#Maimonidean

[sefaradweb]

In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity

🇪🇸 José Faur argumenta que los conversos (judíos forzados a convertirse al cristianismo) fueron un factor clave en el colapso de la sociedad eclesiástica durante la Edad Media y en el ascenso del secularismo y la modernidad. A través de un análisis detallado, Faur explora cómo la conversión forzada de los judíos en la península Ibérica afectó tanto a la comunidad judía como al mundo cristiano, destacando la influencia de la tradición maimonídica y su impacto en el pensamiento secular. El libro también examina el movimiento anti-maimonídeo, la persecución de minorías y el auge del antisemitismo, que llevaron al declive de las instituciones judías y a la creciente alienación de los conversos. Además, se analiza cómo los conversos contribuyeron significativamente al desarrollo del pensamiento europeo y la literatura, a pesar de enfrentar oposición interna y externa. Finalmente, se discuten las alternativas al secularismo como el pluralismo religioso y cultural, y se reflexiona sobre la posición del "otro" en la tradición occidental, destacando figuras como Bartolomé de Las Casas y Antonio de Guevara que, siendo conversos, defendieron a los nativos americanos frente a las atrocidades españolas. Este enfoque revela las dinámicas de poder y prejuicios que han moldeado las relaciones entre judíos, cristianos y otros grupos a lo largo de la historia.

🇺🇸 José Faur argues that the conversos (Jews forced to convert to Christianity) were a key factor in the collapse of ecclesiastical society during the Middle Ages and the rise of secularism and modernity. Through detailed analysis, Faur explores how the forced conversion of Jews in the Iberian Peninsula impacted both the Jewish community and the Christian world, highlighting the influence of the Maimonidean tradition and its effect on secular thought. The book also examines the anti-Maimonidean movement, the persecution of minorities, and the rise of anti-Semitism, which led to the decline of Jewish institutions and the growing alienation of conversos. Additionally, it analyzes how conversos significantly contributed to the development of European thought and literature, despite facing internal and external opposition. Finally, Faur discusses alternatives to secularism such as religious and cultural pluralism and reflects on the position of the "other" in Western tradition, highlighting figures like Bartolomé de Las Casas and Antonio de Guevara who, being conversos, defended Native Americans against Spanish atrocities. This approach reveals the power dynamics and prejudices that have shaped the relationships between Jews, Christians, and other groups throughout history.

[gatheringbones]

[“The focus is the mental and emotional state of the victim, not the boxes that a perpetrator needs to check in order to be let off the hook. Is the person who was hurt feeling better? Have they gotten what they need, emotionally, spiritually? If not, why not?

Perhaps it’s clear why amends happens first—what are you apologizing for, exactly, if the other person still hasn’t been cared for, attended to? Action first. Words later.

An apology, here, does not consist of the words “I’m sorry,” though that statement might be part of it. (It is certainly not “I’m sorry that you were hurt by this perfectly reasonable thing that I did.”) And, as with making amends, a real apology is not aimed at the person who has been hurt, but rather is given in relationship with them. It requires vulnerability and empathetic listening; it demands a sincere offering of regret and sorrow for one’s actions. It requires understanding when approaching a victim might harm them further and navigating that with sensitivity.

The goal is not to do more harm, but to do work that is healing, repairing. This means that the victim’s needs must be centered in the process, always. In subsequent chapters we’ll explore some of the more complex questions around apologies and forgiveness—what to do if approaching the victim may in fact inflict trauma, what it means if the victim is dead and cannot forgive, what it means for the penitent if the victim is not willing or able to be appeased, and the nature and limits of forgiveness.

It is important to note again that, here, repentance and forgiveness are not as tightly intertwined as they are considered to be in contemporary culture. That is to say, from a Maimonidean perspective, repentance is about righting as much of the harm as can be done, and this involves knowing what parts of the process are out of one’s hands.

The work of pacifying, appeasing, and begging forgiveness can feel fraught for some people. It may seem uncomfortable and scary, or embarrassing. It may feel guilt-inducing to own one’s mistakes, selfishness, lack of impulse control, or cluelessness. And yet, the penitent person has already been on a profound journey by the time they arrive at this point. They have had to understand the harm caused, to acknowledge and seek to be accountable for it, to begin working toward deep transformation related to the issue in question, and to invest concretely in reparations. In this way, approaching the victim to try to appease and soothe the wounds one has inflicted may be a natural, organic next step. It may feel like the next obvious thing left to do. By now, the perpetrator’s remorse might be so strong that the apology flows from an open heart seeking change. That is the hope.”]

rabbi danya ruttenberg, from on repentance and repair: making amends in an unapologetic world, 2022

[transmascpetewentz]

my philosophy is essentially a synthesis of postmodernism and postpostmodernism with maimonidean (is that a word?) characteristics

[yiddishlore]

Another issue is that a lot of people, including many Jews, think Ashkenazim are just a group of Europeans who happen to be Jewish. There is identifiable “Ashkenazi Jewish” DNA because of a population bottleneck, but we were not totally isolated from other Jews the way some people seem to imagine.

