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Dialogical Apologetics: Leo Baeck and the Task of Jewish Philosophy
by
Yaniv Feller
A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Department for the Study of Religion University of Toronto
ii
Dialogical Apologetics: Leo Baeck and the Task of Jewish
Philosophy
Yaniv Feller
Doctor of Philosophy
Department for the Study of Religion
University of Toronto
2016
Abstract
Leo Baeck (1873-1956) is widely regarded as a symbol of German Jewry. Though numerous institutions have been
named after him, Baeck’s writings are hardly read nowadays and he is not considered a source of inspiration for
Jewish philosophy or a thinker of relevance for contemporary discussions. Moving away from earlier hagiographical
accounts, this study argues for Baeck’s ongoing significance for both Jewish thought and the study of religion more
broadly. I contend that with Baeck we can think about Jewish philosophy not as a quest for authenticity, but as a
process of coming to terms with the challenge of the other and developing new questions for one’s own self-
understanding. I term this process dialogical apologetics and show that Baeck is part of this long and important
tradition in Jewish thought, which includes Josephus, Judah Halevi, and Nahmanides. Furthermore, Baeck’s
contribution to the study of religion lies in his writings on the concept of essence, a question central in his own time
that is too often neglected in contemporary scholarly discussions. Baeck does not simply privilege the essence of
Judaism over the essence of Christianity; instead, he changes the terms of the debate and rejects an understanding of
essence as an unchanging core in favor of a developmental concept. Finally, Baeck identified the spiritual crisis of
Protestantism early on in Weimar Republic, and vigorously rejected suggestions—very much alive today—to
remove the Old Testament from the Christian canon. In his theopolitics, Baeck developed a scholarly and
theological language to counter what he saw as the political dangers of Marcionite Christianity. Taken as a whole,
this study therefore contributes not only to a better understanding of Baeck’s thought, but also to a discussion about
the tasks of Jewish philosophy and the study of religion.
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Acknowledgments
The image of the scholar sitting isolated in the ivory tower is a myth. This is one conclusion
from working on this dissertation, which has benefited from the assistance and help of several
individuals and institutions. It is my pleasure to thank them.
It has been a true honour and privilege working with my dissertation committee, a group of
dedicated, thoughtful, and caring people. David Novak has been a genuine Doktorvater and
moreh, guiding my way while letting me walk my own path. His erudition in both rabbinic and
philosophical sources made me wonder if this is what studying under Leo Baeck, the subject of
this dissertation, felt like. Conversations with Robert Gibbs have always been exhilarating, very
often ending with a completely new perspective, and new questions. It is only several months
after each meeting that I realized the full consequences of the ideas that emerged. Willi
Goetschel was readily pointing out more possible interpretations and encouraged me to not to
shy away from the radical implications of the arguments. Joseph Mangina’s helpful advice,
especially regarding Christian theology, saved me from egregious mistakes more than once. I
also thank Michael Morgan and Alan Mittleman for their helpful comments on the final version.
Parts of this dissertation were written during a yearlong affiliation with the University of
California Los Angeles, where I have benefited greatly from conversations with David Myers.
They proved formative at an important moment in the process of writing. Dan Avnon (Hebrew
University of Jerusalem) has been a mentor and friend for many years now. I thank him for
numerous conversation and for introducing me to the thought of Martin Buber, and through it to
problems in German-Jewish thought more broadly.
For discussions of various aspects of the dissertation I thank Netanel Anor, Brigidda Bell, Ian
Brown, Joseph Bryant, Sol Goldberg, Rachel Gordan, Omri Greenberg, Pamela Klassen, Elad
Lapidot, Ryan Olfert, Martin Ritter, Adam Stern, Eli Stern, and Marc Volovici. Parts of this
dissertation have been presented in various academic venues. I have enjoyed the conversations at
the Franz Rosenzweig Society, the Association for Jewish Studies, the American Academy of
Religion, the University of Toronto, York University, the Free University of Berlin, and the
Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin.
iv
For their support of the dissertation, I thank the Ontario Trillium Scholarship and the Naim
Mahlab Ontario Graduate Scholarship. The Leo Baeck Scholarship of the German
Studienstiftung has offered not only financial support but also stimulating discussions. I thank
the former director of the Leo Baeck Institute in London Raphael Gross and its current director
Daniel Wildmann. Finally, the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of
Toronto has provided intellectual and financial resources which greatly contributed to my
intellectual development. My gratitude to its past and present directors, Jeffrey Kopstein and
Anna Shternshis, its graduate director Doris Bergen, and its previous undergraduate director Sol
Goldberg, who took keen interest in this project.
I am fortunate to have a loving and caring family. My parents, Maya and Zvi Feller, believed in
me and my work even if it was not always clear why I cannot make it to dinner or visit as often
as I would have liked. My siblings, Guy and Anat, my niece Noga, and my nephew Nadav bring
joy and happiness wherever they are.
My partner Mariam reminds me what is important in life. This work would not have been
completed, let alone written, without her. It is to her I dedicate it. Love you.
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Table of Contents
Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... ii
Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………….iii
Table of Contents ...........................................................................................................................v
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................1
The Symbol and the Thinker 1
Life Stations 6
2.1 From Lissa to Berlin (1873-1914) 6
2.2 First World War and the Weimar Republic (1914-1933) 9
2.3 Berlin under Nazi Rule (1933-1943) 11
2.4 Theresienstadt (1943-1945) 15
2.5 After the Holocaust (1945-1956) 19
The Structure of the Project 21
3.1 Scope 21
3.2 Synopsis 24
Chapter 1: Apologetic Thinking .................................................................................................26
Apologetics on Trial 26
Apologetic Thinking and Its Limits 28
The Blurring of the Border 34
3.1 “What Is Not Apologia?” 34
3.2 The Sword of Polemics and the Shield of Apologetics 38
3.3 Judging Oneself and Judging the Other 40
The Limits of Dialogue 43
Chapter 2: Exemplars of Dialogical Apologetics ......................................................................48
“You have read one, you have read enough”? 48
vi
Josephus Flavius: Historiography and Origins 50
Judah Halevi: The Election of Israel 54
Nahmanides: The Art of Disputation 60
The Tradition of Jewish Dialogical Apologetics 68
Chapter 3: Jesus and the Essence of Religion ...........................................................................69
Essence and the Contemporary Study of Religion 69
Adolf von Harnack 72
2.1 History of Dogma 72
2.2 The Essence of Christianity 74
2.2.1 The Method for Determining the Essence 74
2.2.2 What Is Christianity? 76
Baeck’s Replies 79
3.1 “Harnack’s Lectures on the Essence of Christianity” 79
3.2 The Essence of Judaism 84
3.2.1 Essence as Ethics 85
3.2.2 Method as Critique 90
3.2.2.1 Essence and the History of Religions 90
3.2.2.2 The Prophets between Ethic and Method 93
3.2.2.3 “Fragments of a Great Confession” 96
Essences in Conversation: Troeltsch and Loisy 99
4.1 Alfred Loisy 99
4.2 Ernst Troeltsch 103
Baeck’s Subsequent Methodological Reflections 107
The Open-Ended Wesen 109
Chapter 4: Paul and Gnosticism ...............................................................................................112
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Old Wine in a New Skin 112
Harnack’s Marcion 114
2.1 Marcion and Gnosticism 114
2.2 Marcion and the Christian Canon 117
2.3 The Contemporary Relevance of Marcion 120
Romanticism as Marcionism 123
3.1 The Romantic 123
3.2 Paul and the Birth of Romantic Christianity 126
3.3 Romanticism as Marcionism and Gnosticism 128
The Dangers of Pauline-Marcionite Christianity 130
4.1 Christian Erlebnis 130
4.2 Erlebnis as Election 136
The Answers to Marcionite Religion 137
5.1 Judaism: Mystery and Commandment Combined 137
5.2 Re-Judaizing the Canon as an Answer to the Gnostic Challenge 144
The Realization of Marcionite Religion 146
Reclaiming Saul of Tarsus 149
Epilogue ......................................................................................................................................152
Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................158
1
Introduction
The Symbol and the Thinker
The name Leo Baeck still commands respect and is often spoken about with veneration
among contemporary Jews. If named institutions are any measure of popularity, then Leo
Baeck is at the very mainstream of Jewish life. The Leo Baeck Institute, with branches in
New York, London, Jerusalem, and more recently connection to Berlin, serves as the main
archive and research facility on German Jewry. The Leo Baeck summer school and
fellowship support young scholars working in those fields. The Leo Baeck prize is awarded
by the Central Council of Jews in Germany, which sits at the Leo Baeck House in Berlin. In
Haifa and Toronto, Jewish day schools are named after him; in Los Angeles, the Leo Baeck
Temple and in Melbourne the Leo Baeck Center for Progressive Judaism bear his name.
Leo Baeck is a towering figure in the history of German Jewry. A rabbi who holds a
doctorate from the University of Berlin, a Liberal but early supporter of Zionism, and most
importantly, the leader of the German-Jewish community in its most difficult time. Baeck had
the chance to flee Nazi Germany but he chose to remain with his people and was deported to
Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he survived the Shoah. One United States army
officer unofficially called him “the pope of the German Jews.” For others, he was a “living
saint,” on the same level as the Talmudic sage and martyr Rabbi Akiva. Baeck is also
regarded as the “teacher of Theresienstadt” who taught Plato, Maimonides and Kant at the
concentration camp, often under personal risk.1
Along with respect and admiration, there have also been voices highly critical of
Baeck and his role as the official representative of Jews in Germany in 1933 and onwards,
when the organization he was heading was increasingly under the watchful eye of the
German State Secret Police [Gestapo]. Could Baeck have chosen not to cooperate? Could he
have stalled the deportations? Baeck’s critics recognized his importance, but they used it to
stress his fault and blame him for helping the deportations and remaining silent although he
1 Leonard Baker, Days of Sorrow and Pain: Leo Baeck and the Berlin Jews (New York: Macmillan, 1978), 1;
Albert Friedlander, Leo Baeck: Teacher of Theresienstadt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973); Joshua
Liebman, “A Living Saint” 1948, AR 25273 028, Leo Baeck Institute.
2
knew where the trains were heading. Hannah Arendt went so far as to infamously term him
the “Jewish Führer.”2
Towering figures cast long shadows. Questions about Baeck’s biography and actions,
are the starting point for his admirers and critics alike. Shortly after his death, Walter
Kaufmann noted that “he needs no eulogy. He only needs to be read”.3 Kaufmann’s call was
not heeded. Baeck’s fame as a leader, perhaps due to this fame, is unmatched by scholarly
work on his philosophy and he is still not widely read or regularly taught as part of the canon
of Jewish thought. Yet I believe Kaufmann’s assessment is accurate; Baeck was first and
foremost a Jewish intellectual, a rabbi and theologian who engaged with the burning
philosophical and theological questions of his day. It is in this way that he should be treated:
not as a symbol but as a thinker.
This is not to say that there has not been any research on Leo Baeck’s thought.
Already during his lifetime Baeck received notice by scholars. In 1909, his work had gotten
attention and was criticized by the Christian theologian Ferdinand Kattenbusch, who rejected
Baeck’s claim about Christianity’s need to return to Judaism.4 The second edition of Baeck’s
The Essence of Judaism raised a lot of interest among Jewish scholars, evident for example in
Franz Rosenzweig’s review of the of the work, titled “Apologetic Thinking,” and the
discussions of Baeck’s claim that Judaism knows no dogmas in the Monatsschrift für
Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums.5 Shortly after Baeck’s death, a number of
2 It is noteworthy that Arendt, while leaving her critique of Baeck intact, deleted this expression from
subsequent editions, see Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York:
Penguin, 2006), 124; what he saw as the unfair treatment of Baeck was part of Scholem’s harsh indictment of
Arendt, see Gershom Scholem, “Letter to Hannah Arendt,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays,
ed. Werner Dannhauser, (Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2012), 302–3: “or the sentence about Leo Baeck ‘who in the
eyes of both Jews and Gentiles was the “Jewish Führer”…’ The use of the Nazi term in this context is
sufficiently revealing. You do not speak, say, of the ‘Jewish leader,’ which would have been free of the German
word’s horrific connotation—you say precisely the thing that is most false and most insulting. For nobody of
whom I have heard or read was Leo Baeck—whom we both knew—ever a ‘Führer’ in the sense which you here
insinuate to the reader.” 3 Walter Kaufmann’s introduction to Leo Baeck, Judaism and Christianity, trans. Walter Kaufmann
(Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1960), 19. 4 Leo Baeck, “Die Umkehr zum Judentum (1909),” in Werke 6: Briefe, Reden, Aufsätze, ed. Michael Meyer
(Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 63–69; on this encounter, see Christian Wiese, Challenging
Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Theology in Wilhelmine Germany (Boston: Brill, 2005),
307–14. 5 Franz Rosenzweig, “Apologetic Thinking,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, trans. Paul W. Franks
and Michael L. Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000); Isidor Scheftelowitz, “Ist das überlieferte Judentum eine
Religion ohne Dogmen?,” Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 70, no. 2 (1926): 65–
75; Felix Goldmann, “Die dogmatischen Grundlagen der jüdischen Religion,” Monatschrift für Geschichte und
3
important articles and lectures on his thought were published. Hermann Levin Goldschmidt
offered in 1959 a long review essay which dealt with the recently republished Aus drei
Jahrtausenden [Out of Three Millennia], the posthumously published Dieses Volk [This
People], and Baeck’s lectures on Jewish history from Moses Mendelssohn to Franz
Rosenzweig. It remains one of the few articles that explicitly deal with Baeck’s later
thought.6 Hans Liebeschütz contributed to the understanding of Baeck in the German
intellectual context and Alexander Altmann showed Baeck’s relation to Jewish theology and
to the Jewish mystical tradition.7 Uriel Tal’s work on religion and politics during the
Wilhelmine period places Baeck and the essence debate in a much broader context. In recent
years, Tal’s project has found continuation in the work of Christian Wiese, who reads the
Wissenschaft des Judentums as an answer to Protestant theology in postcolonial terms.8
Another important strand of research focuses on Baeck’s relation to Christianity, with works
by Mayer and Sandmel examining Baeck’s relevance for interfaith dialogue.9 Walter
Homolka has recently published several works that deal with Baeck’s thought. His most
noteworthy contribution remains the link he finds between Baeck’s thought and that of
Luther.10 Especially noteworthy in the literature on Baeck is Albert Friedlander’s lifework of
Wissenschaft des Judentums 70, no. 6 (1926): 440–57; Julius Guttmann, “Die Normierung des Glaubensinhalts
im Judentum,” Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 71, no. 5 (1927): 241–55. 6 Hermann Levin. Goldschmidt, “Leo Baeck - Beispiel und Botschaft,” in Aus den Quellen des Judentums:
Aufsätze zur Philosophie, ed. Willi Goetschel (Wien: Passagen, 2000), 179–95. Another later important example
is Eliezer Schweid, “mi-‘mahut ha-yahadut’ le-‘ze ha-am’ (ha-hitmodedut ha-theologit shel Leo Baeck im
t'kufat ha-Nazism),” in maʼavaḳ ʻad shaḥar (Tel Aviv: ha-kibuts ha-meʼuḥad, 1990), 24–72. 7 Hans Liebeschütz, “Between Past and Future: Leo Baeck’s Historical Position,” The Leo Baeck Institute
Yearbook 11, no. 1 (1966): 3–27; Hans Liebeschütz, Von Georg Simmel zu Franz Rosenzweig: Studien zum
jüdischen Denken im deutschen Kulturbereich (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1970); Alexander Altmann, “Theology
in Twentieth Century German Jewry,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 1 (1956): 193–216; Alexander Altmann,
Leo Baeck and the Jewish Mystical Tradition (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1973). 8 Uriel Tal, Yahadut ve-Natsrut Ba-’Raikh Ha-Sheni’ (Jerusalem: Magnes University Press, 1969); Uriel Tal,
“Theologische Debatte um das ‘Wesen’ des Judentums,” in Juden im Wilhelminischen Deutschland, 1890-1914,
ed. Werner Mosse (Tübingen: Mohr, 1976), 599–632; Uriel Tal, “Al Bakashat ‘Mahut Ha-Yahadut’ Ba-Dorot
Ha-Achronim U’ve-Yamenu,” in Mitos U-Tevunah Be-Yahadut Yamenu, ed. Amos Funkenstein and Asa Kasher
(Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv University, 2011), 181–215; Christian Wiese, “Counterhistory, the ‘Religion of the Future’
and the Emancipation of Jewish Studies: The Conflict between the Wissenschaft Des Judentums and Liberal
Protestantism 1900 to 1933,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 7, no. 4 (2000): 367–98; Christian Wiese, “Ein
unerhörtes Gesprächsangebot: Leo Baeck, die Wissenschaft des Judentums und das Judentumsbild des Liberalen
Protestantismus,” in Leo Baeck, 1873-1956: Aus dem Stamme von Rabbinern, ed. Fritz Backhaus and Georg
Heuberger (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001), 147–71; Wiese, Challenging
Colonial Discourse; Christian Wiese, “‘The Best Antidote to Anti-Semitism?’ Wissenschaft des Judentums,
Protestant Biblical Scholarship, and Anti-Semitism in Germany before 1933,” in Modern Judaism and
Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives, ed. Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese
(Boston: Brill, 2007), 145–92. 9 Reinhold Mayer, Christentum und Judentum in der Schau Leo Baecks (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1961);
Samuel Sandmel, Leo Baeck on Christianity (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1975). 10 Already in Walter Homolka, Jewish Identity in Modern Times: Leo Baeck and German Protestantism
(Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995); Walter Homolka, Leo Baeck: Eine Skizze seines Lebens (Gütersloh:
4
recovering Baeck’s thought systematically, especially the translation of Dieses Volk and his
Leo Baeck: Teacher of Theresienstadt, the first monograph dedicated to Baeck’s work as a
whole.11 Even Friedlander’s important and careful exposition of Baeck’s work, however, falls
at times—already in the title—to the trap of hagiographical writing.
The aforementioned valuable contributions pale, however, compared to the scholarly
work on Baeck’s contemporaries Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Hermann Cohen.12 In
other words, Baeck is the least read philosophically and theologically, although he is one of
the most well-known names among this group of Jewish intellectuals. Leo Baeck, the symbol
of German Jewry, has not made it into the canon of Jewish thought. There can be several
explanations for this situation: first, as implied above, Baeck’s political role during the
Holocaust might influence the willingness to directly engage his thought. This can take two
forms: either as the argument that one cannot judge actions at this time of horror or as the
feeling that his thought might seem tainted by certain actions. This explanation is
problematic, because German intellectuals who supported and benefited from the Nazi
regime—one thinks of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt—are welcomed in many
classrooms today.13 To be absolutely clear, I do not compare Baeck to Heidegger or Schmitt
in this regard, but only point to the fact that even had one shared the view that Baeck
somehow eased the work of the Nazi regime—a very contested position to begin with—this
should theoretically not prevent a serious engagement with his thought.
Second, perhaps the easiest explanation is to dismiss Baeck’s thought as a second-rate
product. Such a line of argument will implicitly or explicitly suggest that Baeck is not studied
Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006); Homolka also edited a series of collected volumes dedicated to Baeck’s work:
Frank Wössner and Walter Homolka, eds., Zwischen Geheimnis und Gebot: Auf dem Weg zu einem
progressiven Judentum der Moderne (Karlsruhe: EPB, 1997); Walter Homolka, Leo Baeck: Jüdisches Denken -
Perspektiven für heute (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 2006); Walter Homolka, ed., Leo Baeck: Philosophical
and Rabbinical Approaches (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2007). 11 Leo Baeck, This People Israel: The Meaning of Jewish Existence, trans. Albert Friedlander (New York: Holt,
1964); Friedlander, Teacher of Theresienstadt. 12 All of the aforementioned thinker have, for example, chapters dedicated to them in Michael L. Morgan and
Peter Eli Gordon, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambrige
University Press, 2007). 13 Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review Books, 2001), 1–77;
on Schmitt in particular see Raphael Gross, Carl Schmitt und Die Juden: Eine deutsche Rechtslehre (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000); and Peter Caldwell, “Controversies over Carl Schmitt: A Review of Recent
Literature,” The Journal of Modern History 77 (2005): 357–87; the controversy around the relevance on
Heidegger’s Nazism was recently rekindled with the publication of the so-called “Black Notebooks”, see Peter
Gordon, “Heidegger in Black,” The New York Review of Books, accessed May 8, 2016,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2014/10/09/heidegger-in-black/.
5
because his thought is not good enough from a philosophical perspective.14 If one wants to
study Jewish neo-Kantianism, one is better served studying Cohen; if it is Jewish
existentialism that one desires, one should go to Rosenzweig and Buber. So goes the
argument, which is based on the assumption that Baeck is unoriginal, unsystematic, or both.
A related iteration of the same theme reads Baeck as “apologetic,” as only responding to
Christian portrayals of Judaism, and therefore inauthentic. I think both lines of argumentation
make a strawman of Baeck as well as the other thinkers. More problematically, however, is
that they might treat authenticity as the benchmark for Jewish philosophy. This question
accompanies the first two chapters of the dissertation.
A final explanation is that the specific branch of German Judaism embodied by
Baeck—the proudly Jewish and German at the same time, the rabbi and the philosopher—this
strand of Liberal Judaism immersed in Kant and Goethe as it is in Midrash and Maimonides
is almost lost. Today we might find traces and new versions of it in some places in North
America and the State of Israel, but the completely different contexts make Baeck’s thought
look like a gothic cathedral from the Old World planted on the beach of Tel Aviv. This is
perhaps not the case with thinkers such as Rosenzweig and Buber, who for various reasons
were easier to adopt.15
Whether it is any of these reasons or a combination of them is hard to determine. The
recovery of Baeck’s philosophy begins with an attempt to frame his thought in light of
relevant questions in Jewish philosophy. I therefore wish to stay away from any
hagiographical or even a chronological account of Baeck’s life. Nonetheless, a biographical
introduction is needed in order to recall the complex life beyond the symbol. In order to stress
the centrality of Baeck’s work as a public intellectual, each of the periods is focused around a
text or a group of texts.16
14 This seems to be Michael Morgan’s position. He implies that Baeck’s thought does not contribute
significantly to a philosophical understanding of Judaism, see Michael L. Morgan, Fackenheim’s Jewish
Philosophy: An Introduction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 314n9. 15 Part of it is probably connected to the first explanation, namely to the Holocaust: Buber emigrated in 1938,
Rosenzweig died in 1929. In both cases no serious coming to terms with their actions during this dark period is
needed. For an attempt to explain the remarkable recent reception of Rosenzweig, see Peter Gordon,
“Rosenzweig Redux: The Reception of German-Jewish Thought,” Jewish Social Studies 8, no. 1 (2001): 1-57. 16 For a comprehensive biographical account, with less interest in the philosophical questions at hand, see Baker,
Days of Sorrow and Pain.
6
Life Stations
2.1 From Lissa to Berlin (1873-1914)
Uri Lipmann (Leo) Bäck (later: Baeck) was born in 1873 in Lissa (East Prussia, today:
Leszno in Poland). His future career as a rabbi and community leader would be in line with a
long lineage of rabbis in his family, including his own father Samuel Bäck. Baeck’s
education, culminating in a rabbinical ordination and a doctor title, started in more
conservative, in the tradition of Zacharias Frankel’s historical Judaism, seminar in Breslau,
before moving to the more liberal Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (later die
Hochschule) in Berlin, where he received his ordination. There might be a temptation to read
this development as an abandonment of one denomination in favor of another. Yet this would
be overly simplistic. Baeck’s early essays show the influence of his studies in Berlin, but he
cannot be classified as a “Reformer.”17 His independence of thought was expressed also in
his relation to nascent Zionist movement. Unlike most other liberal rabbis, Baeck did not
reject the Zionist enterprise and refused a motion to condemn the first Zionist congress. For a
young unknown rabbi this meant risking his career, but he did not shy away from expressing
his position. Although not an active Zionist, he participated in Zionist organizations such as
the JNF and his understanding of Judaism shows a sympathy for the Zionist movement as
fighting assimilation and offering renewal of Jewish life.18
Parallel to his rabbinical studies Baeck also attended the University of Berlin and
completed a dissertation on Spinoza’s early reception in Germany under the supervision of
Wilhelm Dilthey. It is a typical dissertation for the time, technical in nature; little of the
rhetoric of the future rabbi, with his apologetics and polemics, is present. There are moments
in this work, however, when themes emerge that will occupy Baeck’s thought for years to
come emerge.19 The central one for our purpose is a remark about Christianity, made when
discussing the background for the reception of Spinoza in Germany:
It [the Reformation] is in an essential aspect the fight for the recognition of the state as an original,
divine order against the unjust demands of Rome. The Reformers, in their conflict with the spiritual
17 Homolka, Leo Baeck: Jüdisches Denken - Perspektiven für heute, 34–5. 18 Baeck also expressed these views in a publication in the Zionist newspaper Der Jude (1917-1918), see Leo
Baeck, “Lebensgrund und Lebensgehalt,” in Werke 3: Wege im Judentum, ed. Albert Friedlander et al.
(Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 112–22; on Baeck’s political involvement with Zionism see Ernst
Simon’s introduction to Leo Baeck, Ma’hut Ha’yaha’dut, trans. Lea Zgagi (Jerusalem: Bialik, 1967), 31–3. 19 Cf. Friedlander, Teacher of Theresienstadt, 22.
7
sword, found in it [the state] protection, and thankful for it, they always preach: “Be subservient to the
authority.”20
Baeck already shows here a critical attitude toward Christianity. He would later come to
identify this subservient attitude in the romantic and gnostic features inherent in Christianity.
Following his ordination, Baeck’s first position as a rabbi was in the town of Oppeln
in 1897. It is at the time he served as a rabbi to this congregation that Baeck achieved fame
by answering Adolf von Harnack’s immensely popular The Essence of Christianity (1900)
with The Essence of Judaism (1905). Harnack’s work and Baeck’s reply comprise the topic
of the third chapter. For the moment it is sufficient to note that Baeck’s fame was such that,
after five years as a rabbi in Dusseldorf (1907-1912), he moved to Berlin, the largest Jewish
community in Germany, to serve as a rabbi and as a teacher at the Lehranstalt, teaching
homiletics. Baeck would remain in Berlin until his deportation to Theresienstadt.
One text, “Our Position with Regard to Interfaith Dialogues” (1910), is representative
of what I later identify as dialogical apologetics. Originally a public lecture at a Liberal
Judaism congress, it was aimed at a Jewish audience. Baeck begins with the question asked,
namely to respond to recent Christian debates about the existence of the historical Jesus.
Instead of directly answering, however, he suggests that a preceding question is whether or
not Jews should even care: “Don’t we have enough to do with ourselves, and is not the wise
thing to do when two fight outside, to remain behind closed doors and at most to curiously
take a peek from the window?”21 Baeck replies that Judaism was never closed to the world, at
least not by choice. On the contrary, to have empathy for the struggle and aspiration of the
other is part of love of the other [Menschenliebe], which only a religion that is certain of itself
and its values, as Judaism is, can show. In other words, Judaism can appreciate the Christian
question because it fosters the “awe of the belief, which is the beginning of all tolerance.”22 It
is therefore “Jewish duty and historical right” to be involved in the contemporary conflict in
German Protestantism about the historical Jesus. Baeck expresses the wish that this will be a
20 Leo Bäck, Spinozas esrte Einwirkung auf Deutschland (Berlin: Mayer&Müller, 1895), 8. 21 Leo Baeck, “Unsere Stellung zu den Religionsgesprächen,” in Werke 6: Briefe, Reden, Aufsätze, ed. Michael
Meyer (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 80. 22 Ibid.
8
two-way street, and that “Protestant fellow-citizens” [evangelische Mitbürger] will also
inform themselves about the questions concerning Jewry [Judenheit].23
Baeck sees in the engagement with Protestant theological and historical questions a
way for dialogue, but he is also acutely aware that this dialogue is not done on equal footing.
