Untitled

BOOK REVIEWS
Mrin B\n-Ir\x, Genesis Numerology. Association for Jewish Astrology

and Numerology. Rehovot, 2003. 218 pp. ISBN 965-90620-0-1 [Heb.]
The author of this book is Professor of Talmud and Professor of
Jewish History at Bar-Ilan University. In addition to his enormous
erudition and methodology, Professor Bar-Ilan is known for his intel-
lectual guts. In particular, he dares ask questions that no one else
dares to ask and gives answers that no one wants to hear: always
with plenty of classical texts at hand and scores of linguistic evidence
and historical sources to prove the point. In this sense, Professor
Bar-Ilan is a solitary voyager examining new issues and touching
upon areas of Jewish interest as yet unexplored, e.g., his Some Jewish
Women in Antiquity (Atlanta, 1998). Consistently, because of the inten-
sity of his analysis and intimate knowledge of the subject, he opens
new windows even in well trodden areas, e.g., Mysteries of Prayers and
Hekhalot Literature (Heb.) (Ramat Gan, 1987).
In Genesis Numerology Professor Bar-Ilan pulls together his exten-
sive research into an uncharted area of Jewish studies. Although
numerology in other cultures and traditions has been well researched,
it has not been studied within the context of Jewish literary texts,
particularly the Hebrew Scripture. Let me point out, at the very
outset, that numerology deals only with numbers explicit in the text, not
numbers outside the text, as with popular gematarya. It was part of the
intellectual landscape of ancient cultures, and served as a tool for
encoding secret and esoteric messages. Concerning the importance
of numerology in Jewish texts, it would suce to point out that men
of the stature of Philo (pp. 20-21, 200-202) and Newton (pp. 11, 132,
134), among others, were interested in Jewish numerology.
An important distinction introduced by the author is between nor-
mal and incidental, as well as symbolic or archetypal numbers.
These distinctions are fully explained and illustrated. In addition to
a very valuable introduction dealing with the history and scope of
numerology, the book contains three chapters.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2004 Review of Rabbinic Judaism 7
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1. The rst chapter opens with an explanation of the subject, method-
ology, and importance of numerology as a means of decoding
esoteric messages. An important distinction introduced by the author
is between typological and true and between male and
female numbers.
2. The second chapter focuses on methodology. Among the topics
researched are the criteria by which to distinguish between random
numbers distributed accidentally in a text and non-random numbers
intended to encode a particular message. There is a very illumi-
nating discussion of the numbers 6 and 28the perfect
numbers of Pythagorean mathematicsand of the numbers 31
and 127.
3. The third chapter consists of a detailed study of numerology in
the stories of Creation and the Flood.
The book contains several useful appendices, a detailed index of the
dierent numbers examined, and an index of scholars mentioned in
the book. There is also an extensive bibliography of Hebrew and
non-Hebrew sources examined in this work.
The Hebrew title Bereshit of the book has a double sense. First,
it refers to the Book of Genesis (Bereshit), the text examined by the
author. Second, it alludes to the fact that this is only a groundwork,
a kind of preliminary studya beginning (Bereshit)of what the
author hopes will be new studies in this area. A nal note for the
reader interested in Modern Hebrew writings: in addition to his
scholarly accomplishments, Professor Bar-Ilan happens to be a gifted
and polished writer. His style is uid, elegant, and thoroughly inci-
sive. I dare say, it ranks among the very best Hebrew scholarly prose
that I have read.
Jos Faur
Nr+\xv\ Corrror
Josr F\tn, Homo Mysticus. A Guide to Maimonidess Guide for the Per-
plexed. Syracuse, 1999: Syracuse University Press. 266 pp.
Jos Faur, professor of Talmud at Netanya College in Israel, for-
merly at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York
City, brings to the study of Rabbinic Judaism mastery of three quite
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distinct bodies of learning: the Talmudic and Midrashic sources and
medieval Rabbinic sources, contemporary semiotics, and the Sephardi-
Arabic tradition of philosophy nurtured among Jews from the Arabic-
speaking countries whose families originate in Spain before 1492. It
is a fusion that yields enormous intellectual power and energy. After
I read his 1986 masterpiece, Golden Doves with Silver Dots. Semiotics and
Textuality in Rabbinic Tradition (Indiana University Press), I concluded
that he is the most interesting mind working philosophicallynot
theologically nor historically nor in the discipline of history of reli-
gionon Rabbinic Judaism, from its origins to the present. Now his
Homo Mysticus conrms that judgment. He is original, profound, imag-
inative, and utterly lucid. Here we have a reading of Maimonides
by someone at home in the intellectual world in which Maimonides
himself did his work, the world of Rabbinics in the encounter with
Graeco-Arabic philosophy. It is a very dierent reading from the
approach to Maimonides taken by philosophers trained in the Germanic
tradition of Kant and Hegel, who have dominated the interpreta-
tion of the oeuvre of the greatest mind in the history of Judaism.
Maimonides may have found diculty in reading his German inter-
preters (whether they wrote in English or Hebrew or German), but
he surely will have understood every line of Faurs account of matters.
In a clear way Faur shows why constantly referring to Arabic
semiotics and philosophy should dene the norm for Maimonidean
studies. He divides his work into four parts, the rst two of them
centered on the nature of knowledge of God, the third on cosmol-
ogy, the fourth on anthropology. The rst of the two on religious
knowledge takes up what we can know about God, Maimonides
negative theology, the second, the power of imagination. His thesis
is that For Maimonides, Hebrew mysticism is an anthropological
dimension and the very purpose of the human race. Homo Mysticus
is, he says, a post-rational individual: there is a perception that is
higher than rational perception, which opens the gates to a supra-
rational knowledge.
The negative theology yields a doctrine of silence. Knowledge of
God through negative attributes does not derive from a concept, it
is not epistemological: The silence it generates is not absence of
words but the discovery of the system by which an expression coheres
and is meaningful. Here Faur draws upon the usages of Arabic-
speaking Jews, the current philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, C.G.
Jung, and Talmud and Midrash, to clarify Maimonidess point. The
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second part, on the theory of imagination, yields this: Imagination
does not interpret reality but substitute it through a process of men-
tal projections and displacements. Maimonides regarded the works
of imagination ass a distortion of reality: camouaging what is harm-
ful and deviant as beautiful and benecial . . . people dominated by
imagination cannot be ethical. The doctrine of cosmology views
God as a transcendental Supreme being, which means, knowl-
edge of God as absolute creator. It involves three closely interrelated
steps: exiting the realm of imagination, discovering objective reality,
and cognizance of the creator. The rst step consists in freeing the
mind from the grip of imagination . . . the second . . . consists of pen-
etrating the realm of reason and perceiving reality as an objective
entity governed by precise and universal laws. As to cognizance
of the creator, Faur says, Only a mythological deity leaves traces
of its presence. The God of Israel . . . leaves no evidence of his pres-
ence. In the nal part, Faur treats Maimonidess view of the orig-
inal of humankind and its development to ultimate perfection, dealing
with man in the image of God (Gen. 1:26). By this Maimonides
understood man as a logical animal, with the faculty to concep-
tualize rational matters.
Clearly, in Homo Mysticus, we are given a systematic and cogent
approach to historys most important philosopher of Judaism. To
praise Faurs work it suces to say he is worthy of the formidable
task that he has set for himself.
Jacob Neusner
B\nr Corrror
An+ntn Hrn+znrno, A Jew in America. My Life and a Peoples Struggle
for Identity. San Francisco, 2002: HarperSanFrancisco. 468 pp., $29.95.
Arthur Hertzberg is the leading public intellectual of Judaism of our
times, and here he has written his masterpiece: a document of
American Judaic literature, framed in a genre of American writing
but animated by the mind and heart of Judaism. The American
idiom is the memoir, rare in the canon of Judaism, which tells sto-
ries but seldom produces biographies, still less commonly, autobi-
ographies. To attain immortality for his opinions, the Talmudic sage
must leave o his own name. But the message is that of the Torah,
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embodied in a singular life of service, and that is not a common
motif in American writing. Hertzberg describes himself as not only
a man of action and politics but one of thought about the prob-
lems of our time and their relation to the destiny of the Jews.
Rabbi, teacher, preacher, politician, professor, intense partisan in
public policyHertzberg the personality, not his book, is likely to
be reviewed on the occasion of this memoir, which is why, I pre-
dict but hope to be shown wrong, he also wont get any prizes for
his achievement in these pages. If people review the man not the
book, that will be a pity, because the book stands on its own. It is
to be read as a cultural indicator, a sign of the state of Judaism in
America. It forms part of an important pattern. It is a tribute to the
intellectual achievement of the community in which, and for which,
it was written. Hertzberg writes more than to engage, he writes to
change peoples minds, to make demands of truth and meaning and
to make them stick.