The Maimonidean controversy crossed the Mediterranean! Kabbalah, hugely influential in Ashkenazi movements, emerged in Sefarad! The oldest known Yiddish text is from the Cairo Geniza! Why do some Jews have the last name “Ashkenazi”? Because they have an Ashkenazi ancestor who moved out of Ashkenaz and joined a different community! I could go on.

We have real differences, like any group spread across thousands of miles and a dozen languages, but we are still one people and always have been.

It’s kind of wild how a general set of internet stances at the moment combines an idea of ashkenormativity which is about how all the white Ashkenazim are oppressing the mizrachim of color with another idea that Yiddish was the real and true language of all Jews ever, unlike that evil modern Hebrew, and also it’s inherently appropriative for Jews to say yallah and sababa

[apenitentialprayer]

Possible Reasons for Conversion to Christianity Among Medieval Jews

Although we have seen, religious conversion was highly ideologically charged for both Christians and Jews, most actual Jewish conversions to Christianity were motivated neither by theological convictions nor by religious polemics. Moreover, most conversions also bore no clear relation to Jewish-Christian collaborations or friendships, which one might imagine could have led individual Jews to want to join the community of their Christian associates.* [...] No clear link between acculturation and conversion emerges, however, from extant evidence about the vast majority of known conversions [at least 1,500 in the mid-thirteenth century]. Instead, most converts were marginal individuals -socially, economically, or ideologically- who turned to baptism primarily as a means of escaping personal difficulties. 

- Paola Tartakoff (“Testing Boundaries: Jewish Conversion and Cultural Fluidity in Medieval Europe, c. 1200-1391″) Among the reasons listed in the article, we have:

Criminals hoping to commute their sentence - Ramon Fuster killed a fellow Jew and converted to Christianity in order to avoid execution.

Individuals seeking political leverage - Elias l'Évêque converted to Christianity when his fellow Jews would not allow him to take on the position of local tax collector.

Individuals seeking to escape hostility - Pablo Christiani converted after a falling out with his local rabbis, “probably in the context of the Maimonidean controversy,” and Simon de Ratel was physically assaulted by some of his coreligionists.

Excommunicants seeking to regain a sense of community and financial stability - Jamila of Aragon and her four children converted rather than endure five years of exile from their hometown.

Women seeking easy divorce - A married woman and her lover both converted to Christianity so they could marry in late thirteenth century Spain.

Poverty - two thirds of the 1,500 figure given above happened in Italy, at a time that “coincided with a spike in royal taxation.”

*Although stated to be rare, some conversions do seem to be the result of relationships with Christians - Herman of Cologne converted after befriending the local bishop and experiencing the communal life of Augustinian friars.

Debtors escaping their obligations - to “a Jew from Valencia who converted in 1327, taking the name Bonanat Ferrari, conversion may have presented a way to evade Jewish creditors.”

The observations about converts’ motivations invite a reassessment of the causes of medieval Jewish conversion. Against Baer’s contentions about the influence of acculturation in general and Greek rationalism in particular on Jewish conversion, in few cases do spiritual or intellectual convictions of any kind appear to have been at play. Moreover, of all voluntary converts surveyed, only three -Peter Alfonsi of Huesca, Alfonso of Valladoild (formerly Abner of Burgos), and Nicholas Donin of La Rochelle in France- have been said to have had rationalist leanings. Even in these three cases, moreover, it is not clear that rationalism led to apostasy. In the case of Nicholas Donin, for instance, excommunication from the Jewish community may have been a more critical precipitating factor. In addition, against scholarly assertions that a thirteenth-century rise in Christian conversionary pressure led to an increase in the number of Jewish conversions, there is no indication that missionary sermons, disputations, or theological arguments produced converts. Instead, we find that across Western Christendom voluntary conversions to Christianity often were born of a personal despair and served as a way of gaining distance from the Jewish community. As such, they could reflect a sense of individual self-determination and constitute a form of resistance to Jewish social or legal norms.

- same article, emphasis added.

[yidquotes]

One could argue that Catholicism is built on the Maimonidean concept of compromise due to human weakness. It provided and still provides a compromised kind of monotheism, which includes ideas such as the trinity and incarnation.

Rabbi Dr. Nathan Lopes Cardozo

[thejewishlink]

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt"l - The Courage to Live with Uncertainty NOACH • 5776, 5783

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks zt”l – The Courage to Live with Uncertainty NOACH • 5776, 5783

For each of us there are milestones on our spiritual journey that change the direction of our life and set us on a new path. For me one such moment came when I was a rabbinical student at Jews’ College and thus had the privilege of studying with one of the great rabbinic scholars of our time, Rabbi Dr. Nachum Rabinovitch, zt”l. He was a giant: one the most profound Maimonidean scholars of the…

[anonymousdandelion]

#hi#just a gentle reminder that the vast majority of these are ashkenazi movements#many if not most non-ashkenazi jews just identify with where they come from#e.g. sephardic/mizrachi etc.