Both groups are de jure fellow-citizens, but one is treated unlike the other:
We are a minority, and maybe it is part of our historical vocation, to be that, through our existence
already to represent the claim, that true justice [Gerechtigkeit] is first there, where it is shared with
every minority. We are fighting for it, this fight for our right […] No minority which has its own faith,
can assert its equal rights, as long as it has not fought for the respect of its religion. We have fought and
fight for positions and offices, but all of this will not be productive in the long term, when we do not
fight at first place for our religion, in order to win for it the esteem it merits.24
In order to gain the respect and justice one deserves, one needs to speak out loud and clearly.
The demand is not just for equal social chances and access to power. Baeck tells his fellow
Jews that the real standard for their integration, for the level of justice in German society, is
the way the Protestant majority treats Judaism. The problem according to Baeck is that the
treatment of Judaism is done in a denigrating way: Christian theology chooses the worst
aspects of Judaism and presents it as the essential component of the religion.25 The method
should be different: Christianity should be judged by what it holds in high regard, but Baeck
nonetheless insists that these heights of Christianity are part of its Jewish heritage. Thus,
although the “spiritual fight” should be done with “clean hands and clean weapons,” Baeck
himself did not always practice what he preached on this point.26
“Our Position with Regard to Interfaith Dialogues” presents many staples of Baeck’s
thought: the importance of his engagement with Christianity, his understanding of arguing
apologetically from a minority position, the question about the method for determining the
essence of a religion, and finally the understanding that such theological arguments are
always connected to a political reality. All these aspects will continue to accompany his
thought in later years.
23 Ibid., 81. 24 Ibid., 83 - emphasis in the original. 25 Ibid., 82. 26 Ibid.
9
2.2 First World War and the Weimar Republic (1914-1933)
In 1914 the Great War erupted. Baeck, like many other German-Jewish intellectuals, was a
German patriot. He volunteered to serve as a Feldrabbiner—one of around thirty—visiting
the sick and wounded, providing spiritual care, leading prayers, and giving sermons.27 He
also sent short reports and sometimes longer articles that were published by the Jewish
community. One characteristic example should suffice:
Each war is an abundance of suffering. It puts on them, who have to make the decision, a burden. Not
only on the shoulders, but even more so on the conscience. There is no responsibility that would be as
difficult. Only one thing can free the soul: the consciousness that the war is world-historical
[weltgeschichtlich]. A world-historical war, i.e. it is valid for the great whole, that it is for culture and a
civilized way of life [Gesittung], that it is being led for the future of humanity [...] Only that war is
justified, in which a people have respect for itself and may hold this respect. And that it may feel a
decision is given in its hand […] There should be no war for war’s sake and not even for the sake of a
mere peace agreement, which will create a period of calm. It only makes sense if it wants to serve the
future, the great peace of culture.28
Baeck ends the essay with the hope for peace, the acknowledgment of God by the people and
their respect for God and for one another.29 Yet despite this positive ending, the above
paragraph shows a high degree of ambivalence. Baeck mentions time and again the
importance of ethics, and the end of this paragraph can be seen as fostering such a call. Yet
although he describes the heavy moral responsibility, he seems to justify the suffering and
destruction of war in the name of the “great peace of culture,” in the singular, whatever that
may look like. As the war continued, Baeck keeps insisting on the need for “strong nerves”
and speaks about the moral courage that a long war requires. This moral courage is coupled
in his thought in 1916 with duty for one’s fatherland and Heimat.30
Baeck continued to serve as a Feldrabbiner throughout the war. Yet the relation
between Jewish citizens and the German state under whose banner they fought became vexed
following the Jewish census [Judenzählung] of 1916, in which German military officials,
following antisemitic accusations, tried to show that Jews were not doing their part in the
war. The facts were contrary to this claim, however, and Jewish soldiers and Jews at home
27 For an overview of the German Feldrabbiner and their various activities see Sabine Hank, Hermann Simon,
and Uwe Hank, eds., Feldrabbiner in den deutschen Streitkräften des ersten Weltkrieges (Berlin: Hentrich &
Hentrich, 2013). 28 Leo Baeck, “Das Drama der Geschichte,” in Werke 6, 123. 29 Ibid., 124. 30 Leo Baeck, “Du sollst!,” in Werke 6, 124–5; Leo Baeck, “Berichte des feldgeistlichen Rabbiner Dr. Leo
Baeck an den Vorstand der jüdischen Gemeinde,” in Werke 6, 139.
10
felt betrayed. The Jewish census was seen by many Jews as a breach of trust and a violation
of what they considered as the agreement between them and the state: Jews will be educated,
loyal and patriotic subjects, in short they will be good Germans, and they will not be
discriminated against. Baeck must have felt similarly. In a speech at the Lehranstalt in 1919,
when the Kaiserreich was no longer and a feeling of upheaval, of a new beginning but also of
anxiety was in the air, Baeck mourns the Lehranstalt’s teachers and students who have
passed away in the years of the war or have fallen in it. Yet as is often the case with Baeck,
there is more to it. Baeck begins and ends his speech with an analysis of the Prussian state
and its origins in Lutheran theology on the one hand and the Enlightenment on the other.
Luther, as in earlier and later writings, is criticized for his political position. In attempting to
separate between the spiritual world of the Church and worldly rule, Luther in fact gave
everything to the state. Church and state become one:
Both authorities, the stately sword and the spiritual rod [Stab], rest in the same hand: the one regime
[Obrigkeit] has the full power [Gewalt], and its meaning lies in this power. Power is a concept gladly
used in Lutheran theology.31
Baeck is emphasizing here the political dangers involved in Luther’s theology, namely the
possibility of a “Prussian religion” that leads to a police state and the exclusion of non-
Protestants.32
Baeck positions both the Enlightenment and Calvin over and against Luther. He treats
the Enlightenment as detached from Protestantism altogether in order to stress that Jews can
still be loyal citizens and fight for their rights precisely because the ideals they subscribe to
have nothing to do with the stately church or the churchly state of Luther.33 He calls the Great
War that has just ended “to a certain extent a war between Lutheranism and Calvinism.” The
reason the Anglo-Saxons won is that they had more messianic hope and are willing to work
more for the future of humanity. Calvin has won against Luther, and this is also a victory of
Judaism, which shaped these elements in Calvinism.34 This is a striking statement coming
from a patriot who has just recently returned from the front. It shows the extent of mistrust
that Baeck has toward the combination of Lutheran theology and the German state. This
31 Leo Baeck, “Heimgegangene des Krieges,” in Werke 3, 385. Baeck probably has in mind Luther’s “Von
weltlicher Obrigkeit, wie wie weit man ihr Gehorsam schuldig sei”. 32 Ibid., 386. 33 Ibid., 389. 34 Ibid., 387–8.
11
mistrust and the preference for Calvinism as the more Jewish of the two reforms will
manifest themselves also in Baeck’s “Romantic Religion” several years later.
The 1920’s mark the most productive intellectual period in Baeck’s life. Alongside
his work as a rabbi and a teacher, he also publishes on a wide range of topics, including
works on Jewish mysticism, the second much expanded edition of The Essence of Judaism
and some of his most important essays such as “Mystery and Commandment” and “Romantic
Religion”. These will be analyzed in detail in chapter four. Alongside the role of a public
intellectual, Baeck assumes more and more communal responsibilities and is appointed as the
president of the Independent Order of B’nai B’rith, the head of the General Rabbinical
Association in Germany [Allgemeinen Rabbinerverbandes] and, in 1932, he is also appointed
as the president of the Reich’s Representation of the Regional Associations of German Jews
[Reichsvertretung der Landesverbände deutscher Juden]. It is this later position as an official
representative of German Jewry that made him into their official leader when the Hitler came
to power.
2.3 Berlin under Nazi Rule (1933-1943)
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed as the chancellor of Germany and the
situation for Jews quickly deteriorated. Jews were not passive in light of the political
developments. They organized, built, and strengthened institutions that were dedicated to the
help with immigration, social welfare, and education. The official umbrella organization for
these activities was the September 1933 founded Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden. In a
way it is a continuation of the Reichsvertretung der Landesverbände deutscher Juden, both in
terms of its scope and in terms of many of its personnel and its president, Leo Baeck. Yet it
differed in important ways, most notably with regard to the autonomy of its local chapters
and its social mission.35 As a central organization representing most of the Jews of Germany,
it attempted to maintain a certain plurality of Jewish representation amidst pressure from a
totalitarian regime.36 In 1935, following the Nuremberg Laws, the organization was renamed
35 Avraham Barkai, “Wehr Dich!”: Der Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (C.V.) 1893-
1938 (Munich: C.H.Beck, 2002), 301–2. There were inner tensions within the Jewish community, with major
cities such as Berlin under the leadership of Heinrich Stahl waging opposition. These were further exacerbated
by the activities of Georg Kareski, the leader of the revisionists in Germany, who tried to gain the approval of
the Nazi party and published, for example, an article supporting the Nuremberg Law in the Nazi newspaper Der
Angriff. 36 The choice to form a central organization was at the time was not the only possible path. It was also possible
to have a growing fragmentation of the Jewish community, with each sector or person taking care only of
12
Reichsvertretung der Juden in Deutschland. Now there were no longer German Jews but only
Jews in Germany.37
Baeck, the president of this organization, dedicated his efforts to social welfare and to
supporting emigration and education, the latter consisted both of Jewish education as means
of spiritual comfort and of support and professional education that might help emigration.
This process was called by Ernst Simon “building amidst destruction.”38 No text crystallizes
Baeck’s efforts at a spiritual resistance around that time more than the pamphlet that came to
be known as Leo Baeck’s “Kol-Nidre prayer.” In September 15, 1935 the Nuremberg Laws
were passed and racism was now fully integrated into the legal system of the state. Yom
Kippur was on October 6 that year. It is in this context that Baeck composed this pastoral
letter [Hirtenbrief], to be read at the synagogues at this holiest of days. The text begins in a
traditional manner, noting that at Yom Kippur the community stands before God and
confesses “we have sinned.” The text then takes a remarkable turn: instead of continuing
along this traditional liturgical line of acknowledging the congregation’s sins and wishing for
God’s mercy, Baeck leaves the humility associated with the Yom Kippur liturgy in favor of
an assertion of Jewish values and life:
We stand before our God. With the same strength with which we have acknowledged our sins of the
community, we shall express our abhorrence of the lie directed against us and of the slander of our faith
and its expression. This slander is far beneath us. We believe in our faith and our future.39
Baeck argues that for the Jews at this hour, standing before God is an affirmation of their
strength and an assertion of their worth. He stresses Judaism’s contribution to humanity—
monotheistic belief and prophetic justice—and argues that Jewish history shows that God will
help his people withstand every trial. Jews can turn to their history in this hour of need,
“when attack and insult are directed against us, when need and suffering press upon us.”40
himself. Another alternative would have been to follow the tendency of the regime and form an authoritarian
hirerachy. See Kulka’s historical introduction in Otto Dov Kulka, ed., Deutsches Judentum unter dem
Nationalsozialismus (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 13–14. 37 The most comprehensive research on this period, with a detailed collection of the relevant documents is
Kulka, Deutsches Judentum unter dem Nationalsozialismus. 38 Ernst Simon, Aufbau im Untergang: Jüdische Erwachsenenbildung im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland
als geistiger Widerstand (Tübingen: Mohr, 1959) 39 Baeck’s text appears in several translations. I followed Dalia Marx’s here, who provided both the German and
the English: Dalia Marx, “Liturgy Composed on the Brink of Catastrophe: Examination of ‘Akdamut Millin’ by
R. Meir from Worms (late 11th Century) and R. Leo Baeck Hirtenbrief for Kol Nidre Service (1935),” in Leo
Baeck: Philosophical and Rabbinical Approaches, 89–91. 40 Ibid., 90.
13
The subversive potential of this text was not lost on the Gestapo, who ordered its destruction
and forbade its reading in the synagogues. Baeck was promptly arrested but released several
days afterwards.41
After the 1938 November Pogrom, the Reichsvertretung was transformed in 1939 into
the Reichsvereinigung. No longer was it a somewhat free self-help organization; it was now
put completely under the supervision of the Gestapo and had to fight it or comply with its
orders concerning the deportation of Jews. It is this administrative form that is today still
often condemned as collaboration with the Nazi regime.42 In her classic report of Adolf
Eichmann’s trial, Hannah Arendt took seriously Eichmann’s assertion that “the Nazis had
regarded this [Jewish] cooperation as the very cornerstone of their Jewish policy.”43 In a
scandalous part of her report, she concluded:
The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would
have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between
four and a half and six million people.44
Although intentions are central in moral philosophy, in terms of the result it matters little
whether the leadership came from a Chaim Rumkowski—the self-proclaimed Chaim I of
Lodz, who ruled as a tyrant and had currency printed with his signature—or a Leo Baeck,
whom she described as “scholarly, mild-mannered, highly educated.”45 Today scholars take a
more careful stand, one that is more sensitive to all the shades of grey in this dark time, and
so assessments might differ regarding Baeck in particular, and the Reichsvereinigung in
general. Otto Dov Kulka has argued that claiming that the Reichsvereinigung was merely a
Gestapo appointed organization is to ignore its origins and resistance attempts, some of which
41 After Baeck’s release Otto Hirsch, another one of the directors of the Reichsvertretung, was subsequently
arrested for the same accusation but he too was released several days later, possibly at Baeck’s intervention.
Emil Fackenheim remarks that along with this prayer, the mere fact that Baeck was still teaching students
Midrash at the Lehranstalt was another form of spiritual resistance (Emil Fackenheim, “After Auschwitz,
Jerusalem: In Memory of My Teacher, Leo Baeck,” Judaism 50, no. 1 [2001]: 55): “Hence, although he had to
meet Nazi officials, perhaps once a week, he also taught twenty or thirty of us twice a week, and doing so was
more important to him than meeting Nazis; this was not just our impression, it was so in fact: no wonder we
listened.” On Fackenheim's use of Baeck as a starting point to think about post-Holocaust Jewish thought, albeit
without actually engaging Baeck, see Emil Fackenheim, “In Memory of Leo Baeck, and Other Jewish Thinkers
‘In Dark Times’: Once More, ‘After Auschwitz, Jerusalem,’” Judaism 51, no. 3 (2002): 282–92. 42 Beate Meyer, “Reichsvertretung der deutschen Juden,” in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und Kultur, ed.
Dan Diner, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2014), 150–1. 43 Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 124. 44 Ibid., 125. 45 Ibid., 119.
14
attest to “the resolute stand of the Jewish leadership in its struggle against the Nazi
persecutions—including the mass deportations—until the final stage.”46
Baeck himself could have fled Germany several times, including as late as 1939.47
Yet he returned, feeling committed to his community. His active role in the day-to-day
operation of the Reichsvereinigung was apparently not as significant as his title as its head
might suggest and he is said to have withdrawn more and more from making decisions in the
Reichsvereinigung, a fact evident by the absence of his name from protocols, which had not
been the case in the Reichsvertretung.48 By his own account, Baeck knew already in summer
1941 of the harsh fate of Jews sent to the East, and in Theresienstadt in 1943 he already learnt
about the meaning of Auschwitz. Yet he chose to remain silent, explaining he did not want to
lead people to death in despair because perhaps there was still the possibility of being saved
through work.49
The discomfort felt regarding Baeck’s role as the president of the Reichsvereinigung
and his actions during that time is exemplified in one of Baeck’s surviving scholarly writings
from this period: a long text, never published, concerning “The Development of Legal
Position and Place of the Jews in Europe, Mainly in Germany, from Antiquity until the
Beginning of Enlightenment.”50 It is a text that exposes the ambiguity of Baeck’s situation, as
well as his own self-presentation after the war. Baeck mentioned this text as a work he wrote
between 1938 and 1941 at the request of the conservative opposition and resistance to Hitler,
46 Otto Dov Kulka, “The Reichsvereinigung and the Fate of German Jews, 1938/1939-1943: Continuity or
Discontinuity in German-Jewish History in the Third Reich,” in Die Juden im nationalsozialistischen
Deutschland = The Jews in Nazi Germany, 1933-1943, ed. Arnold Paucker, Sylvia Gilchrist, and Barbara Suchy
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986), 357. 47 Homolka, Leo Baeck, 63; cf. Friedlander, Teacher of Theresienstadt, 211n8. 48 Although it is always a risk to deduce from absence, this seems to be the general opinion in research, based on
testimonies and documents. See Avraham Barkai, “manhigut be-dimdumei hidalun,” in Leo Baeck: manhigut
ṿe-hagut, 1933-1945, ed. Avraham Barkai (Jeruslaem: Leo Baeck Institute, 2000), 59–60; a more recent
assessment, based on the available sources today, reaches a similar comclusion: Beate Meyer, Tödliche
Gratwanderung: Die Reichsvereinigung der Juden in Deutschland zwischen Hoffnung, Zwang,
Selbstbehauptung und Verstrickung (1939-1945) (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2011), 142–3. 49 Eric Boehm, “A People Stands before Its God: Leo Baeck,” in We Survived: Fourteen Histories of the Hidden
and Hunted in Nazi Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), 293; Boehm presents the text as the
words of Baeck, although he admits to have paraphrased or at least edited Baeck. Nonetheless, it is worth noting
that Baeck never repudiated the positions he expressed in this text. See Barkai, “manhigut be-dimdumei idalun,”
69–70; Paul Tillich criticized Baeck on this point, see his comments quoted from an interview in Friedlander,
Teacher of Theresienstadt, 47. 50 Leo Baeck, “Die Entwicklung der Rechtsstellung und des Platzes der Juden in Europa, vornehmlich in
Deutschland, vom Altertum bis zum Beginn der Aufklärung” (Berlin, 1938-1942), Manuscript Collection, MS
624, Leo Baeck Institute.
15
for the “day after Hitler.”51 In 2001, however, Hermann Simon revealed that Baeck wrote this
work—with the help of Leopold Lukas and Lucie Dresel—at a direct command of the
Gestapo in 1942.52 Why would the Gestapo need this type of enterprise, which at the end
comprised more than a thousand pages? This is not entirely clear. When one considers that
the command came from the trained jurist Friedrich Suhr, who worked on the deportations of
German Jews, it might be that the work was meant to serve as a theoretical and scholarly
background for the deportations. Not that the conclusion of Baeck’s work would have
mattered. The deportations were already on the way.53 The question still lingers as to Baeck’s
decision to remain silent, if not outright lie, about the true nature and origin of the
manuscript. Should and how does it influence our evaluation of the work, in any way a
collective effort, and its relation to Baeck’s oeuvre? I return to the full weight of these
questions in the next section.
2.4 Theresienstadt (1943-1945)
On January 27, 1943, at the age of almost seventy, Leo Baeck was arrested in his apartment
and deported to Theresienstadt camp.54 His status played in this a role as well: he had been
able to bring more with him into the camp and his travel conditions on the deportation train
might have been more comfortable.55 Officially referred to by the Nazis as “Elders Ghetto”
and “Jewish Settlement Area”—euphemisms that had little to do with the harsh reality of the
51 Hans Reichmann, “The Fate of a Manuscript,” The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 3, no. 1 (1958): 361–63. 52 Hermann Simon, “Bislang unbekannte Quellen zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Werkes‘Die Entwicklung der
Rechtsstellung der Juden in Europa, vornehmlich in Deutschland’,” in Leo Baeck, 1873-1956: Aus dem Stamme
von Rabbinern, ed. Fritz. Backhaus and Georg Heuberger (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp
Verlag, 2001), 103–10; Götz Aly criticized Simon for merely presenting the facts without drawing any
consequnce or assesment of them. Götz Aly, “Streit um Leo Baeck: Gelehrter und Zwangsvorsitzender der
deutschen Juden im Dritten Reich - unbestechlich oder angepasst?,” Berliner Zeitung, October 8, 2001,
http://www.berliner-zeitung.de/streit-um-leo-baeck--gelehrter-und-zwangsvorsitzender-der-deutschen-juden-im-
dritten-reich-unbestechlich-oder-angepasst--16750630. 53 Fritz Backhaus and Martin Liepach, “Ein Schatten im Leben des hochangesehenen Rabbiners: Über die Rolle
Leo Baecks im Nationalsozialismus - neue Funde, Spurensuche und ungeklärte Fragen” (Lecture manuscript,
Frankfurt, January 10, 2001), 5–6, Leo Baeck Collection; AR 66; Group 5, Series 2, Slides 1210-19, Leo Baeck
Institute. 54 Despite some modifications of its data and conclusions, the standard work on Theresienstadt is still Hans
Adler, Theresienstadt 1941-1945: Das Antlitz einer Zwangsgemeinschaft. Geschichte, Soziologie, Psychologie
(Tübingen: Mohr, 1955); Baeck wrote the introduction to this work Leo Baeck, “Geleitwort zu H.G. Adlers
Theresienstadt,” in Werke 6, 366–7; Adler knew Baeck and thought highly of his moral stature in
Theresienstadt, see Hans Adler, “Rechenschaft in dunkler Zeit: Leo Baeck und sein Werk,” in Leo Baeck:
Lehrer und Helfer in schwerer Zeit, ed. Werner Licharz (Frankfurt am Main: Haag & Herchen, 1983), 62–79. I
hope to have sufficiently shown here that the picture is much more morally blurred. 55 Boehm, “A People Stands before Its God: Leo Baeck,” 291; Beate Meyer, “‘Altersghetto’, ‘Vorzugslager’
und Tätigkeitsfeld,” Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente, no. 12 (2005): 134. Baeck did need to officially
sell his house, though, a formality that was meant as a masquerade of normality.
16
camp that served from its beginning as a transport station on the way to the death fields in the
East, first for Czech Jews and later also for Jews for Germany—the conditions in the camp
were not equal for all prisoners. Starting June 1942, Theresienstadt also served as a
“prominent prisoners’ camp” for several groups of German and Austrian Jews including
those with military decoration, members of annulled mixed marriage and Jewish
functionaries.56
The members of the former Reichsvereinigung deported to Theresienstadt soon took
leading positions in its Council of Elders—a close equivalent to a Judenrat—and Paul
Eppstein, who served on the board of the Reichsvereinigung in Berlin, soon stood as its head.
Baeck himself did not actively participate in the Elders Council, but was nonetheless
appointed as its honorary president.57 Baeck’s position was privileged in comparison with
many of the other prisoners: he had his own apartment—almost unheard of in
Theresienstadt—and better food rations. Baeck also still employed Dora Czapski, his house
keeper whom he neglected to mention in his account of his life in Theresienstadt. Yet as
Anna Hájková notes, it is she who allowed the “famous man” the much needed freedom:
Are housekeepers so important in the larger order of things? They are central: Czapski made possible
Baeck’s entire political and spiritual activity at Theresienstadt, where everyday activities in the ghetto
kept people exhausted and severely limited in their spare time. In all my research about Theresienstadt
I came across only one acting housekeeper, and that was Czapski.58
As in the case of the manuscript, Baeck’s testimony about Theresienstadt is ambigious, a
“mix of facts and opportune.”59 By mentioning this, I am not trying in any way to diminish or
minimize the inconceivable horrors and suffering Baeck had to live through in
56 Peter Klein argues that Theresienstadt is thus not a “concentration camp” in the narrow sense of the word. It
was not defined as such by the Nazis and it was meant to serve other needs as well. See Peter Klein,
“Theresienstadt: Ghetto oder Konzentrationslager?,” Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente, no. 12 (2005):
111–23; The definition as a “transport camp” seems therefore to be more adequate. For the current state of
research on Theresienstadt, see Anna Hájková, “Theresienstadt,” in Enzyklopädie jüdischer Geschichte und
Kultur, ed. Dan Diner, vol. 6 (Stuttgart: J.B. Metzler, 2014), 94–8. 57 Baeck had a very tense relationship with Eppstein and he might not have agreed with many of the latter’s
decisions. He remained silent about it after the war, perhaps because he felt that Eppstein—who was murdered
in September 1944—could not defend himself. See Backhaus, “‘Ein Experiment des Willen zum Bösen’:
Überleben in Theresienstadt,” in Aus Dem Stamme von Rabbinern, 121–3. 58 Anna Hájková, “Israeli Historian Otto Dov Kulka’s Auschwitz Account Tells the Story of a Czech Family
That Never Existed,” Tablet Magazine, October 30, 2014, http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-
culture/books/186462/otto-dov-kulka. 59 Ibid., Baeck’s testimony to Boehm about the death of his sisters is also lacking, as one survived quite long,
until March 1944, and did not die shortly thereafter as Baeck claims. He does not claim, however, that “all his
sisters died” as Hájková argues, although this might be implied. Furthermore, as mentioned above, the
authenticity of Boehm’s narration of Baeck is contested.
17
Theresienstadt. The Nazi system tried to strip him of his humanity by assigning him a
number: inmate 187894. At an elderly age, he had at first to conduct hard manual labour
under constant hunger, with people, including dear ones, dying all around him.60 His accounts
of this time show, however, that Baeck had an understandable wish to be perceived and
remembered in a very specific way.
The prisoners in Theresienstadt were allowed to develop a rich cultural life, partly out
of Nazi interest, who later used the “model ghetto” also in carefully shot and edited films.61
Yet the prisoners clearly also developed the cultural life independently and for their own
sake: lectures, music, theater, and sport, all served one purpose - the attempt to remain
humane.62 Baeck regularly lectured Jews and non-Jews alike, who came to listen to the sage
from Berlin. His lectures were so overcrowded that admission tickets needed to be printed for
them. The list of the lectures, in Baeck’s handwriting, is a testimony to his erudition: from
Plato to Hermann Cohen, from the destruction of the temple to the enlightenment, from social
work in the Jewish community to the mind-body problem.63
One lecture, titled “Historiography” [Geschichtsschreibung], survived. It is a rare
testimony to Baeck’s thought in this dark period. Baeck begins by defining history as the
“continuation of life.” a definition that encompasses more than mere existence, a life with a
sense, a life worth living. History is a self-aware totality and unity. This is true both on the
individual and on the community level. As a spiritual and intellectual exercise, Baeck’s
lecture is also a performance of its argument: it attempts to give life in the camp meaning, to
turn mere survival into meaningful life even under harsh conditions. This would have
resonated well with his audience, as would the argument—using a common trope that will be
discussed in the following chapters—that the foundations of historiography are in Athens and
Jerusalem.64 Since Christianity and the shared tradition of the West were often considered a
60 Baeck spoke rarely of his time in Theresienstadt. His first and only explicit in writing description of the
horros was published three month after the liberation. Under the title of “Vision and Patience”, Baeck describes
the horrors of the camp. He says he writes it also in the name for those who died and cannot express themselves
anymore. See Leo Baeck, “Vision und Geduld,” in Werke 6, 361–4. 61 Cf. Kurt Gerron, Theresienstadt: Ein Dokumentarfilm aus dem jüdischen Siedlungsgebiet (Der Führer
schenkt den Juden eine Stadt), 1944, https://www.ushmm.org/online/film/display/detail.php?file_num=2703. 62 Baeck, “Vision und Geduld,” 364; for a recent attempt to collect and document all the cultural activities,
specifically lectures, see Elena Makarova, Sergeĭ Makarov, and Victor Kuperman, eds., University over the
Abyss: The Story behind 520 Lecturers and 2,430 Lectures in KZ Theresienstadt 1942-1944 (Jerusalem: Verba,
2004). 63 Leo Baeck, “Vorträge in Theresienstadt,” in Werke 6, 341–2. 64 Leo Baeck, “Geschichtsschreibung,” in Werke 6, 345.
18
combination of the two, also Christian audience members could identify with this description.
On the one hand, Herodotus, by writing a universal history from the perspective of nations
and people and creating the distinction later to be known as “Europe” and “Asia,” and
Thucydides, writing political history, laid the foundations to all subsequent history, including
the Roman and medieval one.
