New Article: Sepharad in Ashkenaz, That Is the Question!
David Shasha
Sepharad in Ashkenaz, That Is the Question!
At the core of the current Sephardi-Ashkenazi split is the question of whether the German Jews sincerely adopted the Sephardic model of Jewish culture and religion for their own enlightened Judaism.
Back in 2016 there was much discussion in White Jewish Supremacist circles about John Efron’s book German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic:
The following excerpt from the book description provides a sense of what Efron is up to:
Efron examines how German Jews idealized the sound of Sephardic Hebrew and the Sephardim’s physical and moral beauty, and shows how the allure of the Sephardic found expression in neo-Moorish synagogue architecture, historical novels, and romanticized depictions of Sephardic history. He argues that the shapers of German-Jewish culture imagined medieval Iberian Jewry as an exemplary Jewish community, bound by tradition yet fully at home in the dominant culture of Muslim Spain. Efron argues that the myth of Sephardic superiority was actually an expression of withering self-critique by German Jews who, by seeking to transform Ashkenazic culture and win the acceptance of German society, hoped to enter their own golden age.
Efron’s attempt to undermine the role of the Sephardic heritage in Ashkenazi Judaism is the logical extension of Ismar Schorsch’s offensive article “The Myth of Sephardic Supremacy in Nineteenth-Century Germany”:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1AcnHjkeHyLqyjv5QowWDLyd2ipgq83kD/view?ths=true
As I indicated in my article “Devi Mays and the Wages of Sephardic Self-Hatred: Ashkenazi Academics Present Us as Racist Degenerates,” Schorsch transmitted his loathing of Sephardim to his son Jonathan, who has made a veritable career out of examining Sephardim and the Slave Trade:
https://brill.com/view/book/edcoll/9789004392489/BP000036.xml
The move from Sephardic literary-intellectual and religious history to Social Science has served to weaken the importance of our culture in a way that serves the Schorsch-Efron thesis, and paradoxically elevate the Ashkenazi irrational magical occult, as we have seen in the work of Moshe Idel and Elliot Wolfson:
https://kavvanah.blog/2010/07/08/david-shasha-on-kellner-idel-and-nationalism/
Last year I became aware of an interesting counter-text, Sepharad in Ashkenaz: Medieval Knowledge and Eighteenth Century Enlightened Jewish Discourse, published by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007:
The book is certainly not known to the general reading public in the way that Efron’s is. Indeed, even though I was able to purchase a copy on the used book market, it seems that it has more or less vanished since then. But it remains essential reading, if you can find a copy.
The volume of collected conference papers opens with two contradictory views of the matter from Shmuel Feiner and David Ruderman.
I converted the PDF file of the Feiner article and posted it to the SHU group:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/5d1U21j1rGY
It contains a very interesting presentation of Moses Mendelssohn’s ally Naphtali Herz Wessely and his attempt to “become” Sephardic:
In the old Sephardi cemetery in Altona, tombstone No. 1308, decorated with a drawing of a deer and inscribed with Hebrew verse, marks the grave of an Ashkenazi Jew of Ukrainian descent who was buried there in 1805. This is neither a coincidence nor a mistake. Naphtali Herz Wessely, the Hebrew poet and philologist, one of the fathers of the cultural renaissance of eighteenth-century Ashkenazi Jewry, spent his last years in Hamburg. There he made a surprising, unconventional request of the community: he asked to be laid to rest in the Sephardi section of the cemetery, deliberately forgoing burial in the Ashkenazi section where he would have been interred near two of the most prominent rabbis of the previous generation – Jonathan Eybeschuetz and Jacob Emden. This was far more than a symbolic act. It was a twofold statement, through which Wessely disassociated himself from the contemporary Ashkenazi culture and identified with what he considered to be the source of inspiration best fitted to a new direction in intellectual life. Wessely had already chosen the Sephardim as his cultural reference group in the formative stage of his life when, in the 1740s, he joined the circle of Amsterdam Jewish scholars who cultivated the Hebrew language, the Bible, poetry, and philosophy. According to one of his biographers, his identification with the Sephardim was so strong that, in his old age, the Portuguese community in London invited him to serve as its Hakham (rabbi).