@maimonidean-dilemma Very true and good point, thank you for these tags!! I was actually originally thinking of having a voting option along the lines of "this poll is too Ashkenormative to describe me," but ended up taking it out because of the poll limits, with the reasoning that the "not listed" option could serve as a catch-all. In retrospect, it would probably have been better to either remove one of the smaller movements from the selection, or change the verbiage of the "not listed" answer.

It would be nice if Tumblr allowed just a few more voting options...

In any case, I appreciate the reminder. (And here is a current Jumblr poll focused on where we come from, for those interested.)

If you are not Jewish, please refrain from responding, and check back in a week if you're curious about the results! There unfortunately wasn't room in the poll to include a throwaway "show results" option this time.

(Do feel free to reblog, though, whether or not you're Jewish, in case you have Jewish followers! Larger sample size, etc. etc.)

If you're Jewish and affiliated with multiple movements (e.g., "I sometimes go to Reform services and sometimes to Reconstructionist"), or if you identify as an in-between place on the spectrum (e.g., "Conservadox"), try to pick one you feel most connected to in some way — whether that be based on your halachic observance, the services you most often attend, the services you would want to attend if you could, or something else.

[animatedamerican]

tags from @dduane: #absolutely it would lean toward the Talmudic in general conduct #but then there's an old fanon tradition that Vulcans were the Lost Tribe...

"You're not gonna believe this -- we found the Space Jews, and they're Maimonideans."

i would actually love to see the vulcan culture evolve. change. human culture has undergone so many shifts in popular thought and society that it would be great to see vulcans do the same. (we won’t get into the whole “entire alien planet has one unified culture” thing cause we’re operating in a scifi future so some leniency will be granted).

so surak was this ancient guy who figured it all out and helped vulcan civilization with his philosophies. so was plato. so was sun tzu. even if we’re operating with the assumption that everyone listened to surak and followed his teachings (with some… notable exceptions) you CANNOT tell me that no one has expanded upon them! i wont even say “improved” but ffs, the fact that the only deviation from “suppress ALL your emotions” was sybok’s “let’s start a cult and then explode” philosophy is wildly hard to believe in a culture like the vulcans where being a smartass is not only encouraged but required.

SHOW ME THE VULCAN PHILOSOPHICAL DEBATES. show me the t’ed talks arguing that you should only suppress anger, or take one day a month to feel all your emotions and scream endlessly. i want to meet the cafeteria catholic equivalent of a vulcan. show me the vulcan that’s adapted klingon beliefs, or romulan, or fucking ferengi beliefs!! and not in the “it is only logical to amass wealth” way i want a vulcan quark complete with loud blazers and bad ad jingle.

[entanglingbriars]

why don't you write a little bit about the context of Maimonides' writing? so much of what we understand these days about Jewish theology is influenced by the Rambam but I know so little of what things were like before him, or the circumstances that moved him to write

well, I'm not a Maimonidean scholar by any means, and the only work of his I’ve read is his Guide to the Perplexed, which while of interest is not as significant to the development of Judaism as his legal scholarship.

Any followers up to the task?

[unsound-unbody]

So, a few things.

Laila is not a distinctly feminine angel. While לילה is a feminine noun, the Gemara uses both masculine and feminine endings for the verbs. We could take this gender ambiguity to mean that the angel is female, but it could also be a matter of the verbs agreeing with the gender of the noun, even if the angel isn't feminine (this ambiguity is reflected later in translations from Hebrew which will gender her both male and female). Many later Jewish writers also don't even really consider angels as having gender in the true sense of the word. The wikipedia page on Lailah, citing Howard Schultz, says the angel exhibits "distinctly feminine characteristics," but this is speculation on his part based primarily on the fact that midwifery is a traditionally (but not exclusively) female role. Geoffrey W. Dennis seems to think that a discussion in the Zohar about Exodus 12:42 (which concerns the first night after the Exodus, and presumably, for some of the rabbis, the first night of Pesach) confirms that she's female, but this passage is not directly commenting on the name of the angel at all. The Vilna Gaon, in his Haggadah commentary, instead understands it as an answer to the question "Why is this night different from other nights?" understanding "lailah" in the Zohar as referring to "night" in its plain meaning.