The other pillar of ancient historiography is the Israelite people’s view on history,
which Baeck dates to the exodus from Egypt. The full development of the Israelite’s unique
historiographical position is found in the prophets, who tried to understand the laws of
history:
They saw how structures of power [Macht] were erected, and how they collapse again. And they asked
themselves: Is this history? Is this, what the power erects, through which it legitimizes itself in order
then to become dismissed by another power, is this history? And they gave the answer: that is un-
history, the opposite of history.65
Instead of the abuse of power, which results simply in the constant replacement of one power
by the other, the prophets identified the spirit and the idea as the alternative. Every people
needs to make the choice, whether it chooses the task of doing good for humanity or whether
it chooses power, which will result in its own downfall. This is the rule of history that the
prophets recognized.66
It is an allusion to the current situation: Nazi power, Theresienstadt, will pass away.
This point becomes dangerously obvious when Baeck rhetorically asks: “We live in new
days. Is a new task of writing of history put to them? That is the last question.”67 The answer
is an old-new answer: one needs to take up the prophetic mode again:
A people dies, when the spirit, when its task dies in it. And it is the most dreadful dying, when to the
people still remains an existence of power [Machtexistenz], and now everything, the circulation of
being, the circulation of power interlopes into the spiritless and senseless, when all striving of being
bestirs itself now as in a spasm of tremor [krampfhaften Zucken] in whose convolutions the people then
collapses.68
This is a dramatic, visceral description, all too familiar to people hungry and exhausted, to
thoe who have seen strangers and dear ones alike collapse and die on a daily basis.
65 Ibid., 352. 66 Ibid., 353. 67 Ibid., 355. 68 Ibid., 356–57.
19
Even in this dramatic description Baeck still leaves a place for reconciliation. Even
after it dies, this people can be reborn, if it takes up his historical task anew, if it turns back to
the values of helping humanity. Baeck would not give up the German tradition he claims as
his own, he would not let Nazism take the German canon from him: Kant, Goethe, and—in a
text dedicated to historiography—Ranke, are part of Baeck’s heritage.69 Even from within the
abyss, Baeck still manages to see light, for the people of Israel, whose oppressors will fall,
but also, nothing short of a surprise, for the Germans, who have some hope to be redeemed in
the future.
2.5 After the Holocaust (1945-1956)
Theresienstadt was libertated by the Soviets in May 1945. The soldiers who entered the camp
found starved inmates and a raging typhus epidemic. A British army officer, Major Patrick
Dolan, came to locate Baeck and help him leave Theresienstadt, but Baeck chose to remain
longer in the camp in order to assist other survivors. Only at the end of June 1945 did he
finally leave, first to Paris and from there to his daughter in London.
Shortly thereafter Baeck declared: “the history of German Judaism is definitely over.
The clock cannot be put back. I have already recognized that when I was in Germany.”70
Baeck quickly assumed once again the position of a representative and symbol of German
Jewry, even if he himself recognized that German Jewry as it existed before the Holocaust
was no longer. Many honours followed once Baeck resumed his political and intellectual
activities, including appointments as the president of the Council of Jews from Germany, as a
visiting professor at the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, and as the president of the
World Union for Progressive Judaism. In 1948, he travelled to North America, where he was
invited to speak—or rather offer a prayer—at the United States Congress. He also met with
President Harry Truman at the White House.
In this later period, Baeck is once again remarkably productive. Among the many
texts he publishes, one stands out: This People: Jewish Existence, published as a whole only
posthumously. If The Essence of Judaism is Baeck’s early magnum opus, then This People is
the crystallization of his later thought, a text that shows both continuity and difference from
69 Ibid., 358 Baeck finishes the lecture with a citation from Ranke. 70 Leo Baeck, “Ein Gespräch mit Leo Baeck im Aufbau,” in Werke 6, 370.
20
the early work.71 For the purpose of this presentation, another text concerned with similar
themes can be taken: “Why Jews in the World? A Reaffirmation of Faith in Israel’s Destiny.”
The title of the text already frames the question, and the answer. That the question should at
all be asked in this direct way, however, can be read as an attempt to think about Jewish
existence in a post-Holocaust world. As in This People, it is a question about Jewish
existence. The posing of the question already implies a problem, something that needs to be
addressed:
Why are Jews and Judaism in the world? No one would dare to say that either is a comfortable thing
for the world. Nor, perhaps would any Jew say that the Jews are a comfortable thing for themselves.
Neither the Jewish religion nor the Jewish heritage is an easy one.72
The answer can be read as a summation of many of the themes that occupied Baeck’s thought
throughout his life: Jews are in the world for a task, for the commandment, “thou shalt,”
which contains the great hope for a better world.73 This is the core of Jewish affirmation of
faith – the wish to act in this world in order to make it into a better place:
Why are Jews and Judaism in the world? We can now answer at greater length. They are in the world
as witnesses and standard-bearers of the great “thou shalt” which the one God speaks to men so that
men may fulfill it and thus have individuality and freedom arise in them, and because of which life
becomes a reality to them and a real community unites them.74
Baeck believes that it is precisely the commandment that frightened Christians, from the
apostle Paul onwards.75 Judaism and the Jews are in the world to accomplish something from
which Christians turn away. A world without Jews—a prospect that looks all too real during
in the aftermath of the Holocaust—might think that it has already achieved perfection, that it
has attained its goal, although nothing could be further than that, since the ethical goal is
infinite.76 Jews witness in their being and ethical action to the fact that world is not yet
redeemed.
71 Albert Friedlander has succinctly summarized it as the move from essence to existence, see Albert
Friedlander, “Leo Baeck - der Weg vom Wesen zur Existenz,” in Zwischen Geheimnis und Gebot, 14–25. For
reasons made evident in chapter three, this description, as a title, is inaccurate: existence is already present in the
Essence. 72 Leo Baeck, “Why Jews in the World? A Reaffirmation of Faith in Israel’s Destiny,” in Werke 5: Nach der
Schoa - Warum sind Juden in der Welt? Schriften aus der Nachkriegszeit, ed. Albert Friedlander and Bertold
Klappert (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 511. 73 Ibid., 514. 74 Ibid., 516. 75 Ibid., 517. 76 Ibid., 519.
21
The distinction between Judaism and Christianity already shows that although Baeck
speaks of a universal task, he does not espouse a universalism that transcends Jewish
boundaries. On the contrary, the purpose of the essay is to tell its Jewish readers—it was
originally published in the leading Jewish journal Commentary—to hold steady. Their
obligation as Jews is not just to the ethical task; it is also to remain Jews. In 1947, this meant
two certainties:
One, is their longing for a place of their own on earth, and this longing for the land of their fathers has
remained in their hearts with its poetry and its obligations. Now the old longing has returned anew to
become history, historic reality. The other surety has consisted in the customs and statutes that grew up
around the Jew’s life, this “hedge around the Torah” to guarantee his will to preserve his identity.77
These two aspects, the building of a Jewish nation while preserving the Jewish religion are in
a way Baeck’s testament to Jews worldwide. He calls for the preservation of Jewish alterity
precisely for the fulfillment of the task for which Jews are in the world.
Leo Baeck passed away November 2, 1956.
The Structure of the Project
3.1 Scope
Is Baeck only a symbol of a leader in dark times or can his thought still offer a valuable
contribution to contemporary discussions? This dissertation answers the latter in the
affirmative. The question of Baeck’s relevance today is intertwined with our understanding of
the tasks of Jewish philosophy and vice versa, rethinking Baeck’s philosophy calls for a
better understanding of Jewish philosophy. These are the two pillars on which this
dissertation stands. In framing it this way, I hope to contribute not only to our understanding
of this important yet curiously neglected thinker, but also to the possibilities of rethinking the
nature of Jewish thought and the challenges it faces. Finally, the debates discussed in the
following chapters are relevant not only to Jewish thought but also to the academic study of
religion, i.e. they discuss forgotten contributions to the emergence of the field as well as
participate in contemporary conversations about the meaning of essences and the relation
between religious positions and the political order.
77 Ibid., 520.
22
The dissertation follows some basic questions—about apologetics, essences, and the
relation between theology and politics—as they unfold. The organization of the chapters is
therefore not strictly chronological according to Baeck’s life. In fact, I have decided to limit
the dissertation to questions that emerged only until the rise of National Socialism. Given
Baeck’s biography, such a decision was not easy to make and needs to be grounded. First, I
see a rhetorical value in limiting the dissertation to the period before the Holocaust. So much
attention has been given to Baeck the leader that in order to stress his philosophical relevance
it is necessary to bracket, or at least intentionally to marginalize, the president of the
Reichsvertretung in favour of the rabbi, theologian and scholar. I do not ignore Baeck’s
writings as interventions in the public sphere. On the contrary, I argue that focusing on those
before the Holocaust in their historical relevance, and possible relevance for today, is better
achieved by this bracketing.
Secondly, this decision is based on an attempt to avoid an apocalyptic-deterministic
reading of history, as if the Holocaust is the only possible result of German-Jewish history
and as if Baeck’s training and philosophy were meant solely to prepare him to serve his
historical role. Michael André Bernstein warns against such a reading of history and suggests
a different mode of thinking: instead of treating literature, history, and theology as
foreshadowing the events to come, we should try to think about what he calls sideshadowing,
or keeping the contingency of history, the potentialities that have not been actualized, open.
Foreshadowing “implies a closed universe in which all choices have already been made,” and
its most pernicious version is that of “backshadowing,”
a kind of retroactive foreshadowing in which the shared knowledge of the outcome of a series of events
by narrator and listener is used to judge the participants in those events as though they too should have
known what was to come.78
Sideshadowing, by contrast, “champions the incommensurability of the concrete moment and
refuses the tyranny of all synthetic master-schemes.”79 It is an alternative way of looking at
history and literature, one I suggest can be useful in the case of Baeck. This is admittedly
easier to do in the case of literary works than it is in the case of history or when treating a
person’s biography, which is to a certain extent always read from the present backwards. The
78 Michael André Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (University of California
Press, 1994), 3, 16 - emphasis in the original. 79 Ibid., 4.
23
historian is always situated in the present while exploring the past, even if she lets the
multitude of possibilities of the past speak for themselves.80
Although the shadow of the Holocaust looms large over the figure of Leo Baeck, it
must nevertheless be only part of the story told. To recover Baeck’s thought and appreciate
its value, one needs to read Baeck in light of the possible implications of his thought in a
broader, more open way, which lets the questions emerge both in their context and in their
relation to contemporary discussions in Jewish thought and the study of religion. This is
made possible only if one does not read everything in Baeck’s work as foreshadowing his
role as the leader, spiritually and politically, of German Jewry during the Nazi period. In
order to stress that point, I have decided that the present study is better served by limiting its
scope.81
Finally, although there have been a lot of works dedicated to post-Holocaust theology,
Baeck’s thought offers a set of unique methodological problems in this regard.82 To begin
with, his thought is not “post-Holocaust” per se. What should one do with the 1935
Hirtenbrief, a work that from a strict point of view is before the Holocaust yet already under
Nazi oppression? Even more problematic of course is the Rechtsstellung, composed during
Holocaust under Gestapo orders. In addition, there is the question as to what should constitute
his thought as opposed to other genres of texts, if a distinction can or even should be made. A
comparison with rabbis who led communities comes to mind, but it is lacking because
Baeck’s situation was different for the other consideration mentioned above. A comparison
with heads of Judenräte who happen to be rabbis is just as unsatisfactory: on the one hand,
Baeck was not necessarily as active in specific decision making; on the other hand, I know of
80 For a critique of contemporary discussions about historiography of the Holocaust and its fallacies, see David
Engel, “Negating Lachrymosity,” in Historians of the Jews and the Holocaust (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2010), esp. 34-8. 81 There is one point in which the dissertation seems to be failing to achieve this goal. In chapter four, I argue
that Baeck recognized a possible danger in a specific political theology and that he later came to understand
Nazism in light of his position. Yet this is done as a question about the relation between theology and politics
and not as a biographical questions. This, I believe, is an important distinction. In other words, although we
know the history and cannot write completely detached from it, I hope to avoid a backward reading of Baeck’s
life and work. 82 Some important works on post-Holocaust theology include: Steven T. Katz, Post-Holocaust Dialogues:
Critical Studies in Modern Jewish Thought (New York: New York University Press, 1983); Zachary
Braiterman, (God) after Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998); Michael L. Morgan, Beyond Auschwitz: Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Steven T. Katz, ed., The Impact of the Holocaust on
Jewish Theology (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
24
no intellectual who was also a leader who showed the same level of scholarly and theological
reflection as Baeck.
I do not argue that it is impossible to write about Baeck’s philosophy during the
Holocaust in a careful and useful way. In addition, the argument that we cannot judge until
we stood in his place (Avot 2:5) is also problematic, because there is an ethical need to
exercise careful and at times difficult judgment on such extreme cases. The problem in the
case of Baeck, I contend, is more theoretical-pragmatic than ethical: it is not the exercise of
judgment but rather that the histroiosophical and methodological tools to evaluate his work
during this period are lacking.83 Yet thinking through this problem will focus the research
once again on the Holocaust. For this reason as well, I have chosen to limit the scope of the
present work.
3.2 Synopsis
The dissertation begins with the question of apologetics and its meaning. If one of the reasons
Leo Baeck is not read is due to the negative tone that his characterization as an apologist
carries, it is worth asking about the meaning of apologetics in the context of Jewish thought.
Franz Rosenzweig’s essay “Apologetic Thinking” and the ensuing correspondence between
Rosenzweig and Baeck serve as the starting point for this discussion. Apologetics emerges
from this chapter as an act of accounting for oneself in front of the other, which leads in turn
to self-examination, it raises for the individual and community questions that were not
previously there. Understood this way, I suggest we speak of apologetics as a dialogical
enterprise.
The second chapter places the theoretical concept of dialogical apologetics in a
broader historical framework, showing it to be a recurring theme in the history of Jewish
thought. If thinkers such as Josephus, Judah Halevi, and Nahmanides can be considered as
engaging in dialogical apologetics, then surely it is a mode of creative and worthy thinking
about and within Judaism. Although dialogical apologetics is always contextual, the
83 There are works that deal with Baeck as a post-Holocaust thinker, but they tend either to treat his work more
biographically or do not recognize the methodological problems just raised. See for example Eliezer Schweid,
“mi-‘mahut ha-yahadut’ le-‘ze ha-am’”; Albert Friedlander, “Überleben in Theresienstadt und Leben mit der
Schoa,” in Zwischen Geheimnis und Gebot, 52–65; Michael Meyer, “Denken und Wirken Leo Baecks nach
1945,” in Aus dem Stamme von Rabbinern, 129–46; Yaniv Feller, “What Hope Remains? Leo Baeck as a
Reader of Job,” in Hope, ed. Ingolf Dalferth and Marlene Block (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 353–68.
25
questions raised by these thinkers—about history, election, messianism, and writing from a
minority position—are also present in Leo Baeck’s apologetics, albeit in a different
manifestation.
The first two chapters were dedicated to the concept of dialogical apologetics. The
third chapter analyzes a different concept: the essence of religion. At the centre of the
discussion stands Adolf von Harnack’s The Essence of Christianity and Baeck’s replies, both
in a critical essay and later in The Essence of Judaism. Earlier scholarship has asserted the
similarity of method between Baeck and Harnack. I differ on this point. The difference
between Baeck and Harnack is not just in terms of content and their respective evaluations of
Judaism and Christianity. The real innovation in Baeck’s work is its possible methodological
implication: the claim that the essence of Judaism itself is an open-ended concept and not one
eternal and unchanging core. Rather, essence and outer appearance, kernel and husk, are
inseparable.
The final chapter examines the political theology involved in claims about the canon
of Christianity. Baeck’s most severe critique of Christianity, his essay “Romantic Religion,”
is read in light of Harnack’s work on Marcion and his call to de-canonize the Old Testament.
I contend that it is to this striking statement, read as dangerous theology with political
implications, to which Baeck responds. This is not just a challenge Baeck faced during the
Weimar republic. Drawing explicitly on Harnack, recent discussions about the Christian
canon show that this question is still present in public discourse. And so Leo Baeck’s voice
still needs to be heard, for his answers, but even more for his understanding of the questions
of the time.
26
Chapter 1: Apologetic Thinking
Apologetics on Trial
In Plato’s Apology of Socrates, Socrates shows insistent and unwavering commitment to
philosophical life in the face of a death-sentence. He relentlessly argues that his conversations
at the agora do not create impiety, the charge with which he was accused, and he finds no
guilt in his deeds even after being convicted. As a “penalty,” Socrates suggests that he should
be given free meals at the Prytaneum, an honor reserved only for the city dignitaries.1 At no
point does he express regret or show remorse. The “apology” in the title seems at a cursory
glance to contradict the content of the text; Socrates never “apologizes” in the common
understanding of the term, he does not admit a mistake or offer remorse.
Nowadays “apologetics” has fallen to a large extent into a state of disgrace. Think of
the pejorative tone of the sentence “stop being so apologetic.” The same denigrating
perception is true for discussions of apologetics as a philosophical and theological enterprise:
first, apologetics is considered a response to an attack from the outside, hence inauthentic;
second, apologetics is considered to be a misrepresentation of the adversary and, as such, not
only inaccurate, but also offensive; third, apologetics is selective in its use of materials, in
picking and choosing only what serves its arguments, it is thus seen as dishonest. Following
from these points the feeling emerges that apologetics is not sufficiently authentic or rigorous
and therefore unsystematic or incoherent, and at worst is a simplistic, uncritical way of
thinking.2
Originally, however, apology and apologetics did not share these negative
connotations. The Greek word apologia refers simply to an act of defending oneself against
an accusation, very often but not limited to a legal case, without necessarily entailing
recognition of guilt.3 Socrates’ words in his trial illustrate this idea: they are a defense by way
of providing an alternative narrative and a self-confident assertion in front of accusations;
they are giving an account of oneself. In this chapter, I suggest that the concept of apologia
1 Plato, The Apology of Socrates, 36d–e. 2 For a summary of critiques on the genre of apologetics, see Mark Edwards et al., “Apologetics in the Roman
World,” in Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, ed. Mark Edwards et al. (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 8–13. 3 See Cooper’s introduction to the Apology in Plato Complete Works, ed. John Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett,
1997), 17.
27
as a self-assertion grounded in philosophical and theological reflection can serve as a basis
for reevaluating Jewish thought.
Apologetics thus understood is a mode of thought that sheds light on specific
challenges with which a real or imagined minority group is confronted. It is a response in a
way that is both a self-exposition, an advancement of an alternative perspective, and self-
reflection that leads to new questions. One is faced with a challenge and is shaped by it: the
self, one’s sense of identity, is produced in the process of its relation to the other, in the need
to explain oneself. Because it is dealing with a specific challenge, apologetic thinking is
always occasional and embedded in this-worldly concerns, even when it points to the divine
or to absolutes as a source of authority. I term this process dialogical apologetics. It may
seem that the adjective is redundant: after all, if apologetics is a response, it can be argued
that by its definition it presupposes at least an attempt at a dialogue. By calling it dialogical, I
wish to point not only to the possibility of a more genuine encounter with the other, but also
to the fact that the process of apologetics occasions also a dialogue within the group that
needed to reply. In this, dialogical apologetics is different from another, perhaps more
common, understanding of apologetics that is not attuned to the other while simultaneously
claiming utter validity.4
This chapter focuses on a philosophical exposition of the concept of apologetics based
on Franz Rosenzweig’s essay “Apologetic Thinking” (1923) and Leo Baeck’s reply to it.
What are the aims of apologetics? What does it seek to achieve? Where does it fail? What are
the alternatives to apologetic thinking? These are the questions that stand at the heart of
Rosenzweig’s essay. I begin by presenting Rosenzweig’s argument about the merits and
shortcomings of apologetic thinking. The next section then analyzes Leo Baeck’s reply to
Rosenzweig, which highlights what is at stake in discussing apologetics. His brief remarks on
“Apologetic Thinking” call for an assessment of apologetics as a mode of thought, and of
Rosenzweig’s comments on it. Baeck emerges as a careful reader of Rosenzweig and a
thinker who challenges the borderlines between apologetics, polemics, and judging oneself.5
4 For an example, see the title of this Christian apologetic: Peter Kreeft and Ronald Tacelli, Handbook of
Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions (Downers Grove, Ill: IV Press, 1994); it is
also too often taken for granted that such apologetics are essentially Christian, cf. Douglas Groothuis, Christian
Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith (Downers Grove, Ill: IVP Academic, 2011), 20: “It is a
work of apologetics, the ancient and ongoing discipline of defending and advocating Christian theism.” 5 Some aspects of the intellectual relation between Baeck and Rosenzweig have been recognized although surely
the comparison is not exhausted yet. See Albert Friedlander, “Leo Baeck and Franz Rosenzweig,” in Der
28
The final section is dedicated to Rosenzweig’s reply to Baeck and to an evaluation of the
contribution of their exchange to a better understanding of apologetics as a mode of Jewish
thought.
Apologetic Thinking and Its Limits
To call Franz Rosenzweig’s “Apologetic Thinking” a book review is to say too much, and too
little. The essay presents itself as a reading and critique of Max Brod’s Paganism,
Christianity, Judaism (1921) and the second edition of Leo Baeck’s The Essence of Judaism
(1922). By its end, however, the reader gains only a glimpse of the content and structure of
the works.6 Brod and Baeck are only a pretext under which Rosenzweig offers sweeping
arguments about apologetic thought in general and the Jewish tradition in particular.7 That
“Apologetic Thinking” is a critique of Baeck and simultaneously a philosophical discussion
of apologetic thinking makes it a suitable starting point for my argument that Baeck’s work
can be read as part of an apologetic tradition and that this is by no means a derogatory term.
“Apologetic Thinking” is divided into four parts: the first is a presentation of the
theme of apologetic thinking in its relation to dogma and dogmatics and of the relation
between systematic and apologetic thinking. The second is dedicated to Brod’s book,
especially his characterization of Christianity and the role aggadah plays in it. The third is a
critique of Brod and Baeck’s apologetics and their relation to the Law. The last part discusses
the negative connotations associated with apologetic thinking and the reasons for them.
The essay begins with the claim that contrary to the common and often reiterated
opinion that Judaism has no dogmas, Judaism does not have dogmatics but it does have
Philosoph Franz Rosenzweig: Internationaler Kongress - Kassel 1986, ed. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik
(Freiburg: K. Alber, 1988), 239–50; Albert Friedlander, “Die messianische Dimension bei Franz Rosenzweig
und Leo Baeck,” in Aus Zweier Zeugen Mund: Festschrift für Pnina Navè Levinson und Nathan Peter Levinson,
ed. Julius H. Schoeps (Gerlingen: Bleicher Verlag, 1992), 167–76; Ernest Rubinstein, An Episode of Jewish
Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 29-120. 6 Solomon Goldberg, “An Occasional Thought after the System: Rosenzweig’s ‘Apologetic Thinking’
Revisited” (International Rosenzweig Congress, Toronto, 2012); Rosenzweig was more concerned with Brod
than with Baeck. In a diary entry from 5.6.1922, Rosenzweig writes that speaking about Brod and Baeck
together secures him from a confrontation with Brod. This fits the general tone of “Apologetic Thinking,” where
the harsher critique aims at Brod and might explain why his work is described in more detail. Franz
Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften (Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), II.791-2. 7 On the centrality of Rosenzweig’s essay in contemporary discussions of apologetics as a mode of thought, see
Yossef Schwartz, “Die Sprache der Apologetik,” in Religious Apologetics - Philosophical Argumentation, ed.
Yossef Schwartz and Volkhard Krech (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 3–8; Randi Rashkover, Freedom and
Law: A Jewish-Christian Apologetics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 204–10.
29
dogmas, i.e. there are truth-statements but not an explication of obligatory theological
doctrine. Rosenzweig refers to the source of the common opinion as “[i]t has often been said,
and even more often repeated,”8 but considering the German-Jewish context, Rosenzweig
probably had in mind Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem.9 The attempt to identify the source of
Rosenzweig’s claim is not mere pedantry. Since Jerusalem was written in a response to a
challenge by “the Searcher for Light and Truth,” it is and has been widely accepted as an
apologetic work that shows Mendelssohn’s need for self-justification in the face of a
challenge. When Rosenzweig begins with a discussion of dogma and dogmatics, he therefore
already participates in a long on-going apologetic conversation and is taking part in the
apologetic tradition, even if in order to reject some of its assertions.
Rosenzweig insists that that there is one dogma in Judaism, one prerequisite of Jewish
life and thought: the election of Israel.10 In defining election as a dogma, Rosenzweig is
participating in a specific manifestation of the debate provoked by Mendelssohn. The
question of dogma in Judaism was central to Leo Baeck’s dialogical apologetics in the first
edition of The Essence of Judaism (1905), where he argues that Judaism has no dogmas based
on a definition of dogma as a binding confessional form proclaimed by an authority that can
speak in the name of all of the people of Israel.11 Later, in reply to critiques of the second
edition of the Essence, Baeck distinguishes his position from Mendelssohn’s, arguing that
Judaism as a revealed religion has indeed doctrines, among them election, but these are not
an enforceable basis of the community, i.e. the community does not uses sanctions in order to
guarantee their belief, and for that reason they cannot be considered as dogmas.12
8 Rosenzweig, “Apologetic Thinking,” 2000, 95. 9 Mendelssohn famously distinguished between “eternal truths” and “divine legislation,” claiming that Judaism
is the latter and that, unlike Christianity, it is not based on “doctrinal opinion.” See Moses Mendelssohn,
Jerusalem or On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover: Published for Brandeis
University Press by University Press of New England, 1983), 89–90. 10 The importance of the notion of election for Rosenzweig is evident early in his writings, see Franz
Rosenzweig, “Atheistic Theology,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. Paul Franks and Michael
Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 15; on the centrality of the doctrine of election in Jewish thought, and
Rosenzweig’s important role in reviving it in modern times, see David Novak, The Election of Israel: The Idea
of the Chosen People (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 11 Leo Bäck, Werke 1: Das Wesen des Judentums, ed. Albert Friedlander and Bertold Klappert (Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 3 - all references to the 1905 edition are to the old spelling as “Bäck,”
references from the same volume to the fourth edition (identical to the second but with an added index and a
new preface) are to “Baeck.” 12 Leo Baeck, “Hat das überlieferte Judentum Dogmen?,” in Werke 4: Aus drei Jahrtausenden\Das Evangelium
als Urkunde der jüdischen Glaubensgeschichte (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 22–3.
30
Baeck and Rosenzweig agree that election is central to Jewish self-understanding,
even if the former would insist that it is a doctrine and not a dogma. Only Judah Halevi,
argues Rosenzweig, dared to present the election of Israel explicitly, otherwise it remains so
self-evident that it is not articulated.13 In “Apologetic Thinking,” Rosenzweig terms Jewish
existence, inseparable from election, a state of “monstrous actuality” [ungeheure Wirklichkeit
des jüdischen Seins].14 What is this “monstrous actuality”? And how does it relate to
Rosenzweig’s assertion in the Star of Redemption that the Jews are the eternal people?15
Prima facie, the two adjectives “eternal” and “actual” are in tension: how can the eternal be
actualized? How can something actual be made eternal? Hermann Cohen, in the field of
ethics, suggested a solution which Rosenzweig might have adopted: the ethical act is never
actual but always in the process of actualization, i.e. ethics is always future oriented. In this
way one can preserve a notion of the eternal unchanging idea (the Good) while creating space
for the ethical deed.16 It is possible to read Rosenzweig’s discussion of the Jewish people in
light of Cohen’s discussion of eternity, thereby stressing the temporal character of all
existence in Rosenzweig’s thought. The idea of “eternal people” so understood is not meant
to completely take the Jewish people out of history, but rather to lead them to actualization.17
13 The importance of Halevi for Rosenzweig is evident from a letter to his mother, in which he claims, probably
only a little tongue-in-cheek that his name should have been Judah ben Samuel, the name of “the great man
whose middle-sized reincarnation upon the road of ibbur [transmigration] I am: Judah ha-Levi”, see Franz.