Specically, people say that a new Jewish community such as Ame-
rican Jewry, scarcely more than a century and a quarter old as we
now know it, reaches maturity when it sustains a distinctive tradition
of scholarship in Judaism. The third generation of American Jews
has dened a distinctively American tradition of scholarship in Juda-
ismso do many maintain. By that standard American Judaism has
come of age, the American school of scholarship on Judaism attests.
That seems to me an overstatement. Scholarship has its own foci,
denes its own criteria of truth and meaning, and forms a awed
cultural indicator. A more telling, if subtle, criterion presents itself,
and it does prove our maturity as a Jewry: Has a new Jewry made
its own the cultural traditions of its setting, naturalizing them into
media for the expression of authentic Judaism? To that question,
however accomplished American scholarship on Judaism, it is not a
valid indicator. That is because scholarship produces books that are
merely about Judaism. But only when a community can explain itself
in all its particularity also in the context of the Torah can it sus-
tain itself in the life of intellect.
That means nding in the American intellectual setting a mode
of expression distinctive to that setting and also adaptable to the
statement of Judaism. The enduring books of Judaism, whether the
Mishnah or Maimonides Guide to the Perplexed, do not merely discuss
Judaism, they rather express the Judaic truth. This they do in sub-
stance, but, as to form, they create in the medium of their time and
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place. This means we encounter through the Mishnah the setting of
Roman legal codication, and through Maimonides the philosophi-
cal categories of medieval Aristotelianism. Yet the Mishnah and
Maimonides counterpart form for us the most particular, the most
distinctive, of all Judaic writing beyond the Torah. So they deliver
in a new medium, naturalized in context, an authentic statement of
Judaism. And they set the standard for Judaic truth for all time.
That is the context in which I read Hertzbergs bookthat is how
Jewish and Judaic a book it is. It is permeated with living learning.
But it is not unique. In the recent past American Judaism has learned
to speak Judaism in not merely the context but the very idiom of
American culture. Three cases suce. The rst is the ction of
Cynthia Ozick. She has turned ction into a medium of Judaic
expression as did the Hasidic rebbes in theiralso innovativestory-
telling tradition.
But remarkable intellects have also transformed scholarship into
working theology. I refer to Leon Wieseltier for my case. When it
comes to transforming mere scholarly learning into religious truth,
his tough, dense, and brilliant Kaddish represents a book of Judaism,
not merely about Judaism. He turns scholarship into profound med-
itation on the human condition of death as mediated by Judaism.
And the third claim on cultural maturity is laid down for us by
Arthur Hertzberg, who has now taken an American genre of writ-
ing, the memoir, and made it into a medium for a profound record
of a life of Judaism. His too forms a statement not about but within
Judaism. And he has made an American genre of writing serve as
a medium of Torah.
The American genre to which I referthe memoir that transcends
the author and is made to exemplify the age and its lessonsis best
represented by the classic, The Education of Henry Adams (1907), an
autobiography in form, a meditation on culture in eect. That
Hertzberg aspired to replicate that model is explicit in his conclud-
ing pages. How does The Education gure? Telling the story of how
he moved from the world of his birth into the modern world of
uncertainty, Adams presents principal themes of modernization of
American and Western culture in the form of an autobiography,
through chapters of his life meditating on the culture that shaped
his circumstance.
So too, in coherent, thematic, propositional essays on the chapters
of his life Hertzberg has made a statement of Judaism through the
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medium fully realized by Henry Adams. He tells the story of his life,
by way of illustrating what has happened to the Jews and to Judaism.
More to the point, he makes each chapter of his life into an exem-
plary essay on a given issue or development in American Judaism.
The chapters unfold in the temporal sequence of everyday life,
Hertzbergs life: beginnings, education, career chapter by chapter.
But each chapter forms a meditation on the meaning of the events
portrayed therein. The personal becomes exemplary and bears wit-
ness to a larger truth Hertzberg means to convey. It is not princi-
pally a work of self-celebration at all. That is what I mean when I
say, despite the temptation to review the man, the book is the thing.
That is an aesthetic achievement, one of solid, thoughtful writing
and, by the way, awfully ne editing.
What, exactly does Hertzberg do? He tells of his origins in Poland,
in a Hasidic dynasty, and his father, a Hasidic master uncommonly
wise in the sekhel of Judaism. He shows how the issues of the immi-
grant generation and their childrenthe uncertainty of the immi-
grant, the growing up and away of the second generationplayed
themselves out in his up-bringing and education. He captures the
America of the twenties, thirties, and forties, the brutal anti-Semitism
of, among other institutions, the academy and the professors. Puzzled
at how to hold together the inherited tradition of the Torah and
the modern learning of the university, he found his way to the Jewish
Theological Seminary of America and to Conservative Judaism. He
describes his years in the JTSA, as have many other alumni in their
memoirs, as singularly unpleasant. Louis Finkelstein and Saul Lieber-
man do not emerge as winning gures by any means; the one comes
to memory as a mean-spirited politician and manipulator of other
peoples lives, the other an erudite but basically stupid misanthrope.
Zionist and Israeli political personalities, nearly every one of whom
Hertzberg met in his many communal roles in American and world
Jewish institutions, emerge as limited and short-sighted and querulous.
But the book settles only a few scores. Rather, it is rich in praise
and appreciation for many ne Jews and more than a few honor-
able gentiles. By Hertzbergs repeated criterion, would this person
shelter me in when the Nazis or Communists come around next
time? most of the gentiles in these pages qualify. In the heightened
tension of this mans lifetime, in which a large part of his family
perished in death-factories, that is no trivial judgment that he makes.
There is no chapter of twentieth century Jewish aairs that he does
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not invoke, no public issue or debate on Jewish public policy that
he does not recapitulate. Hertzberg was deeply involved in the life
of American synagogues and he built two of them, one in Nashville,
one in Englewood. He was involved in the civil rights revolution of
the 1950s and 1960s. He participated in the great events of the cre-
ation of the State of Israel. He served as a military chaplain in Cold
War Britain. He pursued scholarship and held visiting professorships.
He was a principal in the creation of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, one
of the greatest achievements of Israeli scholarship in its great age,
now over. He was involved politics in opposition to the Viet Nam
war. He held high oce in the American Jewish Congress and the
World Jewish Congress, the World Zionist Organization, the Synagogue
Council of America, and other instrumentalities of American and
world Jewry and the State of Israel. He was a principal in the rap-
prochement of the Roman Catholic Church with world Jewry and
with Judaism. He held a regular professorship as a full time faculty
member. He knew pretty much everybody who was anybody in orga-
nized Judaism and in Jewish politics. And apart from the oces he
held, he participated in the great events of the past half-century and
more, rarely as a by-stander, always as what we call nowadays an
activist. He also wrote two enduring works of historical scholar-
ship, The Zionist Idea and The French Enlightenment and the Jews. His
book on American Jewry made a deep mark as well. These works
will endure. Most scholars in full-time professorships are happy to
write one, and few do that much, and none, not even Salo Baron,
matched his career in Jewish cultural politics.
But he is an intellectual, and the engagement of the activist both
was animated by and also precipitated reection and astute criticism.
And that is why his memoir bears comparison with The Education of
Henry Adams. For like Adams, he makes of his life an occasion for
reection on great issues, enduring dilemmas, those of culture, not
merely of politics, theology, not only sociology. As a result, if we
had no history of American Judaism in the twentieth century but
only Hertzbergs memoir, we could reconstruct from the pages of
that memoir pretty much everything important that shaped the
futureand understand much that conventional histories would not
tell us. Specically, Hertzbergs narrative reveals the reason why.
Jacob Neusner
B\nr Corrror
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L\vnrxcr A. Horrv\x, The Journey Home. Discovering the Deep Spiritual
Wisdom of the Jewish Tradition. Boston, 2002: Beacon Press. 223 pp.
$25.00. ISBN 0-8070-3620-X.
What Homan means by spirituality, the Judaic denition of which
forms the subject of this engaging exercise, is not spelled out in the
beginning, which makes the contents intimidating. But the exposi-
tion is inviting and friendly and artful, never intimidating nor bor-
ing. He covers this program: spirituality with Jewish integrity; spirituality
of Jewish metaphor; spirituality of stewardship, spirituality of dis-
covery, spirituality of landedness, spirituality of translation, spiritual-
ity of suering, spirituality of community.
That is not to suggest Homan covers random topics and never
denes his problem or how he proposes to solve it. Rather, he pro-
ceeds slowly and inductively to discover out of the sources of Judaism
a distinctively Judaic take on the matter. He does not mean merely
religious experience that is aorded by Judaism but rather a Jewish
way of being in the world. In the end he does make matters explicit.
The message of this book is summarized by the author (p. 189):
Authentic Jewish spirituality does exist. . . . It is a genuine part of life,
akin to art, reected in ritual, celebrated in moments of personal tran-
scendence, and implicit I the recognition that life has direction, pur-
pose, and hope.