As for the claim that she's the angel that teaches Torah in the womb and gives people the cupid's bow, my source was Geoffrey W. Dennis' Encyclopaedia of Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism. When I tried to check his sources, I couldn't find anything that confirmed this. Tankhuma Pekudei, which he sources, only says that "the angel in charge of souls" (the Zohar identifies this as Gabriel) does these things. Sanhedrin 96a mentions Laila once but not in this context. Niddah 30b is a source in Gemara for this, but this only refers to "an angel" who is not named. The source in Niddah 30b also only says "and one is taught the entire Torah [in the womb]," leading later (especially Maimonidean/philosophical) commentators to speculate that this entire aggadeta is in response to Plato's idea that all knowledge is remembering things we knew before we were born.

Wikipedia's big source on this claim seems to be Howard Schultz? And while I admit I haven't checked all his sources, he seems based on the sources I've checked, if not making some information up wholesale, at least coalescing a lot of ambiguous & pluralistic information in the tradition to give Laila a more compelling narrative. Because I checked all the major sources he cites and none of them have quite as much fervor about her role in conception as his.

was it you who mentioned in one of the Lilith posts that you had an infodump in the works about the angel laylah? if so, I'd love to hear it! 💕

Here we go!

So- Lailah (לילה) is also the Hebrew word for "night." She's another Jewish-specific figure from the Talmud and later Jewish myth. Most angels are depicted as neutral to masculine, but she is one of the few (if not the only) angels that is distinctly feminine!

In many ways she's the polar opposite of Lilith. While Lilith is very anti-maternal and seeks to destroy, Lailah oversees birth and conception (and based on Rabbinic commentary on the word "night" itself, probably also the sex. Not sex in general or sex for pleasure, but the act of procreation.)

In Midrash Tanhuma/ Niddah 16b- She will take up a "drop" and bring it to HaShem and ask him what kind of person it will be. She'll ask if they're rich or poor, strong or weak, etc. The only thing HaShem DOESN'T decide is if you're righteous or wicked, which is up to your own free will.

Once that's done, she's also your first teacher. They say she teaches you everything about the Torah, prepping you with all that wisdom as you're developing. Then right at the end, she karate chops you in the fucking face which makes you go ???!?!??!? and then bam you're being born. In all of the chaos, you forget everything you know. You spend the rest of your life feeling like you forgot something and learning to reconnect. (I personally connect that story with the yearning converts feel, too. They say converts are Jewish souls coming home, so y'all got angel-chopped like the rest of us. I just think that's nice.)

She just feels like a figure that should be considered really important and yet I hear very little about her? This ramble is about as long as her Wikipedia page.

Also I like her because I have a stimmy thing with L-L names like Lailah, Lilith, Lily, Lola, etc.

[jewsome]

The Ancient Sefer Torah of Bologna by Mauro Perani

The Ancient Sefer Torah of Bologna: Features and History contains studies on the most ancient, complete Pentateuch scroll known to date. It was considered in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as the archetypal autograph written by Ezra the Scribe. The scroll was rediscovered by Mauro Perani in 2013 at the University Library of Bologna. In this volume, leading specialists study the history, textual and material features, and different halakhot or norms to copy a Sefer Torah, as adopted in the pre-Maimonidean scrolls. The Hebrew text is very close to the Aleppo codex, and the scroll was probably copied in Northern Iberia in ca. 1200 CE. The scroll contains letters with special shapes and tagin linking its production with a Jewish milieu which associated the scribal tradition with mystical and esoteric meanings. Besides its codicological and palaeographical interest, the “Ezra scroll” has been preserved for centuries among the treasures of the Dominican convent of San Domenico in Bologna and, in the early modern period, it was the object of reverence and curiosity among the Christians, before being almost entirely forgotten after its confiscation by the French revolutionary troops. This volume presents a detailed overview of the fascinating history and the peculiar makings of this remarkable artefact.

The post The Ancient Sefer Torah of Bologna by Mauro Perani appeared first on Jewish Book World.

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[jewishphilosophyplace]

(Body) Maimonides & Dance (Epistle to Yemen)

In the 12th century, Shia forces in Yemen rebelling against Saladin conducted a persecution of the Jewish community. Originally written in Arabic, Maimonides Epistle to Yemen addressed the contemporary challenge of forced apostasy, heresy, and messianic claims. What caught my eye was how the combination of skepticism and aesthetic taste, especially dance, namely two dancing figures, informs the letter and perhaps the larger Maimonidean worldview.

The skepticism is recognizable enough. Maimonides rejects astrology along with any and all attempts to calculate the coming of the Messiah. These calculations lead to doubt and confusion. The appeal of Judaism and to Judaism is based purely in the past and present, namely the memory of Sinai as spectacle and the living truth of Judaism. But more to the point, it is based on an understanding of the body as a physical assemblage. A masterpiece of religious polemical writing, the letter doubles down on the inner living structure of Judaism, the immutable eternity of its truth, against what he rejects in contrast as the false religions of Christianity and Islam. Judaism is compared to a living body, whose organs and other inward parts, its networks of muscles, nerves, ligaments, joints and bones, are all “truly marvelously made.” In contrast, Christianity and Islam are at best stony, wooden, metallic simulacra. Maiminides compares them to statues, “copied from and patterned after [Judaism],” showing only a trace beauty of an outer organization (Isadore Twersky, A Maimonides Reader, p.443). We all know that Maimonides rejected the ascription of any corporeal attribution to God. But here what we have is Judaism as God’s revelation, perhaps even Torah as creature, in the image of a human body, a wondrous work.