Rosenzweig, Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, ed. Nahum Glatzer (New York: Schocken Books, 1961),
167; Dorit Orgad, “Rihal ve Rosenzweig - Ra’aionot Hofefim be-Mishnotehem,” Da’at 21 (1988): 115–28; I
will deal with Halevi and his thought in the next chapter. Admiration for Halevi has united Baeck and
Rosenzweig. Cf. Barbara E. Galli, Franz Rosenzweig and Jehuda Halevi: Translating, Translations, and
Translators (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1995), Baeck’s comments on xvii. 14 Rosenzweig contrasts this to Christianity, which according to him understands election only in a spiritual
way. See Rosenzweig, “Apologetic Thinking,” 96. 15 Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
2005), 317. 16 Cohen’s discussion was originally meant to explain how ethical action is possible in the world. Cf. Hermann
Cohen, Ethik des reinen Willens (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1904), 377–80; cf. Francesca Albertini, Verständnis
des Seins bei Hermann Cohen (Königshausen & Neumann, 2003), 146–7; Robert Gibbs, “Hermann Cohen’s
Messianism: The History of the Future,” in “Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums”: Tradition-
und Ursprungsdenken in Hermann Cohens Spätwerk, ed. Helmut. Holzhey et al. (New York: Georg Olms
Verlag, 2000), 331–49. 17 Robert Gibbs, Correlations in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 108:
“Eternity for Rosenzweig is not the reality that is out of time; rather, it is the intensive possibility of
completeness in each moment of time”; cf. Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and
German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Dana Hollander, Exemplarity and
Chosenness: Rosenzweig and Derrida on the Nation of Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008);
an alternative reading of Rosenzweig takes Jewish existence as being ahistorical and can be understood as part
of a broader attempt by Rosenzweig to rescue the Jewish people and its history from the dangers of historicism,
or at least to negotiate historicity with the aids of a meta-historical notion. For this option see Paul Mendes-
Flohr, “Franz Rosenzweig and the Crisis of Historicism,” in Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the
Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 311–37; David Myers shows that in
this Rosenzweig is part of a broader tradition in German-Jewish thought in the twentieth century, which is not
31
The notion of “monstrous actuality” would seem to support this interpretation. Randi
Rashkover explains “monstrous actuality” as the claim that “Judaism begins with real people,
experiencing actual historical events out of which emerges a set of impressions that shape or
constitute the basis of Jewish existence or Jewish peoplehood.”18 This is an important
understanding of actuality, one that is supported by the above discussion of the meaning of
the eternal people in the Star. Yet the question remains: what is “monstrous” about this
actuality? Actuality is monstrous precisely because Judaism begins with real people but
should also try and remain eternal in time. The eternity of the Jewish people and is both a
necessity and a formidable [ungeheur] risk, a requirement for the material existence of the
Jews, which simultaneously risks the existence of the Jews as eternal by exposing them to the
world. It is the attempt to actualize eternity that makes actuality monstrous.19
“Monstrous actuality” necessitates occasional, apologetic thinking, which is thinking
within Judaism, as opposed to thinking about Judaism:
One did not become a Jewish thinker in the undisturbed circle of Judaism. Here, thinking did not
become a thinking about Judaism, which was simply the most self-evident thing of all, more a being
than an “ism,” but rather it became a thinking within Judaism, a learning; thus ultimately not a
fundamental but rather an ornamental thinking.20
Thinking about Judaism is part of being a Jew. Thinking within Judaism means that the
external influences do not fundamentally shape the thought and behavior. Although they are
useful and consist in learning, they are but an addition, beautiful and desirable but not an
integral part. This distinction sounds counter-intuitive at first because we expect thinking
about something to come from the outside whereas thinking within a tradition can be more
easily identified with living that tradition. For Rosenzweig, however, this is not the case;
being and living as a Jew is precisely what protects one from external influences.
without its irony: it is an attempt to leap out of history that is rooted in many ways in the same historical context
from which these thinkers were trying to escape, see David Myers, Resisting History: Historicism and Its
Discontents in German-Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). 18 Rashkover, Freedom and Law, 206. 19 A Zionist version of this danger was expressed as “returning to history” by Gershom Scholem, who was
possibly influenced by Rosenzweig. Despite important differences between the two, see Scholem’s statement in:
Gershom Scholem, “The Messianic Idea in Judaism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on
Jewish Spirituality, trans. Michael Meyer (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 36: “Whether or not Jewish
history will be able to endure this entry into the concrete realm without perishing in the crisis of the Messianic
claim which has virtually been conjured up—that is the question which out of his great and dangerous past the
Jew of this age poses to his present and to his future.” 20 Rosenzweig, “Apologetic Thinking,” 98–9.
32
Apologetic thinking resides at the border of Judaism, which already presupposes the
other side of the border.21 The two challenges for apologetic thinking are connected to its
place on the border: first, it might treat one’s own religion in an abstract way while the
adversary is taken seriously; second, one might treat the other religion in an idealized manner
that makes a caricature of it.22 These dangers are present for Rosenzweig in some Jewish
characterizations of Christianity, for example those by Baeck and Brod. They treat
Christianity intentionally in a partial way even though “one could not do a greater injustice
than to present it in terms of its own catechism.”23 The principle of “theoretical neighborly
love,” as Rosenzweig calls it, requires depicting the other in a way that she can still recognize
herself and can still be and live as herself. This means that in order to understand the spirit of
the other, one “must not abstract it from the body that belongs to it.”24 The other should be
understood in a holistic fashion.
The second danger of apologetics is making universal one’s particular position.
Baeck, like Brod, falls into this pitfall as well. Not only does he misrepresent Christianity, he
also universalizes Judaism: “Baeck sees, as little as Brod, that the critical point lies here,
where the essence of Judaism recognized by him is more essence of Judaism than essence of
Judaism.”25 According to Rosenzweig, Baeck is concerned with the universal essence of
things and not with the aspect that makes these things that maintain the particularity of
Judaism. In chapter three, I contend that Rosenzweig’s statement is based on a misconception
of what Baeck understands as essence. Despite his critique, Rosenzweig also recognizes
complexity in Baeck’s position.26
The term apologia in Greek comes, as mentioned, from the legal vocabulary.
Rosenzweig plays on this etymology, writing that like lawyers, apologetics has bad reputation
because lying—about and to themselves and the other—is considered an integral part of the
profession. Yet like defending someone in court, apologetics has the potential to be a noble
enterprise:
21 Ibid., 99. 22 Cf. Rashkover, Freedom and Law, 209; Gibbs, Correlations, 120–21. 23 Rosenzweig, “Apologetic Thinking,” 100. 24 Ibid., 101. 25 Ibid., 107. 26 Although he writes that they are “nearby” and “by the way”, Rosenzweig also notes that Baeck has some
“very fine things” to say about the Law and that he offers profound comments about the Jewish people and
history (Ibid.).
33
It [apologetic thinking] would then embellish nothing, still less evade a vulnerable point, but would
rather make precisely the most endangered points the basis of the defense. In a word: it would defend
the whole, not this or that particular. It would not at all be a defense in the usual sense, but rather a
candid exposition, yet not of some cause, but rather of one’s own [self].27
This exposition of one’s self echoes the Socratic self-assertion in his trial. It is an apologetic
thinking that does not apologize. Apologetics can be a valuable mode of thought only if it is
honest, i.e. done without misrepresenting the other and with an exposition of one’s self that
should include not only what can be presented as universal, but exactly the particular aspects
that separate this “I” or “we” from the others. Both sides of the dialogue should be taken
seriously as a whole, with the entire complexity of their tradition and life. A presentation of
the whole of Judaism, for example, would mean that it is not enough to recognize the
commandment to love thy neighbor (Lev. 19:19), which can all-too-readily be made
universal, but also the commandment to eradicate the memory of Amalek (Deut. 25: 17-19), a
particular commandment that is highly problematic for modern sensibilities.28 Taking the
other and oneself honestly as a whole means that not only ideas should be taken into account,
but also the praxis of living as a believer.
Rosenzweig’s remark that one should make “the most endangered points the basis of
the defense” could be an allusion to Paul’s statement that he will boast only of his weakness
(2. Corinthians 12:5).29 What can this weakness be? One option is the notion of election,
which, as we have seen, is of central importance to Rosenzweig. It would be the weakest
because, especially in the modern world, it is seen as an unwarranted Jewish sense of
superiority contrary to historical evidence. Another interrelated option is that of the Law.
Prior to the statement just cited, Rosenzweig asserts that the apologetic stance of Brod and
Baeck must “break down before the problem of the Law,” i.e. that they fail to understand its
particularity. In this, he identifies a main point of contention in Jewish apologetics throughout
history. The Law and election are both seen as separating Jews from non-Jews, and have
27 Ibid. 28 On the problems that such a commandment raises, see Ofri Ilany, “From Divine Commandment to Political
Act: The Eighteenth-Century Polemic on the Extermination of the Canaanites,” Journal of the History of Ideas
73, no. 3 (2012): 437–61; Dan Avnon, “Is There a ‘Jewish’ Morality? Amalek as a Touchstone: Review of
Michael Walzer (Ed.), Law, Politics, and Morality in Judaism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006,” in
Studies in Contemporary Jewry: The Protestant-Jewish Conundrum, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Ezra
Mendelsohn, vol. 24 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 206–15. 29 I thank Gesine Palmer for drawing my attention to this possible allusion
34
therefore been at the heart of Jewish apologetics. The need to justify them, instead of just
dismissing these notions, can be seen as well as a “weakness” to boast about.
The Blurring of the Border
3.1 “What Is Not Apologia?”
Rosenzweig suggests that there is an alternative method of apologetics, one that would
“defend the whole,” but he does not elaborate what such apologetics would look like. A clue
for his position is found earlier in the essay, where he contrasts apologetic thinking with the
more enduring systematic thinking. This distinction would seem to parallel Rosenzweig’s
distinction between Christian and Jewish thought: the former is systematic and epitomized by
Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae whereas the latter is characterized by Maimonides’ work.
Rosenzweig understands the Mishneh Torah not as a systematic work of philosophy but of
Law and the Guide for the Perplexed, although philosophical, can be understood only when
one realizes that its connecting threads are apologetic.30 Apologetic thinking is legitimate,
needed and its occasional character is not without appeal:
[T]his thinking has what systematic thinking cannot have so easily: the fascination—and the
truthfulness—of thought reacting to the occasion; but therefore a limit is also set for it which only
systematic thinking removes: exactly the limit of the occasional; only systematic thinking determines
the circle of its objects itself; apologetic thinking remains dependent upon the cause, the adversary.31
30 Christianity emerges as the negative folio in Rosenzweig’s thought: it needs dogmatics as a uniting factor
because it is not rotted by other aspects and is in constant need to reach out to the world. Judaism is the
opposite, it has no need to expand in a uniting fashion since it is “already there.” Judaism therefore does not
require dogmatics but only deeds. On the relation between the two see Leora Batnitzky, “Dialogue as Judgment,
Not Mutual Affirmation: A New Look at Franz Rosenzweig’s Dialogical Philosophy,” The Journal of Religion
79, no. 4 (1999): 523–44. 31Rosenzweig, “Apologetic Thinking,” 98. The claim that apologetic thinking is identified with Judaism and
systematic thinking with Christianity is further supported in the next paragraph: “In its dependence upon the
adversary, “Jewish thinking remains apologetic thinking…All reservations about apologetics has not been able
to prevent the fact that the legitimate mode of thinking itself remained apologetic.” (ibid.) It is possible that
Rosenzweig thinks that systematic thinking is a more effective defense from the challenge of exposure to
external influences. This will be in line with Benjamin Pollock’s claim that in The Star of Redemption
Rosenzweig attempts to establish a philosophical system, in line with the tradition of German idealism. In
Pollock’s reading, Rosenzweig attempts—and to a large extent succeeds, as long as we accept that the system is
open-ended until redemption—to build a system that allows knowledge of the All, i.e. that explains both unity
and plurality within this unity (Benjamin Pollock, Franz Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy
[New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009]). That the Star is a complete philosophical system in which the
Jewish people are given a central place means that the Jewish people qua eternal people cannot be called into
question. It is foundational to the system. The conclusion is that Rosenzweig’s system is the perfect apologetics,
a defense after which no further defense is needed; for a reading of “Apologetic Thinking” in light of Pollock’s
work, see also Goldberg, “An Occasional Thought after the System.”
35
Years later, Paul Tillich noted a similar problem. In the introduction to his systematic
theology, he notes a valid reason for distrusting apologetics: “In order to answer a question,
one must have something in common with the person who asks it. Apologetics presupposes
common ground, however vague it may be.”32
Rosenzweig, like the kerygmatic theologians with whom Tillich is in conversation, is
afraid of the loss of authenticity, of giving the particular in favor of shared terms with the
adversary. After describing what he seems to understand as good practice of apologetics—
defending the whole via a candid exposition of one’s self—Rosenzweig comments that the
apologist cannot cross a certain barrier and is always locked in the recognition of one’s own
position as universal:
…although he means himself, he speaks of the human being, of all [human beings]. And thus his self,
the binding of the elements of humankind into the bundle that he himself is, remains a mystery to him.
Apologetic thinking does not cross this barrier. He is denied the ultimate strength of knowing as he is
spared the ultimate suffering of knowing. For ultimate knowing no longer defends, ultimate knowing
adjudicates [letztes Erkennen richtet].33
This ending leaves the reader with more questions than answers: what is the difference
between ultimate and penultimate knowing? Why is apologetic thinking unable cross the
barrier to “ultimate knowing”? Why is “ultimate knowing” also suffering? On whom does
ultimate knowing pass judgment? These are questions for which Rosenzweig provides no
clear answer.
The difficulties in interpreting the above citation stem from Rosenzweig’s various
statements on apologetics. He critiques certain forms of apologetics while implying that
apologetics has the potential of being a noble and important undertaking. One way to
interpret the closing statement of the essay, therefore, is to create a distinction between “bad
apologetics” and “good apologetics” and to claim that only the former, of which Baeck and
Brod are part, has no access to “ultimate knowledge.”34 Apologetic thinking done properly
32 Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 6. 33 Rosenzweig, “Apologetic Thinking,” 108. 34 At one point (ibid., 104) Rosenzweig could be read as implying otherwise. When critiquing Brod’s discussion
of the Law as nationalistic and “on the surface,” Rosenzweig notes that the dichotomies Brod creates collapse in
front of this problem and that “where what he [Brod] pronounces in the name of his and our Judaism is true only
in an ultimate sense, but not in a penultimate sense.” “Ultimate sense,” however, should not be equated with
“ultimate knowing.” The description of Brod’s work seems to suggest that the “ultimate sense” here is the sense
Brod makes of Judaism, i.e. the universal “ultimate” sense there by forgetting the “penultimate” particular. As
we have seen above, this is one of the dangers faced by apologetic thinking.
36
forces the thinker to recognize her epistemic limits. In the face of the encounter with
another’s truth-claim, one recognizes that the entire truth can be seen only from God’s
perspective. The maximum available to the human being is a share in this truth. In other
words, good apologetics is not about defending one’s position at all costs, but about
recognizing the limits of such a defense.35 Michael Zank suggests a different interpretation:
apologetics, as an attempt to define the essence of one’s religion, is bound to fail because it
universalizes the particular. But it is precisely in this failure of apologetics that it allows for
the discovery of the specific and unique, in the Jewish case the election of Israel.36
It might come as a surprise that Baeck readily admits to Rosenzweig that his intention
was to misrepresent Christianity, or rather, not to describe historical Christianity but “pure
Pauline” Christianity as separate from its historical roots in Judaism.37 Although Baeck
mentions that “Romantic Religion” is conceived as one part in a larger work, hence only a
partial description, he is willing to adopt an apologetic stance even at the price of what
Rosenzweig, and Baeck himself, would consider misrepresenting the other.38 This position is
elaborated in a letter from Baeck to Rosenzweig written shortly after “Apologetic Thinking”
was published:
What is in principle not apologia? Is it not in fact all the Platonic dialogues, which search for the
“essence” of the Socratic philosophy? And the line continues on to Kant and Hegel. “The ends of our
consciousness”, to speak with Dilthey, of the historical reality and [the ends of our consciousness] of
worthiness and goal are intertwined with one another. What is here not apologia? And where is the
border! Does not, in the end, only the personal strength gives the determination of the border! It seems
to me that this is also what your last sentence meant. Where is the border also between defending and
judging as well as between accusing and judging, and also, finally, between accusing and defending?39
Baeck challenges the notion that apologetics can be so easily separated from polemics,
because sometimes—as the old military wisdom goes—the best defense is offense. This can
explain why Baeck justifies his mischaracterization of Christianity in the earlier letter. Yet
this does not tell the entire story. Baeck sees in the history of philosophy itself an apologetic
35 Although not stated this way, this is a possible understanding of Gesine Palmer, “‘Letztes Erkennen richtet’:
Rosenzweigs Begriff von Erkenntnis im Stern und in Apologetisches Denken” (presented at the International
Rosenzweig Society, Jerusalem, 2006). 36 Michael Zank, “Vom Innersten, Äußersten und Anderen: Annäherungen an Baeck, Harnack und die Frage
nach dem Wesen,” in Religious Apologetics - Philosophical Argumentation, ed. Yossef Schwartz and Volkhard
Krech (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 32–3. 37 I return to this claim in the fourth chapter, as it central for the interpretation of Baeck’s anti-Marcionite stance. 38 Letter from Baeck to Rosenzweig dated 8th March, 1923. In Leo Baeck, Werke 6: Briefe, Reden, Aufsätze, ed.
Michael Meyer (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 578–9. 39 Letter from Baeck to Rosenzweig dated 5th August, 1923. In ibid., 581- emphasis added.
37
move. Thinking as the defining of the self in relation to others and the world is apologetic.
Baeck and Rosenzweig agree that apologetics is concerned with the representation of oneself
and of the other. They would also agree, I believe, that an ethical dimension is involved: one
should try and avoid misrepresenting the other. They differ with regard to the how to achieve
this goal and what would be considered a misrepresentation: Presenting the other in an
idealized form does not constitute misrepresentation for Baeck, on the contrary it exposes a
facet otherwise hidden.
Baeck’s letter challenges the distinction thinking about\thinking within. Although he
does not develop this point, I think there are several arguments in support of his claim. First,
the borderline between the two is helpful only up to a certain point. Where does a debate over
halakhic principles, e.g. Nahmanides’ critique of Maimonides, as different from debate over
practical halakhic decisions, fit in this dichotomy? Is it “thinking within” or “thinking
about”? Today we would probably call the inquiry of such themes “philosophy of halakha”
but for Rosenzweig this would be an oxymoron.40 Secondly, delineating a borderline between
internal and external is conditioned upon maintaining a dichotomy between Jewish life and
the external challenge of philosophy. Although this dichotomy between Jerusalem and
Athens, between Hebrew and Greek, was common in Rosenzweig’s time, it is itself a
construction that is not inherent to Judaism.41 There is a certain irony in the fact that
Rosenzweig’s portrayal and partial rejection of apologetic thinking is based on an external
category. Thirdly, it is Rosenzweig himself that provides us with the clue of just how
problematic the distinction thinking about\thinking within is, when Rosenzweig writes that
the apologist is always “torn at the border of Judaism” and her thought is determined by the
power that drew her to this border to begin with.42 The apologist is always on the border, but
where exactly is this border, and who can determine if the apologist has been “carried over”
this threshold? Rosenzweig seems to assume a fixed and unchanging border while
recognizing the liminality involved in the process of apologetics itself.43 Finally, if all
40 On this debate as a “philosophy of halakha”, see Moshe Halbertal, ʻAl Derekh ha-Emet: Ha-Ramban vi-
Yetsiratah shel Masoret (Jerusalem: Hartman Institute, 2006), 66. 41 For a deconstruction of the categories “Greek” and “Hebrew” and an emphasis on the way they were
structured in modernity, see Miriam Leonard, Socrates and the Jews (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012);
and Willi Goetschel, The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013). 42 Rosenzweig, “Apologetic Thinking,” 2000, 99. 43 Being “torn at the border” might also allude to Rosenzweig’s near-conversion to Christianity. In a recent
work, Benjamin Pollock challenged the common narrative that Rosenzweig moved from a kind of lackadaisical
notion of Judaism to his embracement of the religion following his Leipzig night-conversation. Rather, Pollock
38
thinking is done in the world, by embedded subjects, and apologetics is occasional, then it is
necessary for the apologist to engage the world and the others inhabiting it in numerous,
overlapping ways. In other words, although one can draw a theoretical distinction between
polemics as misrepresenting the other and apologetics as a candid exposition of one’s self,
this distinction does not hold in face of an actual accusation from the other and the response
to them.
3.2 The Sword of Polemics and the Shield of Apologetics
The theoretical point made by Baeck regarding the overlap between apologetics and polemics
is contested in scholarship. In Apologetics in the Roman Empire, the editors suggest a broad
understanding of the term apologetics as a defense “of a religion against actual or perceived
opponents” but they insist on distinguishing apologetics from polemics “which need not
assume any previous attack by the opponent” and from “merely epideictic or occasional
orations.”44 The suggestion that the difference between apologetics and polemics is the
initiative does not take into account seriously enough the idea of “perceived opponents” as
part of apologetics, i.e. what seems as an attack without provocation, as polemics, can
simultaneously be apologetics against an imagined foe. Furthermore, limiting apologetics to
direct discussions ignore the many ways in which apologetics is conducted exactly by
allusions and references.45 I believe Baeck’s question is valid here as well: where is the
border between accusing and defending and who determines it?
Mortiz Friedländer (1842-1919) makes a similar point in History of Jewish
Apologetics as a Prehistory of Christianity (1903):
It is impossible to draw fixed, immoveable borders between the concepts of apologetics and polemics.
In reality, a perpetual encroachment occurs, from the one field to the other. A defense that wants
claims that Rosenzweig held a religious position, namely he was a Marcionite. See Benjamin Pollock, “On the
Road to Marcionism: Franz Rosenzweig’s Early Theology,” Jewish Quarterly Review 102, no. 2 (2012): 224–
55. Whether we read this paragraph in “Apologetic Thinking” from the perspective of assimilation or from
Marcionism, if it is biographical, it is admittance that his thought is apologetic to the extent that this experience
defines the “depth horizon” of his gaze. 44 Edwards et al., “Apologetics in the Roman World,” 1. 45 An example of this kind of hidden polemic, albeit from a period later than that dealt with by Edward et al., is
Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007) and Israel Yuval’s ground-
breaking research on medieval Jewry. See Israel Jacob Yuval, Shene Goyim be-Vitnekh: Yehudim ve-Notsrim,
Dimuyim Hadadiyim (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2000).
39
nothing more than a momentary clearance of the attack cannot be accompanied by a long-term
success.46
Apologetics is inseparable from polemics according to Friedländer: if it is only ad hoc, it does
not properly defend, because an effective defense is future-oriented and should be able to
fend off further threats. In order to engage these challenges, one needs also to examine the
other’s opinions and be ready to find faults in them.
Friedländer goes on to describe this process as a physical struggle: apologetics is the
shield, polemics the sword. One needs both to win the battle. This metaphor is derived from
the Greek etymology of polemics: fighting or waging a war.47 Although Baeck in his letter to
Rosenzweig sticks to the legal language based on the etymology of apologia, in his first
response to Harnack’s The Essence of Christianity, titled “Harnack’s Lectures on the Essence
of Christianity” (1901), he turns to a metaphor similar to that of Friedländer. Jewish theology
could very much use an honest Christian apologetics, writes Baeck, but “the weapon and
shield of the apologist must be pure and impeccable.”48 Harnack’s, argues Baeck, are not:
Harnack pretends to present objective history when in fact he provides a distorted picture,
both of Judaism and of Christianity.
Rosenzweig provides what seemed to be a clear definition of the bad practice of
apologetics: misrepresenting the other and forgetting one’s own particularity. The former
seems to be a barrier that the apologist cannot avoid. Baeck’s response exposes the limit, and
to a certain extent the artificiality, of such a position. Although, as is evident from his critique
of Harnack, Baeck believes that one should try and avoid misrepresenting the other, a candid
exposition of one’s self is always done vis-à-vis the relation to the other, which can also
appear as a critique. What Rosenzweig describes as “ultimate knowing” inaccessible through
apologetics appears to be part and parcel of the process of apologetic thinking itself. In his
letter, Baeck defies the borders set by Rosenzweig not by claiming that his work is not
46 Moritz Friedlander, Geschichte der judischen Apologetik als Vorgeschichte des Christentums: Eine
historisch-kritische Darstellung der Propaganda und Apologie im Alten Testament und in der hellenistischen
Diaspora (Amsterdam: Philo Press, 1973), 1; cf. Aryeh Kasher, “Polemic and Apologetic Methods of Writing in
Josephus’ Contra Apionem,” in Josephus’ Contra Apionem: Studies in Its Character and Context with a Latin
Concordance to the Portion Missing in Greek, ed. Louis H. Feldman and John R. Levison (Leiden: Brill, 1996),
143: “We shall soon see that the line I have drawn between these methods [apologetics and polemics] is rather
artificial and is, indeed, drawn for reasons of convenience only, as the two were actually interwoven”. 47 Kasher, “Polemic and Apologetic Methods of Writing in Josephus’ Contra Apionem,” 143–4. 48 Leo Bäck, “Harnacks Vorlesungen über das Wesen des Christentums,” Monatschrift für Geschichte und
Wissenschaft des Judentums 45 (1901): 120.
40
apologetic, but by emphasizing that apologetics is the continuing negotiation of the boundary
between oneself and the other.
3.3 Judging Oneself and Judging the Other
In response to Baeck’s challenge, Rosenzweig maintains the distinction between judging and
defending, claiming that the former is the extreme case whereas the latter is the mundane:
Ul’ewai shte’he biati keyeziati – one can say with Rav by this judgment.49 Then it becomes “judging
over oneself” [“Richten über sich selbst”[. So that in this extreme case actually, but with weeping and
gnashing of teeth [Heulen und Zähneklappern], happens, what the epistemological blockhead holds for
normal: it becomes “known without premises.” That is therefore something very rare and should be
rare. […] The apologetic attitude is much more normal; it only continues in the scientific region a
mode of the routine thinking, whereby the accounting for oneself [Sichselbstberichten] can have
nothing routine, but must remain something of days of prayer and repentance. Because plain knowing
is not an „end in itself,“ but only one of the human activities. This is something that must have been
placed after the last word of my little essay and what you […] actually have read.50
Here Rosenzweig adds an important explanation regarding “ultimate knowing”: it is a rare
situation of accounting for oneself, and it is this accounting for oneself that is painful.
Judgment of oneself occurs outside the routine everyday thinking, in days of prayer and
repentance.
