New Article: Timothy Snyder on “Trust” and “Law” as a Bulwark Against Tyranny in the Context of Jewish Humanism and its “New Talmudic” Academic Enemies
David Shasha
Timothy Snyder on “Trust” and “Law” as a Bulwark Against Tyranny in the Context of Jewish Humanism and its “New Talmudic” Academic Enemies
Rachel Maddow has of late been doing some very serious soul-searching as she deals in a very public way with all the evil that is going on with Trumpworld.
Given the very sorry state of the Liberals these days, I am not exactly sure how to take her self-examination; largely because news outlets like MSNBC have been quite unsuccessful – compared to the racist Trumpmedia FOX and Breitbart – in articulating a clear vision of American Democracy to their viewers.
As we have been seeing in the Democratic primaries, the Left is more fractured than ever, at a time when unity is absolutely necessary to defeat Trump’s evil.
That being said, her recent interview with Yale history professor Timothy Snyder was an excellent presentation of the problems we face and what we might productively do about them:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxinX6i8cUY
Professor Snyder has written what many consider to be the most important historical treatise on 20th century Tyranny as it applies to the present moment:
https://www.amazon.com/Tyranny-Twenty-Lessons-Twentieth-Century/dp/0804190119
Many of the ideas Snyder presents in the interview will already be familiar to SHU readers from my many agitated anti-Trump rantings, but he does have a knack for formulating his recommendations and coping mechanisms in a very helpful manner.
I was glad to see him forcefully attack the Nazi philosopher Carl Schmitt, whose name and importance to radical Far Left intellectual discourse should be familiar to you:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/n_PfflGM7lw
But my big take-away from the interview was his profoundly important linking of the terms “Trust” and “Law.”
In my current readings I have been dealing with the vicious assault on the traditional Jewish legal system by nihilistic Hegelian essentialists led by Berkeley professor Daniel Boyarin.
I have addressed a number of these issues in the recent Special Newsletter on Maimonides:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/pcddAeJ4Qw8
Boyarin’s most explicit demolition of the Talmudic heritage is his execrable book Socrates and the Fat Rabbis:
https://www.amazon.com/Socrates-Fat-Rabbis-Daniel-Boyarin/dp/0226069168
Boyarin is a radical Left Wing White Jewish Supremacist who negates the Maimonidean tradition and Sephardic Jewish Humanism in favor of a static historicist method which is grounded in 19th century German thought that extends the antinomianism of Reform Judaism to places that even Abraham Geiger and Isaac Mayer Wise could not have imagined.
Boyarin’s idea is to negate the Open Text of Post-Modern Judaism and its evolutionary pluralist-democratic systemology, and replace it with a hermetic reading of the Talmudic tradition steeped in Social Science theory and the isolationism of the documentary source-critical approach of the German Idealist tradition of Hegel and his followers.
One would think that by now the German 19th century, which led to the disastrous German 20th century in myriad ideological-conceptual ways, would be rejected by scholars, especially Jewish ones. But the tragic lessons of the past have surely not been learned when we look at the “New Talmudists.”
Here is how Boyarin opposes the Open Text and dialogism of the traditional Talmud, as it has been understood for generations, and linked it to Platonic absolutism:
It is at least arguable that the second most vauntedly dialogical of texts from antiquity – after Plato – is the Babylonian Talmud. The Bavli has become almost a poster child for the dialogical text. Countering perhaps an earlier (nineteenth century) representation of the Talmud as severe and repressive, many twentieth-century critics (including the writer of these lines) saw in the apparent expansiveness of the Talmudic dialectic a version of pluralism or some kind of near-deconstructive undecidability. Certainly, as I have suggested above, and as many have argued before me, the Bavli bespeaks numerous individual voices. But I have changed my mind that such a plethora of voices necessarily constitutes a dialogical text. (Socrates and the Fat Rabbis, pp. 140-141)
Foundational to the current scholarship is the work of David Weiss Halivni, whose book The Formation of the Babylonian Talmud has provided the ideological template for a renewed attack on rabbinic integrity and systematic continuity:
https://www.amazon.com/Formation-Babylonian-Talmud-David-Halivni/dp/0199739889
Professor Halivni’s atomistic and layered reading of the Talmud emphasizes the role of its anonymous editors, who have become known as the Stammaim, not only as the final producers of the finished Talmud text, but whose ethos permeates the entire document.