Maimonides also doubles down on the Sinai event, and in doing so doubles down on imagination as the bedrock of popular Jewish religion. Maimonides wants the people to understand by way of the imagination that the Torah hangs on Sinai “and the memory of this occasion” as God’s final and consummate revelation. “It is imperative, my fellow Jews, that you make this great spectacle of the Revelation appeal to the imagination of your children. Proclaim at public gatherings its momentousness. For this event is the pivot of our religion, and the proof which demonstrates its veracity” (p.442). What Maimonides calls for then, what he recognizes as popular Jewish religion, is truth conveyed through the two forms of “great spectacle” and public performance.

Maimonides doubles down on spectacle and performance with this startling, even erotic image in praise of the people Israel:

Solomon, of blessed memory, has compared our people to a beautiful woman with a perfect figure, marred by no defect, in the verse, “Thou art all fair, my love; and there is no spot in thee.” (Song of Songs 4:7). On the other hand, he depicted the adherents of other religions and faiths, who strive to entice and win us over to their convictions, as courtesans who lure virtuous women for lewd purposes. Similarly they seek devices to trap us into embracing their religions, and subscribing to their doctrines. To these who endeavor to decoy her into avowing the superiority of their creed, our nation deftly replies, “Why do you take hold of me, can you confer upon me something like the felicity of the two companies?” She reasons thus, “If you can furnish us with something like the Revelation on Sinai, in which the camp of Israel faced the camp of the Divine Presence, then we shall espouse your doctirnes.” This is metaphorically expressed in the verse, “Return, return, O Shulammite; return, return, that we may look upon thee. What will you see in the Shulammite? As it were a dance of two companies.” (Song of Songs 7:1). Now “Shulammite” signifies the perfect one; “A dance of the two companies” alludes to the joy of the theophany in Mt. Sinai in which both the camp of Israel and the camp of God showed as is intimated in the two following verses: “Moses brought forth the people out of the camp to meet God,” (Exodus 19:17), and “The chariots of God are myriads, even thousands upon thousands; the Lord is among them, as in Sinai, in holiness” (Psalms 68:18) (p.443).

One could easily say that these vivid appeals to the imagination were intended for common people and for the education of children. But this is not a merely incidental figure of thought, simply passed off as “just a metaphor.” What we have before us is a long and sustained attention to an image. There is a possible, maybe definite, philosophical conclusion to what in this section of the letter are remarkable couplings of the image of human bodies, joy and an open and erotic appeal to aesthetic imagination, to revelation viewed through the prism of poetry, to the Song of Songs and Psalms, to the spectacle and performance of dance. Much more than “law,” Maimonides turned his readers’ eye on two beautiful companies of dancers, the company of Israel and the camp of God, suggesting that he saw in aesthetics and the art of performance a more sure foundation against doubt and skepticism than simple and bald appeals to divine power and religious authority. The authority of revelation, its value as truth, would lie in the confidence of the dance itself, in image of the performance of the dancers, in this case, before a male philosophical gaze.

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[jewishphilosophyplace]

Messianism & Moral Radicalism (After the Holocaust) (Steven Schwarzschild)

Avoiding him for years, I knew that reading Steven Schwarzschild’s Pursuit of the Ideal was going to be for me an unpleasant professional chore. He wrote an important article about “Jewish aesthetics” that appears in the volume. But that was all I was going to read, and really it too is a strange intellectual exercise. That essat occupied some three paragraphs in the preface to The Shape of Revelation, where it left an unfavorable impression. I highlighted there the confluence of Judaism and high modernism presented by Schwarzschild against postmodernism, Andy Warhol, and pop-art. That was years ago already. This spring, reading the entire volume ended up being one of the very last things I needed to do in the process of completing draft-chapters on ethics and messianism for new research, in which he will occupy at most a footnote or two. Not without an interest of their own, the essays collected in Pursuit of the Ideal only confirm what I already thought. There is something badly awry, albeit instructive, in this body of work. A radical thinker, a moral radical, Schwarzschild did not grasp very well the tension between the ideal and the real, which he posed in stark binary terms. For him, it was one or the other, with no in-between. As post-Holocaust Jewish thought, it is oddly obtuse to the problem of human suffering.