In order to understand “ultimate knowing” and its relation to prayer and repentance,
an excursus into Rosenzweig’s liturgical theory is needed. In the Star, Rosenzweig devotes a
significant portion of the third part to a discussion of liturgy and ritual, which is the organon
by which he understands redemption in a similar way to how mathematics functioned in the
first part and grammar in the second.51 Whereas God loves the individual human being, the
human being returns love to God by loving her neighbor—Rosenzweig’s interpretation of
Lev. 19:18 and its ending “I am HE”—thus creating a community, it is love that transforms
the other from “she” to “you” and from this encounter with the “you,” a “we” is convoked.52
49 Rosenzweig refers here to B. Sanhedrin 7b, which in the standard Vilna edition reads: “were that my entrance
be the same as my departure” [ולואי שתהא ביאה כיציאה]. Note that Rosenzweig slightly amends the citation. I
return to this point shortly. 50 Letter from Rosenzweig to Baeck dated 11th August, 1923. In Franz Rosenzweig, Briefe und Tagebücher,
II.918–9. 51 Rosenzweig, Star, 312. 52 This summary of the move from Revelation to Redemption in the second part of the Star hardly does justice
to the complexity of its argument and the logic of love that Rosenzweig develops. Since my concern here is not
with the Star but with the notion of apologetics, it will have to do. Cf. Gibbs, Correlations, 107: “The move
from the discussion of revelation, with its lovers’ dialogue, to redemption, where we address a neighbor
41
For Rosenzweig proper prayer—as opposed to untimely prayer that claims to “hurry the
Kingdom” or instrumental prayer to have some wish fulfilled—belongs to the “we” and never
only to the individual.53 Proper communal prayer is the means of showing eternity in time
precisely because it does not attempt to force the future redemption but only anticipates it.54
Prayer shows in the present the possibility of a better future because it grounded in God-
human love-relation, as well as in the natural world (lunar and solar movements). In this
connection of the two spheres, prayer shows the process of redemption as a human-world
relation that is connected to human-God relation.
This claim can be understood in light of Rosenzweig’s description of the Jewish
calendar: there is a constant cycle between kodesh and hol, between the work-day and the
Shabbat, which encapsulates in itself once again both the cyclical nature of time (every
seventh day is a Shabbat) as well as its linear character (every Shabbat throughout the year a
different portion is read from the Torah).55 In a similar fashion, the Jewish holidays,
especially the pilgrim- festivals of Passover, Shavuot and Sukkot, symbolize in the year the
cyclical and linear form, the process of creation, revelation and the promise of redemption,
which is also present in the Shabbat liturgy.
Rosenzweig’s spatial metaphor of the liturgical circle highlights a different circle, one
present in “Apologetic Thinking.”56 As we have seen, Rosenzweig argues that Jewish
apologetic thinking is always on the border, never in the “undisturbed circle of Judaism.”
Furthermore, the difference between apologetic and systematic thinking is that only the latter
“determines the circle of its objects itself.”57 The metaphor of the circle alludes to what the
non-apologetic mode of thought might be, or rather, what “good apologetics” can be: it is the
duplication of the liturgical life cycle and the participation in the “we” that is the community.
Jews qua eternal people can face the “monstrous actuality” by living as Jews. This is only an
cohortatively to convoke a community, is a broadening of the circle of love, required by the very structure of
love. Love is not fulfilled on the honeymoon.” 53 Rosenzweig, Star, 283–5. 54 Ibid., 235. 55 Ibid., 329; cf. Steven Kepnes, Jewish Liturgical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 109:
“The weekly cycle of Shabbat then becomes the smallest wheel within the wheels of time that sets the whole
temporal movement toward redemption and eternity in motion.” 56 I am indebted to Robert Gibbs in recognizing the importance of spatial configurations, see Robert Gibbs,
“Lines, Circles, Points: Messianic Epistemology in Cohen, Rosenzweig, and Benjamin,” in Toward the
Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, ed. Peter Schäfer and Mark R. Cohen (Leiden:
Brill, 1998), 365–84. 57 Rosenzweig, “Apologetic Thinking,” 98.
42
apparent tautology; it is in fact a task. Jewish life as expressed and ordered in liturgy—as
well as in generational belonging through blood, in the Law, in being people and not a nation,
and in having a sacred language that is not spoken—is the defense on the whole that is “not at
all a defense in the usual sense, but rather a candid exposition.”58
I contend this is the “ultimate knowing” Rosenzweig claims for the extreme and very
rare case, it is the knowledge gained through prayer and repentance. The description in the
Star of the Days of Awe resembles in its language Rosenzweig’s explanation to Baeck:
The judgment that is otherwise set into the end of times here is placed immediately into the present
moment. It therefore cannot be the world that is judged […] Rather, the judgment judges over the
individual. Every individual’s destiny is determined according to his actions.59
The individual is directly judged, but in this judgment of the individual who stands before
God, the individual says “we have sinned.” It is a communal prayer that is also particular and
universal. In her singularity as an individual, the Jew stands as part of the Jewish community,
which stands for every individual and human being. The most striking difference between
Rosenzweig’s reply to Baeck and the above description of Yom Kippur is the identity of the
judge: whereas in Yom Kippur it is God, Rosenzweig implies in the letter to Baeck that it is
self-judgment and accounting for oneself which allows for this “ultimate knowledge.” Yet the
attribution of this kind of self-judgment to “days of prayer and repentance” suggests that the
individual can do so only when she stands in front of God.
Further support for the claim that the individual judgment is always before God is
given by the expression Rosenzweig chooses to describe the suffering involved in ultimate
knowledge, the “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” This is an allusion to Matthew 8:12 (and
parallels). This suffering here is what is promised to those who reject the word of God and
are therefore cast into the darkness. Why is this knowledge accompanied by suffering? I
contend that it is because it offers a glimpse—perhaps only fleeting but a glimpse
nonetheless—of the divine, and with it of one’s own finitude, of death as manifested in the
face of God. The glimpse of the divine as “ultimate knowing,” however, suggests that it is not
58 Ibid., 107; on the other factors that Rosenzweig enumerates see Rosenzweig, Star, 317–24. 59 Rosenzweig, Star, 344.
43
something embraced with silence and light, as Zachary Braiterman has argued, but with the
visceral reaction of “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”60
The allusion to Rav at the beginning of Rosenzweig’s reply to Baeck shows that the
concern with the suffering of oneself is intimately connected with the suffering of the other.
“Ul’ewai shte’he biati keyeziati,” would that my entrance be the same as my departure.
Rosenzweig slightly misquotes the sentence. In the Talmud, Rav says ולואי תהא ביאה כיציאה,
“would that the entrance be the same as the departure,” but Rosenzweig renders it in the first
person because he is concerned with self-judgment. That the ultimate knowing is life-
threatening is evident already in the first part of Rav’s saying, not quoted by Rosenzweig:
“this man is going to death of his own will” (B. Sanhedrin 7b). Rashi explains that Rav left
his home to the court without sin, and prayed not to make erroneous judgment. Rav wanted to
come back home the way he left it – without sin. Rosenzweig is thus correct to point out that
Rav is self-judgmental, but fails to notice that he does so in his capacity as a judge, i.e. while
passing judgment on others. On Yom Kippur, in front of the judgment of God, the “I” prays
as part of a “We” and as standing for all of humanity; in a similar fashion, when Rav
practices self-judgment it is connected to the judgment of others and the need to account for
his own judgment in front of God. The erroneous judgment of the other can lead to suffering,
and in turn this will be reflected in God’s judgment of the judge. The suffering of the other is
connected to our suffering.61
The Limits of Dialogue
The correspondence between Baeck and Rosenzweig clarifies “Apologetic Thinking”: the
good practice of Jewish apologetics, which avoids the pitfalls of universalizing one’s position
or caricaturizing the adversary, is according to Rosenzweig the leading of Jewish life, which
60 Zachary Braiterman argues that the theme of death is central to the Star, indeed to Rosenzweig’s oeuvre as a
whole, and that Rosenzweig embraces death and is enamored with it, see Zachary Braiterman, The Shape of
Revelation: Aesthetics and Modern Jewish Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 125; cf. Elliot
R. Wolfson, “Facing the Effaced: Mystical Eschatology and the Idealistic Orientation in the Thought of Franz
Rosenzweig,” Zeitschrift für neuere Theologiegeschichte 4 (1997): 39–81. 61 Martin Kavka claims that Rosenzweig’s account of suffering is ethically lacking because the soul does not
speak to another soul and that the choir drowns the voice of the sufferer. See Martin Kavka, Jewish Messianism
and the History of Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chp. 4. I find this critique, which
can be framed as a Levinasian objection to Rosenzweig, quite convincing. If we read Rosenzweig as suggesting
that suffering is shared we might ground Rosenzweig’s ethics in a more compelling way, even if not as
imperative as in the case of Levinas. To be clear, I do not suggest that Rosenzweig offers a utilitarian account of
fear of punishment, i.e. that I should alleviate the suffering of the other so that I would not suffer. Rather, what
he implies is that the suffering I cause to the other is also my suffering because “he is like you” (Lev. 19:18).
44
in turn allows “ultimate knowing,” a possible glimpse of God and one’s own temporality.
Rosenzweig’s response to Baeck is coherent with his arguments both in the Star and in
“Apologetic Thinking.” It shows the difference between improper apologetics and living as a
Jew, the proper apologetics according to Rosenzweig.
Baeck would agree with Rosenzweig regarding the importance of Jewish existence
and of Jewish life, expressed in liturgy, as the best apologia, a point he reiterated throughout
his life. Yet his objections regarding Rosenzweig’s critique of apologetic thinking still hold.
Rosenzweig’s reference to Rav exposes in fact the limits of his account of apologetics by
recalling Baeck’s question: if Rav is self-judging while judging others, where is the border,
this time between judging as a unique “ultimate knowing” mode and defending, or for that
matter accusing? If Rosenzweig’s attempt to present “ultimate knowing” as judging already
admits the possibility that it is judgment of another as well as of oneself, then it is open to the
exteriority of a human other. What then, differentiates it from occasional apologetic thinking?
The border is indeed blurred.
In addition, Rosenzweig neglects the development of Jewish praxis itself. Like any
other—and considering its minority position throughout history, perhaps more than others—
religion, culture, or people, Jewish praxis is situated in specific historical circumstances. Is it
possible to make a “defense of the whole” as Rosenzweig requires, while isolating Jewish life
and prayer from their historicity? Rosenzweig thinks that it is. The “monstrous actuality” of
Judaism defies, however, a clear border between apologetic thought and lived practice.
Jewish prayers, as we have seen a crucial aspect of Rosenzweig’s thought, were written and
composed at certain circumstances and went through numerous changes. Even if
Rosenzweig, based on an anti-historicist tendency in his thought, could have attempted to
ignore, minimize or outright reject the results of studies as Leopold Zunz’s The Sermons of
the Jews (1832) and Ismar Elbogen’s The Jewish Prayer in Its Historical Development
(1913) at least it could have been expected that he reflect on the fact that the Talmud presents
debates concerning certain prayers (B. Berakhot 28b).62
62 Leopold Zunz, Die gottesdienstliche Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt: Ein Beitrag zur
Alterthumskunde und biblischen Kritic zur Literatur- und Religionsgeschichte (Berlin: L. Lamm, 1919); Ismar
Elbogen, Der jüdische Gottesdienst in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung. (Leipzig: G. Fock, 1913).
45
The tension in Rosenzweig’s thought regarding the Jews as “eternal people” that is at
the same time in history forces an untenable dichotomy between Jewish life as a self-
exposition and Jewish philosophical thought qua apologetics, between thinking about and
thinking within. Baeck’s position exposes the limits of such an account: defending, accusing
and judging are intertwined and not so easily distinct as Rosenzweig seems to have them. For
Baeck this does not pose a real problem because in his view the Jewish people are immersed
in history.63
Although we should heed to Rosenzweig’s warning about the dangers of apologetics,
its occasional character does not necessarily makes it limited, for every thought is in one way
or another occasional. This is the main thrust of Baeck’s reply. The important point about
apologetics is not its distinctiveness from accusing or judging—these borders are fluid—but
rather the ways it expresses the inner-being and the personal strength of the apologist. Such
expression of oneself, a “candid exposition of one’s own self,” to speak again with
Rosenzweig, is impossible in a vacuum: it already presupposes the other and her possible
influence. Apologetics is thus a call that needs to be answered, not so much for the accuser’s
sake, but because of the apologist’s need for self-reflection. As part of a commentary on
Levinas, Robert Gibbs makes a similar suggestion regarding apology:
Because I am vulnerable to the other person’s teaching, I respond by apology, explaining myself. The
performance of apology is double: affirming myself and inclining myself before the other person. […]
Called to speak, I respond. I speak as I, but to another, to one who can criticize me.64
There is a risk for oneself in engaging in an apology or apologetics. The demand of the other
in our context, however, is not the ethical demand of the Levinasian face. On the contrary, it
is often a threat to hurt the I: “your religion is not worthy,” “your people are liars,” “you can
choose between conversion and death,” “God has deserted you and elected me” – all these are
a different kind of demand made by the other that requires response and thats demand an
apology as a self-assertion while listening to the other. In our case, these are the demands of
the Christian majority upon the Jewish minority.
63 I discuss this point in greater detail in the third chapter. For the moment, see Baeck, Wesen des Juentums, 3,
11. 64 Robert Gibbs, Why Ethics? Signs of Responsibilities (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 45; the
passage Gibbs comments on is in Levinas is in Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on
Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 40.
46
The focus so far has been on the apologist’s perspective. The apologist is faced with a
challenge, a question, and called to respond. The response is a judgment of the other, but also
on oneself. This process of being called, questioning back, judging the other, and judging
oneself is the exposition of one’s self, a self not as a given or constant but as shaped in the
process. Yet a lingering question remains: What happens if the there is no response from the
accuser, who does not bother listening? In the context of German-Jewish history, this
question can be framed in terms of the (in)famous “German-Jewish dialogue.” Gershom
Scholem argued against it, claiming this dialogue to be no more than a myth. It takes two for
a dialogue, he wrote, but while the Jews spoke to the Germans, the German never counted the
Jews qua Jews as worthy partners for conversation:
To whom, then, did the Jews speak in that much-talked-about German-Jewish dialogue? They spoke to
themselves, not to say that they outshouted themselves. […] When they thought they were speaking to
the Germans, they were speaking to themselves.65
Written after the Holocaust and from a decidedly Zionist perspective, Scholem’s
interpretation has struck a chord and has been influential for several decades, with supporters
and detractors alike taking it as their starting point.66 Scholem is correct to a certain point.
Baeck, for example, needed to come to terms with the theology of Adolf von Harnack, but
not the other way around.67
Scholem’s insistence on the historical question of whether such an encounter ever
occurred slightly misses the mark.68 The term apologetics as conceptualized by the discussion
between Rosenzweig and Baeck helps us get around this problem. Even if the dialogue as
such was a myth, it could still lead to the advancement and enrichment of Jewish thought and
life. In this sense, it is not a monologue, but rather an attempted dialogue with the other that
65 Gershom Scholem, “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis:
Selected Essays, ed. Werner Dannhauser (Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2012), 63. 66 Enzo Traverso, The Jews and Germany : From the “Judeo-German Symbiosis” to the Memory of Auschwitz
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995); Marion Kaplan’s review of this work is also a critique of
Scholem, see Marion A. Kaplan, “The ‘German-Jewish Symbiosis’ Revisited: Review of Enzo Traverso’s The
Jews and Germany,” New German Critique 70 (1997), 183–90; Dan Diner agreed with Scholem to a certain
extent but argued that now there is a negative symbiosis. He argued, however, that after Auschwitz the self-
definition of both Germans and Jews are conditioned upon their relation to the Holocaust and therefore also to
one another (Dan Diner, “Negative Symbiose: Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz,” Babylon: Beiträge zur
jüdischen Gegenwart 1 [1988]: 243–57). 67 Zank, “Vom Innersten, Äußersten und Anderen,” 38. 68 Even if the myth was an idea or shared ideal, he argued, it was never so because the Jews to whom the few
German were willing to speak had abandoned de facto their Judaism. Scholem, “Against the Myth of the
German-Jewish Dialogue,” 61; Gershom Scholem, “Once More: The German-Jewish Dialogue,” in On Jews
and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays, ed. Werner Dannhauser (Philadelphia: Paul Dry, 2012), 68.
47
leads to a dialogue within one’s own group. Apologetics is effective not only in contributing
to a better understanding of the other, but also in examining one’s own tradition. In other
words, it is not just relational, between a Jew and a Christian, between Baeck and Harnack,
but also self-relational, i.e. between members of the Jewish community. Whether Harnack
acknowledges Baeck’s reply or not is of secondary importance. It is precisely the attempt to
move outside, to engage the other, that has led to self-reflection. Socrates would have liked
the Athenians to acquit him, but even when they did not, his examination, of himself and of
society, remained of value just the same, both for the Athenians of the time and for future
generations. It is in this sense that I have called this mode of thought dialogical apologetics.
48
Chapter 2: Exemplars of Dialogical Apologetics
“You have read one, you have read enough”?
I do not think that there is in the whole domain of literature a less profitable reading than that of the
controversies between Jews and Christians […] If you have read one, you have read enough for all
time. The same casuistry and the same disregard for history turn up again and again. Nervousness and
humility are always on the side of the Jews, who know that, whatever the result may be, the end will be
persecution; arrogance is always on the side of their antagonist, who are supported by a band of
Knights of the Holy Cross, prepared to prove the soundness of their cause at the point of their daggers.
Besides, was there enough common ground between Judaism and thirteenth century Christianity to
have justified hope for a mutual understanding?1
Solomon Schechter’s assessment of the Barcelona disputation (1263) represents a typical
negative stance toward apologetics as a situation that is thrust upon the Jews and which they
meekly try to handle. The last chapter contested this view based on a philosophical
understanding of the concept of apologetics as a mode of Jewish thought that can be
conducted dialogically—overtly or covertly, with or without a reply—as a self-exposition in
response to the other.2 In this chapter, I supplement the more theoretical discussion of
dialogical apologetics by providing historical examples to the ways in which apologetics can
be dialogically understood. The aim of this chapter is twofold: first, these exemplars allow us
to place Baeck in a long and respectable tradition of Jewish apologetics. Second, and more
importantly, each of these exemplars belong to the Jewish canon and show high levels of
originality; each of their contributions had a lasting effect on Jewish thought. Taken together,
they contest the notion that apologetic is inauthentic and can therefore have no long-term
value for Jewish thought.
Three salient exemplars of dialogical apologetics are discussed in order to achieve
these purposes: Josephus Flavius, Judah Halevi, and Nahmanides. Although the authors are
presented in chronological order, this is not an attempt to present a complete and closed
narrative of Jewish apologetics. If apologetics is always temporal, the formulation of a
1 Solomon Schechter, “Nachmanides,” in Studies in Judaism: First Series (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication
Society of America, 1911), 104. 2 Even Schechter admits that much: “These public disputations occasionally forced the Jews themselves to
review their position towards their own literature and led them to draw clearer distinctions between what they
regarded as religion and what as folklore. But beyond this, the polemics between Jews and Christians were
barren of good results” (ibid.). Although the division between “religion” and “folklore” is problematic,
Schechter’s point, despite its dismissive tone, is important. From the conflict emerges a need for self-definition.
49
question demanding an answer, then writing the history of Jewish apologetics would be one
possible way to tell the history of Judaism and Jewish thought.3 Although other examples can
be given, these authors were selected for their importance in the history of apologetics and
Jewish thought and because they highlight questions that remained relevant for Jewish
apologetics also in the twentieth century and hence to Baeck’s work.
The chapter begins with Josephus Flavius’ Against Apion, one of the earliest works of
apologetics and a classic of the genre. It introduces many of the strategies used in the writing
of apologetics in antiquity. Its influence on subsequent writing of Christian apologetics
suffices to justify its consideration. For the present discussion, I focus on the way Josephus’
apologetic method is grounded in historiography, a trope that found resonance in many
modern Jewish apologetics.
Judah Halevi’s Kuzari is an invitation to reflect on central themes of election and
exile. Given its immense influence on generations of Jewish thinkers, an examination of the
Kuzari qua dialogical apologetics shows the centrality of election and the role of encounter
with the other in the formation of Jewish thought, even in a thinker identified by Rosenzweig
as the least apologetic.4 Reading the Kuzari in terms of dialogical apologetics exposes the
multifaceted ways in which it is, both in structure and in content, an attempt to demarcate
boundaries.
The final section presents Nahmanides’ disputation with Friar Pablo Christiani in
Barcelona. This disputation, conducted in front of King James I of Aragon, demonstrates the
use of the Talmud as part of the Church’s new mission strategy in medieval times. With a few
exceptions, assessments of the Barcelona disputation have been diametrical: either it was a
pitiful event or it was a heroic defense of Judaism. Both one-sided pictures are distorted and
obscure the fact that there was not just a heated debate but also listening. This picture is
understandable. The medieval disputations serve for many as the epitome of negative, forced
Jewish-Christian encounters. They were never conducted on equal footing and Jews had to be
extremely cautious in their replies. At the same, even in such an event a dialogue occurs that
3 In a recent impressive work of erudition, David Nirenberg attempts to describe the history of anti-Judaism in
the West. A longue durée history of Jewish apologetics could be seen as a the mirror-image to this project, as it
would examine the Jewish responses and self-presentations in front of the anti-Jewish tendency. See David
Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2013). 4 Rosenzweig, “Apologetic Thinking,” 96.
50
shapes Nahmanides’ position as well as his method. The Barcelona disputation thus calls for
an appreciation of the precarious position of Jews in the encounter with Christians and the
fact that even under such circumstances, creativity and the development of thought is
achieved.
Josephus Flavius: Historiography and Origins
Josephus’ Against Apion (ca. 94) is one of the oldest texts in the tradition of apologetic
writing.5 It is composed of two parts, which are only roughly compatible with the two books
into which it is divided.6 The first part provides evidence for the antiquity of the Judeans,
because in the Roman Empire people with an ancient history were perceived with greater
respect.7 The second part has a more specific target: it is a refutation of accusations by
Manetho, Apion and others.
Josephus responds to an accusation, but the audience for this response is not
necessarily identical with that of the accuser. One potential audience is those who have heard
the slanders and were influenced by them, for those “who conduct their reading without
envy.”8 John Barclay suggests that the moderate level of Greek and the cultural allusions in
the text seem to support the claim that it was meant for a reader who possesses “a
sympathetic non-Judean stance, needing persuasion on non-Judean grounds but open to it and
ready to enjoy the text’s polemical tirades against a variety of critics.”9 Against Apion thus
addresses those who might have been influenced by the slurs against the Judeans; the
declared audience is probably also the implied audience, i.e. Roman educated people. Even if
5 The title is not attested by Josephus himself and is only subsequently implied by Christian authors. Flavius
Josephus, Against Apion, ed. Steve Mason, trans. John Barclay (Leiden: Brill, 2000), xxvi–xxx; the originality
of Josephus’ method and arguments in this text is contested: although some scholars claim that the text borrows
from earlier Jewish apologetics, it is impossible to assert such a claim with certainty because the sources from
which Josephus’ could have known are nowadays not available. Furthermore, Josephus often makes references
to critics of his own work, which suggests that he is concerned with specific circumstances. Martin Goodman,
“Josephus’ Treatise Against Apion,” in Apologetics in the Roman Empire: Pagans, Jews, and Christians, ed.
Mark Edwards et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 46–48. 6 Cf. Barclay’s introduction to Josephus, Against Apion, xix. The division into two books might have been a
material necessity, deriving from the length of the scroll at Josephus’ disposal. Cf. Goodman, “Josephus’
Treatise Against Apion,” 51. 7 By referring to “Judeans” I follow the editor of the new translation of Josephus’ works, which preferred the
term “Judean” to “Jews” in order to emphasize Josephus’ pre-rabbinic context. See Steve Mason, “Jews,
Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” Journal for the Study of Judaism
38, no. 4 (2007): 457–512; cf. Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties,
Uncertainties (University of California Press, 1999), 67–106. 8 Josephus, Against Apion, 2.147. 9 Barclay’s introduction to ibid., xlviii – emphasis in the original.
51
the text was intended for the Roman educated public, the possibility of Judean readership
cannot be excluded. It is reasonable to assume that parts of the intended audience were
Judeans, who, like Josephus, read Greek, were moving in Roman circles and have been
influenced by the prejudices to which Josephus responds. This text would have given them
means to respond against such slurs and would instill in them a sense of self-dignity.10
Against Apion addresses both Romans and Judeans, “outsiders” and “insiders” alike, by
blurring the lines between the two and showing that apologetic literature is never injective; it
strives to achieve its purpose in multiple, sometimes overlapping, ways.
The apologetic character of Against Apion is evident in Josephus’ rhetoric and
linguistic choices. Legal language and references to Socrates’ trial are prevalent throughout
the text: Josephus offers “apologia,” a defense for the Judeans, whereas the charges against
them are kategorien.11 Apion’s accusations are “as if [he was] bringing a law suit” and
Josephus recurs to the legal concepts of testimonies and witnesses.12 Furthermore, against
Apollonius’ charges that Judeans foster negative attitude to foreigners, Josephus claims that
Jews are more tolerant than the Athenians, who executed not a foreigner but their own
citizen, Socrates, for uttering a single word about God which was not in accordance with their
laws.13 As the names of Socrates and Plato were well-known and respected around that time,
it is a useful reference point in the apologetic discourse. This strategy is not unique to
antiquity: each generation of religious thinkers has to deal with the prevailing philosophies of
his time and show his agreement with, departure from, or superiority over them. Philo and
Hellenistic philosophy, Maimonides and Aristotelian philosophy and German-Jewish
philosophy’s relation to Kant can all be taken as examples of this phenomenon.
Josephus challenges the dichotomy Roman\Judean by asserting the value of the
Judean tradition. Romans should learn from Judeans the ways of good constitution and
governance. The theocracy—a term coined by Josephus—was a political system in which the
legislator Moses, combining “with great care” instruction by words and by training of
10 Victor Tcherikover, “Jewish Apologetics Reconsidered,” Eos 48 (1956): 169–93. Against such a reading, cf.
Goodman, “Josephus’ Treatise Against Apion,” 51: “[it] must surely have been written with Gentile audience in
mind, since the summary of Judaism at Against Apion 2.180-219 was far too crude for Jews.” 11 Josephus, Against Apion, 2.147. 12 Ibid., 2.4, 1.69–70; this rhetoric is also preserved in the writings of the Church Fathers, e.g. Tertullian,
“Apology,” in The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, ed.
Alexander Roberts et al., vol. 3 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1971), 17. 13 Josephus, Against Apion, 2.262–4 and editor's note 1066.
52
character, ascribed to God power and goodness and gave the priests authority so that all the
people will obey in piety.14 A significant part of Josephus’ discussion of the Mosaic
constitution is dedicated—along with a refutation of blood libels—to the positive social
aspect of the Law and the relation to non-Judeans it fosters.15 This was an efficient system
that could serve as a role model. It offers education to piety that would have been appreciated
by Roman readership and provide Judean readership with a sense of pride.16 Josephus uses
the process of apologetics as an occasion to present Moses and the Law. Like the argument
regarding the antiquity of the Judeans, this argument as well is based on an appropriation of
history. Moses, “who was most ancient,” is a wiser statesman than Solon and his like, and so
his words, and the deeds of the Judeans, should be taken seriously.17
Another strategy used by Josephus is attacking the opponent; he also—to use the
metaphor from the last chapter—strikes with the sword and not just defends with the shield.
Josephus tarnishes Apion’s character by stressing his Egyptian origins, thereby lowering his
intellectual status in the eyes of the readers.18 This is one of the risks of apologetics
recognized by Rosenzweig in “Apologetic Thinking”: in its zeal for rhetoric and persuasion,
apologetic thought risks misrepresenting others, either the person against whom the original
defense is made or other groups that are used in order to divert the heat of the accusations to
another source. Josephus’ ad hominem arguments are in this context rhetorically
understandable but intellectually unsatisfying and have no lasting impact as a defense of his
position.