It is a theory of the Talmud which severs generations of rabbis and scholars from one another, serving to impose a radical discontinuity on the system. The standard understanding has created a harmonious conceptual unity out of the mass colloquy of disparate voices who speak over generations in a form of dialogue that was thought to be organized as transcriptions of academy proceedings. It is this traditional dialectic that has been emphatically overturned.
But even more than this, according to the current scholarship, these disconnected and discordant rabbinic voices are seen as imposing alien views onto Biblical Law, as the Bible itself is mined as a closed system which is effectively distorted by the Talmud.
In a lengthy passage that seeks to substantiate his earlier point from Socrates and the Fat Rabbis denying the dialogical pluralism of the Talmud, Boyarin explicates Halivni’s theory in an explicit manner that makes the conspiratorial aspect of the rabbis clear:
The bulk of the Babylonian Talmud consists of a particular kind of dialectic in which two opposing views on agiven topic in halakha are presented and then an argument is pursued in which each of the two amora’im (named post-Mishnaic speakers) tries to topple the view of the other by contradicting it with authoritative texts which are explained away in turn. More often than not, the “conversation” ends with neither side defeating the other, but all contradictions to either side neatly explained away in more or less convincing fashion. Although the “fiction” of the Talmud is that these are the records of living conversations that actually took place, it is clear, rather, that they are the product of artfully constructed rhetorical composition practices that make use of existing halakhic sayings in order to construct the dialectic, which is glued together with constructive materials, questions that various sayings are made as if to answer, and contractions made up out of originally independent sayings. This is the specific authorial “hand” that has taken the utterances (memrot) of the amora’im and turned them into conversations and especially dialectics, in large part by juxtaposing them one to the other (even if the speakers were continents and centuries apart). These anonymous authors have also frequently added questions to which the utterances were allegedly an answer, objections that they allegedly refute. All of this connective material that builds the dialectic of the sugya out of the memrot is called (traditionally and by scholars) the stam or stamma). (p. 143)
In other words, the Talmudic canon is a fraud of gigantic proportions; a fraud that misrepresents its rhetorical constructions as it harbors an absolutism which is akin to Platonic “monologism.” Rather than being an Open Text, the Oral Law is a repressive discourse built on duplicity and legal trickery.
It is quite amazing that the pluralistic hermeneutic of the classical rabbinic heritage as we have always undersoot it, is being replaced with the blunt authoritarianism of univocal reading that wrongly marks the Talmud as “monological”; a term of opprobrium that Boyarin deploys in order to reject the authority and integrity of Jewish Law and its democratic dialogical tendencies.
Boyarin cleverly seeks to tie his “monological” rabbinic tradition to Platonic absolutism, and then claims that both those traditions subvert themselves in ways that only his exegesis can uncover!
Indeed, as has been the case with the Documentary Hypothesis, this academic reading implicitly harbors absolutist Greco-Christian values, seeing the rabbinic movement as a new accretion that violates Biblical “truth”; a “truth” which has ultimately been revealed in the person of Jesus Christ by the New Testament Gospels and Pauline Epistles.
Christian essentialism is thus not only a valid reading of the Hebrew Bible, as Boyarin insists in his popular book The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ, it is an older tradition than the rabbinical one, as it is closely tied to the eschatological books excluded from the canonical Hebrew Bible which were written anonymously during the Second Temple period.
Rabbinic Judaism is thus seen as only one Jewish “option” out of many equally valid ones. And in fact, given the “lateness” of its textual witness, its authority is denigrated as priority is given to the extra-canonical Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, as well as to the Christian Scriptures.
In Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity, Boyarin radically post-dates the separation of the two faiths, largely due to this rabbinic “belatedness.” The “unfortunate” separation is generated due to rabbinic “monologism” and its belligerent intransigence. Rabbinic authority is mercilessly savaged.
The rabbinic claims to oral transmission in a unified legal system, as famously articulated in the canonical Letter of Rabbi Sherira Gaon in the 9th century (which has since become the basis of traditional Talmudic historiography), have been rejected by the current scholarship, as every effort is being made to date what are seen as intentionally written texts with specific authors and ideological biases with pinpoint accuracy.
