ICYMI: Newsletter Special: The Jewish Primitivism of Michael Wyschogrod
David Shasha
Introduction: The Jewish Primitivism of Michael Wyschogrod
It is highly unlikely that many Jews have heard of the late Michael Wyschogrod, but they are certainly familiar with the fundamentalist theological revolution that he has helped to inspire.
For those who are trying to better understand and process the current state of academic Judaic Studies and the dominance of the Neo-Con Tikvah Fund model in it, understanding Wyschogrod’s thought is critical.
Although his primary work The Body of Faith is a very complex piece of religious writing, the primordial anti-Rationalism that it propounds has become integral to the thinking of the Jewish Right Wingers today.
Wyschogrod’s thought is fundamental to a new generation of Jewish Radicals who have hijacked academic study, as their politics figure significantly into the current Trumpworld degeneracy.
I first became aware of Wyschogrod and his very confused – and confusing – doctrinal Jewish Theology in his 2010 article “A King in Israel” about Jewish Messianism, published by the radical Right Wing Catholic journal, First Things.
As I indicated in my comments to that article, Wyschogrod presented a very odd amalgamation of Neo-Con values with a very curious ambivalence about the Zionist project and its violent messianism.
I would subsequently discover in the coming years what this confusion was all about.
In my 2016 article on Wyschogrod and his devoted disciple Rabbi Meir Soloveichik, I highlight the very Ashkenazi disdain for Maimonides that is so central to their atavistic and hermetic understanding of Judaism; a Judaism which is largely based on a draconian literalist reading of the Hebrew Bible that eschews Sephardic Jewish Humanism and its openness to science and philosophy.
Indeed, Wyschogrod strongly believed in a corporeal, anthropomorphic deity and utterly disdained figurative readings of the Biblical texts. His Biblical literalism was so pronounced that many readers felt that he was indefatigably antagonistic to the Rabbinic tradition and its non-literal Midrashic hermeneutics.
It was Soloveichik who tried to save his mentor from the anti-Talmudic critique. In his 2010 dissertation, done under the supervision of fellow Tikvah Fund maven Leora Batnitzky of Princeton, Soloveichik valiantly tried to assert Wyschogrod’s Talmudic bona fides, though to little avail.
For those who would like to explore the matter further, here is the complete dissertation:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ytYVvsu-He-LACFKWcSsYGguR5uX33u9/view?ths=true
Soloveichik’s 2005 Azure article fixes in firmly on Wyschogrod’s obsession with Israel’s Chosenness; a factor that brought him into close contact with Christian thinkers and their own Supremacist religious values.
The article serves as an introduction to Wyschogrod for the Neo-Con Jewish world, as it seeks to publicize ideas that would become extremely important to what I have called The New Convivencia; the union of Evangelical Christians and Orthodox Jews under the Zionist rubric.
In 2009 Soloveichik wrote a somewhat shorter article on Wyschogrod for First Things, which once again looked to promote him as a Jewish figure who could serve as a model of integration with the Christian religious radicals.
Back in 2005, Rabbi Shai Held, currently of Mechon Hadar, wrote a lengthy review for the academic journal Modern Judaism of Wyschogrod’s devoted Christian disciple R. Kendall Soulen’s anthology of his mentor’s writings, Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations.
Soulen, like Soloveichik, is a critical figure in the ongoing promotion of Wyschogrod. In his essay on the anthology, Held sees Wyschogrod as a Jewish Karl Barth. Indeed, Wyschogrod has also been compared to other Christian icons like Kierkegaard.
Held, another proud member of The Tikvah Fund family, namechecks Shaul Magid and Jon Levenson in the article’s acknowledgements, showing us how smoothly the economy of Right Wing ideas travels in the Neo-Con Jewish world.
It is certainly no coincidence that Wyschogrod is presented in connection with Christian thinkers, as his ideas strongly resonate with classical Christological values of material Incarnation and Prophetic Biblical literalism.
When Wyschogrod died in December 2015, The Tikvah Fund’s Tablet Magazine published a gushing tribute to him written by David Goldman. Once again, the Neo-Con Jews sought to make the larger Jewish community aware of Wyschogrod’s atavistic thinking and its value for their radical political project.
The final article in this special newsletter is by the aforementioned Leora Batnitzky, who supervised the Soloveichik dissertation. Her Jewish Review of Books tribute to Wyschogrod came just a few months after the Goldman Tablet article. JRB, like Tablet, is a Tikvah Fund publication, and Batnitzky’s discussion uneasily fluctuates between Abraham Joshua Heschel’s universalism and Wyschogrod’s particularist ahistorical neo-pagan Judaism.
Batnitzky is a devoted disciple of Leo Strauss and his debased attacks on the heritage of Jewish Humanism, from Maimonides to Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen. Her influential 2011 book How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought erased Sephardic Judaism from its presentation, as only Ashkenazi Judaism could be seen as “Modern.”
I highlighted that offensively racist point in my comments to Jon Levenson’s review of the book in the following SHU post:
Indeed, you can see how tightly-knit this Tikvah Fund Neo-Con world really is. The names continue to recur as they reinforce the essential ideas that now dominate the field of academic Judaic Studies.
Batnitzky’s assessment of Wyschogrodian Jewish chauvinism in the JRB tribute brings us right back to the problems generated by the Right Wing political extremism that emerged in the Neo-Con Revolution under the influence of its authoritarian hero Strauss, and how it connects to the even more debased religious fundamentalism of The New Convivencia.
Batnitzky’s intemperate waffling on the vital matter of particularism and universalism in Judaism is the result of a lengthy conceptual-ethical process of emphatically rejecting the values of Sephardic Religious Humanism, as the Ashkenazi dysfunction and misanthropy takes over a Jewish world that has increasingly lost its moral bearings.
The Jewish Primitivism of Michael Wyschgrod thus represents a watershed moment in the ongoing erosion of the Andalusian Jewish heritage and its militant replacement by the chauvinist values of the Ashkenazi tradition. It is a truly dangerous step backwards in Jewish History, as it has sought to link arms with other religious radicals in a way that serves to threaten a free and open society and the Liberal values of pluralism, tolerance, and democracy that have been so vital to Jewish survival in the Modern era.
David Shasha
A King in Israel
By: Michael Wyschogrod
Michael Wyschogrod and Meir Soloveichik: Anti-Maimonideans in Action
By: David Shasha
God’s Beloved: A Defense of Chosenness
By: Meir Y. Soloveichik
God’s First Love: The Theology of Michael Wyschogrod
By: Meir Y. Soloveichik
The Promise and Peril of Jewish Barthianism: The Theology of Michael Wyschogrod
By: Shai Held
Michael Wyschogrod, Dean of Jewish Theologians, Dies at 87
By: David P. Goldman
Michael Wyschogrod and the Challenge of God’s Scandalous Love
By: Leora Batnitzky