To make this claim stick, Homan works from the facts of Judaism
to the spiritual wisdom that is embodied in them, a subtle and pen-
etrating exercise indeed. He does not wish to predetermine matters
by adopting the prevailing denitions, which originate in Christian
religious experience, and so missing the distinctively Judaic religious
content imparted by Judaism, but he also does not propose to go
native by mere translation of obscure medieval texts, as though merely
because the English sentence appears intelligible, he therefore has
made a statement of consequence.
That is not to suggest denitions are not forthcoming, but it is always
in context:
Jewish spirituality begins with the Bibles claim that there is a region
of experience called the Holy. It surfaces in times of awe, or in dar-
ing notions of harmony, hope, and goodness. . . . This biblical spiritu-
ality was adapted and then transformed by the Rabbis of late antiquity,
who made it part and parcel of the historic quest for meaning that
we now call Judaism.
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Clearly, Homan holds, there has to be a vocabulary of Jewish spirit-
uality, one that holds true to the familiar experiential landmarks:
of Jewish lives, but it takes a . . . translation process to arrive at what
our parallels are. . . . The options before he wrote his book were these:
Jewish categories can end up being translated in such a way that they
become utterly Christianized, in which case they cease being descrip-
tive of what Jews actually experience. Or Jews can answer questions
about Christian categories by simply translating old Hebrew documents
into modern English and then pointing to them as if to indicate what
the Rabbis would have said if they lived in our time and spoke English.
What Homan proposes is that spirituality is
our way of being in the world, the system of connectedness by which
we make sense of our lives, how we overlay our autobiography in the
making with a template of time and space and relationship that is
vastly greater than we know ourselves individually to be.
For Judaism that means serious engagement with ancient texts that
can be made to translate into spiritual answers for modern dilemmas.
These denitions do not capture the specicity of the discussion,
they leave the wrong, false impression that Homan speaks in abstrac-
tions. What he does is convey great truths in humble stories, win-
ning attention through narrative, holding it through the exposition
of a quite original and winning message. He wishes to set forth the
spirituality of metaphor, and this he does through a case of a power-
ful, immediately accessible metaphor drawn from a life-situation of
a rabbi, who sees himself as a cup that has sprung a leak: Someday
someone will lift me up and nd me empty. In Judaism, he main-
tains, Bit by bit . . . the experiences we undergo add up to an imag-
ine of who we think we are. . . . Then the spiritual question . . . is
whether we can posit an underlying self that will prove lasting. This
quest for biography he then expounds in full detail, with the climax
the exposition of the book of Leviticusof all unanticipated turn-
ings in this surprising book. The message of the account of metaphors
is, . . . the shape of life is not a given; it is what we make of it.
And we have no choice but to make something of it. The only ques-
tion is what that something will be.
With the issue and method of the book in hand, the program
requires only a brief summary. The spirituality of stewardship con-
cerns itself with reciting blessings, the Jewish liturgical art. The
spirituality of discovery introduced Torah-study as spiritual artistry.
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This is dened: we study Torah to discovery what God has hid-
den away knowing all the while that the purpose of study is not
necessarily to nd anything. That is to say for its own sake. The
spirituality of landedness concerns itself with the Holy Land. The
spirituality of translation asks about the particular conceptual frame-
work that denes Jewish thought: We paint the world in cultural
colors that read God, Torah, and a people called Israel: you can-
not be a Jew without drawing on them somehow Jewish spirituality
uses Jewish ideas, Jewish rhetoric, Jewish concepts, Jewish words,
and Jewish analogies. That is what makes it Jewish. Then the issue
is how these categories serve and what people make of them.
What, exactly, Jews make of creation, revelation, and redemption
occupies a subtle and rich discussion. Here Homan plumbs the
depths of rendering ideas from culture to culture, for example, cre-
ation in Judaism into the notion of order and pattern in contemporary
cosmologyand so throughout. His summary captures the message:
Creation, revelation, and redemption remain three basic Jewish val-
ues. . . . Leave them in their literal translated shape and you get an
interesting prcis of Jewish theology. Translate them into their con-
textual backdrop and you get some fascinating lessons in Jewish his-
tory. translate them into modern-day concepts and you get a spiritual
armation of pattern, purpose, and hope. Spiritual thinking is the
attempt to say more about the universe than science can, without say-
ing anything that science cannot at least grant as possible. . . .
When it is night, spirituality for the suering, shades over into auto-
biography, and presents a profound meditation on what happens when
we do not see a pattern at all . . . Can there be spirituality for those
that suer . . . or is spirituality a luxury of the fortunate? Certainly
this is the most profound chapter of them all. The book ends with an
address to the fourth generation, The spirituality of community.
Here Homan places the project of spirituality within the unfolding
of the four generations of American Judaism from the great migra-
tion to the present. He sees the task of the coming generation: to
transcend ethnicity and seek out the holy in such things as the ways
we think, the blessings we say, the truths we discover, the homes
we have or seek to nd. Jewish spirituality is not just real. It is rea-
sonable and it is deep.
Homan stands comparison to others who have addressed the
Jewish reader with an exposition of the spirituality of Judaism. He
vastly outclasses Lawrence Kushner in literacy, both in writing and
in learning. He captures a distinctively Judaic message, encompassing
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the sources of Judaism, for a Jewish reader, so he outperforms Harold
Kushner, a brilliant writer but not nearly so focused on Judaism as
Homan is. So Homan is more literate than the one Kushner and
more of a Jewish theologian than the other has claimed to be.
The right league is the one dened by Abraham J. Heschels expo-
sitions of Judaism, particularly his Man Is Not Alone and God in Search
of Man. These classics of Judaic and religious exposition cover more
ground and exhibit greater intellectual ambition than Homans does.
But they do not exceed in eect and in outcome the power of
Homans exposition, its originality, and its compelling quality. The
message is the same, the medium not, and Homans greater clar-
ity and focus and succinctness make for a more compelling book.
Homans enterprise is worthy of its task: discovering the deep
spiritual wisdom of the Jewish tradition, and I expect his book will
attain the status of a classic, as have Heschels comparable books,
but perhaps a classic as much read and responded to as it is praised
and celebrated. What Heschel in his day sought to do, the audience
he at that time aspired to reach, is what Homan has accomplished,
in all humility and art, for the generation of those who these days
seek God.
Jacob Neusner
B\nr Corrror
Is\\c K\rivi, Early Jewish Exegesis and Theological Controversy: Studies in
Scripture in the Shadow of Internal and External Controversies ( Jewish and
Christian Heritage, 2). Assen: Van Gorcum 2002. XVI + 214 pp.
ISBN 90 232 3713 7 Euro 59.00.
At rst glance, this book is a lively collection of some previously
published articles and lectures that were updated and woven into a
coherent book about the biblical exegesis that grew out of Jewish
internal and external disputation. On second sight, it is much more,
making an overall statement in respect to the exegetical approaches
many Christian scholars take to the Old Testament as well as
regarding Jewish approaches to the Hebrew Bible. Since this state-
ment is clearly presented at the end, I suggest that readers start with
the last chapter, a review essay entitled The Task of Hebrew Bible/
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Old Testament TheologyBetween Judaism and Christianity and
with Kalimis Epilogue that follows it.
Inspired by Brevard Childs famous suggestion that the fundamental
goal of Christian theologians is to nd testaments in reference to
Jesus in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament,
1
Kalimi takes issue
with this prevailing attitude of some scholars. This type of Christian
approach suggests reading the Bible as coherent scripture in which
one part is the fulllment of the other, which pushes Jewish schol-
ars of the Bible who are attempting to locate theology in the Hebrew
Bible into a certain corner. The only joint project in this arena of
competing theological approaches is the so-called History of Israelite
Religion (p. 115). Summarizing this argument, Kalimi nds that
many theologians still dene Christianity through the negation of the
Judaic tradition. Everything that happened before Christianity is seen
in light of events described in the New Testament. Kalimi ghts his
ideological, scholarly, and textual battle on two frontsagainst both un-
relenting Christian theologians and the biblical historians of Judaism.
Kalimi similarly laments the lack of interest in Christian theology
by many Jewish scholars in addition to their own neglect of the
Hebrew Bibles own theology, as diverse as it may be.
Kalimi recognizes the importance of the Rabbinic exegetical lit-
erature for biblical theology and, as we may hypothesize, for a recon-
struction of a theology of the Rabbinic Judaism that is partially
driven by biblical theology. This eld is similarly neglected, because
many scholars deny any coherent thought in this corpus of Rabbinic
literature (exceptions are few and far between, such as S. Schechters
early attempt at writing a Rabbinic theology
2
and J. Neusners numer-
ous volumes of scholarship that convey the very coherence of the
Rabbinic texts and the theology governing the documents).
3
This
type of textual reasoning addresses the major views of the Bible as
books that inform in bits and pieces vs. the midrashic view of an
1
Childs, Brevard, Biblical Theology of the Old and New Testament: Theological Reections
on the Christian Bible (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993).
2
Schechter, Solomon, Aspects of Rabbinic Theology with a New Introduction by
Neil Gillman, Including the Original Preface of 1909 and the Introduction by Louis
Finkelstein ( Jewish Lights, 1999; reprint of the 1909 ed., New York: Macmillan).