The Ruderman contribution slavishly follows the Schorsch model as it seeks to undermine the value of the Sephardic heritage:
Once again, we have the Ashkenazi “challenge” to the notion of the “Sephardic mystique”; something that we previously saw in Ruderman’s 1995 book Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe:
https://www.amazon.com/Jewish-Thought-Scientific-Discovery-Modern/dp/0814329314
Two things from that book have stuck with me since I read it many years ago:
There was the scathing attack on Jose Faur’s reading of Converso figures like Juan Luis Vives and Francisco Sanchez.
In Faur’s book In the Shadow of History: Jews and Conversos at the Dawn of Modernity he makes the argument for including such radical Converso thinkers in the Jewish tradition:
https://www.sunypress.edu/p-1250-in-the-shadow-of-history.aspx
I have discussed a number of the Converso issues in my article on Manuel da Costa Fontes’ excellent companion to the Faur book, The Art of Subversion in Inquisitorial Spain:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16Q5bnDAid8WSNWlf6xftWZnsyQbKrnRXwycu2qL_vYw/edit
Ruderman strenuously disagrees with this expansive understanding of the Conversos in the Jewish tradition:
The problem with Faur’s reading of Sanchez is obvious. As Faur admits, Sanchez’s Jewish identity remains elusive, nor can it be shown that his constructive skepticism is ultimately attributable to his converso identity rather than to Galen, to his Italian university studies, or simply to his disillusionment with the scholastic curriculum of his day. (p. 278)
While he affirms the work of Americo Castro and his student Stephen Gilman, prime academic sources for Faur’s view on the Conversos, Ruderman’s PILPUL seeks to target Faur as a tendentious Sephardic apologist who is wrongly seeking to include Converso thinkers in the “hermetic” Jewish tradition.
It is all part and parcel of a complex web of Anti-Sephardic arguments that ultimately leads to Ruderman’s brutally undermining the work of David Nieto, another figure central to Faur’s understanding of the relationship between Sephardic Judaism and Modernity.
Here is how he closes the chapter devoted to Nieto, “A Jewish Thinker in Newtonian England”:
Seen as a whole, Nieto’s major writings suggest a consistent and well-conceived educational strategy for presenting the Jewish faith in a social environment that was isolated from the mainstream of Jewish culture, highly secularized, and only tenuously attached to Jewish sources. (p. 330)
He then boldly accuses Nieto of fostering heterodoxy:
Some thirty years after Nieto died, Dr. Jacob de Castro Sarmento wrote to the elders of the Spanish and Portuguese congregation announcing his intention to withdraw from the community on the ground that “the different opinion and sentiments I have entertained long ago … entirely dissenting from those of the Synagogue … do not permit me any longer to keep up the membership in your body. I therefore now take my leave of you, hereby renouncing that communion in which I have been considered with yourselves.” Sarmento’s break with his ancestral heritage is embodied in the legacy of David Nieto dramatically adumbrated in the wave of defections from traditional Judaism in years to come. In the long run, even Nieto’s elaborate reconstruction of Judaism, like Mendelssohn’s after him, could not withstand the mighty forces of Jewish social disintegration unleashed by the rapidly changing political and cultural ambience of Enlightenment and revolutionary Europe. (pp. 330-331)
It is interesting that Ruderman admits to a connection between the Sephardi Nieto and the Ashkenazi Mendelssohn, but does so in the realm of Spinozistic heterodoxy, which Ashkenazim in Nieto’s time did as well:
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/1807957/jewish/Pantheism-and-Judaism.htm
Rejecting Faur’s integrative Jewish Humanism, Ruderman blazes a new path which tears asunder what he calls “mainstream” Judaism, shorthand for Ashkenazi fundamentalism and its un-enlightened approach, from “enlightened” Judaism. The twains shall never meet.