Schwarzschild invoked messianism years before it was brought into vogue in critical theory, and for that alone his work is worth a look. But to what purpose did he stick his hands into that fire? For someone writing well into the 1980s against political and religious Zionism, maybe Schwarzschild should have known better than to play the messianism card. To be sure, he was utterly prescient in his radical critique of the State of Israel, in particular Jewish racism in Israel, but for the wrong reasons. His critique of Israel conformed to a larger pattern of thought privileging idealism and ethical idealism, transformed into an uncompromising form of moral radicalism that he positioned over against “reality.” Compare him in contrast to post-Holocaust thinkers like Richard Rubenstein, Eliezer Berkovits, and Emil Fackenheim. Politically, they were, of course, conservative to the extreme about Israel. Writing so soon after 1945, Israel was for them a precious icon of life against death. And yet, for all that, the post-Holocaust thinkers understood the State of Israel more or less realistically, more or less historically. In the end, they did not look upon Israel through an idealist-eschatological lens. As they imagined it, Israel was for them a real place meant to meet real human problems in the here and now. From deep within “the religious,” they understood that God was a problem, not an ethical foundation of faith, as per Schwarzschild. They shared none of his austere theological confidence. For them the only important datum was the Jewish people, Israel after Auschwitz.

Associated with ethical socialism, messianism was for Schwarzschild the end all and be all of Judaism. Looking to the future and only to the future, messianism stood for ethical perfection. Ethics and messianism are radical and uncompromising figures of thought strictly opposed to reality (understood to be imperfect, compromised, and cruel). Itself always in pursuit of the ideal, Judaism was marshalled to teach that the world as it is is never what God wants it to be (pp.209-11). This is the essential teaching of “pure monotheism,” presented as the truth of Judaism, as a “clear cut norm,” “authoritative tradition,” with “no doubt,” “in fact,” as “historic fact” (cf. 3, 129,130, 209, 235, 244, 247). Hyperbolic to the extreme, the essence of Judaism is no longer “ethical monotheism,” that moderate bourgeois inheritance from nineteenth century liberal Judaism. Much more stringent Schwarzschild distilled the essence of Judaism into “moral radicalism,” which he posed against ethical eudaemonism and the Aristotelean mean (chapter 8).

As an aesthetic figure, moral radicalism may have been marked by an austere and alien grandeur, but, conceptually, it was mangled at the root. Let’s start with how Schwarzschild consistently confused moral radicalism (i.e. absolute and uncompromising commitments to justice, mercy, and the virtue of humility) with religious radicalism (loving God to the point of excess, the desire to imitate God, to see God, to confront God without any mediating intermediary). Reading Deuteronomy 6:5 in order to lampoon liberal religion, is it possible, he demanded to know, to love God with “a moderate part of one’s heart”?  Schwarzschild has just pulled a bait and switch. If we are to assume that ethics speaks to right human action or to individual virtue and social relations, then the commandment in Deuteronomy to love God with all one’s heart, soul, and might is not ethical per se (p.139). Unethical to the extreme, a “foolish pietism,” to turn all one’s attention to God is to turn one’s eye away from human beings.

Schwarzschild makes the same elision between ethics and religion when writing about Maimonides. Noting the ethical dictum at the end of the Guide that to know God is to practice grace, justice, and righteousness in this world, Schwarzschild fails to comment that this highpoint in the text is the precise moment at which the soul separates from the body, and allowing the perfected intellect to unite with the Active Intellect. We see this too in Schwarzschild’s reading of The Eight Chapters, also by Maimonides, his commentary to the ethical tractate Pirkei Avot. Here again what Schwarzschild himself calls the religious “extremism” in the effort to “see” God certainly outstrips Aristotelean moderation. About this, he was right about Maimonides. But this might be better understood to constitute the limits of Maimonidean ethics, or at best their consummation at the limit. Schwarzschild doesn’t seem to grasp that this extreme comportment is no longer ethical. Poltics and ethics are a condition for intellectual perfection, not its telos. Transcending interhuman and character ethics, the relation is religious-prophetic (pp.142-3).

What about the individual, which, according to Maimonides, Torah must always accommodate? While one can appreciate the religious intensity of the spiritual stretch of the vision, it would be a category mistake to call it ethical as conventionally understood, even as “infinite task.” In Schwarzschild an intense disregard if not for human life as such, then for the value of individual human life as a particular actuality. The contempt shown for “the vulgus” and hoi polio is consistent and withering. Viewed from an eschatological point of view, for Schwarzschild the value of a single human individual life, a suffering human life, pales before “the ideal.” As a general statement, does this hold true. Moral radicalism tout court is unsympathetic as such to human weakness, even to the human suffering that one might have thought, would have propelled it in the first place.

