New Article: Modern Jewish Philosophy as White Jewish Supremacy
David Shasha
Modern Jewish Philosophy as White Jewish Supremacy
Prior to the Internet age, as was the norm, students of Judaism were obliged to go to actual bookstores or libraries in order to find books about our culture and history.
And when you went to the bookstore or library and searched the Judaica section, you were likely to find the very popular 1981 textbook edited by Paul Mendes-Flohr and Jehuda Reinharz, The Jew in the Modern World: A Documentary History:
You can read a preview of the book, along with its massive Table of Contents, at the Google Books site:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Jew_in_the_Modern_World/0Bu5GnLZCw0C?hl=en&gbpv=1
It is interesting to note that in 2010 the book’s third edition was updated with a new chapter on Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews:
But the inclusion of the chapter, of course, did not put an actual end to the White Jewish Supremacy, largely because the rest of the book was not changed in order to provide a more balanced, inclusive perspective where Sephardic thinkers and ideas would be able to act as a foil to the Spinoza-fueled understanding of Judaism that permeates the White Jewish Supremacy.
In other words, even when Sephardim were noticed, they were not included in the basic body of the work, but separated in their own chapter.
It is critical to note this point when looking at a workbook in Modern Jewish Philosophy by Leonard Levin:
https://www.academia.edu/7828538/Workbook_in_Modern_Jewish_Thought
The workbook TOC is listed in full at the end of this article.
Believe it or not, Rabbi Levin is the editor of a White Jewish Supremacy book, Studies in Judaism and Pluralism, which does not have a single Sephardic contributor, or any specific Sephardic content in its entries:
https://www.amazon.com/Studies-Judaism-Pluralism-Honoring-Anniversary/dp/1934730610
I believe that is what the Ashkenazim call CHUTZPAH!
As we will soon see, White Jewish Supremacy is a consistent factor throughout his work.
I received a copy of the workbook through my Academia.edu account, which sends out articles of interest on a daily basis, using previous site searches as a metric to narrow down specific fields of interest.
In other words, the new Internet metric effectively supplants and supplements the old physical book search, and directs students to a massive amount of academic resources that are free and accessible to all. All you need to do is just click your mouse to download them, and they are magically loaded to your hard drive.
So, it is not that Professor Levin, like Mendes-Flohr and Reinharz, is a major player in academic Jewish Studies, or an intellectual celebrity; it is that with the ubiquity of Academia.edu as a major on-line resource database, his “comprehensive” workbook gets posted to many e-mail accounts, thus becoming an important voice in the ongoing Jewish intellectual discussion.
Now, one look at the Mendes-Flohr-Reinharz book in comparison with Levin’s workbook will show that there is not that much conceptual difference between them. Indeed, White Jewish Supremacy permeates both works. The historical timeline and thematic construct, the way we see both history and culture, is thoroughly Eurocentric and driven exclusively by the concerns of Ashkenazi “Enlightened” Jews.
It is therefore critical to understand the massive role played by the Sephardi apostate and Anti-Semite Spinoza in the process, as he introduces both anthologies.
Spinoza (1632-1677) is seen as the “Modern Jew” par excellence, in a way that simultaneously undermines the classical Sephardic heritage which he fought against so vehemently; as it seeks to question and eliminate the traditional Torah values of normative Jewish religiosity.
In this article I will be contrasting the ubiquitous Ashkenazi-centric racist version of Jewish history with an “alternative” Sephardic view, that must be contextualized at the very moment when Spinoza’s Converso confusion presents its “heretical” breach.
In this sense, we should carefully note how academic Judaic Studies and its institutional racism affirms this breach:
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300224108/menasseh-ben-israel
The prestigious Yale Jewish Lives series, which also reflects a racist exclusion of Sephardim, recently published a rare book on a Sephardi, but with a catch.