This is the case even though the rabbinic literature is of a very unique nature, and strongly resists being measured along the lines of Greco-Roman thinking.
Boyarin’s institutional control of academic rabbinic studies has become decisive, as we can see from the following books written by his followers; a “New Talmudic” canon that is an obsequious echo-chamber designed to break the integrity of the centuries-old system of Halakhah and the Open Text of Midrash.
Yale’s Christine Hayes is one of the most important of his ditto-heads, and has published a number of important books that impose modern Eurocentric values on the ancient rabbinic texts.
In What’s Divine About Divine Law Hayes traps the Talmud into a Greek philosophic-legal paradigm which it consistently resists; though that never seems to discourage her:
She makes very specific demands of the Talmud, demands that are alien to its process, and when those demands are not met, the literature is found wanting.
With echoes of the texts we presented earlier from Boyarin, she lays out the analytical process:
Rabbinic texts are famously full of controversy, and multiple, conflicting opinions, which most scholars agree is indicated of a practical legal pluralism in some cases. But practical pluralism does not tell us whether the rabbis are theoretical pluralists or monists. Do the rabbis understand God’s divine law – the Written and Oral Torah – as essentially pluralistic, or do they perceive it as providing in theory a single true or authentic answer to every legal question even if the answer cannot be ascertained at a practical level (resulting in practical pluralism)? Does the rabbinic notion of Torah approximate natural law in its monism? Or is it committed to a pluralism at the theoretical level that pulls against Greco-Roman discourses that describe divine law as a single stable truth? (p. 174)
As we can see from her tendentious analysis, the rabbis are interrogated using the conceptual categories of Greco-Roman natural law, and more than this are processed through the filters of Platonic philosophical rationalism. It is an analysis that fits perfectly into the Boyarin “monological” paradigm.
Hayes was then given the plum assignment by Cambridge University Press to edit their Companion to Judaism and Law:
The volume is an excellent introduction to the current field with entries by many Boyarin disciples. The book’s vast historical scope reminds us that the Sephardic weltanschauung has been completely excised from the present academic discourse; more than that, any mention of the Sephardic heritage is pejorative. Only the Ashkenazi tradition matters at this point. The magical occult takes priority over the rational-scientific values of Maimonides and Jewish Humanism. Hermeticism is the order of the day.
Chaya Halberstam’s Law and Truth in Biblical and Rabbinic Literature goes even deeper into what has become known as the “Narrative” turn in Jewish legal studies, which muddies the Halakhah/Aggadah binary in a very purposeful way that functions as a foil to the traditional system of Talmudic legal studies:
The book sets out, in the Boyarin “Fat Rabbis” manner, to “re-narrativize” Jewish Law in a way that is very similar to Constitutional Originalism of the Conservative Right. The idea in both academic schools is to “recover” the original meaning of the text and set that meaning in stone. It freezes the hermeneutical process, as it also freezes the legal tradition in time, as she clearly states in the introduction:
In this book, I explore two different modes of judicial rhetoric: the Hebrew Bible, which deploys an authoritative discourse of knowledge, certainty and divine truth; and tannaitic literature, which assumes a stance of perpetual uncertainty, despite the biblical tradition, and demands the authoritative construction of legal truth. I hope to demonstrate how the rabbinic posture of uncertainty in shaping Jewish law promoted extra-legal creativity alongside a residue of anxiety over the consistent possibility of factually wrong and morally wrongful judgment. The chapters that follow trace varying degrees of rabbinic confidence in legal decision making, suggesting that as uncertainty permeates disparate realms of rabbinic law, it fortifies rabbinical authority while regularly threatening to topple the very system of law and worldly justice that the rabbis endeavor to establish. I also investigate the theological implications of these legal discourses, demonstrating how the experience of the divine both supplements these earthly concerns and is simultaneously filtered through them. (pp. 3-4)
A key text that is uniformly cited in all these books is Robert Cover’s 1982 paper “Nomos and Narrative” which seeks to add a deeply subjective ideological stratum to the Law; a rhetorical move that has served to anchor the Boyarin method in setting Talmudic Law against itself:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jFLXRokGfnxBpVHk-PUEa8baDXHngHwm/view?ths=true
To see how Judaic Studies scholars have made use of the Cover paper, Steven Fraade’s “Nomos and Narrative Before Nomos and Narrative” provides a representative example:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SCG0I7X7wSxIArgs9rLtS6vjFqxgmpWl/view?ths=true
The collapsing of the Halakhah/Aggadah binary means that emotion and unreason, hallmarks of the non-coercive subjective Aggadah, becomes in truly Neo-Christian Eurocentric fashion a way to infuse Law with absolute doctrine and dogma.