3
For example, Neusner, Jacob, A Theological Commentary to the MidrashVolumes
I-IX (University Press of America, 2001), which again demonstrates the theological
structure of these texts.
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308 nook nryirvs
interconnected whole
4
that expresses dierent phases of biblical theo-
logy; as a concrete example, Kalimi mentions certain categories of
biblical theology that are similar to Jacob Neusners categories of
Rabbinic theology. Both touch upon areas such as the relation between
God and Israel, Israel and the nations, holiness, the land of Israel, etc.
Although Jewish theology appears to be an elusive topic, Kalimi cor-
rectly states, It is true that the theology that is found in the Jewish
commentaries does not unite the theology of the Bible into one book.
But this fact does not lessen the importance of theology in Jewish
commentaries (p. 120). Kalimi further extends the idea of a Jewish
theology of the Bible into the works of the medieval Jewish philoso-
phers, who indeed reacted to the Bible in attempting to integrate
Judaism and Greek/Arabic philosophy. We may gather from this
discussion that traditional Jewish scholarship has a lot to oer theo-
logians from all walks of life. Theology is not uncongenial to biblical
Judaism and its interpreters. We reject the theology of the inter-
preters only because we view theology as inherent to an ecclesiastical
structure Judaism did not have for most of its history until the con-
temporary split of Ashkenazi Jewry into four or more denominations,
presently expressed by the separate dogmatic positions taught in
dierent seminaries and institutions of higher learning.
Kalimi continues with a thorough review of secondary literature
in the eld of Jewish biblical theology. He concludes with the obser-
vation that Jews indeed show some interest in Jewish theology; how-
ever, Jewish theology nds its expression in dierent ways than
Christian literary works. This reviewer proposes that this latter notion
powered the essays in the beginning of Kalimis book in a similar
way that a nal midrashic statement containing the result of an
inquiry drives the midrashic operations presented in the beginning
of a midrashic unit.
In the initial chapter concerning the disputed heritage of the
Jerusalem Temple, the author demonstrates his expertise in biblical
history by drawing from the Deuteronomistic as well as the Chronistic
history. This investigation culminates in a clear distinction between
the often blurred terms the land of Moriah from the Book of
Genesis and Mount Moriah from Chronicles. In another chapter,
Kalimi discusses the aliation of Abraham and the sacrice of Isaac
4
This was rst voiced by Robert Alter in his famous The Art of Biblical Narrative
(New York: Basic Books, 1981), p. 11.
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nook nryirvs 309
with Zion in Jewish sources and Gerizim in Samaritan ones. This
chapter rushes the reader through a plethora of information from
the Dead Sea Scrolls, Egyptian, Samaritan, and archaeological
texts, such as the synagogues at Dura Europos and Bet Alpha.
This information includes a rare comparative discussion of Samaritan
midrashim, which present dierent versions of the familiar bibli-
cal story and show a clear identication of the site of the sacrice
of Isaac. Kalimi also cites the diering views of some Israeli scholars
on this topic of identication. Of utmost importance is the discussion
of the continuation of the dispute over the mountain tops found in
diverse sources such as the Babylonian Talmud and Gospel of John.
Following the topic of biblical gures and events, Kalimi discusses
the sources in respect to those born circumcised, a major concern in
Rabbinic Bible exegesis. This concept may be cautiously placed within
the context of the Hadrianic persecutions and the ban on circum-
cision. Kalimi then turns his attention to the gure of Joseph. These
two chapters deal with the relationship between Joseph and his broth-
ers and the (in)famous story of Joseph and Potiphars wife
5
(p. 82).
In conclusion, it goes without saying that one cannot read the
Bible by itself; it must be read within the biblical interpretations
based in the dierent traditions in order to investigate the theology
of the documents. Isaac Kalimi is to be praised for his attempts to
look at the socio-cultural and historical background of some of the
textual passages; although this background information is elusive, we
may nd patterns of experiences and icons of other cultures. This
approach is denitely set against the prevailing view that it is impos-
sible to dene the historical setting; however, the author does not
claim that the texts are transcriptions of any historical events and
steers away from midrashic historical referentiality.
Each chapter of the book has very clear conclusions. Similar to
some previous books in the eld,
6
Kalimis book presents some of
the visual material that appropriately illustrates and breathes life into
Bible interpretations. Carefully compiled indices complete the book.
This book belongs on the shelves of every serious Judaica library;
it also addresses a general readership, and it is of interest to under-
5
A eld that was also ploughed by the present reviewer, see Zwischen gyp-
tischer Vorlage und talmudischer Rezeption: Josef und die gypterin. Kairos 24/25
(1992/93) pp. 75-90.
6
Heinemann, J., Aggadah and its Development (Keter: Jerusalem, 1974) (Hebrew).
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310 nook nryirvs
graduate as well as graduate students. A minor criticism: the book
would have beneted from tighter editing. But this in no way takes
away from the important engagement and willingness of the author
to approach the virtual mineeld of discussions about biblical his-
tory and exegesis.
Rivka Ulmer
Btckxrrr Uxiyrnsi+v
The Zohar. Pritzker Edition. Volume One, Translation and commentary
by D\xirr C. M\++. Stanford, CA 2004: Stanford University Press.
lxxvii + 482 pp. $45. Foreword by Margot Pritzker. Introduction by
Arthur Green.
Is Judaism a mystical religion? The Zohar, the apex of Jewish mys-
ticism, was dismissed by modern Jewish scholarship, represented by
Graetz, as nonsense, and rehabilitated by Israeli and European aca-
demic scholarship on Judaism, as substantive. Here the pendulum
swings back: the Zohar is at best impenetrable, at worst nonsense.
This translation proves that those who know the text best cannot
make it accessible either in translation or in explanation.
The Book of Radiance, the Zohar forms a sizable commentary
to the Pentateuch and the Five Scrolls, a commentary built around a
mythic theology that reads the Torah as a guide to Gods story, not
Israels, divine self-disclosure, in Arthur Greens phrase. Supported
by the Pritzker foundation, Daniel Matt sets forth a translation in
twelve volumes. The translation is accompanied by a commentary that
deals with words and phrases and claries details of the text.
The result is a sustained demonstration of the incomprehensibility
of the Zohar. Since that document has been represented as the glory
of the Qabbalah or Jewish mystical tradition, then what we have before
us calls into question whether the Zohar has any claim to intelligi-
bility. Bits and pieces gleam, but the document as a whole is incoherent,
much of it obscure gibberish. Nothing in the introduction, translation,
and commentary helps.
First, the text that is translated is fabricated and does not exist
outside of Matts own study: If I could have located a complete,
reliable manuscript . . . this would have provided a starting point.
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nook nryirvs 311
He ignores the standard printed text, which everybody owns, but
has composed what he calls a critical text, which is based on a
selection and evaluation of the manuscript readings. That means
his translation correlates only loosely with the available printing.
The translation, second, is idiosyncratic, as Matt says, literal yet
poetic. Sometimes the poetry overwhelms, as Matts own chosen
instance shows. Tishbys deceiving lights of uncleanness and Soncinos
certain bright but unclean essences here emerges as Flying, she
encounters those hooded, hunchbacked, dazzling demons of delement.
I marvel that the Aramaic, which says, literally, Flying, she encoun-
ters those qumrin tehirin of delement, can yield such poetry. Those
free-hand alliterations, with no counterpart in the Aramaic, must
make even William Sare envious.
Third, this is not a user-friendly translation. That is because Matts
commentary does not aord access to the document, only to words
and phrases and sentences and paragraphs within it. For all the
explanations of detailsa whole footnote devoted to explaining what
Tellin are, for instanceMatt does not lead the reader through the
document. There are no sign posts, no sub-heads, no introductions
to passages, no systematic exposition of the substance of matters.
There is no reference system that identies each sentence, paragraph,
chapter, such as we have for Scripture and, now, for Rabbinic lit-
erature. So there are no signals as to where we are at any point in
the text. Greens introduction is disorganized and incoherent.
Fourth, no audience can make sense of an unmediated text with
sentences such as this one, which begins the comment on Gen. 1:1:
In the beginning . . . At the head of potency of the King, He engraved
engravings in luster on high. A spark of impenetrable darkness ashed
within the concealed of the concealed, from the head of Innity
a cluster of vapor forming in formlessness, thrust in a ring . . . and
so on. How the commentary is supposed to clarify the cited text I
cannot say. For example on luster on high: Matt supplies, The
brilliance of the rst serah, Keter, represented in the Zohar as
coeternal with Ein Sof. Oh.
Jacob Neusner
B\nr Corrror
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312 nook nryirvs
Srvvotn Rossrr, Bible Dreams. The Spiritual Quest. How the Dreams in
the Bible Speak to Us Today. New York 2003: S.P.I. books. 366 pp.
Judaism is a public religion that encompasses personal spirituality.
Religion is public, a fact of society and culture, not private or per-
sonal. Spirituality refers to attitudes, experiences, and feelings that
are private and individual. Religiosity is a matter not of attitude or
personal conviction but of public activity; it is what people do together.