14 Ibid., 2.165-73. 15 Ibid., 2.207–15. 16 The affirmation of the Law is a theme that appears frequently in Jewish apologetics and Josephus’ way of
justification by the Law’s political usefulness and its ancient origin is not uncommon in Jewish thought and is
present for example in Spinoza. Hardly seen as an apologist of Judaism in the traditional sense, Spinoza goes to
a great extent to justify the law of the Jewish polity. In this, he seems to follow Josephus, whom he cites several
times, see Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne
and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2.18, 6.23, 9.7; the reliance on Josephus
was a common method in scholarly works in the Dutch Republic at the time, see Susan James, Spinoza on
Philosophy, Religion, and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 266–271. I do not mean to equate
the two: remember that when Josephus writes about the Law, there is no canonical oral tradition in place, no
halakha in the way it is understood today. In rabbinical Judaism, there was also a need to justify this aspect of
the Law, and thinkers had to grapple with this fact as well. Nonetheless, Josephus’ discussion of the constitution
shows that the Law remains an important red thread that runs through Jewish apologetics even if the question of
what exactly is meant by this Law drastically changes. 17 Josephus, Against Apion, 2.156. 18 Ibid., 2.28–30. Cf. Barclay's comment: “To label his opponents ‘Egyptian’ while highlighting the honors
received from Rome was to restore Judean pride on the back of Egyptian disgrace, a bid to reverse one set of
ethnic stereotypes by trading on another.”
53
This is not to say that one is not allowed to critique the adversary. Engaging with the
adversarial position in order to identify mistakes in it is one way of framing one’s own
thought. Take for example Josephus’ claims about origins. What is at stake is the social
stature of the Judeans: if they originated from Egyptian lepers, as their detractors claim, then
they are very low on the Roman social ladder.19 Josephus finds contradictions or implausible
aspects in the adversarial narrative and provides counter-evidence.20 A similar strategy is
applied by Josephus in his treatment of the Greek historians, whose work he critiques by
showing contradictions within different Greek historiographies and exposing the limited
record of events presented.21 Instead of these flawed accounts, Josephus offers a variety of
sources perceived to be older and therefore more reliable, e.g. Egyptian and Babylonian
records. Although its standards might be different than ours, Josephus’ apologia is based first
and foremost on historiography: he shows the mistakes of those who claim that recent origins
of the Judeans and gives evidence for its antiquity.22
Historical arguments are not always a central aspect of Jewish apologetics, but
especially with the rise of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, the use and misuse of history
became a point of constant tension for Jewish intellectuals at the turn to the twentieth century.
Josephus’ Against Apion, with its simultaneous defense of the antiquity and the relevance of
Jewish law, is one prominent exemplar that shows the ways historiography can be used as a
method of apologetics, both in refuting the adversary and in providing an exposition of
oneself.
19 An interesting re-emergence of this type of origins argument in modernity is Sigmund Freud, Der Mann
Moses und die monotheistische Religion: Drei Abhandlungen (New York: Longmans, 1939). 20 Josephus, Against Apion, 1.219. 21 Ibid., 1.15-26. 22 Josephus can rely here on his Antiquitates Judaicae as a source. This is an additional reason, asides from
personal honour, why he deals with critiques of his own work. (1.53–6); cf. Paul Spilsbury, “Contra Apionem
and Antiquitates Judaicae: Points of Contact,” in Josephus’ Contra Apionem: Studies in Its Character and
Context with a Latin Concordance to the Portion Missing in Greek, ed. Louis Feldman and John Levison
(Leiden: Brill, 1996), 348–68; for Josephus’ defense his stature as an historian against accusation concerning his
Wars of the Jews, see Shaye J. D. Cohen, Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a
Historian (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 121–37; Gregory Sterling, Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephos, Luke-
Acts, and Apologetic Historiography (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 17: “Apologetic historiography is the story of a
subgroup of people in an extended prose narrative written by a member of the group who follows the group’s
own traditions but Hellenizes them in an effort to establish the identity of the group within the setting of the
larger world.” Although this definition is of great interest, it too seems to presuppose a fixed Hellenistic
tradition that is opposed to another fixed narrative, Jewish or Christian. I would rather suggest that the
Hellenistic tradition is in itself a construct and a product of historiography.”
54
Judah Halevi: The Election of Israel
In medieval times, Jewish thinkers turned to the genre of dialogue as an efficient literary
form, beloved and widely prevalent in the non-Jewish culture of the time.23 Dialogues were
used for various purposes from popularizing and disseminating the philosophy of the day to
providing arguments for the “correct belief” against both internal and external challenges.
This section examines what is arguably the most famous and influential dialogue in Jewish
history, Judah Halevi’s (1075-1141) The Book of Refutation and Proof on the Despised Faith,
commonly known as The Book of the Kuzari (ca. 1140).
Originally written in Judeo-Arabic, it is better known in the Hebrew translation of
Judah ibn Tibbon. The transmission of this work in Hebrew suggests that it was meant for a
Jewish audience, originally perhaps to acculturated Jews who could read Judeo-Arabic but
subsequently to a broader Jewish audience.24 The Kuzari’s apologetic aim is clear from the
introduction:
I was asked for my claims and answers against the claims of those who dispute our religion: from those
who are attracted to philosophy, from those who believe in other religions, and from the heretics among
the sons of Israel.25
The Kuzari is a multifaceted work of apologetics: it functions as apologetics of a Jewish
position in front of other religions and worldviews, but also as a denunciation of competing
Jewish positions. The inner-Jewish polemic is also evident from those not given a voice in the
discussion. Besides the protagonist of the philosopher, Christian and Muslim, all of which are
rejected, there are also astrologers, alchemists, and most importantly Karaites that are
mentioned. It is at the heart of the Kuzari, in the middle of the third book, that the king
comments that Karaites’ piety seems worthier to him than that of their rabbinical
counterpart.26 What follows is a long discussion in which the haver, the Jewish sage, defends
23 Aaron Hughes, The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 7. 24 It is noteworthy that the Kuzari praises Hebrew as unique, but was originally written in Judeo-Arabic. This
inner tension is evident also in Halevi’s biography. He lived and worked mostly in Granada and in al-Andalus,
where he was highly regarded as a poet, physician and a leader of the Jewish community. Later in life, he
rejected the Judeo-Arabic culture in which he was so highly regarded, seeing it as adherence to non-Jewish
modes of thought and literary structure. The Kuzari, written in the language of this culture, is at the same time a
rejection of it. Cf. Ross Brann, The Compunctious Poet: Cultural Ambiguity and Hebrew Poetry in Muslim
Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 84–118. 25 Judah Halevi, Sefer Ha-Kuzari, trans. Judah Even Shmuel (Jerusalem: Dvir, 1972), opening. Heretics are
“minim” in Even Shmuel translation, thus defining once again a category of “inner” heresy. 26 It is among others this central position that has lead scholars to claim that it is not the refutation of philosophy
but of Karaism that is the main purpose of the Kuzari, see Daniel Lasker, “Judah Halevi and Karaism,” in From
55
rabbinic Judaism by appealing to history and tradition: the Karaites believe that they can
interpret the Torah without tradition; like the Khazar king, their intentions are good, but their
deeds are not because they cannot properly grasp the commandments without the chain of
transmission.27 The incorporation of the Karaite position into the discussion, and the fact that
it is mentioned by the king, a convert to Judaism who is skeptical of rabbinic Judaism, shows
Halevi’s need to create a fine distinction between inner and outer boundaries: the Karaites
went astray, but they are nonetheless considered part of Israel in a way that the Christian and
Muslim are not.28
The Kuzari is a story about the conversion of the king of Khazar, a kingdom east of
the Black Sea whose king and some of its inhabitants converted to Judaism around the ninth
century CE.29 The story of the king’s conversion to Judaism and his subsequent lengthy
discussions with the Jewish haver compose the main narrative of the dialogue. The
presentation of Halevi’s version of Judaism to Jews is therefore achieved in the Kuzari via a
Ancient Israel to Modern Judais : Intellect in Quest of Understanding : Essays in Honor of Marvin Fox, ed.
Nahum Sarna, Jacob. Neusner, and Ernest Frerichs (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989), 111–25. This claim is
further supported by a letter found in the Cairo Geniza. In it, the reason for composition of the Kuzari is
described as a response to an acquaintance who was caught to the Karaite minut in the lands of the Christians.
See Joseph Yahalom, Shirat Hayav Shel R. Yehudah Halevi (Jerusalem: Magnes University Press, 2008), 73. 27 Halevi, Sefer Ha-Kuzari, 3.53. The term haver of the Hebrew translation comes from the Arabic al-habar,
which refers to a non-Muslim cleric. The Hebrew haver is a Mishnaic term for a Jewish rabbinic scholar. (Diana
Lobel, Between Mysticism and Philosophy: Sufi Language of Religious Experience in Judah Ha-Levi’s Kuzari
[Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000], 182n8). The haver is part of the Jewish scholarly group, the havura. It is thus
once again a signifier of the separation from the Karaites, who do not belong in this group. Leo Strauss
forcefully argued that the background story and its opening might suggest to the reader that it is a historical
account and that Halevi’s own position can be equated with that of the haver, a position supported by the fact
that the haver gets the most extended part of the dialogue and describes the beliefs and actions required by
rabbinical Judaism. Strauss, however, warns against such a simplistic reading and suggests that no one character
represents fully Halevi’s position. Careful attention should be given to the literary character of the work and the
way it is constructed (Leo Strauss, “The Law of Reason in the Kuzari,” in Persecution and the Art of Writing
[Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 101–3); the fact that Halevi’s position is almost too easily
identified with the haver’s is evident in early manuscripts. In one manuscript, Halevi is conflated with the haver.
In other cases, however, the haver is identified by the name of Isaac (ha)-Sangari, a rabbinic word deriving from
the Greek meaning to defend, thus stressing the apologetic character of the work. See Adam Shear, The Kuzari
and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 1167-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 58–63. 28 On Halevi’s circle in light of the Cairo Geniza, see Moshe Gil and E. Fleischer, eds., Yehudah Halevi U-Vene
Hugo: 55 Teʼudot Min Ha-Genizah (Jerusalem: ha-Igud ha-ʻolami le-madaʻe ha-Yahadut, 2001); Marina
Rustow showed that during the Fatimid caliphs role (969-1171) rabbinic and karaite Jews cooperated on the
political level and were also intermarried (Marina Rustow, Heresy and the Politics of Community: The Jews of
the Fatimid Caliphate [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008]); the later definition of the Karaites as a sect had
more to do with questions of political power over the Jewish community in the Iberian peninsula than with
ideological separation according to the sociological model of church-sect. See Marina Rustow, “The Qaraites as
Sect: The Tyranny of a Construct,” in Sects and Sectarianism in Jewish History, ed. Sacha Stern (Leiden: Brill,
2011), 149–86. 29 There are still debates as to the extent that Judaism was actually practiced within this kingdom and to its
origins. For two accounts see Douglas Morton Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars (New York:
Schocken Books, 1967); and Kevin Brook, The Jews of Khazaria (Lanham, Md: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
56
narrative that has a non-Jew as its main interlocutor. If the king, a pagan who is skeptical
toward revelation at first and has no special favor for Judaism, converted, then the arguments
presented must be seen as objectively convincing. The structure of the narrative is itself part
of the apologetics: it is an inversion of Isma’ili dialogues of Halevi’s time. In them, the
conversion occurs only at the end of the story, whereas in the Kuzari it happens at its
beginning, after the first book; for the Ismailis the knowledge is esoteric and is meant only
for selected few, whereas Halevi emphasizes that the king’s conversion was quickly made
public and many followed him.30
The king of Khazar is troubled by a dream in which he hears an angel telling him that
his intention is pleasing to God, but his deed is not. He decides to search for the meaning of
the dream and first invites a philosopher, who tries to convince him that a belief in God is
limited to purifying the soul by worshiping in thought the “first cause.” Religion is simply a
tool for educating the masses. The king rejects the philosopher’s position as incompatible
with the angel’s message – his intention is already pure, it is the proper deed that is lacking.31
A Christian sage follows the philosopher, but is quickly rejected by the king for his belief in
irrational dogmas such as transubstantiation and immaculate birth.32 A Muslim sage is
rejected for a similar reason; his claim for the holiness of the Quran cannot be supported by
someone out of the tradition. The king’s words show respect for the notion of tradition. He
does not reject Christianity and Islam as religious traditions but claims that to an impartial
observer from the outside they are unconvincing. When the king further requires a public
“empirical” proof, a miracle witnessed by many, the Muslim sage calls as witnesses the
30 Cf. Aaron Hughes, The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy, 32–43; the subversion is achieved also by
borrowing from Shi’ite and Sufi terminology, see Shlomo Pines, “Shi’ite Terms and Conceptions in Judah
Halevi’s Kuzari,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 2 (1980): 165–251; and Diana Lobel, Between
Mysticism and Philosophy: Sufi Language of Religious Experience in Judah Ha-Levi’s Kuzari (Albany: SUNY
Press, 2000). 31 Halevi, Sefer Ha-Kuzari, 1.2-4; Strauss claims that the philosopher is the main target of the Kuzari but that
there is no direct rejection of his position because Halevi does not stage a direct debate between the Jewish sage
and the philosopher. In fact, according to Strauss the haver cannot really convince the philosopher because they
do not share the same presupposition, see Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing, 105; the Kuzari is not an
anti-rationalist book. The king requires logical consistency and in several places the haver emphasizes that the
Jewish belief does not contradict reason (cf. Halevi, Sefer Ha-Kuzari, 1.89: “God forbids that we shall believe in
what is impossible and in what the mind distances and sees as impossible”). Adam Shear shows that the often
proclaimed dichotomy—most strongly put forth by Harry Wolfson—between the Kuzari and Maimonides’
Guide, between irrational belief rationalism, is to a large extent a modern construct that is not evident in early
modern interpretations of these works. See Shear, The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 2–9. 32 Halevi, Sefer Ha-Kuzari, 1.5.
57
stories of Moses and the Israelites, of “which there can be no doubt about their
truthfulness.”33
The king, somewhat reluctantly, sends for a Jewish sage. Unlike the previous
interlocutors, who began with a universal statement on the nature of God, the haver’s opening
statement is a declaration of belief in “the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who brought the
sons of Israel out of Egypt with signs and miracles.”34 The starting point is the particular
election of the people of Israel and not universal principles. The Jews, it is argued, are on a
different ontological level than other people and are the only ones capable of receiving
revelation and have an immediate contact with the divine.35 The haver’s contested claim
should not be taken prima facie: there is a tension in the Kuzari between the particularistic
account of the Jewish people in book one and the more universalistic description of book
four, between the fact that prophecy is given only to the people of Israel and the fact that it is
the gentile king, a non-Jew, and not the haver who receives revelation in a dream.36 It is in
33 Ibid., 1.9. 34 Ibid., 1.11. 35 Ibid., 1.27, 1.115, 2.32–4. on the connection to prophecy, see 1.102–103, 5.20; according to the haver, the
same holds true not only for the Jewish people but also for the Hebrew language and for the Holy Land, see
2.10ff, 2.67ff; this “substantial distinctiveness” of the people of Israel as arising from Halevi’s concept of God is
analyzed in Novak, Election of Israel, 210, 213–18; on the problem of conversion—and remember that the
frame story is the conversion of the king—see Michael Berger, “Toward a New Understanding of Judah
Halevi’s ‘Kuzari,’” The Journal of Religion 72, no. 2 (1992): 224–28. The theme of the unique ontological
status of the people of Israel has played a central place in kabbalistic imagination, as expressed for example in
the literature concerning the Zohar, in the generations following Halevi. See Elliot R. Wolfson, Venturing
Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 26: “Israel is
portrayed as the ‘holy seed’ (zar‘a qaddisha), whereas the other nations of the world (with the possible
exception of Islam, according to some passages to be discussed in more detail in the next chapter) are said to
derive from the demonic ‘other side’ (sitra ahra), the realm of ten impure potencies on the left that correspond
to ten holy sefirot on the right.” 36 Yochanan Silman has explained this and other tensions in the work by claiming a change over Halevi’s
position throughout time. In other words, books one and four were written in different times and the latter is
chronologically later and shows a move from a more particularistic to a universalistic position., see Yochanan
Silman, Ben Filosof Le-Navi: Hitpatḥut Haguto Shel R. Yehudah Ha-Leṿi Be-Sefer Ha-Kuzari (Ramat-Gan: Bar
Ilan University, 1985); others have tried to minimize the importance of the dream. For a summary of approaches
to this problem, see Micah Goodman, Ḥalomo Shel Ha-Kuzari (Israel: Dvir, 2012), 165–7; the relation between
gentiles as potential recipients of revelation and Jews is complicated throughout the Kuzari. In later parts of the
work (Halevi, Sefer Ha-Kuzari, 4.11–15), the haver treats all religions as striving toward the same intent, but
only the Jews received the Law and are able to perform the corresponding deed. Christianity and Islam occupy a
special place in this regard. They seem to understand something about the divine teaching and could have been
otherwise compared to “proselytes” that accept the “root of the commandments and not their branches” but their
behavior, e.g. the fact that they pray in a different direction than toward Jerusalem, suggests that they mislead
people and act wrongly. Although they are closer to Judaism than the philosophers, Christianity and Islam are
nonetheless rejecting most of the revealed commandments. In a striking analogy, the haver notes that both
religions are closer to Judaism than Jeroboam was, i.e. perhaps with good intention but with wrongdoing.
58
negotiating between the two poles of election that the unique problematic of the Kuzari, and
its lasting influence, are brought to the forefront of Jewish thought.
The discussions between the king and the haver present the theological tension
between election, exile and suffering. If the Jews are elected, why do they suffer in exile?
This question, emerging also as a challenge from Christian theology, is of cardinal
importance to Halevi and the Kuzari offers several complementary answers: first, the exile is
part of the “empirical proof” of God’s election.37 Halevi’s position can be read as an
appropriation of Augustine’s argument. Augustine claimed that the Jews, carnal Israel, are
marked like Cain: they are a constant reminder of the possibility of sin, but should not be
killed but rather dispersed.38 Yet for Halevi, the existence of the Jews as a distinct people
despite their dispersion is not a sign of rejection or sin but rather an affirmation of their
election. If despite everything there are still Jews in the world, it is a proof of divine
providence.
The second argument is related to suffering for God. Halevi recognizes that this
feeling is not unique to Judaism and is present also in Islam and Christianity. That the Jews
have no power shows according to the haver that they are nearer to God than Christians and
Muslims. Being under the yoke of other nations, they suffer more for their faith. When the
king objects and says that the Jews would be brutal like anyone else if they had the power,
the haver passionately admits: “you have found the place of my disgrace, king of Khazar!”
Jews should be able to carry “the burden of exile” willingly, but unfortunately this ideal is not
fulfilled.39 Halevi suggests here that accepting the diasporic experience with all its hardship
has meaning. The question regarding the theological meaning of the suffering of the Jewish
people can be seen as central to Jewish thought in times of strife and disaster. Writing at a
time when the memory of the massacres and forced conversions of the First Crusade (1099)
37 Halevi, Sefer Ha-Kuzari, 2.33. 38 Augustine develops this position, which is to a certain extent more favorable to the Jews than other
alternatives at the time, as part of an inner struggle within the Church. In other words, this is also a case in
which the “inner” needs and “external” relation to the other are interrelated. On Augustine’s position and
symbolism, and its relation to his opponents within the Church, see Paula Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews: A
Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism (Toronto: Doubleday, 2008), 260–352; it is possible that Jews in
medieval Ashkenaz appropriated their interpretation of their exile from Augustine (Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism,
506n112). I do not claim that Halevi knew Augustine work—or that it is not possible to locate similar Muslim
influences—although given the prevalence of his theology this cannot be excluded, as Halevi lived for part of
his life in Christian territory. On the biographical background, see Yahalom, Shirat Hayav, 32–59. 39 Halevi, Sefer Ha-Kuzari, 1.113–15; quote in 1.115.
59
is still fresh, Halevi searches for a theodicy of sorts, for explanation of and meaning in
suffering.
Third, the exile is part of a divine plan for the conversion of the non-Jews.
Christianity and Islam are not completely rejected but are also part of a divine plan. In book
four, the haver tells the king that the Jews in exile are the seed from which the tree of faith
will grow and all people, perhaps through Christianity and Islam, will in fact become Israel.40
There are two interrelated arguments here: Jews have a mission to the non-Jews and non-
Jews in turn have a role in the divine plan.
Finally, there is proof by deed. After the haver emphasizes the importance of the
Land, the king notes the irony in making such an argument in exile and says that the haver
does not practice what he preaches. In response, the haver exclaims once more: “you have
found the place of my disgrace, king of Khazar!”41 Although the discussion moves on, the
king’s challenge remains in the background of the text. At the end of the Kuzari, this it is
revisited: the haver decides to leave the comfortable life at the king’s court in order to take a
dangerous journey to Jerusalem. The king tries to convince him to stay, but the haver
responds—in an echo to the beginning of the book—that Jerusalem will be built only if the
deeds of Israel fit their intention.42
The Kuzari revolves around some of the central challenges to Jewish thought, namely
the value of tradition, election, land, and exile. These questions emerge in Halevi’s work vis-
à-vis a meeting with the other, via dialogical apologetics. The core of Halevi’s answer to
them is that proper intentions should be followed by proper deeds: the king found the deed to
match his intentions and converted to Judaism; the haver, for his part, did not remain
unchanged and decided to immigrate to Jerusalem. In this narrative, both have changed in the
process of apologetic discussion. The Kuzari is at once a posing of a question about election
and suffering, a defense of Judaism, and a self-exposition.43 In dialogical apologetics the two
are interwoven. Constructed as a dialogue, it exposes the dialogical character of apologetics
40 Ibid., 4.23; remember that the king turned to Judaism because both Islam and Christianity affirmed it. The
vocabulary of this section might allude to Romans 11:16-24. 41 Ibid., 2.24. 42 Ibid., 5.27; Shear, The Kuzari and the Shaping of Jewish Identity, 299–309; Goodman, Ḥalomo Shel Ha-
Kuzari, 280–88. 43 Novak, Election of Israel, 220: “The Kuzari was written not only as a defense of Judaism but also as an
argument for it”; Hughes, The Art of Dialogue in Jewish Philosophy, 48.
60
as listening to other voices, learning from them and incorporating them into one’s own
thought and behavior. Unfortunately, not all dialogues are as kind as Halevi’s imagined
narrative. In medieval Christian Europe, the real disputations between Christians and Jews
were often much more heated and resulted in disastrous consequences for the Jewish
community.44
Nahmanides: The Art of Disputation
Two female figures stand side by side: one is crowned, holding a cross and a chalice. She
stands proud and gazes forward into the future. The other figure holds a shattered lance and a
book. Blindfolded, she faces downwards submissively, conquered. The two appear in tandem
in one of Europe’s most impressive cathedrals, the Cathedral of Our Lady of Strasbourg. But
not only there. In the twelfth century CE, Ecclesia and Synagoga, an artistic depiction of a
theology of supersessionism and the triumph of Church upon the battered Synagogue,
became a common representation in medieval cities in Christian Europe.45
In the thirteenth century, with the help of converted Jews, Ecclesia’s gaze turned to
the Talmud.46 Jews were forced to hear sermons by Christians and public disputations were
arranged to show the truth of the Church’s interpretation of Scripture and Talmud alike.47
Unlike Halevi’s fictional dialogue in the Kuzari, the disputations between Jews and
Christians in Christian Europe could be a matter of life and death for the Jewish community.
The Paris disputation (1240), for example, was a prelude to the confiscation and burning of
the Talmud in 1242. Both extant accounts of this disputation, from the Christian and the
44 Although the situation of Jews under Muslim rule in the Middle Ages cannot amount to a “golden age”, as
imagined later by Jewish historians, they nonetheless fared better during the Middle Ages than Jews under
Christian rule. For a comparative perspective and the myth of the “golden age”, see Mark Cohen, Under
Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008). 45 The motif has its origins both in Roman art’s representation of subdued people and in the writings of the
Church Fathers’ portrayal of Judaism as a woman who fell from glory, but it is only around the twelfth century
CE that it became common and was presented as major public art, see Nina Rowe, The Jew, the Cathedral and
the Medieval City: Synagoga and Ecclesia in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), especially 47-51. 46 Among the vast literature on this change in approach, see Amos Funkenstein, “Ha-Temurut Be-Vikuh Ha-Dat
Ben Yehudim ve-Nozrim Bmeah Hasteim Esreh,” Zion 33, no. 3–4 (1968): 125–44; Robert Chazan, Daggers of
Faith: Thirteenth-Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989); Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1982). 47 As Chazan notes, “disputation” in this context should not imply a controversy among equals (for which the
term debate is perhaps more fitting). Although I share his reluctance, for the sake of convention and ease of
reading, this term shall be used without quotation marks. Cf. Robert Chazan, “The Barcelona ‘Disputation’ of
1263: Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response,” Speculum 52, no. 4 (1977): 824n1.
61
Jewish side, show that the Jewish side of the debate was severely limited, with its only role
responding directly to the questions posed. More than a public discussion, this was an early
search of the Talmud for heresy, a new process in which the Jews got entangled. The Talmud
was scrutinized for anti-Christian material that is considered blasphemous, as well as for
negative attitude toward Christians and “unedifying discourse” about God.48
In July 1263 in Barcelona, in front of King James I of Aragon, another debate whose
centre was the Talmud took place, this time between Friar Pablo Christiani and Nahmanides,
a commentator on the Bible, early teacher of kabbalah, and the leading authority of thirteenth
century Jewish life in Europe. Unlike the Paris disputation, where the Talmud was ridiculed
and presented as irrational, the strategy in Barcelona was different: Pablo Christiani
attempted to show that based on the Talmud Jesus is the Jewish messiah that has already
come. If he can convince Nahmanides or show the Jewish position to be untenable, this
would provide a strong case for his mission’s strategy of using the Talmud to convince Jews
to convert to Christianity.
There are two accounts of the Barcelona disputation: one is in a dialogue form,
composed in Hebrew and written most probably by Nahmanides himself; the other is a
shorter, anonymous text in Latin with the royal sigil imprinted on it.49 Nahmanides’ text was
written in Hebrew, which immediately suggest that it was meant for the Jewish community.
Nahmanides might have wanted to write his side of the disputation in order to protect himself
against rumours that he did not defend Judaism properly. In addition, Christian missionary
efforts based on the Talmud continued in the aftermath of the disputation and required a clear
response from the Jewish side.50 After the disputation, a legal persecution brought against
48 Yitzahk Fritz Baer, “Le-Bikoret Ha-Vikuhim Shel R. Yehiel Me-Paris ve-Shel Ramban,” Tarbiz 2, no. 2
(1931): 172–87; especially relevant were passages which seemed to refer to Jesus, such as bSanhedrin 107b and
bSanhedrin 43a. For a summary of the accusations see Hyam Maccoby, Judaism on Trial: Jewish-Christian
Disputations in the Middle Ages (Portland: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1993), 26–38. When looked
from a contemporary scholarly perspective, such material might have indeed referred to Jesus, as part of a
Talmudic polemic with Christianity. See Peter Schäfer, Jesus in the Talmud (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2007). That this does not of course justify the disputation and its consequences should be self-evident. 49 The Latin account is published in Baer, “Le-Bikoret Ha-Vikuhim Shel R. Yehiel Me-Paris ve-Shel Ramban,”
185–7; I have used Maccoby’s translation (Maccoby, Judaism on Trial, 147). 50 Nina Caputo sees in the text’s main purpose the rebuttal of Jewish converts to Christianity and not of gentiles
who were born Christians. If this is the case, then Nahmanides’ account, like Halevi’s Hakuzari, is a dialogue
with someone from the outside that is also meant to warn delineate inner boundaries. See Caputo, Nahmanides
in Medieval Catalonia: History, Community, and Messianism (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
2007), 107–118; cf. Chazan, Barcelona and beyond: The Disputation of 1263 and Its Aftermath (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992), 45, 133.