Such subjectivism forces ancient narratives like those found in the Talmud to become static; a set of dogmas that are reified. The process becomes in Modernity a binary which divides Orthodox believers, who hold the narratives to be wholly “true,” from the non-believer academics who use those narratives to belittle the ancient rabbis for their ignorance and prejudice.
What was once a process that freed the Jewish sages to speak their minds in a free and unfettered manner, has now become a dogmatic prison that constricts Judaism in the present moment.
It is a hermeneutical move that I have addressed in my article on Samson Raphael Hirsch’s attack on Maimonides where reason and magic clash:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1osm0botpWsc_L-yS0ZvOOD-FPmIY75vb7T83BjQI9wE/edit
Hirsch, like YU icon Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, demanded subjective narrative-ideological doctrinal meaning in Halakhah, contrary to Maimonides’ rational and dispassionate scientific legal system rooted in the Geonic tradition.
Cover’s “Nomos and Narrative” thesis, wittingly or unwittingly given his longstanding Progressive Liberal values, is now being used in a reactionary political modality that is related to Timothy Snyder’s articulation of “Trust” and “Law” as it applies to Authoritarianism and Tyranny; absolutist monological power structures that choose unreason over science and anarchy over system. Feelings and Law are not a good combination when it comes to equality and justice.
Another exponent of this “re-narrativization” of Jewish Law and Talmudic studies is Barry Wimpfheimer, whose book Narrating the Law: A Poetics of Talmudic Stories has become a touchstone in the field:
Professor Wimpfheimer, with a timely assist from Boyarin, also got a plum assignment to do the entry on Talmud in Princeton’s Lives of Great Religious Books series:
Wimpfheimer shows us how Haredi Orthodox Talmud study can be subverted, while still maintaining its fundamentalist-literalist categories that are used as a punching bag designed to undermine “Trust”; what Snyder has seen as the key element in the Rule of Law.
As he states in Narrating the Law:
As a result of the privileging of code and statue, talmudic legal narratives are regularly misread by traditional and critical readers. In the course of producing statutory coherence, the dominant mode of reading (sometimes already within the Talmud itself) forces legal narratives into statutory form and suppresses that part of the narrative that is inexpressible in statutory form. The transformation of narrative into statute erases some of the narrative’s distinguishing features – such as temporality, plurality, and affect. In addition to these seemingly ancillary erasures, the dominant mode of talmudic reading must often work to suppress the basic legal message of a Talmudic legal narrative because the very dramatic twist that makes a story interesting is often inconsistent with the cultural expectations preserved in normative statutes. (p. 5)
In this passage we see how the Boyarin “Legal Narrative” methodology is articulated in close relation of Cover’s “Nomos and Narrative” exposition, in a way that privileges a static text-critical reading mired in Greco-Roman legalism and its conceptual values. The end result is a legally-dubious rabbinic tradition that does not hold proper legal principles.
It is important to note that many of these “New Talmud” scholars are former Ultra-Orthodox Yeshivah students whose primary frame of reference is the Ashkenazi Tosafist PILPUL tradition. They routinely tie this tradition to the German heritage of Idealist textual criticism which extends Wellhausen’s Anti-Semitic Documentary Hypothesis to a renewed attempt at exposing the Talmud as an incoherent mess which was edited by secret committee in a duplicitous manner.
The method is “anti-reading” inasmuch as it seeks to violently sever and disconnect the different parts of the Jewish literary canon and set out a “hermeneutics of incoherence” that opens the door to distrust and suspicion of legal stability. Midrash is seen as less a method of parsing the Open Text of Scripture, and more a repository of Platonic ideas and dogmatic doctrines examined for consistency and literal conceptual accuracy in contemporary terms.