Steven Nadler’s book on Menasseh Ben Israel (1604-1657), Spinoza’s unhappy teacher, is complicated by the fact that Ben Israel was part of the Amsterdam rabbinical establishment that excommunicated Spinoza:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baruch_Spinoza#Expulsion_from_the_Jewish_community
Ben Israel was in England when the actual ban took place, but his relationship to the apostate has still made him an outsize figure in Jewish history:
https://www.tau.ac.il/~kasher/pspin.htm
Menasseh is seen as another of the heretic’s many persecutors:
Indeed, the main theological role of the belief in the immortality of the soul is to establish the foundation of reward and punishment not in this world - "For we have seen in this world that the righteous man suffers while the wicked man prospers" - but under different circumstances. Clearly, Menasseh ben Israel undertook the task of pursuing "the question most commonly raised by all the commentators of our nation... for why are the spiritual destination and the reward of the soul after death not mentioned in the Torah..." He intended, as he said, "to investigate and explore this belief as far as I can, so that everyone will know that our Torah has nothing missing in it," and this "in spite of the fact that there is no nation and language in the land of the living which does not admit that the soul is spiritual and immortal... nor is there any one among us, thank God, who denies this principle..." (33)By the time Menasseh ben Israel wrote the above, the case of Uriel d'Acosta had receded and that of Baruch de Spinoza and Daniel de Prado did not yet surface. At any rate, Menasseh ben Israel undoubtedly shared the opinion that denying the belief in the immortality of the soul was one of the "abominable heresies."
Critical to the ban was the role of Saul Morteira (1596-1660), head of the Amsterdam rabbinical court:
Indeed, Hakham Morteira accepted Maimonides's opinions and frequently cited them. In a letter addressed to Venice,(17) apparently written in 1635, he ascribes his ideas to "Maimonides, the leading spokesman,"(18) and clarifies that while he was making a public sermon, he referred to "the established tradition accepted by the people of Israel, the baraita, which appears in the first chapter of Rosh Ha-Shanah (17a): "But as for the heretics ["minim"] ... and the scoffers ["apikorosim", lit. Epicureans] who rejected the Torah and deny the resurrection of the dead ... these will go down to Gehinnom and be punished there for all generations.... Gehinnom will be consumed but they will not be consumed...".(19) In his homily on the Thetzave portion of the Law, which is included in Giv'at Sha'ul, his collection of homilies, Morteira writes about "these thirteen Articles of Faith... For everybody agrees that these are the principles of Faith and he who denies them has no share in the world to come..." One of them is "the principle of the divine origin of the Torah. And it is suggested by the name "Dan" for it teaches us that in His divine Torah, God gave human beings the laws [dinim] according to which they have to conduct themselves."(20)
The choice of Steven Nadler to write the Menasseh Ben Israel biography is telling, because he is a vehement Spinozist:
https://aeon.co/essays/at-a-time-of-zealotry-spinoza-matters-more-than-ever
He recently wrote an article for the Wellhausian Torah.com which reminds us of Spinoza’s centrality in the Bible Criticism industry:
https://www.thetorah.com/article/spinoza-who-wrote-the-bible-determines-how-we-read-it
As he states there:
For Spinoza, then, the Bible should not be regarded as a source of truth: not historical truth, not metaphysical truth, not truths about nature and the cosmos, not even truths about God. The Bible is not philosophy, history, or science. What the Bible does proclaim, loud and clear (according to Spinoza, at least)—the truth that is the heart of all the prophetic writings when they are read and interpreted properly and according to Spinoza’s hermeneutical method—is a simple, moral one: Love God above all, and love one’s neighbor as oneself.
He concludes with a boldly heretical anti-Jewish flourish, calling Torah Judaism “the idolatrous worship of mere paper and ink”:
In Spinoza’s view, if an account of Scripture and its interpretation forestalls the idolatrous worship of mere paper and ink and turns people toward the genuine devotion to God, to pious behavior, then it has made an important contribution to dispelling superstition and to the propagation of true religion.
Spinoza’s view, as we can clearly see in the Levin workbook, is firmly rooted in the European Enlightenment, with its negative view of traditional religion, and its absolute elevation of the Mind above Tradition, raising the inflexibility of the Rational and the Scientific in deleterious ways that impact us to this day.