62
Nahmanides also mentions that he presented an account of the disputation to the bishop of
Gerona. It might have been a different version of this text in Catalan, one that is no longer
extant, and so the possibility that Nahmanides also had a non-Jewish audience in mind cannot
be excluded.51
The two texts agree for the most part on the agenda of the disputation: 1. whether the
messiah has arrived or not; 2. whether the Talmud claims that the messiah appeared in the
person of Jesus; 3. the divine or human character of the messiah; 4. the suffering servant of
Isaiah and the relation of this prophecy to Jesus.52 Despite this basic agreement, the accounts
differ greatly in their assessment of the event. Nahmanides claims that he set the agenda
whereas the Latin text states that it was the friars’ initiative.53 Furthermore, in the Latin text,
Nahmanides is described as not being able to refute Pablo Christiani’s arguments and as
attempting to run away from the disputation through lies. In the Hebrew account, by contrast,
Nahmanides argues that he requested and was granted freedom of speech during the
disputation. Yet even by his own account, this freedom had its limits. It does not amount to
equal conditions and when Nahmanides’ attempts to step out of his role he is silenced.54
Nahmanides does not deny that he asked to quit the debate and that he was advised to do so
among others by Brother P. de Janua. However, he claims to have continued the debate at the
personal request of the king himself.55
The truth is probably located somewhere in between: that some of the Christian
participants may see Nahmanides’ request to quit as a concession and cowardice is not
surprising, just as it should come as no surprise that Nahmanides was probably afraid—and
after Paris disputation he had good reasons—that repercussions for himself and the Jewish
community will follow if the disputation continues as planned. Indeed, Nahmanides had to
pay a personal price for his role in the disputation. Possibly because of the publication of his
51 Caputo observes that the genre of disputation was quite popular and it is possible that the bishop would take
interest in it not as an affirmation of Nahmanides’ stance but for its literary quality, see Caputo, Nahmanides in
Medieval Catalonia, 167–70. 52 For a summary of the topics and comparison of the texts, see Baer, “Le-Bikoret Ha-Vikuhim Shel R. Yehiel
Me-Paris ve-Shel Ramban,” 178–80; Robert Chazan, Barcelona and beyond, 61–3; Caputo, Nahmanides in
Medieval Catalonia, 119. 53 Chazan notes that based on other instances, it is highly unlikely that Nahmanides had an influence on the
agenda, see Chazan, Barcelona and beyond, 65. 54 Nahmanides, “Vikuah Ha-Ramban,” 1.311, 1.316. 55 Ibid., 1:116; Maccoby, Judaism on Trial, 150.
63
account of the disputation, he was accused of blasphemy and was forced into exile.56 At a late
age, he chose to take the dangerous journey to the Land of Israel.57
Given these disparate accounts, it is easy to see how different scholars reached
opposing conclusions about the results of the disputation based on the level of verisimilitude
each document was assigned.58 This section is concerned with the way Nahmanides
formulates his apologetics in a dialogical manner and so the authenticity of his account is
only of secondary importance. More interesting for the present discussion are the ways in
which this short text represents Nahmanides’ theology, in particular his view of messianism
and how it is presented in the context of dialogical apologetics.
In Nahmanides’ account, Pablo Christiani brings references from the Hebrew Bible
and the Talmud to suggest that Jews recognize that the messiah has come in the person of
Jesus. Nahmanides refutes his reading and shows that Pablo Christiani misunderstood the
particular texts and Judaism more broadly. Nahmanides does not stop at refuting his
opponent’s position. He also offers counter-arguments in dialogue with Christian theology:
First, Nahmanides uses empirical-historical arguments, i.e. if the rabbis in the Talmud
believed that Jesus is indeed the messiah, they would have converted long ago. That they did
not testifies that this was not their view.59 Furthermore, if the messiah has indeed come, there
should be a change in the world, which according to Scripture should be a peaceful place.60
The second group of arguments is concerned with calculation of the end of times. If
the messiah has not come yet, when will he come? Nahmanides is required to answer this
question as a response to the challenge of Pablo Christiani that the promised Jewish messiah
has indeed already come. He uses this opportunity to advocate his interpretation of the book
of Daniel. Based on his calculation, the suffering Messiah son of Joseph will appear in the
year 1358 CE and the redeeming Messiah son of David will appear 45 years later (1403
56 Chazan, Barcelona and beyond, 92–9. 57 The Land of Israel had a mystical meaning for Nahmanides and serves an important role in his explanation of
the reasons for the commandments. Cf. David Novak, The Theology of Nahmanides Systematically Presented
(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992), 89–97; and Moshe Halbertal, ʻAl Derekh Ha-Emet: Ha-Ramban Vi-Yetsiratah
Shel Masoret (Jerusalem: Hartman Institute, 2006), 173–6, 259–63. 58 For a summary of earlier scholarship and its methodological problems, see Chazan, Barcelona and beyond, 4–
16; and Caputo, Nahmanides in Medieval Catalonia, 96–107. 59 Nahmanides, “Vikuah Ha-Ramban,” 1.303. 60 Ibid., 1.311.
64
CE).61 Nahmanides’ willingness to “calculate the end” and make his calculations known
despite some rabbinic prohibitions is explained through his perception of cyclical time.
According to Haviva Pedaya, Nahmanides followed a kabalistic concept of time that is based
on the notion of shmita, the world exists six thousand years and is destroyed in the seventh
thousand. At the end of seven such cycles is the great Jubilee. Each cycle corresponds to the
same cyclical nature within itself, symbolized in the six days of work and Shabbat.62 He
believed that the closer one gets to the end of a cycle the clearer the vision of the end
becomes and it is therefore permissible.
Chaim Chavel suggests that Nahmanides’ Sefer ha-Ge’ulah (Book of Redemption),
Nahmanides’ most detailed tractate concerning the end of time, was composed in the
aftermath of the disputation.63 In Sefer ha-Ge’ulah, Nahmanides refers to Christianity,
writing that he “shall not respond to them, because their word is not worthy of response […]
and it will make my answers long, because their places are many, and it is not the purpose of
this letter.”64 Nahmanides takes such care to explain that he is not concerned with Christian
opinion that it suggests the exact opposite: that Christianity serves as the backdrop and reason
for this work. Sefer ha-Ge’ulah is consistent with Nahmanides’ self-presentation in front of a
Christian interpretation of time, and—if really written in the aftermath of the disputation—
can be seen as part of Nahmanides’ dialogical apologetics.
Third, Nahmanides’ hermeneutical method is part of the process of dialogical
apologetics and the refutation of Christian claims. Nahmanides believes that the end is near
because he interprets Daniel’s vision in a typological manner and sees the last beast Rome as
representing his own time and the rule of the Church, which would be destroyed when the
messiah comes.65 The typological argumentation is also evident in Nahmanides’ commentary
61 Ibid., 1.313–14. 62 Haviva Pedaya, Ha-Ramban: Hitʻalut - Zeman Mahzori ve-Text Kadosh (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2003),
especially 209ff.; Pedaya suggests that this pattern is already evident in earlier Jewish sources prior to the
middle ages, but if this is the case remains unclear, see Halbertal, ʻAl Derekh Ha-Emet, 213n291. 63 Chavel’s introduction to Nahmanides, “Sefer Ha-Ge’ulah,” in Kitvei Ramban 1.255; Halbertal, on the other
hand, dates it earlier, to after 1240, and sees in it a response to the disappointment from the messianic
expectations of 1240, see Halbertal, ʻAl Derekh Ha-Emet, 244–5. 64 Nahmanides, “Sefer Ha-Ge’ulah,” 1.268. 65 Nahmanides, “Vikuah Ha-Ramban,” 1.309–10. Nahmanides claims to have said that to King James I in
private as part of the disputation. This claim is highly unlikely. The need to secrecy in this regard is not due to
the esoteric nature of this teaching, but was probably meant to secure Nahmanides against accusations of
falsification of the disputation by eye-witnesses. By claiming that he said these things in private Nahmanides
gives the reader the sense that he was in a close relation with the king while maintaining the verisimilitude of
the narrative; in the claim that Rome is the last beast, Nahmanides rejects interpretations, such as ibn Ezra’s,
65
on the Torah, whose guiding principle is that Israel’s history is prefigured in the deeds of the
Fathers:
Everything that has happened to the Fathers is a sign for the sons and therefore the texts elaborate in the
telling of the travelling and excavation of wells and other instances, and whoever wishes might think
that these are redundant things of no use, but they all come to teach about the future.66
Amos Funkenstein sees in typological reading of history an operation of Christian
hermeneutics and claims that Nahmanides appropriates this method.67 In other words, it is not
only the content of Nahmanides’ claims that is in dialogue and polemic with Christianity; his
method itself can be seen as part of a dialogue. Nahmanides’ utilizes Christian hermeneutics
in order to subvert the Christian interpretation: he reads the events of the Fathers with an
emphasis on the tribulations that Israel shall face, they represent not progress but rather
regress, the forced exile from the Land. Furthermore, the events prefigured in the Hebrew
Bible are present in Jewish history, not in another text (the New Testament). Israel in its
existence is the fulfillment of the promise to the Fathers and not Christ.68
The last claim is evident in Nahmanides’ interpretation of the Suffering Servant
prophecy of Isaiah (Is. 52-53), an important prophecy in Christian theology and one of the
topics of the disputation. Against the Christian interpretation that sees the person of the
suffering Christ in these verses, Nahmanides reads them as referring to the entire people of
Israel and adds that the Messiah son of David never dies according to Jewish sources. The
account of the disputation mentions that Nahmanides tried to explain this point further but the
king and all present “did not want to listen.”69 It is possible that in the aftermath of the
disputation, Nahmanides felt that the Christian interpretation of this contested chapter needs
to be countered in a more thorough way. This explains his decision to write a commentary on
which claimed that it was the Muslim rule (Nahmanides, “Sefer Ha-Ge’ulah,” 1.283–6); a similar claim
regarding the destruction of Christianity, appearing in his commentary on the Torah was censored in the
Giustinian edition (1545), see Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, The Censor, the Editor, and the Text: The Catholic
Church and the Shaping of the Jewish Canon in the Sixteenth Century, trans. Jackie Feldman (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 151. 66 Nahmanides, Perush Ha-Torah, ed. Chaim Dov Chavel (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 1963), Gen. 12:6; cf.
Nahmanides, “Torat Ha-Shem Temima,” in Kitvei Ramban, 1:163–164. 67 Amos Funkenstein, “Parshanutu Ha-Typologit Shel Ha-Ramban,” Zion 45, no. 1 (1980): 35–59; Elliot
Wolfson points out that the relation between pshat and sod in Nahmanides’ hermeneutics is not one of allegory
but of two different ontological levels by which reality is to be understood. They manifest the constant tension
between upper (elyonim) and lower (tachtonim), see Elliot R. Wolfson, “By Way of Truth: Aspects of
Nahmanides’ Kabbalistic Hermeneutic,” AJS Review 14, no. 2 (1989): 111. 68 Nahmanides, Perush Ha-Torah, Gen. 26:1; see also the discussions in Halbertal, ʻAl Derekh Ha-Emet, 219–
26; and Pedaya, Ha-Ramban, 24. 69 Nahmanides, “Vikuah Ha-Ramban,” 1.307.
66
these verses.70 It is through the contact with an adversary that Nahmanides is able to present
his own position, even if the adversary does not want to listen.
Finally, Nahmanides tries to shift the terms of the debate. He argues that the crux of
dispute between Christians and Jews is not so much the interpretation of messianism but the
Christian false perception of the divine nature, e.g. the Christian belief in the Trinity. In a
matter resembling the Khazar king’s challenge to the Christian sage in the Kuzari,
Nahmanides claims that King James I believes claims such as immaculate birth and
transubstantiation only because of his education from youth. Nature and reason reject the
main tenets of Christianity.71 An accompanying strategy is assigning less importance to
certain issues, dismissing them as insignificant for Judaism. Considering the discussion above
regarding Nahmanides’ calculations of the end, it might come as a surprise that he adopts this
strategy for the topic of messianism.72 In the disputation, Nahmanides makes the claim that
the messiah is not central to Judaism. King James I of Aragon, he declares, is more important
to him as a Jew than the messiah.73 Such a claim can be understood as an attempt to minimize
the damage of the Christian argument that the messiah has come and as apologetic in the
negative, nervous and humiliated sense that Solomon Schechter’s opening quote conveyed, as
a concession of one’s belief out of fear or the need to please the adversary.
As mentioned, there should have been fear in Nahmanides’ heart given the nature of
these disputations and the possible consequences of his words. Yet I do not think his position
can be treated as an attempt to avoid confrontation. A closer inspection of Nahmanides’
interpretation of the commandments and the human condition reveals that his claim about
messianism is consistent with his theology. In Nahmanides’ view, prior to sin humans lived
forever and their will corresponded to the divine will.74 It is through sin that the human loses
70 Nahmanides, “Be’ur Ha-Ramban Al Parashat Hi'ene Yaskil Avdi,” in Kitvei Ramban, 1.321–6. 71 Nahmanides, “Vikuah Ha-Ramban,” 1.310–11. That it is highly unlikely that Nahmanides expressed this
opinion publicly in front of the king is irrelevant in this context. Rather, as in the apologetic exemplars noted
above, it is the way he frames this defense of his religion for his own audience that matters. 72 Another famous example that cannot be dealt with here is Nahmanides’ relation to aggadah, which he seems
to reject as obligatory text in the disputation. See ibid., 1:306; among the literature on aggadah in Nahmanides'
thought, see Bernard Septimus, “Nahmanides and the Andalusian Tradition,” 17–22; Marvin Fox, “Nahmanides
on the Status of Aggadot: Perspectives on the Disputation at Barcelona, 1263,” Journal of Jewish Studies 40, no.
1 (1989): 95–109; Wolfson, “By Way of Truth: Aspects of Nahmanides’ Kabbalistic Hermeneutic,” 153–178;
and Shalem Yahalom, “Vikuah Barcelona ve-Ma’amad Ha-Aggadah Be-Mishnat Ha-Ramban,” Zion 69, no. 1
(2004): 25–43. 73 Nahmanides, “Vikuah Ha-Ramban,” 1.310. 74 This explains why the messiah, although born, can be thousand years old, see ibid., 1.307; on the relation
between Paradise (Gan Eden) first human and primordial sin, see Bezalel Safran, “Rabbi Azriel and
67
this correspondence. The Jews, however, are able to have mediation to divine will through
the commandments. Since Nahmanides lives in the pre-messianic age, the commandments
and their effect on everyday life are indeed more central to him than the figure of the
messiah, because it is through the commandments that the divine and human will correspond
here and now in a manner similar to the way it will be in the messianic age.75
Every person of the people of Israel has the ability to help bring about the messianic
age, because of the ability to share in the process that will finish the cycle and return the
world to its primordial condition. Nahmanides’ interpretation of Is. 52-53 supports this claim
by portraying the entire Israel as the Suffering Servant. Furthermore, in his commentary on
the Torah, Nahmanides implies this idea in a discussion of the circumcision of the hearts
(Det. 30:6).76 Although the context of the verse is as part of a returning to God’s mercy, the
messianic age and the messiah are not explicitly part of it. On the other hand, the connection
between belief in the messiah and messianic age and the circumcision of the hearts is an
important theme of the Pauline epistles (Rom. 2:29, Col. 2:11). One can surmise that the need
to emphasize the future messianic implications of this verse is part of another hidden polemic
against and dialogue with Christianity.
Nahmanides’ account of the disputation highlights the dangers posed to a minority
when conducting a theological debate with the majority. It also shows, however, that one can
speak, and indeed develop one’s position, in times of persecution. My hope is that this
discussion debunks one-sided assessments of the Barcelona disputation, or of Jewish
reactions to persecution more generally. It is certainly the case that there was a real, perhaps
life-threatening, danger. The disputations should not be portrayed as a polite exchange
between two gentlemen over a cup of tea. At the same time, one should not lose sight of the
dialogical aspect present in Nahmanides’ account and the numerous allusions to Christian
methods of interpretations, as well as his need to explicate the Jewish position vis-à-vis the
Christian interpretation. Nahmanides’ apologetics is dialogical, despite its polemical context:
it is a self-confident assertion and presentation of his Judaism while also revealing—in the
Nahmanides: Two Views of the Fall of Man,” in Rabbi Moses Nahmanides (Ramban): Explorations in His
Religious and Literary Virtuosity, ed. Isadore Twersky (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 75–
106; Pedaya, Ha-Ramban, 314–22; Halbertal, ʻAl Derekh Ha-Emet, 121–6. 75 Nahmanides, “Vikuah Ha-Ramban,” 1.315: “and there is no difference on this matter between this world and
the days of the messiah other than the subjugation to the kingdoms.” 76 Nahmanides, Perush Ha-Torah, Det. 30:6; Pedaya, Ha-Ramban, 285–8.
68
use of method and adaption of themes—knowledge and openness to the position and method
of the adversary and using it to develop new questions for Jewish thought.
The Tradition of Jewish Dialogical Apologetics
Dialogical apologetics as a mode of thought is occasional and developed in a response to a
specific challenge. The three exemplars in this chapter illustrate that despite its occasional
character, several themes nonetheless recur in Jewish apologetics: the political dangers to the
Jews, the use and misuse of history, the notion of election, and the interpretation of Scripture.
These are all leitmotifs and questions with which Jewish thinkers constantly grapple. Jewish
dialogical apologetic is concerned with posing the timely questions and asking old questions
anew as they take new forms. As the theoretical discussion in the first chapter and the
historical discussion in this chapter show, dialogical apologetics is concerned with the
questions and the way they are framed in relation to the other. This is true of their content just
as it is true of the genre and method of framing the question. Dialogical apologetics is about
posing questions and attempting to answer them in a way that can be called relational self-
assertion: it is open to change through an engagement with the other, without ever losing
one’s own particularity. It is also self-relational, because through apologetics new questions
emerge for the community involved, regardless of whether or not the adversary listens to the
answers provided. Now that the concept of dialogical apologetics is developed through
several historical examples, a better appreciation of Leo Baeck’s work is possible. I therefore
turn to the reasons and ways in which Baeck formulated his first question: what is the essence
of Judaism?
69
Chapter 3: Jesus and the Essence of Religion
Essence and the Contemporary Study of Religion
A century ago claims about the essence of religion had a different intellectual currency than
they do nowadays. Today, many in the contemporary academic study of religion are rightly
suspicious of construction of essences as means of exercising discursive power in a way that
might eventually also lead to physical violence.1 These voices are an important and much
needed contribution to the critical study of religion. They should not, however, cause us to
ignore or dismiss texts dealing with “essence” as antiquated or irrelevant without seriously
engaging them. I suggest in this chapter that a discussion of events such as the “essence
debate” at the turn of the last century sheds light not only on that historical period, but also on
neglected voices in the academic study of religion, voices that provide insights regarding the
term “essence.”
The essence debate began in winter semester 1899-1900. The lecture-hall of the
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin is packed with around 500 students and listeners.
Behind the podium stands Adolf Harnack. At the request of students, Harnack decides to give
a summary and accessible presentation of his views on Christianity. The result is published
shortly thereafter as Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence of Christianity]. It is an
immediate bestseller, running through more than sixty thousand copies within less than a
decade in German alone and being translated into numerous languages.2 Part of the immense
success of The Essence of Christianity can be attributed to Harnack’s stature as a scholar.
One of the most important public intellectuals in Germany and author of the seven volume
1 Despite important differences between them, and at the risk of over-simplifying their position, the following
scholars can be seen as representatives of this critical approach to the study of religion: Jonathan Z. Smith,
Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Russell T.
McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion: The Discourse on Sui Generis Religion and the Politics of Nostalgia
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after
September 11 (London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Albeit from somewhat different motivations, and
more concerned by the attempt to define Christianity in useful terms, some theologians have also rejected the
concept of essence. Stephen Sykes, for example, replaces it with the notion of “identity” see Stephen Sykes, The
Identity of Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984). The concept of identity, which Sykes uses as a
minimal definition, does not really solve the problems raised by the search for essence. At most, it frames them
differently. 2 Thomas Hübner, Adolf von Harnacks Vorlesungen über das Wesen des Christentums unter besonderer
Berücksichtigung der Methodenfragen als sachgemässer Zugang zu ihrer Christologie und Wirkungsgeschichte
(Frankfurt am Main: P. Lang, 1994), 16, and Ex II: 312–57.
70
History of Dogma, Harnack’s lectures were made popular among others because of the
person delivering them, his scholarly authority, and his vivid style.3 Yet there is more to it
than just the orator’s charisma. The popularity of Harnack’s lectures suggests that they
captured the Zeitgeist of the era, especially for the Protestant, educated, bourgeoisie, who
searched for the meaning of being Christian at the turn to a new century.4 Harnack provided
an answer to this question in clear terms with which many of his listeners could identify.
Whether in praise or controversial tone, many felt the need to reply to Harnack’s work. In the
five years following its publication almost five hundred reviews, articles, and books and
related to The Essence of Christianity appeared, marking it as a literary and theological
event.5 This debate was not limited to Christian participants: the essence debate touched an
open-nerve for many Jews, forcing them to ask questions about their own identity and the
meaning of Judaism in the modern world.6
Harnack epitomized “liberal theology at its height” and his lectures conveyed more
than his idiosyncratic opinion.7 The general tendency of the lectures and its method were
shared—despite differences and exceptions—by many German liberal Protestants, an
assemblage of theologians and historians of religion that worked in the late nineteenth
century and into the early twentieth century. Among them one usually counts, along with
Harnack, students and followers of Albrecht Ritschl, among others Julius Kaftan, Wilhelm
Hermann, Martin Rade, and Ernst Troeltsch. These theologians were heavily reliant upon the
ideas of the Enlightenment and understood themselves to be writing after Kant and Hegel.8
3 For a biographical account see Gunther Wenz, Der Kulturprotestant: Adolf von Harnack als
Christentumstheoretiker und Kontroverstheologe (Munich: Utz, 2001), esp. 9–13; although biased, the most
comprehensive account of Harnack’s life remains by his daughter. See Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, Adolf von
Harnack (Berlin-Tempelhof: Hans Bott, 1936). 4 Ernst Troeltsch, “What Does ‘The Essence of Christianity’ Mean?,” in Writings on Theology and Religion, ed.
Robert Morgan and Michael Pye (Atlanta: John Knox, 1977), 164. 5 Hübner, Adolf von Harnacks Vorlesungen über das Wesen des Christentums, 250–92. 6 Uriel Tal, Yahadut ve-Natsrut Ba-’Raikh Ha-Sheni’ (Jerusalem: Magnes University Press, 1969); Uriel Tal,
“Theologische Debatte um das ‘Wesen’ des Judentums,” in Juden im Wilhelminischen Deutschland, 1890-1914,
ed. Werner Mosse (Tübingen: Mohr, 1976), 599–632; Uriel Tal, “Al Bakashat ‘Mahut Ha-Yahadut’ Ba-Dorot
Ha-Achronim U’ve-Yamenu,” in Mitos U-Tevunah Be-Yahadut Yamenu, ed. Amos Funkenstein and Asa Kasher
(Tel-Aviv: Tel-Aviv University, 2011), 181–215; Hermann Levin Goldschmidt, “The Essence of Judaism,” in
The Legacy of German Jewry, ed. Willi Goetschel, trans. David Suchoff (New York: Fordham University Press,
2007), 124–327. 7 Adolf von Harnack, Adolf von Harnack: Liberal Theology at Its Height, ed. Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis:
Fortress Press, 1991). 8 For a recent forceful expression of this argument, see Gary Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit: The
Idealistic Logic of Modern Theology (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 23: “Modern theology was born in
the attempts by Schleiermacher, F.W. J. Schelling, G. W. F. Hegel and others to construe Christianity from the
standpoint of a transcendental post-Kantian subject that was inconceivable without Kant.”
71
They were all concerned with principles of love of the neighbor and individual faith. Their
method stressed historical thinking, often accompanied with some notion of personal
experience, as the appropriate approach to scriptural exegesis.9
This chapter examines Leo Baeck’s contributions to the essence debate. In order to
understand The Essence of Christianity in all its implication, I begin by discussing Harnack’s
work and its theological positions. One of the first responses to Harnack came from a young,
unknown rabbi from Oppeln named Leo Bäck.10 Baeck is one of many Jewish scholars who
responded to Harnack, not the least because of the negative presentation of the Pharisees in
The Essence of Christianity. Baeck intervenes in this discussion twice: first in a critical
review of Harnack’s book in 1901 and several years later in the form of The Essence of
Judaism (1905), which brought Baeck fame—especially in its second revised edition—and
marked him as an important voice of German Jewry. This work does more than just present a
self-standing “essence of Judaism” contra to Harnack’s “essence of Christianity.” It is also a
sustained and critical meditation on the study of religion. An explication of the content and
method of The Essence of Judaism thus comprises the core of this chapter. The chapter
concludes by expanding the horizon of dialogue and examining Baeck’s critique of Harnack
in light of parallel Christian critiques, in particular Ernst Troeltsch and Alfred Loisy.
Thinking about these three thinkers together as a constellation, as well as reflecting on
Baeck’s later methodological comments, provides a better understanding of Baeck’s impetus
of critique and its relevance.
9 The term “liberal Protestantism” is itself contested, and many as those identified as such, most notably Ritschl,
rejected this label, which was later used pejoratively also by the proponents of dialectical theology. For Karl
Barth portrayal of this stream of thought, see Karl Barth, Protestant Thought from Rousseau to Ritschl, trans.
Brian Cozens (Free Port, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1971); for an overview of the movement and the
problematics of the definition: Christine Axt-Piscalar, “Liberal Theology in Germany,” in The Blackwell
Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology, ed. David Fergusson (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 468–
85; for an alternative, broader, definition, see Dorrien, Kantian Reason and Hegelian Spirit, 4-5: “Liberal
theology, in my definition, was and is a three-layered phenomenon. Firstly it is the idea that all claims to truth,
in theology and other disciplines. […] Secondly, liberal theology argues for the viability and necessity of an
alternative to orthodox over-belief and secular disbelief. […]The third layer consists of specific things that go
with overthrowing the principle of external authority and adopting a mediating perspective between authority
religion and disbelief.” 10 I do not attempt to create a fictive parallel between the two. It is clear that Harnack was the senior scholar,
who completely ignored responses such as Baeck’s. See Zank, “Vom Innersten, Äußersten und Anderen,” 38:
“when one names Baeck and Harnack in the same breath one creates a parallel and equality that did not exist
historically.”
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Adolf von Harnack
2.1 History of Dogma
The Essence of Christianity can be seen as a popular version of the arguments Harnack
developed in his History of Dogma. This work, Harnack’s magnum opus, merits therefore a
discussion before the argument in The Essence of Christianity can be fully grasped. It is in
the History of Dogma that Harnack defines his historical method. The history of dogmas—the
“doctrines of the Christian faith logically formulated and expressed for scientific and
apologetic purpose”11—is the attempt to see how dogmas arose and developed in their
interrelation to one another. Harnack emphasizes the non-Jewish character of early
developments in the emerging Church. Dogma is not part of the original message of the
gospel as proclaimed by Jesus but “in its conception and development is a work of the Greek
spirit on the soil of the Gospel.”12 Two elements appear in this succinct definition: the Greek
spirit and the soil of the Gospel.
In the emerging Christian community Harnack recognized “few Jewish, but many
Graeco-Roman features.” The pillars on which the early Church stands are those of Greek
philosophy.13 The “soil of the Gospel,” however, is still essential, a seed cannot grow without
a proper soil. In a reply to criticism of the first edition of History of Dogma, Harnack explains
that dogma cannot be identified with Greek philosophy, because its definition already
presupposes the attempt to clarify the Gospel and the belief in revelation.14 Despite this
disclaimer, it is clear that Harnack searches a demarcation line between the emergence of
dogma and the “original” gospel that can be identified with Jesus. This demarcation line is
central to his historical understanding of Christianity. The two most important transformation
in the history of the Gospel are connected to demarcation lines: first, the move from the
11 Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. Neil Buchanan (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), 1. 12 Ibid., 17; History of Dogma bears the mark of “liberal Protestantism”, and in particular that of Albrecht
Ritschl. This is evident from a letter written by Harnack to Ritschl in 1885, on the occasion of publishing the
first volume: “My theological work began seventeen years ago with the study of your ‘Establishment of the Old
Catholic Church’ […] The present book is sort of a conclusion of long years of study. It would never have been
written without the foundation that you laid. Please take it in a friendly way and remain kind to the author, even
there where you cannot share his observations and judgments.” Harnack to Ritschl on 19.12.1885, cited in
Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack, Albrecht Ritschls Briefwechsel mit Adolf Harnack 1875-1889, ed.