Under the surface, the strong pathos that inflects this transformation of ethical idealism into moral radicalism betrays a unique form of affective volatility undoubtedly pressured by the Holocaust. A mix of heart and heartlessness, the fever pitch of Schwarzschild’s moral radicalism explains why his discussion of the dispute between R. Akiva and ben Petura seems to go off the rails. In this well-known debate in tractate Bava Metzia of the Babylonian Talmud, there are two men in the desert, one in possession of just enough water for the one person to live, but only at the expense of the other. Ben Petura would have them share the water, meaning that both men will die in the desert. The opposing view is Akiva’s. In the Bavli, it is clear that either one person or no person will survive this zero-sum ordeal. Typically regarded in Jewish tradition as winning the argument, Akiva’s ruling is that, in order to survive this state of emergency, the owner of the water should keep the water and preserve his own life, even at the expense of the other.

Raising the stakes to that higher pitch of moral radicalism, Schwarzschild brings a post-Holocaust swerve to this classical conundrum. In his re-reading, the “model situation” under consideration is “actually” one in which it is unclear if either man in the discussion will survive the passage through the desert. Bending the text in light of “cool analysis” and the “history of Jewish martyrdom” leads Schwarzschild to conclude that both men will die in the desert, either as martyrs or as “frustrated survivors.” Bringing the conversation to bear on our own contemporary condition, Schwarzschild now complains, almost suddenly, that no one today wants to talk about “the possibility of future martyrdom.” He is distressed by the thought that in “our times,” “no one seems to have any idea anymore about having to draw the line somewhere, beyond which, as a limit, one may not go without losing one’s humanity, though, perhaps saving one’s life –not to speak of lesser sacrifices” (pp. 132-3). This is the view that we have no choice but to die sometime, and that one should always prefer one’s own death rather than to cause the death of another person. Schwarzschild conflates this with killing, which he insists “Judaism” forbids absolutely.” Having further conflated killing and murder, the appeal of martyrdom is unique to Schwarzschild.  “May my soul die the death of the righteous and my end be like theirs.” Against post-Holocaust theology, Schwarzschild calls “psychopathic” its will to survive at every cost after Auschwitz. Instead he embraces the example of the poet, Yehudah Halevy, as the willingness to suffer and to die (p.134-5). The martyr dies not for the sake of one’s fellow human being; the martyr dies for the sake of God’s name.

Guiding the moral radicalism undergirding this idiosyncratic appeal to martyrdom is the firm and unshakeable trust in the God of Israel. Schwarzschild trusts that God, even if we are to call God cruel, saw to the survival of the Jewish people during the Holocaust and will always see to the survival of the Jewish people (cf. pp 86, 89, 94-8 in chapter 4, “On the Theology of Jewish Survival”). This is the confidence that God will extricate humanity out of the inextricable muck of material existence (p.223). Sorting through old arguments about the soteriological effect of human action versus divine grace, Schwarzschild rejects apocalyptic modes of religious thought (the notion that redemption comes only by way of sudden catastrophic rupture) and also utopianism (defined as the false belief that the world can be made perfect). Against Scholem, Schwarzschild thinks one can separate both concepts from pure messianism (i.e. the notion that there is “some organic relationship between human history and its end” allowing us to grasp that ethical action is a necessary but insufficient condition for ethical perfection).

After the Holocaust, the confidence is fragile. Undercutting his own thesis, Schwarzschild could only say that to pin one’s hope for salvation upon some sudden, apocalyptic divine act of grace and only grace would depend upon an experience so “horrifying,” “morally atrocious” and “experientially painful” that one would never want the messiah to come in the first place (pp.225-6, “On Jewish Eschatology”). But surely, he must have understood that the Holocaust was exactly that — horrifying, morally atrocious, and experientially painful to the extreme. As much as he wants to subvert Scholem’s famous thesis that messianism is a theory of catastrophe, in writing these lines, Schwarzschild only highlights the degree to which the difference between messianism and apocalypticism is a too fine if not altogether non-existent line. For Schwarzschild, the pursuit of the ideal bears up over the weight of brute human reality. In this, it might be more to the point to concede that ethical perfection and moral radicalism are not worth the radically unbearable price of radical suffering.

Furthermore, when framed as radical ethical idealism, messianism is an eminently falsifiable belief. On the one hand, we have already suggested that Schwarzschild is critical of political and religious Zionism. On the other hand, he insists that “statements about life in the Messianic era or in the world to come are not logically self-contradictory or morally counterproductive and, in addition, produce this-worldly ethical injunctions which can both function empirically and be approved of morally” (p.222).  With an eye on rightwing religious radicalism in the State of Israel today, it is hard to follow this logic. As Schwarzschild himself knew well enough, statements about messianism can be ethically counterproductive, even morally atrocious. The so-called difference between messianism and false messianism is another thin line.