Such was the view of Descartes (1596-1650):
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/
As that entry states:
René Descartes’ rationalist system of philosophy is one of the pillars on which Enlightenment thought rests. Descartes (1596–1650) undertakes to establish the sciences upon a secure metaphysical foundation. The famous method of doubt Descartes employs for this purpose exemplifies (in part through exaggerating) an attitude characteristic of the Enlightenment. According to Descartes, the investigator in foundational philosophical research ought to doubt all propositions that can be doubted. The investigator determines whether a proposition is dubitable by attempting to construct a possible scenario under which it is false. In the domain of fundamental scientific (philosophical) research, no other authority but one’s own conviction is to be trusted, and not one’s own conviction either, until it is subjected to rigorous skeptical questioning. With his method, Descartes casts doubt upon the senses as authoritative source of knowledge. He finds that God and the immaterial soul are both better known, on the basis of innate ideas, than objects of the senses. Through his famous doctrine of the dualism of mind and body, that mind and body are two distinct substances, each with its own essence, the material world (allegedly) known through the senses becomes denominated as an “external” world, insofar as it is external to the ideas with which one immediately communes in one’s consciousness. Descartes’ investigation thus establishes one of the central epistemological problems, not only of the Enlightenment, but also of modernity: the problem of objectivity in our empirical knowledge. If our evidence for the truth of propositions about extra-mental material reality is always restricted to mental content, content before the mind, how can we ever be certain that the extra-mental reality is not other than we represent it as being? Descartes’ solution depends on our having secured prior and certain knowledge of God. In fact, Descartes argues that all human knowledge (not only knowledge of the material world through the senses) depends on metaphysical knowledge of God.
The Enlightenment tradition plays a major role in the Spinoza Question, and in the way that a counter-tradition developed; a tradition that can be seen in the Sephardic heritage which has been forcibly excluded from the contemporary Jewish discourse.
I have discussed this counter-tradition in an article on the Zionist extremist and Alt-Right supporter Yoram Hazony, which deals with the historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aU5eUG3_dui2ugm1oANVkWLh1-TgH4dtlqCruef7pCo/edit
I was struck by the fact that in the lecture Hazony never discussed Berlin’s work on the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1744):
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 the article I provided a number of resources on Vico and his Religious Humanism:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Science
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i3APFbTg8NiBGhLDfkaExyLKilbgd5sDYitoEcAMLVQ/edit
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Critics_of_the_Enlightenment
Where Descartes sharpened the rationalistic dogma, Vico expounded on what he called “Poetic History”:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/vico/#NewScie
Here is how Nancy du Bois expresses the counter-Cartesian “rhetorical” philosophy:
"Nature"
is the ideal human being, what God created Adam to be as described by Pico, but
after the Fall we have to toil to be wise and happy. "Certainly those who
think that wisdom is idleness have simply failed to understand it. Wisdom
indeed is the improvement of man. And man is mind and spirit. While mind is
misled by error, the spirit is corrupted by passions. Wisdom heals both ills,
ordering the mind by truth and the spirit by virtue" (IO 5.2).
Human beings can become divine or nearly divine, but in order to imitate God we
have to tame the passions and cure the corruptions of human nature through
education. "In fact, nature has unhappily established that we, by the
impetuousness of our mind, fall into error and are brought around to that truth
which we are born to reach by a direct path only by a tortuous one"
(ibid.). On this path "while other created things must follow their
nature, man instead must follow wisdom as his guide" (IO 2.2). Human
beings differ from all other creatures in that wisdom, not nature, is our
guide. The enthusiasm for our potential (as we saw in the first oration) is not
eclipsed in the later orations, but the hard work of becoming virtuous and wise
is emphasized.
The definition of wisdom that emerges as central to the account of paideia in
the inaugural orations is from Plato's Alcibiades: "wisdom is the
perfecter of man" (Alc. 1 124e). It is likely that Vico is
following Pico who makes the Alcibiades an important source for Plato's
views of self-knowledge and wisdom. Recall that in the Alcibiades,
Socrates asks "what is a human being?" And Alcibiades answers,
"I do not know what to say." (Alc. 1 129d). How one answers
this most Socratic of questions is definitive of what one thinks philosophy as
the love of wisdom is.
Vico paraphrases the Alcibiades when he defines wisdom in the New
Science as "wisdom is the perfecter of man" (Alc. 1 124ff). In
addition, he uses this in the prayer at the end of his last oration, which he
gave to an Academy; "wisdom, which is mind and language, is the perfecter
of man in his properly being man." (5) This account of wisdom as
self-knowledge in Vico's later writings was first expressed in the fifth
inaugural oration, as quoted above (IO 5.2). To be wise one must know
who one is. This knowledge is creative as opposed to merely reflective since
one must make oneself actually what one is potentially. Perfection is both the
process and the goal of human nature, and wisdom is what makes the achievement
of the human telos possible. For Aristotle human beings were
distinguished primarily by reason, but also by their political and mimetic
nature. It is this third definition from the Poetics that most
Renaissance thinkers (at least the Platonists) adapt, that "human beings by
nature delight in imitation" (Po. 1448b5-9, emphasis added).