The dierence is, we can study what a group does but only acknowl-
edge the report concerning what an individual believes in private.
What a group arms can be examined in context, derived from the
interplay of contemporary opinion and the heritage of doctrine and
normative deed through the ages. What an individual professes can
only be noted. Of spirituality one may use the language, My
Judaism or My personal encounter with Christ, but of reli-
gion one speaks of what is shared and public: Judaism teaches . . .,
Christianity maintains . . ., Islam holds. . . .
The task of writing authentically on the spiritual life of Judaism
(Jewish spirituality) is not easily accomplished, because by spirituality
people mean many things, most of them subjective. But a number
of highly gifted scholars of Judaism have created a literature of Jewish
spirituality that is worthy of its task: to represent what is particular
to Judaism, public and shared by us all. The names of Harold
Kushner and Neil Gillman come to mind. Rabbi Kushner has trans-
formed a personal experience into an artful and compelling com-
panion to suering. Rabbi Gillman has made theological argument
into the medium for rigorous thinking about intangible attitudes and
emotions. Lawrence A. Homan in The Journey Home. Discovering the
Deep Spiritual Wisdom of the Jewish Tradition has written a classic of
remarkable sensibility, and anyone who perseveres in the profound
work Kaddish, by Leon Wieseltier, knows what it means to study
Torah as an act of religious engagement.
In the context of writing on spirituality in the tradition of Judaism,
Seymour Rossel now adds his name to that short list of authentic
voices capable of speaking to the individual in behalf of the public
and corporate religious world of the Torah. He writes for a broad
audience of Jews and Christians, but his is a perspective shaped by
Judaism. He writes with art and restraint, not relying on rhetoric to
replace religious reality: encounter, authentic emotion.
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His basic thesis is, In the Bible every dream of vision is a prophecy,
but every prophecy is not necessarily a dream. He argues that as
individuals, when we record a dream, we are performing an act of
creation . . . share our dreams with others, especially in the creativ-
ity we bring to interpreting our dreams and visions together. So he
meets head-on the challenge of subjectivity and insists that he engages
in a public act. Dreams are deliberately forced to serve our waking
selves. In interpreting Jacobs dream, the sages wanted to know how
it shapes the future of the people: the Bibles most famous dream
and the interpretations placed on it by the sages provide clues for how
the interpretation of dreams may ultimately shape destinies. He
expounds paths of interpretation, and then illustrates the journey.
Abraham and Jacob sought divine answers to moments of uncertainty
and distress by initiating the dream process in a ritual way . . . they
sent a question upward . . . received the inspiration and guidance they
were seeking. . . . If Jacobs staircase dream dealt with estrange-
ment, divorce, and the path to salvation, the story of Jacobs wrestling
match deals with maturity, self-image, and reintegration.
Naturally, Joseph provides the occasion for much discussion, but
in from scout to seer Rossel nds those who walked in the foot-
steps of Joseph. Having explored the dreams of Genesis, he turns
to two dreams from other biblical books. He concludes with two
chapters: the potential for healing and transformation, out of the
dream forest: the meaning of the spiritual quest. In these chapters
he focuses on the meaning for the present of the messages contained
in dreams: how we can do for ourselves what here he does for us.
This is comparable to Rabbi Gillmans essay, in his theological book,
on how the faithful of Judaism can do theology for themselvesa
tour de force.
What Rossel succeeds in accomplishing, therefore, is to make the
most intimate and private experience, the dream, into the raw mate-
rial of social culture. He has shown how to transform what is per-
sonal into what serves the public interest. This he has done through
the force of intellect and the power of rigorous thought. That is why
to the list of those who have met the challenge of writing books not
about Judaism but of Judaism is added the name of Seymour Rossel.
Jacob Neusner
B\nr Corrror
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314 nook nryirvs
Pr+rn Scn\rrrn, The History of the Jews in the Greco-Roman World. London
and New York: Routledge, 2003, 231 pp.
Peter Schaefer is Professor of Religion and of Jewish Studies at
Princeton University and Professor of Jewish Studies at the Free
University of Berlin. His brief sketch of the history of the Jews of
Palestine from Alexander the Great to the Arab conquest originally
appeared in German in 1983 and in English in 1995. It is now
revised and corrected. It covers ten chapters: Alexander the Great
and the Diadochi, Palestine under Ptolemaic rule (301-200 B.C.E.),
Palestine under Seleucid rule (200-135/63 B.C.E.), the Hasmonean
dynasty, Herod the Great, from Herod to the First Jewish War, the
rst Jewish war (66-74), between the wars, from 74-132 C.E., the
Bar Kokhba revolt (132-134), from the Bar Kokhba revolt to the
Arab conquest of Palestine. There is an extensive bibliography and
chronological table.
The narrative is wooden and clunky, with emphasis on political
history. There is a drastic disproportion in the narrative. Three entire
chapters are devoted to the period from 66-74, 74-132, and 132-
135, respectively, while a single chapter is devoted to the next half-
millennium, from the Bar Kokhba revolt to the Arab conquest, from
the 132 to ca. 650. To say that the treatment of that long period
is a mite supercial is to understate matters. The Rabbinic sources
that provide much of the information are read uncritically and gullibly,
so the account is not only supercial but unreliable. Schaefer col-
lects and arranges information, paraphrases a lot, interprets seldom,
and brings the story to life nevera mediocre book.
Schaefers book does not stand comparison with Lester L. Grabbe,
Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian [Vol. I: Persian and Greek Periods; Vol. II:
Roman Period] (Minneapolis, 1992) or his Judaic Religion in the Second
Temple Period. Belief and Practice from the Exile to Yavneh (London and
New York, 2000). Grabbe has produced a far more reliable and
comprehensive account of the history and religion of the times, down
to the end of the rst century, covered by Schaefers rst nine of
his ten chapters. On the religious and cultural life of the Jews, Donald
Harman Akenson, Surpassing Wonder. The Invention of the Bible and the
Talmuds (New York, San Diego, and London, 1999). is far more
lively and discerning. With such superior works available, it is dicult
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to recommend Schaefers potted history for any English-language
readership, academic or lay.
Jacob Neusner
B\nr Corrror
Doy Scnv\n+z, Faith at the Crossroads. A Theological Prole of Religious
Zionism, translated by Batya Stein, Leiden: Brill, 2002, xii + 250.
The academic canon of modern Jewish thought includes very few
Orthodox personalities. Scholars, until recently predominantly non-
Orthodox, apparently prefer those liberal thinkers whose struggle
with modernity has led them to abandon traditional Jewish beliefs
and practices, assuming that those Jews who have been loyal to pre-
modern Judaism have little to say that could not have been said one
way or another 500 years earlier in the Middle Ages. Certain excep-
tions were made for those who were considered able to assimilate
contemporary philosophical ideas into their defenses of tradition, pro-
viding at least a patina of modernity to their thought. Thus, Rabbi
Samson Raphael Hirsch, who was instrumental in the formulation
of nineteenth-century German Jewish Orthodoxy, which incorporated
elements of modernity (unlike its Eastern European counterpart), call-
ing for both Torah and derekh eretz (secular studies and pursuits), has
been the subject of serious scholarly interest.
Recently, as the ranks of Jewish studies academicians have been
augmented by modern Orthodox (and even, to a lesser degree, ultra-
orthodox) Jews, there has been a renewed interest in thinkers who
could serve as models for contemporary Orthodoxy. Rabbi Joseph
Dov Soloveitchik, German trained and living in America, is used as
an exemplar of conservative rationalism; Rabbi Abraham Isaac Ha-
Kohen Kook, trained in Eastern Europe and living in pre-state Israel,
provided a more traditional and mystical model for his followers.
The thought of Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz is a popular subject of
research and discussion, both among non-observant academics for
his unconventional views regarding Israeli politics, and among the
nationalist Orthodox Zionists who vigorously opposed him. There has
also been recent interest in Hasidic thinkers, the nineteenth-century
founders of the Musar movement, and some Orthodox Holocaust
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316 nook nryirvs
theologians. Otherwise, very few modern Orthodox thinkers have
been studied seriously in the academy.
Prof. Dov Schwartz of Bar-Ilan University, an institution that is
one of religious
1
Zionisms major accomplishments and a preemi-
nent symbol of accommodation with modernity, has devoted much
of his prolic research to broadening the canon of medieval Jewish
philosophy to include ignored thinkers and their philosophical cir-
cles. In contrast to most historiographers of Jewish thought in the
Middle Ages, who are rmly in the great thinkers mode of dis-
course, Schwartz has brought to light ignored authors and issues in
order to re-evaluate the role of philosophy in Jewish life among the
larger populace and not only among the few outstanding thinkers.
He has also discussed that period from new perspectives, such as
attitudes towards messianism and astrology. Displaying a virtuosity
that is becoming rare in an era of increasing specialization, Prof.
Schwartz has also produced a number of works devoted to modern
and contemporary Jewish thought.