Another muddle: the pursuit of the ideal depends upon a view of the world according to which “reality” is too irredeemably rotten to function as a platform for the very ethical action it demands in relation to standards of messianism, perfectionism, and moral radicalism. Instead of determining ethical action in this world, these essays give way to an extreme form of religious love for the sake of the God of Israel. Unto death, the thinking here is no longer ethical if by ethics we mean the morally ambiguous terrain of human virtues and interpersonal relationships. None of this reflects “cool analysis.” It is all rather hot to the touch. The more coherent counterclaim would be that moral universe in this world is not given to the Platonic, mathematical precision that Schwarzschild wants for ethical action. Ours is an experience of the world too often overwhelmed by “horrifying experience” and moral atrocity. To work one’s way around in this world requires the kind of accommodation that Schwarzschild associates with Aristotelean ethics, even as the refusal to accommodate to the reality of this world lies at the heart of this post-Holocaust brand of ethical idealism and moral radicalism.

If Schwarzschild’s thinking is muddled, it because it bangs up against ontological muddles, not just conceptual ones. This is to say that he further confuses the relation between things that perhaps are already mingled at the root. They include muddled relations between what’s real and ideal, between is and ought, between what is permitted and forbidden, between messianism and apocalypticism, between religion and ethics through which there is no way out except perhaps through death. Does this explain the appeal of martyrdom? About the confused or confusing understanding of the relation between the ideal and real, this is what I wrote about Schwarzschild’s essay on Jewish art and modernism in the preface to The Shape of Revelation:

Writing at mid-century after the triumph of modernism…Steven Schwarzschild allows plastic art into Judaism; although once again, word trumps image in order to contrive a uniquely Jewish approach to visual art. Schwarzschild cites the Shulkhan ‘Arukh, to explain that Jewish law permits nonmimetic plastic expression. According to a gloss by Moses Isserles (1520–72), “There are those who hold that images of man or a dragon are not prohibited unless they are complete with all their limbs, but the shape of a head by itself or a body without a head is in no wise forbidden.” Schwarzschild relates this opinion back to the rationalism of Moses Maimonides, who rejected any attempt to stand for the human soul, God’s very image. As Schwarzschild puts it, “To represent physical appearance as the whole person is, therefore, a misrepresentation. The converse is also true: a ‘misrepresentation’ will in fact be a true depiction. . . . To represent the empirical as tout court is, therefore, also to misrepresent God.”

 Deference to the authority of Jewish law notwithstanding, this stilted approach to art trips up on German philosophical idealism. Schwarzschild continues to patrol the anxious boundary separating art from reality, the ideal from the empirical. He wants to avoid that instance in which two objects, the original and its artistic reproduction, appear exactly identical. According to Schwarzschild, art is no longer art when the artwork neither adds to nor detracts from the real world. “What in truth is the difference between a pop art duplicate . . . of a soup can and the original on a display shelf? Hegel was surely right when he held that whenever and wherever the idea is believed to have become identical with the real, the ‘death of art’ has occurred.” Couched in the idealist critique of empirical reality and in a modernism already at war with postmodernism, Schwarzschild’s discussion of the Shulkhan ‘Arukh proudly concludes, “We have thus deduced two of the chief principles of twentieth-century modern art—abstraction and distortion.” Leaving copy realism far behind, abstract art nihilates physical semblance, whereas distortion detracts from and adds to it.

Modern art and Judaism are thereby forced to confirm each other on the basis of philosophical constructs regarding the fixed difference between appearance, representation, and reality. Mostly, the entire exercise remains fundamentally arbitrary, as seen by Schwarzschild’s embrace of Rembrandt, El Greco, and Modigliani, while excluding classical Greek art, its Renaissance revival, French pointillism, and American pop art. The author seems to think that the shadows and light casting human figures in Rembrandt’s paintings obviate their realistic character, while Warhol’s soup cans violate the fragile boundary between real and ideal. Spurious at best, such judgment reflects a rearguard modernism, not

halakhic principle. Kandinsky is far less dogmatic. “Approaching it in one way, he writes, “I see no essential difference between a line one calls ‘abstract’ and a fish. But an essential likeness.’ Line and fish are “living beings,” each with latent capacities. A “miracle,” these capacities are made manifest and radiant by the environment of their composition. And this despite the equally essential difference that a fish “can swim, eat, and be eaten.”

For all that he turned to modernist abstract art, the philosopher was unable, as the artist was able, to negotiate the difference between the abstract or ideal versus the real, between a picture of a can of soup and an actual can of soup. In this, Schwarzschild refused to distinguish between spiritual and physical need. Unable to tolerate the distortions of ethical life, the pursuit of the ideal is unable to accommodate itself sympathetically to human weakness. The best one could say is that the thinking at work in these essays is hyperbolic, unreal like abstract art. But even Kandinsky’s art touched in some way upon the world. Perhaps it is the case that Schwarzschild’s thought was also touched by the world, or rather burnt by the real. By his own admission, the form of thought does not belong to this world. The pursuit can only end falling in on itself, instantiating the problem with moral radicalism in the first place.

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