That both Pico and Vico select the dialogue that defines wisdom as perfecter of
man reveals the commonality in their view of humanity.
It is important to begin our discussion of Modern Jewish Philosophy and White Jewish Supremacy with Vico and Descartes, because the binary plays a central role in how the racist Ashkenazi Jewish academics set out their exclusion of Sephardim.
I mentioned earlier the role of Hakham Saul Morteira, an Ashkenazi trained in Venice under Leone Modena (1571-1648), who relocated to Amsterdam, in the Spinoza mess:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/morteira-saul-levi
His name never appears in surveys of Modern Jewish Thought, though he expressed important ideas and values that can be seen in the larger tradition of Sephardic Judaism.
Marc Saperstein has done excellent work in presenting Morteira’s thought and its vital place in Modern Judaism:
Morteira connects Sephardic Judaism through its Converso heritage to the Italian Humanist Counter-Enlightenment.
It is a process that has been carefully documented in the context of Sephardic history in the late Jose Faur’s classic study In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity:
As can be clearly seen in Levin’s workbook and the Mendes-Flohr-Reinharz volume, Faur’s scholarship has been completely ignored, even though he presents an important supplement to the scholarship of the famed historian Yosef Hayyim Yerushalmi:
https://www.amazon.com/Zakhor-Jewish-History-Lectures-Studies/dp/0295975199
In the third lecture of his classic book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Yerushalmi examines the role of post-Expulsion Sephardim in the march to Jewish Modernity:
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Zakhor/H4699-AuY20C?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover
In another lecture, “Exile and Expulsion in Jewish History,” he similarly makes reference to Sephardic historiographers like Solomon ibn Verga (1460-1554) and Abraham Zacuto (1452-1515) in the transformation of Jewish thinking in the early Modern world:
It is worthwhile to note that in the years prior to his untimely passing, Yerushalmi was working on the first English-language translation of Ibn Verga’s classic Shebet Yehudah:
https://history.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/u184/myers/intro_yerushalmi.pdf
More than this unfinished work of translation and cultural reclamation, Yerushalmi published a short monograph on Ibn Verga’s book, The Lisbon Massacre of 1506 and the Royal Image in the Shebet Yehudah:
And though his incredulous view of Ibn Verga’s cosmopolitan Sephardic approach to Gentile political authority runs counter to Faur’s multi-layered narratological presentation, it is important to note that at least Yerushalmi paid attention to the Sephardic heritage, and included it in his evolutionary understanding of Modern Judaism:
https://www.umass.edu/sephardimizrahi/past_issues/091227partone.html
It was the study on Isaac Cardoso (1604-1683) and his book Las Excelencias de los Hebreos that comprised the most extended work of scholarship in Yerushalmi’s career:
To this study of Cardoso in the context of the Renaissance and Religious Humanism, we can add Yosef Kaplan’s excellent book on Isaac Orobio de Castro (1617-1687):
The through-line here is the Padua Medical School which brings us to David Nieto (1654-1728); the Sephardic Hakham in London whose works Matteh Dan and De La Divina Providencia provide an alternative Vichian view of Jewish Thought that stands in contrast with the White Jewish Supremacist Enlightenment version:
http://www.heshaim.org/other-items-2/
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07R4RTBS1/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_tkin_p1_i0
Here is a brief article on Nieto and his work by the book’s translator:
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/divine-providence-or-universal-nature-david-nieto/
Faur discussed Nieto in chapter 2 of his book Golden Doves with Silver Dots, “Semiology and Metaphysics.”
Sandra Rudnick Luft discusses this analysis in her book Vico's Uncanny Humanism: Reading the New Science Between Modern and Postmodern:
As she states there:
One purpose of Faur’s discussion, besides recovery of the linguistic nature of the Judaic worldview, is to characterize that linguistic nature as semiotic. Drawing on the writings of Saussure and Benveniste, Faur says that for the Greeks a thing is, whereas in the created world things, which are the word of God, signify. Thus, whereas metaphysics subsumes the universe to the categories of ontology, for the Jews the world is a semiological system. Faur distinguishes the latter from the Aristotelian conception of the world as material nature, which gave rise to mechanistic conceptions with the emergence of modern science. David Nieto, spiritual leader of the Sephardic congregation in London (roughly contemporary with Vico), criticized the scientific conception of nature not only because it was mechanistic, but also because it conceived of nature as universal. There were particular natures, Nieto said, but no “universal nature”; rather God himself “is nature.” The identity of God and nature, which would have been pantheistic in a metaphysical system, was not for Nieto, for whom God was a providential agent who continually repeated the creative process and whose creative acts were speech.