As I have been reading these books – a deeply depressing experience – I cannot help but think of the Trumpist institutional subversion(s) and the naked emotionalism of his Populist Authoritarianism; a politics of barbarous emotions and subjective feelings constructed as a primordial nativist narrative.
This, of course, is the opposite of Sephardic Jewish Humanism with its rational and scientific standards.
But more than this, the “New Talmudism” seeks to sever the rabbinic tradition from the Post-Modernist systemology, where texts are examined through self-critical reading strategies that focus on method and meaning at the expense of such historical absolutism.
The Boyarin school throws around a lot of jargon-inflected terms, but never steps back to examine its own value-laden reading modalities as they apply to canon-formation and textual ambiguity; what the Post-Modernists call “indeterminacy of meaning.” For these academics the text is always transparent and provides its meaning in an unmediated way.
It is what Emmanuel Levinas, a figure derided by Boyarin and his school, set up as the binary Totality and Infinity:
https://www.amazon.com/Totality-Infinity-Essay-Exteriority-Philosophical/dp/0820702455
“Totality” is academic-intellectual-religious certainty, while “Infinity” is the pluralism and expansiveness of the Open Text:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/levinas/#TotaInfiContEthiTheo
It is an ethical Jewish hermeneutic, rooted in human multiplicity and horizontality rather than “monologism” and divided vertical historicity, that is completely absent from the “New Talmudist” readings. Social Science dogma and historicist absolutism have replaced Midrashic openness and its profound moral insights that develop over time.
Indeed, Levinas’ method was a direct assault on the German Idealist tradition that has been vigorously embraced by the “New Talmudists” and their textual hermeticism.
I have presented Levinas and his Jewish Humanism in the following SHU post:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XWNPnJU7ZjavXKNzSH8d3suz3a7L89UqHyf4ISlwgTU/edit
Boyarin’s nihilist antinomianism rejects the Jewish Post-Modernism of Susan Handelman and Jose Faur, in the manner of Robert Alter:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B1NQdm28qvvXeFJDdkdrYmVVQUk/edit
I have linked Boyarin and Alter in the following article:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/berkeley/davidshasha/n7vS2aoQkao/4ZeTMvY5AAAJ
Ultimately the idea is to squeeze out those who seek to bring tradition and modernity together; forcefully separating those two modalities by using historical absolutism in the German manner. They continually rig the system to get their preferred result. Haredim and Non-Believers are all that is left for Jews in this context. The center is attacked and is not holding. The dogmatists demand that you pick a side and stay in your lane.
It is a binary that closes the door to syncretic Jewish Humanism and the horizontal axis that has maintained the vitality of Jewish Law over many centuries, in favor of a rigidly diachronic axis that demands an absolute rabbinic past that cuts off any sense of development or evolution. Jewish Law is relativized and ultimately destroyed in a way that resembles, but goes way beyond, the 19th century European Jewish Reformers.
It is a scorched-earth Jewish hermeneutic that constricts us, just as Spinoza did so many centuries ago.
And this leads us back to Timothy Snyder and his attack on the New Tyranny.
“Trust” in the Law means that we are able to get beyond the literalist dogmatics, whether they are Right Wing or Left Wing, Fundamentalist or Academic. It means that Law is an organic part of our lives, and not a museum exhibit which functions atavistically in hermetically-sealed compartments of static literary-critical analysis.
Trump’s Tyranny can be seen as part and parcel of a larger fundamentalist-literalist culture that exists across the political spectrum, where Law is being subverted for the purposes of historical dogmatism and primordial modes of reading and exegesis which have been articulated in different academic, religious, and intellectual contexts and then re-purposed by reactionary political absolutists to suit their nefarious “feelings”-based agenda that has led to hysteria and division.
Violence is the key to this hermeneutical strategy and its authoritarian institutional prison-house.
It is only through philosophical Reason and a contextual reading of the Open Text of our religious traditions that we can break the chains of these new dogmatists and their undermining of an organic understanding of Law, which can serve human beings as a healthy alternative to the rampant subjectivism of authoritarian systems and their racist residuum.
David Shasha