Sepharad in Ashkenaz generally rejects this approach, as many of its contributors are expert in Medieval Judeo-Arab philosophy and science, and affirm the causal ties between the Ashkenazi thinkers in the early Haskalah, like Mendelssohn and Wessely, and the classical Sephardic heritage.
One crucial exception to this rule is Carlos Fraenkel, one of the new hotshots in the academic study of Jewish Philosophy:
http://carlosfraenkel.com/about/
The Ashkenazi Fraenkel has curiously published a book called Teaching Plato in Palestine:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691151038/teaching-plato-in-palestine
It is telling to note his Neo-Con Tikvah-style politics in a positive review of the work of David Nirenberg:
Nirenberg has become the current heir to Bernard Lewis, as he continues to demonize Islam and its culture:
As Michael Roth states in his Washington Post review of Nirenberg’s book Anti-Judaism:
Islam followed this same pattern of solidifying orthodoxy by stoking anti-Jewish fervor. Muhammad set Islam, like Christianity, firmly within an Abrahamic tradition, but that made it crucial to sever the new religion from any Judaizing possibilities. Rival Islamic groups, like rival forms of Christianity, often painted their adversaries as hypocritical Jews scheming to take the world away from spiritual truths essential for its true salvation.
Fraenkel, the pompous teacher of Plato in Palestine, affirms the Nirenberg thesis in his review of the same book:
Muslims argue that true tolerance can be found only in Islam. Nirenberg quotes a passage from the Hamas Charter which holds that Palestine should become a Muslim country because only ‘under the wing of Islam’ can Muslims, Christians and Jews ‘coexist in peace’. For Nirenberg, this benign picture of Islam, like that of Christianity, is a fantasy. That it is rooted partly in what Jews have had to say about Islam is an irony not lost on him. By insisting on how good the conditions for Jews were in Muslim lands, Jewish intellectuals from the Enlightenment onwards intended to put the anti-Semitism of supposedly civilised Europe to shame. In the 20th century, Muslim scholars picked up this narrative and gave it an anti-Zionist twist: if Muslims had treat-ed Jews so well, why should they pay for the crimes committed against Jews in Christian Europe?
As we have learned, the politics of the Arab-Muslim Middle East has been deeply impacted by the twin pressures of Zionism and Arab Nationalism, and the way that intellectuals from the two warring communities understand their own “imagined histories.” Religious fundamentalism in those camps has only made things that much worse.
Fraenkel firmly allies himself with the Tikvah world, and rejects the Convivencia values of the classical Sephardic heritage:
https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/authors/?a=carlos-fraenkel
His Tikvah Jewish Review of Books article “Spinoza in Streimels” was posted to the Academia.edu site:
https://www.academia.edu/3197855/Spinoza_in_Shtreimels_An_Underground_Seminar
He clearly shows us which side of the heresy divide he is on:
At the same time, Spinoza is fascinating to them not only because he is a fellow lapsed Jew. They also hope to find in him a philosophical expression of Jewish ideals—from the love of God to the quest for peace and justice—that doesn’t require the baggage of traditional beliefs and practices. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (along with two other curious Hasidic philosophers) even join me at a Spinoza conference that Dan Garber, the distinguished scholar of Early Modern philosophy, has organized. Their presence causes puzzlement among the professional philosophers. “Should I have ordered kosher food?” Garber, whose grandfather studied in a yeshiva in Vilna, asks. He then tells a famous joke about a Hasid who arrives in heaven, finds a superb restaurant operated by Moses and supervised by God himself. “I’ll have the fruit platter,” he says. Another Jewish colleague asks me in surprise: “Did I just see a Hasid eating potato salad at the buffet?”
Indeed, once again we are in the Leo Strauss pool of Jewish apostasy, and the opposition between “mainstream” Judaism and “enlightened” Judaism. It always goes back to the Ashkenazi binary between faith and doubt.