Professor Luft’s trenchant presentation affirms the place of Sephardim in Post-Modernism, with its Open Text and pluralistic understanding of reality and philosophy.
It is the Nieto tradition which became central to the Anglo-Sephardic Jewish heritage, so beautifully articulated in Moses Angel’s 1858 classic The Law of Sinai and its Appointed Times:
This tradition was the foundation of the many Jewish writings of Grace Aguilar (1816-1847):
Michael Galchinsky has edited an excellent anthology of Aguilar’s work:
I have discussed its importance in the following article:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/zWrk7XPeunk
And it is here that we can point to perhaps the most important figures in Modern Sephardic Judaism, Sabato Morais (1823-1897) and Elijah Benamozegh (1822-1900).
I discussed Morais and Jewish Humanism in the following special newsletter:
Benamozegh composed the posthumously-published classic Israel and Humanity, which presents the most fully realized iteration of Jewish Humanism in the Modern period:
https://www.amazon.com/Elijah-Benamozegh-Humanity-Classics-Spirituality/dp/0809135418
It is also worthwhile to note Benamozegh’s alternative approach to Darwin:
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d517/a47dee77c49b00aa8ac3b2cb78f836e8cf26.pdf
Both Morais and Benamozegh were born and raised in the port city of Livorno, a major center of Sephardic life:
https://repository.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1078&context=library_papers
The Penn scholar Arthur Kiron has provided us with a treasure-trove of studies and documents on Morais and his foundational role in American Jewish History:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oJ6PrGWTGHnTnfPkBhPao3oSucPPg-k4sEKZDgCGOZc/edit
When we turn again to Leonard Levin and his racially-biased workbook, we can see that not only Sephardim and Sephardic Judaism are left completely out of the discussion, but the concept of Religious Humanism is also absented.
Indeed, it is quite reasonable to posit an alternative schema of Ashkenazi Jewish Thought which rejects Cartesian absolutism, and instead adopts the Sephardic tradition and its less dogmatic philosophical tendencies.
That line can begin with Moses Mendelssohn, and extend to the Neo-Kantians like Hermann Cohen and Leo Baeck, whose ideas were promulgated by figures like Ernst Cassirer and Erich Auerbach.
It is important to note that both Cassirer and Auerbach, like Isaiah Berlin, wrote extensively on Vico:
http://www.nhinet.org/auxier2.htm
https://www.summaryplanet.com/literature/Erich-Auerbach.html
I have addressed the problem of the Ashkenazi-Sephardi binary in my article “A Broken Frame: Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction”:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZZLhopNWNnqMb0GW2OQGcripP8SnZojsmxamctBLDzU/edit
The article was rejected by Ashkenazi loyalist Rabbi Marc Angel for publication in his inaptly-named journal Conversations, but was eventually published in Tikkun magazine:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TjFku-0Z8bD2BD4QuDxv6OWK5Lubd8Uj/view?ths=true
Here is how I put it there:
The point that is so important to understand here in the subsequent development of Jewish life in the Modern era was that European Judaism struggled with the problems that such rejectionism placed on its ability to develop and adapt to the ways of the world. So long as European Judaism remained locked into ghettoes, the matter of acculturation was not seen as a decisive issue. But once Europe began to change and provide to Jews the ability to integrate into their societies, deep conflicts arose in the Jewish world.
Some very basic trends began to emerge in the late 18th and early 19th century European Jewish world: Stirrings of a movement for Reform clashed with the old Talmudic schools in Eastern Europe. A seminal figure such as Moses Mendelssohn (1727-1786), himself an observant Jew, was initially seen, as was Azariah de Rossi (c. 1513-1578) in an earlier generation, as a possible danger to the pristine hermetic faith. Mendelssohn provided his own take on Religious Humanism by reading some of the new European learning into the Jewish sources.