In the present book, Schwartz has attempted to expand the canon
of modern Jewish thought, oering the philosophy or theology of
those Orthodox thinkers who are associated with religious Zionism,
that part of modern Jewry that has attempted to make a synthesis
of Jewish nationalism (whose advocates have tended to reject reli-
gion) and traditional Judaism (whose ultraorthodox/haredi practition-
ers have tended to reject nationalism). Although some of the religious
Zionist thinkers are well known, such as Rabbis Soloveitchik and
Kook (and his son Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook), others are less well-
known or almost completely unknown outside religious Zionist circles.
Thus, Schwartz employs the writings of Samuel Alexandrov, Moshe
Amiel, Isaiah Aviad (Wolfsberg), Isaiah Bernstein, David Cohen (the
Nazir), Reuven Egushewitz, Simon Federbusch, Stem-Tov Gefen,
Jacob Harlap, Hayyim Hirschensohn, Zeev Jawitz, Isaac Nissenbaum,
Meir Or, Isaac Jacob Reines, Shlomo Zalman Shragai, Moshe Unna,
Abraham Yekutieli and others
2
as sources for his discussion. I believe
1
Throughout the book, the term religious means Orthodox, following com-
mon Israeli usage. Views of Conservative or Reform Zionists are not considered.
The term religious-Zionist is invariably hyphenated, except, surprisingly, in the
books title. This mirrors exactly the original Hebrew original.
2
Most of these men were rabbis, although the English translation, unlike the
Hebrew original, rarely accords them their rabbinical titles (and rarely their rst
names). Since one is used to seeing these names prefaced by the word rav or
rabbi, the use of last names only in the absence of titles is somewhat jarring. Some
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nook nryirvs 317
the only Sephardi in the book is Chief Rabbi Ben-Zion Meir Hai
Uziel (with the exception of the harbinger of Zionism, Rabbi Judah
Alkalai, who falls outside the chronology of the book and also was
European in origin); Schwartz makes no comment on the Ashkenazic-
centric nature of religious Zionist thought. Despite his remark that
the parameters of the study include contemporary thinkers (p. xi),
almost all those cited are deceased. It should be noted as well that
since most of the sources are written in Hebrew, and those who
have researched religious Zionism have generally written in the same
language, the publication of an English language book on the sub-
ject, even though it is a translation from the original Hebrew, is a
welcome development.
3
It is perhaps unfair to the author to comment at the outset that
the academic world may have been more than justied in ignoring
most of the thinkers who populate his book, given its interest in pro-
fundity and originality, traits notably lacking in many of the reli-
gious Zionist personalities. Prof. Schwartz, whose training in medieval
philosophy stands him in good stead when analyzing the thought of
the moderns, is not unaware that the subjects of his study were not
always capable of providing consistent and convincing arguments for
their positions. It is most unlikely that their works will be popular
hundreds of years from now, as is the case with the best of the medie-
vals. At the end of his book, Schwartz turns to the critiques of reli-
gious Zionism provided by both Rabbi Soloveitchik and Prof. Leibowitz,
and then concludes with his own dissatisfaction with the way in
which religious Zionism has developed.
4
For instance, Schwartz writes:
of the thinkers discussed were not rabbis (in the original, some have titles such as
Dr. or Prof.), so the distinction between those who were and those who were not
rabbis probably would have been useful. There is also no consistency in the use of
English equivalents of Hebrew names; thus, Abraham Itzhak Kook (rather than
Abraham Isaac or Avraham Y/Itzhak) and Zvi Judah Kook (rather than Zvi
Yehudah); Moses and not Moshe Unna, but Moshe and not Moses Avigdor Amiel.
3
The translation is generally readable and accurate, even if somewhat stilted,
with an occasional usage error (paragon rather than parallel on p. 211, l. 1).
I have not systematically compared the original with the translation, but I did notice
that the next to the last paragraph of the original Hebrew has been omitted for
some reason. A feature missing in both versions, which would have been useful to
the reader unfamiliar with the thinkers who are cited, is a glossary of short biogra-
phies. One might also question the publication of a work on twentieth-century
Jewish thought in a series entitled The Brill Reference Library of Ancient Judaism.
4
The synthetic descriptions of religious Zionist thought that occur in the rst
ve chapters give no indication that Schwartz intends to provide a scathing cri-
tique of these views, both in Chapter Six and in his Postscript.
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318 nook nryirvs
Indeed, religious-Zionism is apparently fettered by a paradox: while
aspiring to merge with modernity, its own theology is unwilling to
acknowledge genuine modernity, namely, to recognize an existence
without essential room for God and theology. It raises the banner of
a dialogue with the secular world, but undermines any option of such
a dialogue within its own theological world. No other alternative is
apparently available as long as theological fullness is the foremost essen-
tial characteristic of religious-Zionism, as indicated by the analyses in
this book (pp. 226-227).
The failure of religious Zionist thinkers to oer consistent and non-
paradoxical intellectual positions does not mean, of course, that they
should not be the subject of research, especially by someone who is
not embarrassed to point out the shortcomings of his subjects. It
does mean, however, that the reader must cope with material which
is, at best, unconvincing, and, at worst, oensive.
A good example of this aspect of religious Zionist thought is its
ethnocentrism. It is true that traditional Jewish theology, drawing its
inspiration from the biblical doctrine of chosenness as developed in
the Middle Ages by Judah Halevi and the Zohar, tends to make an
essential distinction between Jews and other people. It might even
be said that this trend, although challenged by Maimonides, was
dominant in the pre-modern Jewish religious consciousness and
remains strong in the haredi communities, which have attempted to
repress any inroads of modernity, both in practice and in thought.
Religious Zionists, however, claim to be open to modern intellectual
currents, and, as Schwartz shows, they often can speak the language
of Spinoza or Kant. It is, thus, jarring, although not surprising, to
read statements from Rabbi Kook and his circle concerning the
uniqueness of the Jewish people:
Judaism is the inner core of humanity and of reality in its broad
sense . . . The people of Israel are the yardstick of the entire world
if they rise, the world rises with them, and when they fall, the whole
world falls with them . . . Israel is to the world as the soul is to the
body . . . Israelthe heart of all the nations (p. 163).
Rabbi Zvi Yehudah Kook refers to Jewish nationalism as surely
always cosmopolitan, always encompassing humanity and the entire
universe. It always entails the realization of universal, eternal,
innite and divine ideals (p. 164). Rabbi Harlap refers to the faith
of the gentiles: At best they can be rescued from falsehood; hence,
their faith is entirely negative, lacking any positive content (p. 31).
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nook nryirvs 319
The nations of the world are demonic forces intent on destroying
the Jewish people who are an expression of divine totality (p. 68,
n. 62). Abraham Yekutieli maintains that the Jewish people possess
an advantage over other people since they used intuition rather than
deductive reasoning and understanding and, therefore, were able to
impart prophecy and absolute morality to the world (p. 33, n. 89).
These expressions are part of a world view that sees Zionism in
a messianic light (the Hebrew word meshihiut, messianism, written in
Hebrew letters, adorns the cover of the book, even if it is not part
of the title), with the State of Israels providing not solely a home
for Jews but eventually universal salvation. Thus, it is both the divine
will, and in the worlds interest, to support wholeheartedly Jewish
claims to the entire Land of Israel. Non-Jews in the Land are enti-
tled to individual property at best, but not to any claim of com-
munal or political rights. Any Jewish activity to promote the religious
Zionist goals is inherently moral; any alternate activity is inherently
immoral. For the religious Zionists, theology and politics (and halakhah,
Jewish law) are intimately related, although Schwartz concentrates
almost exclusively on the theological issues.
In order to demonstrate that religious Zionist thinkers have a com-
prehensive theological world view, Schwartz looks at their writings
from a number of dierent perspectives. First, he provides analyses
of religious Zionist approaches to the denition of faith (Chapter
One), an issue of importance given the non-religious worlds rejec-
tion of doctrines which are not based on rational epistemology. While
most religious Zionist thinkers opined that faith is a communal activ-
ity, one which distinguishes Jews from non-Jews (the Kook school),
others thought that it is purely personal matter (Rabbi Hirschensohn)
or a product of ones existential being (Rabbi Soloveitchik).
Next, Prof. Schwartz moves to the notion of divine immanence
(Chapter Two). He argues that most of the religious Zionist thinkers
understand God as being part of the world, directing human activities
(or at least Jewish ones) from inside the soul. In contrast, haredim tend
to see a transcendent God as controlling the world totally from out-
side of it. It would seem that for all practical purposes, both the ultra-
orthodox and the nationalist Orthodox would claim God as the author
of history, even if they disagreed as to the signicance of that history
(e.g., what is the status of the State of Israel). Neither group is willing
to dispense with individual providence despite counter-evidence, such
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320 nook nryirvs
as the Holocaust, a subject that surprisingly merits no discussion in
the whole book. Gods justice and wisdom are apparently consid-
ered defensible using the tools provided by traditional theodicy.