Fraenkel’s contribution to Sepharad in Ashkenaz is consistent with the binary:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xyZd18gT8Frqi-MFDlt55Mkw-SInJX57/view?ths=true
His article on Solomon Maimon is an attempt to subvert Jewish Humanism by, as we saw with Ruderman’s attack on Nieto, characterizing Maimonides as heterodox:
Maimonides’ account, however, leaves the cosmological version of the problem quid juris unsolved, for in the worldview of the medieval Aristotelian there is no place for the material component of objects in either the divine or the human intellect. This second version of the problem can be solved only through the Spinozist transformation of Maimonides’ God: from a God who is only the formal cause of the world into a God who is both the formal and the material cause of the world. Thus the “gap” (II, 521) in Kant’s system, due to the twofold source of the cognized object, is closed. The infinite intellect now secures the unity of ideas and objects. This unity, according to Spinoza, also characterizes the order of modes; whence in my view Maimon derived his thesis that for the human intellect ideas and objects are “objectively one and the same” (III, 185), and that the distinction between them is only “subjective”, a consequence of the incompleteness, i. e., finite nature of human cognition. Finally, Maimon’s paraphrase of the Scholium to Ethics II, proposition 7, in which Spinoza himself acknowledges his debt to the God of Maimonides, leaves no doubt that he was aware that his attempt to complete Kant’s “Copernican revolution” in philosophy is based on the metaphysical line of thought leading from Maimonides to Spinoza, and from Spinoza to himself.
The Fraenkel article boils down to the problem of materialist anthropomorphism (monism) and monotheism, which he claims Maimonides was unable, or unwilling, to resolve.
In other words, the only logical way out of the conundrum presented by religious philosophy, and thus Religious Humanism, is to go the way of Spinoza and Pantheism:
In my view, this scholium is not only a crucial passage in the Ethics for Maimon’s understanding of Spinoza and for his Spinozist transformation of Maimonides’ notion of the divine and human intellect; it also seems to imply, if we pursue the reference to the God of “some of the Hebrews”, that Spinoza himself considered his notion of God to be no more than an unclouded version of Maimonides’ notion of God, and, moreover, that Maimon was aware of this. The reference to the God of “some of the Hebrews” is, to be sure, not devoid of travesty. Looked at more closely the God of the Hebrews turns out to be none other than the God of the Greeks – more precisely the divine nous, ultimately derived from Aristotle’s Metaphysics XII, 7 and 9. From this we must infer that the alleged “Hebrews” were not the Hebrews of Biblical times, but medieval Jewish Aristotelians, in particular Maimonides, who had transformed the God of Aristotle into the God of the Bible. They had provided the divine nous with a Hebrew garb, and, draped in this costume, Spinoza made his acquaintance. Spinoza’s claim that in order to reach his monism from the monotheism of the Hebrews all he had to do was dissipate a “cloud” seems to be justified if we recall the structure of God’s intellectual activity in Maimonides: The unity of substance reflects the unity of God as the subject and object of the act of self-intellection. The unity of the order of modes reflects the unity of the intelligible order of nature and its intellectual cognition in God’s apprehension of everything that follows from his causal activity. Elsewhere I have reconstructed in detail the path that in my view leads from Maimonides’ monotheism to Spinoza’s monism, and I have presented the textual evidence from Spinoza’s early works as well as the Ethics, which supports my reconstruction. Briefly summarized my thesis is that, on the one hand, Spinoza applied the structure of the intellectual activity of Maimonides’ God to the relation of substance and modes (or Natura naturans and Natura naturata) of his Deus sive Natura; on the other hand he extended God’s ontological scope by integrating the attribute of extension into his being. The intellectual activity that for Maimonides constitutes God’s essence recurs in what Spinoza describes as God’s “essentia actuosa” in the Scholium to Ethics II, 3. This “active essence”, however, is no longer limited to intellectual activity but becomes extension (or, if you wish, extensive activity) as well. The “cloud”, therefore, which Spinoza had to dissipate in order to reach his monism from the monotheism of “some of the Hebrews”, refers to the same problem that Maimon addressed in his commentary on Guide I, 69: the exclusion of matter (or extension) from God, i. e., the cosmological version of the problem quid juris.