The confusion created by Mendelssohn’s teaching led to a renewed effort in rabbinical circles to refuse any connection with the outside culture. In the long run, Mendelssohn became an icon to the reformers and rejected by what would become known as Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, a movement created in reaction to the establishment of Reform Judaism, soon closed ranks against the attempt by rabbis to incorporate Humanist culture into Judaism.
Such was a repetition of the Maimonidean Controversy which led to new fissures and conflicts in Ashkenazi Jewish culture.
The tendentious work of White Jewish Supremacists like Leonard Levin repeats these tired binary oppositions, as those bitterly divisive conflicts continue to plague the Jewish world. Religious Jews are pitted against Atheists in a Battle Royal of philosophical no return.
As Levin presents it, the whole mess is seen as fully constitutive of what Modern Jewish Thought is all about.
Indeed, not only is Religious Humanism rejected as a possible way of mending fences, but Post-Modernism, another avenue for authentic Jewish realization in the conflicted world of Cartesian Enlightenment, with the Anti-Semitic valuations of Kant and Hegel serving to create even more problems for Jews, is left unaddressed.
Levin does manage to speak very briefly of Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995), but completely leaves out his close ties to Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), a Sephardic Jewish thinker born in Algeria, and the Post-Modernist movement.
I have presented the thought of Levinas in the following collection of articles:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XWNPnJU7ZjavXKNzSH8d3suz3a7L89UqHyf4ISlwgTU/edit
I have also discussed Jewish Post-Modernism and Christianity in the following article:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HCst9FdQrjdxXVnH5-WyfnBAxXkgbs3_evxqEVTNPRk/edit
My articles on Midrash and Jewish hermeneutics provide a framework in which to better understand the process:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/understanding-midrash_b_535249
https://drive.google.com/file/d/146Vb-HwQWc6WdQjzmpfsNlWtgVgbuN8J/view?ths=true
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ACDjEk2HiBT_8JGUcEqmZLB4anyeSG49/view?ths=true
Of course, it was Jose Faur who helped to pioneer the idea of Jewish Post-Modernity in his aforementioned book Golden Doves with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXQnNIeEJ3aGdSSjQ/view?ths=true
In the book he expounds on the work of Derrida and the Egyptian-born Francophone Jewish poet Edmond Jabes (1912-1991), who have been linked together since Derrida’s classic 1966 essay “Edmond Jabes and the Question of the Book”:
https://dokumen.tips/documents/derrida-edmond-jabes-and-the-question-of-the-book.html
So, in spite of the fact that Levin mentions Levinas, he does not expand the discussion to include Faur and Jewish Post-Modernism in the larger context of the Jewish philosophical tradition.
And in this he is consistent not only in his Anti-Sephardi bias, but in his slavish devotion to a static view of Modern Jewish Thought which breaks down into a hardened binary of Believers and Non-Believers.
There is the Orthodoxy of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) and Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993), which is opposed to the Reformist values of the Spinozist Jewish Haskalah and those thinkers who espouse a Judaism rooted in Enlightenment dogmatism.
And so it is that Modern Jewish Thought is presented to the unwitting student as a completely Ashkenazi construct.
It is not that Levin and other White Jewish Supremacists are unaware of the Sephardic heritage. He knowingly mentions classical figures like Maimonides (1138-1204), Judah Halevi (1075-1141), Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1167), and Hasdai Crescas (1340-1410).
But as we move away from the Middle Ages and into the Modern period, there is not a single Sephardi to be found.
Indeed, it reminds of a statement made by the late Rabbi Ezra Labaton to my students many years ago: “What have the Sephardim done since the Expulsion?”
The idea was to demean the Sephardic heritage as a legitimate means to be a contemporary Jew. Sephardim in this sense have no contribution to make to the Modern Jewish experience, as only Ashkenazim can be “Modern.”
And in spite of the fact that the Ashkenazim have made a mess of it, it is their dysfunction, as we can clearly see in the impoverished Levin workbook, that is canonized as the only way to process Modern Jewish Thought.
Though these precious Sephardic resources are becoming ever more scarce, in both Israel as well as the Diaspora, and as studies of Sephardic intellectual ideas are barely seen in our university Judaic Studies departments, the reality is that not only is there a rich tradition of such Jewish Thought, but that the ideas might actually help Jews to better navigate the Modern world, and harbor less alienation and anxiety when it comes to their own religious tradition and its engagement with the non-Jewish world.
