jewish integration into Christian society since they were essentially saying "we're not as other as you think, since your founder was-one of us." Moreover, claiming Jesus as Jewish helped combat Christian anti-Semitism by defusing much of the Christian basis for anti-Semitism, which traditionally drew on the opposition of Jesus to Judaism.

However, Jewish writers who wrote about Jesus as a historical Jew did more than simply strive for acceptance within Christian society, they also tried to improve the status of Judaism in the eyes of both Christians and Jews. Perhaps above all, their scholarly views promoted Jewish cultural dominance within Christian European society by asserting that Jesus' teachings came from Judaism, thereby implying that "they got everything from us" and that "Christian history is background to Jewish history, not the other way around." Thus, reinterpreting the figure of Jesus as a Jew, and viewing him in a sympathetic manner, became a way for modernizing Jews to try to acquire for themselves a more rooted place in modern European society. It provided them with a means of integrating both Jews and Judaism more resolutely into the culture of the West by illustrating that culture's Jewish roots. The reclamation of Jesus as a Jew, and his teachings as inherently Jewish, helped to locate Judaism as central to Western civilization, and many even claimed that Judaism was the foundation of that civilization along with, or in place of, Christianity. In this way, "the negative Jesus of medieval Jewish polemics, created in self-defense, now became the positive Jesus of modern apologetics, created in an act of Jewish self-assertion." The creation of a Jewish Jesus allowed Jewish advocates of Emancipation and integration to elaborate new "strategies of selfhood" both outwardly and internally.

Schweitzer's claim that "each successive epoch of theology found its own thoughts in Jesus" applies equally to modern Jewish writing on Jesus. Reinterpreting the past as a way of asserting modern alternatives to tradition was a dominant feature of the Haskalah movement, and the turn to modernity in general within the Jewish world, and Jesus played an important role in this ideological reconstruction of the Jewish past. As Jews of the Haskalah and its successor movements redefined the essence and meaning of Judaism, Jewishness, and Jewish history for the modern age, they also reconceptualized the place of Jesus within the world of Judaism in ways that conformed to and even embodied such new definitions. Their new assessments of Jesus became an integral part of their various programs for transformation of Jewish life. In the many different works written by modern Jewish intellectuals incorporating Jesus in a positive way, we see this strategy at play. For Moses Mendelssohn (1729-86), the leading figure of the Berlin Haskalah, arguing the Jewishness of Jesus functioned as an apologetic for continued Jewish religious observance-in a slightly modified guise-and was part of his argument for the inclusion of Jews in European civil society. The leading scholars of Reform...