All this means is that Solomon Maimon, the Jewish apostate, read the purported Maimonidean inconsistency in light of Spinoza’s Pantheistic modifications.
As with Strauss and his twisted thesis in “Persecution and the Art of Writing,” Maimonides was either concealing something out of fear of being accused of heterodoxy, or he was not a true philosopher, unafraid to lay out the truth in full.
Maimon, who ironically took the name of the man whose Jewish Humanism he so emphatically rejected, became the model for the later Jewish Reformers who abrogated the Halakhah and caused the integrity of our sacred texts to be undermined:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/maimon-solomon
As that entry notes:
In Berlin he became a member of Moses Mendelssohn's circle, but was abandoned by Mendelssohn a few years later because of the dissolute life he led. Forced to leave Berlin, he moved first to Hamburg and then to Amsterdam. In Hamburg he beseeched a Lutheran pastor to convert him to Christianity, yet he confessed his disbelief in Christian doctrines. The pastor retorted that Maimon was too much a philosopher to be a Christian. Thereafter, between 1783 and 1786, with the help of some benefactors, he was able to study at the gymnasium of Altona. Still poverty-stricken, he moved from Altona to Berlin, then to Breslau, and in 1787 back to Berlin. There he studied Kantian philosophy and under its influence wrote his first work in German, Versuch ueber die Transzendentalphilosophie (1790). He sent a manuscript of the book to Marcus Herz, who sent it to Immanuel Kant. Kant remarked in a letter to Herz (May 26, 1789) that it was clear to him from a cursory study of the book that its value was very great, and that nobody understood his philosophy as well as Maimon (E. Cassirer (ed.), Immanuel Kants Werke, 9 (1918), 415). Kant's letter determined Maimon's future. He found a publisher for his book and scholarly journals accepted his articles for publication. From 1790 to 1795 Maimon was supported by a benefactor, Count Adolf Kalkreuth, at whose residences near Berlin and Freistadt, Silesia, he lived. When Maimon died, he was buried outside the Jewish cemetery as a heretic.
As I have said, Maimon’s work stood as an important model for Reform Judaism:
https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Maimon_Salomon
As we see there:
Maimon was especially critical of religious practices and beliefs, which in his opinion departed from the ideal of the natural and rational religion, which he claimed Judaism had once been. His autobiography influenced the reform proposals and the self-evaluation of maskilic circles, especially in Eastern Europe, as well as most of their ventures into the genre of autobiography. Translations were issued in English (1888), Polish (1913), and Hebrew (1942).
For the Ashkenazi Sephardi-deniers there are only literalist readings of both Judaism and Philosophy. Lines are drawn in sharply absolutist terms, as any attempt at synthesis is obstinately refused.
Ashkenazi intellectuals like Leo Strauss, Ismar Schorsch, John Efron, David Ruderman, and Carlos Fraenkel reject the values of Religious Humanism; instead seeking to separate Judaism from general culture. Their binary view of Judaism fits with the larger attempt to separate Sephardim from Ashkenazim, as the latter have ultimately determined that a Jew can only be a strictly Orthodox rejector of Modernity or a Modern rejector of the classical Jewish tradition.
We have seen this in the ongoing attack on Convivencia, and the refusal to make use of the classical Sephardic tradition as a bridge mechanism for renewed ties to the Arab-Muslim world.
It is therefore important to note the deleterious impact of such Ashkenazi hard-nosed rejectionism, and the dangers it posits for an already-dysfunctional Judaism that continues to drift further and further away from the synthetic, integrative values of general human interaction, as was the ideal for many centuries in the Sephardic world; a world now in the throes of complete erasure.
David Shasha