David Shasha
Appendix: Leonard Levin’s MODERN JEWISH PHILOSOPHY WORKBOOK Table of Contents
UNIT 1: TRANSITION TO MODERNITY
WHAT IS “MODERN JEWISH PHILOSOPHY”? -- A CONCEPTUAL WARMUP
Exercise 1: Landmarks of Modernity
Discussion 1.1: Landmarks of Modernity
Exercise 2: Modern Ideas
Discussion 1.2 Modernity and Ourselves
Exercise 3: “Jewish” and “Philosophy”
Discussion 1.3: On Judaism and Philosophy
Discussion 1.4: Modern Thinkers -- Combinations and Permutations
UNIT 2: PRECURSOR – SPINOZA (1632-1677) AT THE CROSSROADS OF THOUGHT
Theological Political Treatise, Chapter 7: "On the Interpretation of Scripture"
Discussion 2.1: Spinoza on Reading the Bible
Theological Political Treatise. Chapter 8: “Of the Authorship of the Pentateuch (Torah, Chumash), and the other historical books of the Old
Testament.”
Discussion 2.2: On the Authorship of the Torah
Ethics Part 1: “Concerning God”
Synopsis of Ethics Part I
Discussion 2.3: Spinoza on God and Nature
UNIT 3: MOSES MENDELSSOHN (1729-1786) ENTRY INTO MODERNITY
Turning point: The Lavater Affair
Discussion 3.1: The Lavater Episode
Mendelssohn’s Mature Outlook: Civic Tolerance and Enlightened Judaism
Synopsis of Jerusalem
Discussion 3.2: Evaluating Mendelssohn’s Achievement
UNIT 4: REFORM, NEO-ORTHODOXY, CONSERVATISM (1800-1885) ADAPTATIONS TO MODERNITY
Point of Departure: The Sanhedrin of Napoleon, 1806
Discussion 4.1: Judaism: Religion or Nationality?
Key Textual Excerpts
DISCUSSIONS 4.2-4.4: The Three 19th-Century Movements
DISCUSSION 4.5: The Three Movements Compared
CHECKLIST FOR DISCUSSIONS 4.2-4.5
UNIT 5: MARTIN BUBER (1878-1965) EXISTENTIALIST APPROACH -- HASIDISM AND DIALOGUE
The Homecoming Pattern
Buber’s Way to Judaism
Discussion 5.1: Homecomers
The Coherence of Buber’s Thought
Key Textual Excerpts: I and Thou
Discussion 5.2: Buber on I-Thou and I-It
Excursus: Buber and Kant
Buber’s Hasidic Teachings
Discussion 5.3: Buber’s Hasidic Teaching
Discussion 5.4: How Successful Was Buber’s Synthesis?
UNIT 6: FRANZ ROSENZWEIG (1886-1929) EXISTENTIALIST RESPONSE – REVELATION AND AUTONOMY
Paradox of Rosenzweig: Individualist and Traditionalist
The Star of Redemption
Discussion 6.1: What Does Rosenzweig’s Star Say to You?
The Buber-Rosenzweig Debate Over Halakhah
Discussion 6.2: Buber versus Rosenzweig: Who Was Right?
UNIT 7: SECULAR RESPONSES (1860-1948) ZIONISM, DIASPORA NATIONALISM, YIDDISHISM, RADICALISM, LIBERALISM
Differences Between Western and Eastern Europe
Discussion 7.1: Religion vs. Nationality Revisited
The Wave of Secularism: 1859-1914
Zionism: Ahad Ha-Am (1856-1927)
Diaspora Nationalism: Simon Dubnow (1860-1941)
Yiddishism: Chaim Zhitlovsky (1865-1943)
Jewish Radicalism: Isaac Deutscher
Liberal Assimilationism: Horace Kallen (1882-1974)
Discussion 7.2: Secular Jewish Ideologies
UNIT 8: MORDECAI KAPLAN & RECONSTRUCTIONISM (1881-1982)
PRAGMATIC AND SOCIOLOGICAL RESPONSE
Reinterpreting Religion for a Secular World: Mordecai Kaplan
Key Textual Excerpt (from Judaism Without Supernaturalism)
Criticisms and Responses to Kaplan
Discussion 8: How Much Of Kaplan’s Approach Do You Accept?