Prof. Schwartz then proceeds (Chapter Three) to discuss religious
Zionist reactions to the philosophy of Benedict Spinoza, the excom-
municated seventeenth-century Jew who inspired many secular Zionists
for his rejection of supernatural religion and his raising the possi-
bility of a reconstituted Jewish state. The latter statement occurs in
Spinozas Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, a work noted for its seminal
criticism of the unity and divinity of the biblical corpus and for its
call for religious freedom. This aspect of Spinozas thought was
rejected by the Orthodox Zionist thinkers who were attracted more
by Spinozas philosophy in his Ethics. Ironically, a number of these
thinkers adopted some of Spinozas ideas, such as the immanence
of God, despite his being declared a heretic. Of course, Spinoza is
also the subject of criticism for his denial of a personal God. Never-
theless, the religious Zionist use of Maimonides to provide argumenta-
tion, as well as a perceived need to answer Spinoza three hundred
years after his death, border on the anachronistic. One might also
ask whether Spinoza plays such a central role in religious Zionism
as is implied in this chapter. Nevertheless, the seriousness with which
some Orthodox thinkers treated Spinoza is in sharp contrast to the
total haredi disregard of him.
The fourth chapter of the book outlines what the author calls
religious-Zionist theology. Schwartz demonstrates that one of the
major constituents of this theology is the appropriation of national-
ism as a legitimate expression of Jewish belief. This turn to nation-
alism is what distinguished the early religious Zionist thinkers from
their more conservative colleagues, and it caused their ostracism from
the traditional rabbinic world.
The specics of religious Zionist theology and ideology are dis-
cussed in Chapter Five. The perceived dependence of the world
upon the Jewish people is a natural result of the blend of national-
ism and theology. Furthermore, the religious Zionist thinkers looked
forward to the restoration of traditional Jewish forms of serving God
(the translation of avodah as worship does not quite capture the
semantic range of the Hebrew term), such as by sacrices and by
commandments tied to the land of Israel. As a further part of their
ideology, the religious Zionist refuse to recognize Jewish secularism
as having any value independent of its utility in achieving the nation-
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nook nryirvs 321
alistic goals of Judaism. In essence, there is no such thing as Jewish
secularism: The Jew always seeks the Creator of the universe (Rabbi
Soloveitchik, p. 181); Jews can never become a secular people
(Rabbi Amiel, p. 185). Schwartz argues that these beliefs mark a
conscious turning point in Jewish thought.
One of the contributions of Schwartzs book is to show that the
exclusivist tendency of most religious Zionist thinkers is not the only
option before the contemporary Orthodox Jew who supports the
State of Israel and the Zionist enterprise. Two early religious Zionist
leaders, Rabbis Reines and Hirschensohn, are shown to have held
moderate views, with Reines specically divorcing Zionism from
Jewish messianism, at least in his apologetical writings. These opin-
ions are no longer fashionable among most religious Zionists, who
are rmly in the camp of Rabbi Kook and his followers. As noted,
Rabbi Soloveitchik and Prof. Leibowitz (Chapter Six) also held dis-
senting views, so much so that it is dicult to regard them as authen-
tic religious Zionists. The Land of Israel is not at the center of Rabbi
Soloveitchiks philosophy, and he refrained from moving to Israel.
Prof. Leibowitz essentially left the religious Zionist movement and
served as its bte noire for many years. Their inclusion in this work
apparently reects Schwartzs desire to provide alternatives to the
majority religious Zionist views and is not because they are typical
of this movement.
In his exposition and then critique of religious Zionist thought,
Schwartz ignores the obvious question: what is it about religious
Zionism, or the religious Zionist community, that allowed the nation-
alist Kookian view to become dominant, while the moderate stances
have been shunted aside? Why do second- and third-rate thinkers
achieve such resonance in their communities and have such an impact
on public policy in Israel (the settlement movement, which is pow-
ered by the religious Zionist communities, has enjoyed signicant
nancial and political advantages from both major Israeli political
blocs)? It seems to this reader that one factor behind their success
might very well be the state religious educational system, which dis-
courages individual thinking and encourages uniformity of belief and
practice. Although a branch of the Israeli public school system,
administered by the Ministry of Education, its educators often oer
only one theological and political vision to their pupils. Furthermore,
students are taught that the authority of the rabbis of the movement
is to be accepted without their ideas being subjected to analysis or
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322 nook nryirvs
criticism. In this way, religious Zionism has incorporated the ethos
of the haredim (despite major dierences in theology and ideology; cf.
pp. 143-148), and it is, therefore, not surprising that a combination
of the two world views (what is known is Israel as hardaliut) is now
becoming popular. Furthermore, as students of medieval philosophy
well know, simplistic, literal approaches are often more compatible
with the needs of the masses than the elitist, sophisticated philoso-
phy of a thinker like Maimonides. The vicissitudes of Jewish history,
including persecution culminating in the Holocaust, certainly make
ethnocentric sentiments more appealing.
How can a dissenting religious Zionist challenge the predominant
trend? It would appear that one of Prof. Schwartzs goals in this
book is to provide tools to those who are unhappy with messianic
nationalism, both by analyzing the views of its advocates and by sug-
gesting ways to an alternative approach. Schwartz asks:
[I]s it indeed possible to reconstruct religious-Zionis[m] from the col-
lapse of its most elementary foundations, namely, forsake the entrenched
theological underpinnings on which it is built? Alternatively, if we pre-
serve the theological foundation, we preclude a genuine dialogue with
the secular world. Furthermore: it appears that, ultimately, the theo-
logical foundation led to a takeover by the extremist messianic trends
of religious-Zionism, because there are no yardsticks or limits to theo-
logy. Under the guise of hollow slogans la love of Israel and the
nations unity, words that turned out to be empty and meaningless,
an extreme version of messianism has ourished, at times with omi-
nous consequences (p. 228).
Schwartzs solution is to return to the moderate, non-messianism of
Rabbi Isaac Jacob Reines, founder of religious Zionism. Rather than
dening the land of Israel as a principle of faith, Reines was will-
ing to support the Uganda proposal (to place a temporary Jewish
refuge in the heart of Africa, far from the Holy Land). Religious
Zionist yeshivot should return to concentrating on halakhah rather than
on ideology. The question of the borders of the State of Israel should
be a political, rather than a religious, issue.
5
Whether Schwartz will
be successful in his endeavor remains to be seen, as does the impact
on religious Zionism of any eventual territorial compromise involv-
5
The missing penultimate paragraph answers those who say that halakhah and
ideology are intrinsically connected, calling upon the rabbis to demonstrate respon-
sibility, thereby acknowledging, with a play on the traditional sentiment, that it is
hard to be a religious Zionist.
RRJ 7.1_ BR_295-327 new 9/14/04 3:02 PM Page 322
nook nryirvs 323
ing uprooting of settlements. What is clear is that Prof. Schwartz,
all of whose many books have been written in Hebrew and who is
relatively unknown outside Israel, deserves more translations of his
work which will give him a wider audience for both his academic
discoveries and his personal views.
Daniel J. Lasker
Brx-Gtniox Uxiyrnsi+v or +nr Nrory
Grz\ Vrnvrs, The Authentic Gospel of Jesus. Penguin Books. 464 pp.
ISBN: 071399567.
As a secular historian fascinated by the historical-Jesus industry, for
the last decade or more I have been boring my friends with the pre-
diction that in the next scholarly generation the big steps in the eld
will be made by Jewish scholars.
1
This is, rst, because in the usual
case they have a much bigger tool chest than do their non-Jewish
colleagues: familiarity with the great Rabbinic corpus and its asso-
ciated languages, and also because of a mindset that usually perceives
Judaism in the late Second Temple era as a nuanced, complicated
matter with an integrity of its own and not just as a preparation for
some new religion. Secondly, the prediction has been based on the
blindingly virtuoso work of Geza Vermes.
In 1973, Vermes published Jesus the Jew. A Historians Reading of the
Gospels. In this and in three subsequent volumes (1983, 1993, and
2000) he forced the search for the historical-Jesus to accept one sim-
ple fact. Jesus was not a Christian. Jesus was a Jew. That phrase,
Jesus was a Jew, is found near the beginning of almost every recent
study of the this-world life of Yeshua of Nazareth, although not
always with the same meaning that Vermes intended. (Christian writ-
ers tend to produce a Jewish Jesus who has characteristics remark-
ably similar to those of the early church fathers.) For Vermes, the
real Jesus (one of his favorite terms) was neither the deity created
by later Christians nor the demonic gure invented by the later rab-
bis. He was a non-mystical Hasidic prophet. He had a ministry of
1
Originally printed in the Globe and Mail, Toronto, Canada, December 20,
2003; reprinted with permission.
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324 nook nryirvs
one year or less (in 29-30 C.E.). He intended his preachings only
for a Jewish audience. He had no belief in his own messiahship, or
in being the son of God. He expected the kingdom of Yaweh to
come sometime soon, and he preached religious attachment to the
Mosaic Torah and the need for faith-trust in the Almighty to has-
ten that glorious day.
