(Vico 4) From 2015: Yoram Hazony Against Isaiah Berlin, Vico, and Jewish Humanism
David Shasha
Yoram Hazony Lecture: “The Jew in Contemporary Philosophy and Theology,” at the Oxford University CHABAD, February 10, 2015
I do my best to avoid posting long videos from the Web, but Yoram Hazony’s recent lecture on Isaiah Berlin and the Counter-Enlightenment delivered at the Oxford University CHABAD is most certainly worth watching, as it adds to our understanding of the Sephardi Question and how Ashkenazim have sought to maintain their hegemonic control over Jewish intellectual discourse at the present time:
Here is the formal announcement of the program:
Hazony’s primary aim, as is the usual way of Modern Orthodox Jews, is to force a linkage between Judaism and, in this particular case, Isaiah Berlin’s critique of the Enlightenment.
Critically, Berlin highlights the work of Giambattista Vico whose classic 1725 book New Science developed what Jose Faur has called “Religious Humanism”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Science
For those not familiar with Vico’s writings, the following article by Professor Nancy Du Bois provides a good introduction to his thought:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i3APFbTg8NiBGhLDfkaExyLKilbgd5sDYitoEcAMLVQ/edit
Berlin brilliantly presented his critical ideas on Vico in the classic book “Three Critics of the Enlightenment”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Critics_of_the_Enlightenment
There is a great irony here: As Hazony speaks passionately about Jewish particularism and the contingency of knowledge, he forces Judaism into an abstract posture that removes Jewish Philosophy from its concrete historical development.
Hazony cursorily presents classical Jewish Philosophy in its development from Philo of Alexandria to Hermann Cohen, a path which travels along the road of Sephardic Jewish polymaths such as Se’adya Ga’on, Maimonides, Judah Halevi, Solomon ibn Gabirol, and Abraham ibn Da’ud. But he resolutely ignores the larger context of medieval Arabo-Islamic civilization in which it was gestated; preferring instead to emphasize the idea of a Biblical philosophy which he has previously written about:
http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Hebrew-Scripture-Yoram-Hazony/dp/0521176670
It is this static Biblical philosophical analysis that ultimately serves to subvert Vico’s Religious Humanism as it extols the idea of a Jewish elitism rather than a Judaism that participated in the larger project of a poetical religious truth that was embedded in the context of Greco-Roman rationalism and science.
Hazony makes a brief mention of the classical Jewish Philosophers, but his ultimate aim is to valorize his own reading of the Bible with its Neo-Conservative underpinnings and its implicit attack on Liberal values.
He, not unexpectedly, emphatically closes the lecture with an impassioned paranoid tirade on Anti-Semitism and Jewish alienation that firmly flies in the face of the integrative model of Religious Humanism.
Hazony seeks to present Jewish Philosophy as a set of theological ideas emanating from the Hebrew Bible as a means to counter European ideas of truth. Hazony’s univocal understanding of Jewish Philosophy is a series of analytical abstractions rather than historically-charged realities rooted in the organic development of Jewish thought over time. He presents Jewish Philosophy as a static, ahistorical phenomenon that resists evolutionary development.
By ignoring the complex transmission patterns of Sephardic Jewish Humanism rooted in Maimonides’ grand synthesis, Hazony is promoting the racially-charged values of Ashkenazi Zionist exclusivity. This hermeneutic endeavor serves to undermine the very Liberalism that Isaiah Berlin sought to promote in his work on Vico. Not surprisingly, the Oxford lecture does not at all address values such as pluralism, tolerance, and models of human co-existence. Such values are not a part of Hazony’s “Hebraic” vision.
In this way he studiously avoids the Religious Humanism paradigm and the way in which it has been understood in the Sephardic tradition; a matter that has been explained by Jose Faur in his many scholarly books and articles on Judaism and the Sephardic heritage, especially Golden Doves with Silver Dots and The Horizontal Society:
While extolling the value of “experience,” Hazony limits the meaning of such “experience” to his own Ashkenazi ethnocentrism and its formative Eurocentric values. This ultimately allows him to justify his divisive anti-Liberal ideas and claim Jewish Philosophy for the larger cause of Ashkenazi Neo-Conservatism and Zionism.
In the process of articulating his version of Jewish ideality, Hazony ignores the many representatives of Jewish Humanism in the modern period; brilliant figures such as Elijah Benamozegh, Israel Moses Hazzan, and Sabato Morais.
Tellingly, these great Sephardic Jewish thinkers did indeed have a formal connection to the work of Vico and used it to articulate a contemporary understanding of Judaism that stands in stark contrast to Hazony’s Ashkenazi essentialism and its Neo-Conservative values.
It is only in the Sephardic tradition, the one that has been expunged and silenced by Ashkenazi ethnocentrists like Hazony, that the liberal values of Vichian Religious Humanism have been preserved.
It is a subject I have discussed many times and in many different contexts:
I have even presented the matter in the contentious context of Ashkenazi Orthodoxy and shown just why and how it is that the model has been so emphatically rejected:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/yct/davidshasha/JPZFturnQkQ/FX8HLC0KgtoJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/yct/davidshasha/DPXgyW5KkZQ/fV41g72MXsEJ
My article “A Broken Frame: Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction” sums up these concerns:
I have previously discussed Hazony’s radical understanding of Zionism and its implications for Sephardic Jewish culture and history in my essay “The Nightmare of Diaspora”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1QiSKgPuEarpnSqRaJs6JdBTDWpWVzJkCG1XCCj37KEE/edit
With the ongoing erasure of the Sephardic Jewish heritage the noble values of Religious Humanism are cruelly being withheld from the Jewish community; a community in desperate need of a different way to be Jewish than the stale and arid formalism of Neo-Conservatives like Yoram Hazony.
David Shasha
From SHU 678, March 15, 2015