UNIT 9: ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL (1907-1972) PHENOMENOLOGICAL APPROACH TO THE BIBLE
God In Search Of Man, Part I: God
Discussion 9.1: Heschel On God
God In Search Of Man, Part II: Revelation
Discussion 9.2: Heschel on Revelation
God In Search Of Man, Part III: Response
Discussion 9.3: Heschel on Jewish Observance
UNIT 10: JOSEPH B. SOLOVEITCHIK (1903-1993) A HALAKHIC-RATIONAL APPROACH
Central Concepts of Halakhic Man
Soloveitchik’s Kantian Apologetic for Judaism
Extrapolating A Soloveitchikian Concept of Revelation
10.1 Discussion on Soloveitchik’s Halakhic Man
10.2 Discussion on Soloveitchik’s Lonely Man of Faith
UNIT 11: CONTEMPORARY THEOLOGIANS (1960-PRESENT) BOROWITZ, GILLMAN, ROTH, HARTMAN
“Three Movements” Updated: Where Are We Now?
Borowitz: Autonomy Revisited
Discussion 11.1: Borowitz and Contemporary Reform
CONTEMPORARY CONSERVATISM: HALAKHAH AND AGGADAH
Gillman: A Conservative Aggadic Approach
Discussion 11.2: Gillman on “Broken Myths”
Roth: A Conservative Halakhic Approach
Discussion 11.3: Roth on the Halakhic System
David Hartman: Covenant Theology, Orthodox Style
Discussion 11.4: Hartman on Living Covenant
UNIT 12: CREATION THEOLOGY AND MODERN COSMOLOGY RATIONALISM REVISITED: BIG BANG AND INTELLIGENT DESIGN
Milton Steinberg’s Common Sense Approach
Discussion 12.1: Steinberg’s “Common Sense” Theology
Intelligent Design (1): Arguments from Biology
Intelligent Design (2): Arguments from Cosmology
Discussion 12.2: Theology and the New Cosmology
UNIT 13: HOLOCAUST THEOLOGY
Stephen Katz’s Inventory of Holocaust Theological Interpretations
Intellectual Versus Emotional Responses
Discussion 13.1: What Would Your Response Be?
Key Text: Nietzsche’s Madman
Richard Rubenstein’s Holocaust Theology
Elie Wiesel’s Experience in the Light of Nietzsche
A Note on Emil Fackenheim
Discussion 13.2: Nietzsche, Rubenstein, Wiesel, Fackenheim, etc.
UNIT 14: CONTEMPORARY ISSUES
Emmanuel Levinas
Discussion 14.1: On Levinas
Jewish Feminism
Discussion 14.2: On Jewish Feminism
“Jewish Renewal”
Discussion 14.3: On Jewish Renewal
Death and Immortality
Discussion 14.4: On Death and Immortality
Discussion 14.5: Summing Up
APPENDIX A: IDEAS
Autonomy
Bible, Critical Theory of Authorship
Communism
Diaspora Nationalism
Enlightenment
Evolution and Intelligent Design
Existentialism
Gesetz / Gebot
Halakhah
Homecoming
Immanence of God
Intelligent Design
Law / Command
Messianism
Panentheism
Pantheism
Phenomenology
Pragmatism
Revelation
Science and Theology: A Bibliography
Socialism
Transcendence of God
Yiddishism
Zionism
APPENDIX B: THINKERS
Ahad Ha-Am
Buber, Martin
Cohen, Hermann
Crescas, Hasdai
Dewey, John
Dubnow, Simon
Frankel, Zacharias
Geiger, Abraham
Gersonides, Levi
Graetz, Heinrich
Halevi, Judah
Hegel, G.W.F.
Heine, Heinrich
Herzl, Theodor
Heschel, Abraham Joshua
Hess, Moses
Hildesheimer, Azriel
S.R. Hirsch
Ibn Ezra, Abraham
Kallen, Horace
Kant, Immanuel
Kaplan, Mordecai M.
Kook, Abraham
Krochmal, Nahman
Leibnitz, Gottfried
Lessing, Gotthold
Levinas, Emanuel
Maimonides, Moses
Marx, Karl
Mendelssohn, Moses
Rosenzweig, Franz
Schechter, Solomon
Soloveitchik, Joseph B.
Spinoza, Baruch
Steinberg, Milton
Zhitlovsky, Chaim
Zunz, Leopold