Geza Vermes was the perfect person to develop and popularize
such views. Born in Hungary in 1924 to non-observant Jewish par-
ents, he and his parents were baptized as Roman Catholics when
Vermes was seven years old. He took the Catholic faith seriously
and at age twenty enrolled in a seminary in Budapest. (This, not
long after his parents were killed in Poland by the Nazis, their Cath-
olicism not being sucient to exempt them from their Jewish past.)
Vermes tried unsuccessfully to be accepted into the elite Dominican
Order, but in 1946 garnered a place with the Fathers of Sion. This
order, founded to convert Jews to Christianity, now was mostly con-
centrating on studying the Jewish Bible from a Christian perspec-
tive. Through the Order, Vermes was ordained a priest and also
received a doctoral degree; and this just at the time the Dead Sea
Scrolls were becoming available. Vermes, though not part of the
central research team that controlled the Dead Sea Scrolls, had access
to a good deal of the material, both as a doctoral student and later
as editor of the prestigious Cahiers Sioniens. He left the Catholic priest-
hood in the mid-1950s and became, rst, a lecturer at Newcastle
University and then, in 1965, Reader in Jewish Studies at Oxford.
About ve years later, he publicly announced that he was convert-
ing to membership in a Liberal Jewish congregation in England.
Subsequently, he became Oxford Universitys rst professor of Jewish
Studies. Vermes did several editions of the English translation of the
Dead Sea Scrolls, and in the early 1990s was a power broker in the
opening of the scrolls to a wider range of scholars. Since his retire-
ment in 1991, he has remained immensely powerful: an advisor to
the Israeli Antiquities Authority, the continued head of the Qumran
Research Centre at Oxford, and a full-time member of the English
intellectual establishment.
That background is necessary if one is to understand why Vermes
most recent book, presented under the supremely condent title, The
Authentic Gospel of Jesus, has to be viewed with plangent sadness. This
volume was not Vermess idea, but was suggested to him by his
Penguin editor. The project bears all the marks of a cynical pub-
RRJ 7.1_ BR_295-327 new 9/14/04 3:02 PM Page 324
nook nryirvs 325
lisher goading a lion in winter to roar one more time for the pub-
lishers prot. Most of the book, nearly 370 pages, consists of Vermess
comments on each of the 297 sayings in the Synoptic Gospels that
he believes are possibly those of Yeshua of Nazareth and his indi-
cation of which of these are authentic and which are later creations
by overly-enthusiastic believers. Each saying is presented on its own,
and one soon realizes that one is reading a big card le. Many of
his comments on individual sayings are worth attention, bring shrewd
and free of jargon. A peculiar aspect of this authoritative commen-
tary (it is, after all, meant to yield The authentic gospel) is that
there is neither a bibliography nor more than occasional citations of
other scholars. This is unfortunate, as many of Vermess ideas are
not his own, and even in old age the civilities of scholarly debt should
be honored. The absence of a bibliography masks the fact that
Vermes has read only tfully in the relevant literature since his rst
book appeared in 1973. A good deal has happened since then, both
in the discovery of primary material and some very challenging new
studies of the historical Jesus. Nevertheless, one hears one of his
sycophants exclaim, No academic apparatus or learned inghting
with other scholars clutter these wonderful pages. Too true.
The deeper sadness this volume evokes, stems, however, from two
observations Vermes makes in the thin pages at the front and back
of the book where he breaks away from his index cards and in a
reedy voice provides two admissions that make his long-term Jesus
project easy pickings for his opponents, especially for those who do
not like the idea of Jesus as a product of Second Temple Judaism.
The rst of these is: Reecting on the matter, it struck me that
I had never tried my hand at a critical interpretation of the Gospel
text itself. Perhaps this is how I should have started the Jesus pro-
ject years ago, I said to myself, but maybe it is better late than
never. The candor here is admirable, but it is rather like a NASA
chief who, having sent four astronauts into space, suggests maybe
we had better systematically chart some landing spaces and, oh, yes,
look into those gravitational laws, or whatever theyre called. Thus,
when one goes back over Vermess earlier Jesus work, one nds that
not only is it not based on any systematic textual taxonomy, but
that he has refused in all his work to examine more than casually
the basic questions of how the New Testament texts t together.
(Too transAtlantic, he says of methodological discussions in his
best adopted-English tone.)
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326 nook nryirvs
In this fth volume of the Jesus project, Vermes reveals what has
underlain the whole Jesus-the-Jew eort. Vermes accepted (without
stating this as the case) a version of the Mark-hypothesis for the ori-
gin of the Synoptic Gospels that was prevalent in the late 1960s.
Not silly stu, but nothing that should be taken as immutable. To
this he added bits of the Gospel of Thomas, parts of Q , and then
he started writing, placing his impressionistic readings in the context
of the Tanakh, the DSS, and the Rabbinic corpus, all in a brilliantly
allusive manner that deected challenge. The present book makes it
clear that what he had done was to drastically truncate the New
Testament texts. He turfed out the Gospel of John. Granted, that
Gospel is markedly anti-Jewish, but it makes some specic historical
attributions to Jesus that require examination, not merely amputa-
tion. Then Vermes got rid of Paul, except for a few fugitive refer-
ences. Again, one can grant that Paul has made a lot of modern
Jewish readers uncomfortable with his version of Torah, but his let-
ters contain historical quotations that he attributes to the Lord and
these are the earliest documents in the Christian canon that contain
any of Yeshua of Nazareths sayings. Tossing away the earliest doc-
umentary witness to the Jesus-faith is a bit cavalier. So, in this fth
volume of the Jesus Project, the one which is to give us The author-
itative version of Jesus words, we have almost entirely material from
the Synoptic Gospels, and the rest of the Christian canon is binned.
Two hundred and ninety-seven possibly-authentic sayings from which
Vermes can pick and choose to nd Jesus-the-Jew.
Vermes denes himself as an historian and an admirably old-fash-
ioned one in many ways. No theological by-passes for him. He argues
that, although not written chiey as historical documents, the three
Synoptic Gospels contain materials that reect the kernel of histor-
ical reality. This reality can be retrieved, he believes, and the real
Jesus behind Christian theology exhibited. And, in fact, he believes
he is doing just that.
Great. But now we hit the other admission of a scholar-in-old-
age, one that helps to explain why Vermes-the-ruthless (he has thrown
away most of the Christian scriptures as below his probative standards)
turns into Vermes-the-credulous: he nds that 145 of the 297 sayings
of Jesus recorded in the Synoptic Gospels are wholly or partly gen-
uine. This estimate of authentic sayings is denitely higher [his empha-
sis] than most contemporary New Testament critics would allow.
How did he get so many? The answer is that within the Synoptic
RRJ 7.1_ BR_295-327 new 9/14/04 3:02 PM Page 326
nook nryirvs 327
sayings he abandons the basic rule of the history profession to which
he claims allegiance: namely, that the grounds of presumption in
any proof are negative. That is, something is presumed not to have
happened unless there is a preponderance of armative evidence
that it occurred. Or, as Jacob Neusner so eectively chanted, What
we cannot show, we cannot know. In contrast, Vermes, in a tiny
Afterword, suggests that the fundamental principle of New Testament
criticism, namely that the burden of proof rests on the claim of
authenticity, is to a large extent misleading. Now, in a two-tier sys-
temauthentically-by-Jesus or not-authenticthat is the only possi-
ble way to proceed, despite Vermes objections. Who would want
included in a version of Jesus Authentic Gospel items that the asses-
sors found to be improbable? Vermes is right in saying that not-
probable does not mean impossible. However, when one goes through
his The Authentic Gospel of Jesus one nds that he frequently side-
shues. He takes items that were possibly said by Jesus, but prob-
ably were not, and labels them as authentic (meaning probably by
Jesus, a major shift in meaning). This slight of hand and heart is
how he obtains so many more authentic sayings than do other schol-
ars of the historical Jesus.
Ironically, Vermess present volume is one of the most important
to appear in historical-Jesus studies in the last two decades because
it takes us backstage on one of the major biblical projects of the last
century and lets us see the wires, mirrors, and jerry-rigged trusses
that the audience in the front of the house has previously been
denied. We come to appreciate the terric pressures that Vermes
has had to bear and to recognize how it is that Vermes, as a Jew,
threw out most of the Christian scriptures, including the Fourth
Gospel: and then, how Vermes, as a former Christian, credulously
grabbed at so much of the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels, like a man
struggling towards an oasis in a mirage. If Geza Vermes as an his-
torian of Yeshua of Nazareth here reveals himself as having feet of
clay, we will still have to honor him as a hero for having tried to
absorb in its own person, and thus in his scholarship, the terrible,
soul-rendering torsion that a deep knowledge of ancient Judaism and
of Christianity inevitably produces.
Donald Harman Akenson
Uxiyrnsi+v or Liyrnroor \xr Qtrrxs Uxiyrnsi+v
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