Joachim Weinhardt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 415. 13 Harnack, History of Dogma, 45. 14 Ibid., 21.
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originator of the Gospel, Jesus, to a generation of disciples and then from the “soil” that is the
Jewish context to the Gentile Christians.15
This position calls attention to the difference between the message of Jesus and the
doctrine about him and between Jesus and his Jewish context. Harnack’s answer is
straightforward: one can identify an original, discernable message in the gospel of Jesus, i.e.
in his life and words.16 Through the commitment to the historical study and what he perceives
as the original message of the “gospel within the gospel,” Harnack is willing to call into
question—this is perhaps his most important deviation from Ritschl’s teaching—even
classical doctrines such as the Trinity. In making such claims, Harnack engages in theological
debates of his day. It is not a detached historical research, because for him “[e]very historical
study is an ethical task.”17 One example of the implications of Harnack historical studies is
the Apostolikumsstreit. Following a historical study of the Apostles’ Creed, Harnack was
consulted in 1892 by a group of students who urged the Church to change its creed, which for
them was no longer aligned with modern sensibilities. In his reply, Harnack called a literal
acceptance of the Apostles’ Creed a sign of immaturity and suggested to put alongside it, or
replace it with, a new statement of faith.18 This is a radical suggestion that did not endear him
to the Church officials, already suspicious of the centrality of the study of history in theology.
The Apostolikumsstreit shows the intimate connection between Harnack’s historical studies
15 Ibid., 71. 16 Ibid.; Albrecht Ritschl, “Instructions in the Christian Religion,” in Three Essays, trans. Philip Hefner
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), par. 3, 7, 11, 16 etc. as Hefner notes in his introduction to this volume, the
translation as “Instructions” misses the reference to Calvin’s Institutes, which has the same title in German:
Unterricht in der christlichen Religion; on the importance of return to the message of Jesus, see Albrecht
Ritschl, “‘Prolegomena’ to the History of Pietism,” in Three Essays, trans. Philip Hefner (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1972), 127. At the same time, Ritschl also goes to great length to claim Jesus’ singularity and uniqueness
in his context, writing for examples that Jesus “set himself above all the preceding prophets of the Old
Testament” and that, by fulfilling the prophecy and proclamation in his own life, he is “unique, for should any
other fulfill the same task as perfectly as he, he would be unlike him because of his dependence upon Jesus”
(Ritschl, “Instructions in the Christian Religion,” 229–30); Susannah Heschel suggests that Ritschl’s thesis on
the origins of Christianity led to a radical exclusion of Jewish elements in New Testament scholarship. With the
elimination of Baur’s structure of sublation, what little place that Judaism was perceived to have had within the
early Church has been eliminated. Instead, the focus of research now moves either to the post-apostolic period,
which is considered to have nothing Jewish in it, or to the opposition between Jesus and the Pharisees (Susannah
Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998], 123). 17 Harnack, History of Dogma, viii. 18 Adolf von Harnack, “In Sachen des Apostolikums,” in Adolf von Harnack als Zeitgenosse: Reden und
Schriften aus den Jahren des Kaiserreichs und der Weimarer Republik, ed. Kurt Nowak, vol. 1 (New York: de
Gruyter, 1996), 502–503.
74
and his political and theological positions. In other words, Harnack’s rejection of dogma is
central to his understanding of the present.
The second question concerns the relation between Jesus and the Judaism of his time.
Although Jesus followed the prophets and the Torah, he also introduced something new when
the time was ripe. This is a point Harnack repeats constantly in his discussion of the
personality of Jesus. To the question “what new thing Christ has brought,” Harnack answers
with Paul: “So, if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything has passed away;
see, everything has become new!” (2. Cor. 5:17). One can indeed find parallels to every
aspect of Jesus’ preaching, yet this misses the point. Historically Jesus is singular because of
his personality:
It is the person, it is the fact of his life that is new and creates the new. The way in which he called
forth and established a people of God on earth, which has become sure of God and of eternal life; the
way in which he set up a new thing in the midst of the old and transformed the religion of Israel into
the religion: that is the mystery of his Person, in which lies his unique and permanent position in the
history of humanity.19
Not doctrinal statements, but Jesus’ personality, in deed and word, is the decisive element.
Jesus’ deeds and teaching shine forth even more when seen in light of his historical
context. The Jews of the time had, according to Harnack, a great treasure at their disposal: the
belief in the One God. They were, however, poor vessels for this treasure. The universality of
the message, its spiritual power, severed it from its original national constraints. The attempts
of the “professional watchmen,” a reference to the Pharisees, to secure the national treasure
by hedging a fence around it “is but a proof of the advancing decomposition within the
Jewish nation.”20 Jesus exposed this “external righteousness” of the Pharisees as “fraud.”21
2.2 The Essence of Christianity
2.2.1 The Method for Determining the Essence
The two questions present in the History of Dogma, regarding the relation of the historical
Jesus to the Christ of dogma and the Jewish context of Jesus, play a prominent role also in
19 Harnack, History of Dogma, 73. 20 Ibid., 47. Harnack has mAvot 1:1 in mind. 21 Ibid., 68. In a note following this statement, Harnack suggests that the potential for ethics and universality
was already present in Pharisaic and Alexandrian-Jewish teachings, but it could not be developed due to the
constraint on external measures.
75
The Essence of Christianity. In this work, Harnack defines the “essence of Christianity” by a
reference to the simple message of the Gospel in the words and acts of Jesus. 22 Such an
argument has several implications: first, if the message is to be discerned in authentic
sayings, then the task of defining the essence belongs to the historian, who is qualified to
determine the authenticity of sayings based on a careful historical investigation. It is a
different method than that of traditional apologetics or philosophy of religion.23 Secondly,
Harnack’s attempt to trace the essence of Christianity is based on historical research not just
of the period of Jesus, but also of subsequent developments. In order for something to be
considered essential, it has to be lasting and present throughout the development of the
history of Christianity.24 Third, although the history of Christianity as a whole should be
looked at, the emphasis on the principles laid down by Jesus already means that there are
inessential aspects to Christianity in its various later manifestations. This view is in
accordance, as we have seen, with Harnack’s treatment of dogma as a subsequent addition to
Christianity.
In his lectures, Harnack constantly uses the image of separating the “kernel” [Kern]
from the “husk” [Schale] to describe the historian’s task of separating the essential from the
auxiliary.25 As with the discussion of dogmas, the historical analysis presents itself as
objective while aiming at showing the relevance and vitality of the kernel for contemporary
life. This is already evident in the decision to present the essence of Christianity in the form
of public and highly accessible form. It is also present in a later lecture “The Certainty and
Limits of Historical Knowledge” (1917), where Harnack writes:
[A]ll history that merits knowledge, must be in some sense and somehow history-of-the-present
[Gegenwartsgeschichte]. Only that which serves the knowledge of the present may raise the claim, to
become an object of knowledge for us.26
22 Adolf von Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums: Sechzehn Vorlesungen vor Studierenden aller Facultäten
im Wintersemester 1899/1900 an der Universität Berlin gehalten (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1900), 6; English:
Adolf von Harnack, What Is Christianity?, trans. Thomas Baily Saunders (London: Williams and Norgate,
1901), 9. 23 cf. Harnack, What Is Christianity?, 7–9. 24 Cf. ibid., 12: “There are only two possibilities here: either the Gospel is in all respects identical with its
earliest form, in which case it came with its time and has departed with it; or else it contains something which,
under differing historical forms, is of permanent validity. The latter is the true view.” 25 Ibid., 10, 12–13, 39, 85–6, 118 etc. 26 Adolf von Harnack, “Über die Sicherheit und die Grenzen geschichtlicher Erkenntnis,” in Adolf von Harnack
als Zeitgenosse, vol. 1 (New York: de Gruyter, 1996), 931–2 - emphasis in original.
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By presenting the essence of Christianity, Harnack seeks to show for his audience and
readership the relevance of the words and message of Jesus for their lives. Harnack
emphasizes time and again the kernel, but there are moments in which he acknowledges the
importance of the husk in protecting the kernel:
Just as we cannot obtain a complete knowledge of a tree without regarding not only its root and its stem
but also its bark, its branches, and the way in which it blooms, so we cannot form any right estimate of
the Christian religion unless we take our stand upon a comprehensive induction that shall cover all the
facts of its history.27
Such remarks, however, do not change the general tendency: the kernel, and not the historical
development of the husk, is the determining factor of the essence; the former is essential,
even if it needs the latter. This means judging the development of Christianity by a historical
look backward, by comparing it with the intention and message of its founder, Jesus.
2.2.2 What Is Christianity?
What, then, is the essence of Christianity that Harnack finds in the words of Jesus? True to
his belief in its simplicity, Harnack summarizes the essence of Christianity succinctly: “First,
the kingdom of God and its coming. Secondly, God the Father and the infinite value of the
human soul. Thirdly, the higher righteousness and the commandment of love.”28 In Outlines
of the History of Dogma, Harnack offers a slightly different version, giving more place for
Christ as the centre of the religion, as different from the historical words of Jesus.
Christianity there is defined as “that religion in which the impulse and power to a blessed and
holy life is bound up with faith in God as the Father of Jesus Christ.”29 In both definitions,
however, it is knowledge of God and the Kingdom, not Christology, that stands at the centre
of the definition.
Harnack’s focus on the kingdom of God treats it as an ethical message. This is a
common feature of liberal Protestantism, evident already in Ritschl’s work. The main
message of Jesus according to Ritschl is concerning the “kingdom of God,” which is the
27 Harnack, What Is Christianity?, 10; cf. Adolf von. Harnack, The Mission and Expansion of Christianity in the
First Three Centuries, trans. James Moffatt (New York: G.P. Putman’s Sons, 1908), 234: “Like every living
plant, religion only grows inside a bark. Distilled religion is not religion at all”. For a reading of Harnack in light
of the interrelation kernel-husk, see Sykes, The Identity of Christianity, 136–8. 28 Harnack, What Is Christianity?, 36. 29 Adolf Harnack, Outlines of the History of Dogma, trans. Edwin Knox Mitchell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957),
1.
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divinely ordained highest good (summum bonum) for the Christian community.30 Ritschl’s
contribution to the understanding of the kingdom is in claiming it not as a philosophical or
dogmatical concept, but as historical. According to his historical analysis, Jesus’ message in
the New Testament is the proclamation of the kingdom as the forgiveness of sins and the
coming in the midst of time of the kingdom of God as a covenant of people who recognize
Jesus himself as the bearer of this revelation about the kingdom.31 The kingdom of God in the
midst of human everyday life, is founded upon the Christian revelation. The implication of
this analysis is that the kingdom of God is not purely moral but also religious, i.e. it cannot be
made universal without grasping the message of Jesus and its proper development in
Christianity.
About three years after Ritschl’s death, his historical understanding of the kingdom of
God was challenged by his son-in-law Johannes Weiss, who claimed in 1892 that Jesus’
understanding of the kingdom as ethical is no more than a “vestige of the Kantian idea” that
distorts the historical concept.32 Jesus did not mean the kingdom of God as ethical, but as
eschatological. As the highest good, the kingdom is not concerned with human moral action
but with an unknown future. Harnack follows Weiss in his understanding of the message of
Jesus as a proclaiming the message of the kingdom as something radically new in accordance
with the teaching of the “Old Testament,” but he insists on maintaining Ritschl’s emphasis on
the ethical nature of the kingdom of God by claiming that the apocalyptic—in the original
meaning of the word—is the revelation by and through Jesus of God as the loving Father.33
The Essence of Christianity thus emphasizes the teaching of Jesus by focusing on his
personality as the defining factor of Christian ethics and as a model for imitation. Harnack
30 Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Development of the
Doctrine (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1900), 34; for the following paragraph see also Hans Schwarz, “The
Centrality and Bipolar Focus of Kingdom: Ritschl’s Theological Import for the Twentieth Century,” in Ritschl
in Retrospect: History, Community, and Science, ed. Darrell Jodock (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 104–8.
Following Kant’s third formulation of the categorical imperative, Ritschl identifies the kingdom as ethical.
There is a historical vector leading from Kant’s “kingdom of ends”, through Schleiermacher and up to Ritschl.
Cf. Christian Walther, Typen des Reich-Gottes-Verständnisses: Studien zur Eschatologie und Ethik im
19.Jahrhundert. (Munich: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1961), 169. 31 Ritschl, “Instructions in the Christian Religion,” par. 5; this is a point also made by Ritschl in the second
volume of Justification and Reconciliation. Cf. Gerald McCulloh, “A Historical Bible, a Reasonable Faith, a
Conscientious Action: The Theological Legacy of Albrecht Ritschl,” in Ritschl in Retrospect: History,
Community, and Science, ed. Darrell Jodock (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 38–9. 32 Johannes Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, ed. Richard Hiers and David Holland
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971), 133; cf. Rolf Schäfer, “Das Reich Gottes bei Albrecht Ritschl und Johannes
Weiß,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 61, no. 1 (1964): 68–88; Schwarz, “The Centrality and Bipolar
Focus of Kingdom,” 108–11. 33 Harnack, History of Dogma, 58.
78
insists that although historical work needs to be meticulous and based on a careful
examination of the details, the kernel itself, as well as identifying it, is very simple and
straightforward:
To contend that Jesus meant his whole message to be taken provisionally, and everything in it to
receive a different interpretation after his death and resurrection, nay, parts of it to be put aside as of no
account, is a desperate supposition. No! His message is simpler than the churches would like to think it;
simpler, but for that very reason sterner and endowed with a greater claim to universality.34
One way to think about it is through Kant’s interpretation of the figure of Jesus. According to
Kant, Scripture can provide people with Urbilder or archetypes for moral teaching and
action. Jesus in Kant’s reading of Scripture appears as an exemplar, as the manifestation of
the moral-rational ideas to which human being must aspire. In his life and teaching, Jesus
serves as a model for the human beings striving toward moral cultivation.35 Harnack is not
presenting a version of the story of the Fall, from Jesus’ message to its constant distortion.36
He believes that although a lot of Church history shows a deviation from the message of
Jesus, there can be periods of progress, and the Reformation and his own time, in which the
message is made relevant for the present, can be considered as such.37
Similar to the presentation in the History of Dogma, the essence of Christianity is
constructed in opposition to the Pharisees. Jesus’ personality shines bright in the dark of the
Pharisees. Perhaps given the public and spoken nature of The Essence of Christianity,
however, some of Harnack’s more nuanced comments in History of Dogma about the
Pharisees disappear in favor of a one-dimensional presentation:
He [Jesus] came into immediate opposition with the official leaders of the people, and in them with
ordinary human nature in general. They thought of God as of a despot guarding the ceremonial
observances in His household; he breathed in the presence of God. They saw Him only in His law,
which they had converted into a labyrinth of dark defiles, blind alleys and secret passages; he saw and
felt Him everywhere. They were in possession of a thousand of His commandments, and thought,
therefore, that they knew Him; he had one only, and knew Him by it. They had made this religion into
34 Harnack, What Is Christianity?, 94–5. 35 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and Other Writings, ed. Allen Wood and
George Di Giovanni (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6:60–1; cf. James DiCenso, Kant,
Religion, and Politics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 243–54. 36 Stephen Sykes suggests that such a misreading of Harnack is based on an uncritical acceptance of Loisy’s
views, which are discussed later in this chapter. Cf. Sykes, The Identity of Christianity, 129. 37 Kurt Nowak, “Bürgerliche Bildungsreligion? Zur Stellung Adolf von Harnacks in der protestantischen
Frömmigkeitsgeschichte der Moderne,” Zeitschrift Für Kirchengeschichte 99 (1988): 326–53.
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an earthly trade, and there was nothing more detestable; he proclaimed the living God and the soul's
nobility.38
Jesus’ Jewishness is not denied, but minimized; everything outside the kernel of his teaching
is treated as part of the husk.39 If the essence of Christianity is determined by the meaning of
the historical knowledge for the present, then it would seem that the same is true for its
opposite – the historical knowledge of the Pharisees as the negative folio of Jesus’ teaching
is just as necessary for the present. As one can imagine, it is this attempt to detach Jesus from
Judaism by vilifying the latter that Jewish scholars and theologians found most disturbing.
Baeck’s Replies
3.1 “Harnack’s Lectures on the Essence of Christianity”
Baeck’s review of Harnack’s lectures was published in 1901 in the Montasschrift für
Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums, the most important scholarly organ of the
Wissenschaft des Judentums, and it relies on this scholarly tradition.40 His first type of
objection consists of providing a comparative perspective. The aspects of Jesus’ teaching that
Harnack defines as the essence are for Baeck indeed an essential part of Jesus’ teaching, but
this teaching is Jewish through and through. Jesus’ emphasis on the commandment of love is
typical of none other than the Pharisees that Harnack disparaged: Akiva, “the official leader
of the people,” claimed that the love of the neighbor contains the entire Jewish religion.41 In
claiming Jesus not only as a Jew but as a Pharisee, Baeck is contesting the opposition in
Christian thought between Jesus and the Pharisees. If Jesus is a Pharisee, either the Pharisees,
and by implication Judaism, are of great and essential value to Christianity, or Jesus suffers
from all the negative stereotypes associated with the Pharisees and can hardly be deemed a
moral exemplar. In this critique, Baeck follows the pioneering work of Abraham Geiger,
which he cites approvingly.42
38 Harnack, What Is Christianity?, 36. 39 Ibid., 118: ". 40 Hans Liebeschütz, Von Georg Simmel zu Franz Rosenzweig: Studien zum jüdischen Denken im deutschen
Kulturbereich (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1970), 59–64. 41 Leo Bäck, “Harnack’s Vorlesungen über das Wesen des Christentums,” Monatschrift für Geschichte und
Wissenschaft des Judentums 45 (1901): 106. 42 Ibid., 118; On Geiger, see Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus; Albert Friedlander, Leo Baeck:
Teacher of Theresienstadt (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), 59, 74–76; see also Leo Bäck, Das
Wesen des Judentums (Berlin: Rathausen and Lamm, 1905), 30.
80
Although Baeck does not directly challenge the centrality of the “kingdom of God” as
part of Jesus’ teaching, he claims that Harnack “does not seem to thoroughly know the
language of the time” and therefore conflates two related terms, namely the “kingdom of
God” [Gottesreich] and “the days of the messiah” [Zeit des Messias].43 Despite its relegation
to a footnote, such a claim can have profound implication. If the kingdom of God is so central
to the teaching of Jesus, as Ritschl, Harnack and others have claimed, then Harnack’s
misunderstanding of the two terms creates a distorted picture of that essence. The two terms
might be related but are not the same. Baeck’s argument falters, however, for several reasons:
first, Baeck does not explain the difference between the two concepts. My inference that in
“the kingdom of God” Baeck thinks about the “world-to-come” follows a classical instance
that might have inspired Baeck, but olam ha-ba cannot be easily identified with the “kingdom
of God.” Even if this inference is correct, the distinction between olam ha-ba and yemot ha-
mashiah is probably later then Jesus’ time.44 Harnack is thus not wrong to conflate the
kingdom of God, the world-to-come and the days of the messiah, because the concepts were
intermingled at the time of Jesus. Finally, a Christocentric reading of Jesus’ proclamation of
the kingdom of God—although not necessarily shared by Harnack—would actually support
the conflation of the two concepts into one.
Although Baeck’s critique of Harnack concerning the “kingdom of God” is untenable
upon closer scrutiny, he is correct on other accounts, insisting for example upon the
comparative aspect that is lacking in Harnack’s analysis. The same type of argument is
evident when Baeck contends that Harnack fails to distinguish between halakha and
aggadah. The vast corpus of Jewish literature is not only based on legal discussions and
decisions (halakha) but also on parables, legends and stories that are meant to educate or
elaborate the halakhic decision (aggadah). Halakha is meant to teach law; aggadah is meant
to teach virtue. The two are interrelated, but for the purpose of comparison they can be
43 Bäck, “Harnack’s Vorlesungen,” 100n1. Baeck might be thinking alongside the Talmudic opinion of R. Hiya
bar Aba that prophecies refer to the times of the messiah (yemot ha-mashiah) but that on the world-to-come
(olam ha-ba) nothing can be said (B. Berakhot 34b). By noting the conceptual difference, Baeck aims to show
the limits in speaking from a Jewish perspective about God’s dominion at the world-to-come. 44 David Novak, The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1995), 262: “In early rabbinic teaching, there does not seem to be any clear distinction between 'the days
of the Messiah' (yemot ha-mashiah), 'the resurrection of the dead' (tehiyyat ha-metim), and 'the world-to-come'
(olam ha-ba - see, e.g., M. Avot 2.16).”
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analytically separated: the New Testament should be compared in this understanding only to
some aggadic materials.45
This argument is also an argument about the New Testament. The claim that the New
Testament should be compared to aggadic material is tantamount to treating it as part of a
broader genre of Jewish literature.46 This early insight by Baeck is pursued further in his later
work. In “The Old Opposition to the Aggadah” (1914), Baeck claims that the method of
interpreting scripture in the New Testament is aggadic. In fact, the later rabbinic position
toward aggadah is identified by Baeck as a reply to Christianity and the need to keep the
borderline between the two religions.47 The consequence of Baeck’s argument is the
treatment of the New Testament, or at least parts of it, as a Jewish text.48 In his later work The
Gospel as a Document of the History of the Jewish Faith (1938), Baeck insists on reading
what he identifies as the earliest layers of the Gospels, especially present in the synoptic
Gospels, in terms of the Jewish hermeneutical tradition:
the old Gospel tradition […] has to be understood in terms of these special features of Jewish tradition.
It partakes fully of all these characteristics, for it is really nothing but a part of this tradition […] Here,
too, the beginning is that pupils have heard the worlds of their teacher—for it is as a teacher that Jesus
appears first of all—and experienced his deeds and his passion. To hand on what they had heard and
seen would have been required of them in any case, as a pious obligation which they owed their
master.49
Samuel Sandmel notes the lack of references to Form Criticism in this later work by Baeck,
which leads him to claim that “Baeck was as external to the scholarship of Christians
respecting Christian sacred literature as was the usual Christian to the Jewish scholarship on
45 Bäck, “Harnack’s Vorlesungen,” 107–10. 46 The debate about the relation between the New Testament and rabbinical literature had peaked a couple of
years later, with Wilhelm Bousset’s publication of Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter
(1903). On this see Wiese, “Ein unerhörtes Gesprächsangebot: Leo Baeck, die Wissenschaft des Judentums und
das Judentumsbild des Liberalen Protestantismus,” in Leo Baeck, 1873-1956: Aus Dem Stamme von Rabbinern,
ed. Fritz Backhaus and Georg Heuberger (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001),
155. 47 Leo Baeck, “Der alte Widerspruch gegen die Haggada,” in Aus drei Jahrtausenden (Berlin: Schocken Verlag,
1938), 177–8. 48 Although they would not go so far as to claim the New Testament as a Jewish text, Christian scholars had to
accept some of the methodological critiques regarding comparison offered by Jewish scholars, who had a far
better knowledge of the rabbinical sources. The same cannot be said of studies of the Hebrew Bible, a field in
which Jews had little influence. See Wiese, “‘The Best Antidote to Anti-Semitism?’” 152. 49 Leo Baeck, “The Gospel as a Document of the History of the Jewish Faith,” in Judaism and Christianity,
trans. Walter Kaufmann (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1960), 62.
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Jewish literature.”50 Sandmel recognizes, however, that in final reckoning—note the year of
the above publication—this might be part of Baeck’s response to theological antisemitism
and his attempts to prove the superiority of Judaism over Christianity.51 Baeck attempts to
rescue the Jewish character of the gospels precisely by insisting on their oral character by
following the aforementioned insight offered by Abraham Geiger regarding Jesus the
Pharisee and extending it further. Not only Jesus, but the entire early layer of the Gospel
should be read in light of the Jewish oral tradition that is concerned with interpretation of the
Bible as well with stories about the sage, Jesus of Nazareth, bringing this tradition forth. It is
not simply a question of knowledge of contemporary scholarship or lack thereof. Baeck
suggests that the gospels are an oral Jewish tradition and should be treated methodologically
as such. Seen in light of this genre, they require a different sort of reading than is
presupposed by the Christian scholarship on the Bible.
Perhaps the most compelling critique offered by Baeck is his claim that Harnack’s
attempt to define the essence is subjective. Harnack sees in the Gospel not what was central
for its time, but rather what is central for his own era. One way to understand this critique is
to see Baeck as following the Rankean dictum, wie es eigentlich gewesen. In this reading,
Harnack is not a good historian because he is not providing objective judgment. Baeck seems
to go in this direction when he begins his critique by citing Harnack’s claim that the lectures
are concerned with determining the essence historically, but this remains only “an empty
ideal.”52 It is difficult to write as an objective historian about the origin of one’s own religion,
but if that is what Harnack claims to do, he should also try to hold up to his word.53 Harnack
fails to do so, and so his work becomes one of apologetics and would have been more aptly
named “my religion” or “my Christianity.”54
Baeck argues that Harnack’s book is in fact a work of apologetics. Although he uses
the word “apologetic” with the traditional pejorative tone, i.e. in order to portray Harnack’s
views as subjective, Baeck does not reject here apologetics altogether. As we have seen in the
first chapter, Baeck believes Jewish theology could use an honest Christian apologetics
50 Samuel Sandmel, Leo Baeck on Christianity (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1975), 9; for a more generous
assessment of Baeck’s relationship to German-Protestant scholarship of his time, see Reinhold Mayer,
Christentum und Judentum in der Schau Leo Baecks (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1961), 17. 51 Sandmel, Leo Baeck on Christianity, 15. 52 Bäck, “Harnack’s Vorlesungen,” 98. 53 Ibid., 99. 54 Ibid., 100, 104–5.
83
whose “weapon and shield” are “pure and impeccable,” under the condition that such an
apologetics does not pretend to be history and think that it may use historical injustice and
misrepresentation as weapon.55 This notion of apologetics suggests that Baeck is not
necessarily concerned first and foremost with history “as it truly was,” but rather with the
way one describes, uses, and misuses history and historical knowledge. The problem,
however, is that Harnack does not adequately fulfill what he has set up to do; he is neither an
objective historian nor an honest apologist.
Baeck wrote his dissertation under Dilthey, and it is reasonable to assume that he has
been aware of Dilthey’s critique of historical knowledge.56 According to Dilthey, the method
for Geisteswissenschaft, the “science of the human,” is understanding (Verstehen) the lived-
experience (Erlebnis) of another, whether contemporary or from the past.57 Verstehen is a
process that involves both re-experiencing the subjective, the mental image of the human
being whose work is being examined, and the abstraction, representation, and
conceptualization that follow it in order to make a broader claim. In this process, there is also
a constant back-and-forth between the inner experience of the individual and the context for
this experience. Michael Ermarth summarizes the subjective and objective dimensions of
Verstehen when he writes:
Verstehen presupposes the full experience of the living subject; all cognition in the human sciences is
in a sense a re-cognition of human life. Consequently, Dilthey concluded that Ranke’s desire to efface
himself before the object would be tantamount to removing the vital precondition of understanding
itself. A pure cogito or ich-loses Subjekt cannot provide the grounds of comprehending the human
world.58
Dilthey’s critique of historical reason is in the background of Baeck’s comments on Harnack:
the question is not only whether Harnack properly understood Jesus’ teaching. The more
55 Ibid., 119–20. 56 Leo Bäck, Spinozas erste Einwirkung auf Deutschland (Berlin: Mayer&Müller, 1895); Albert Friedlander has
emphasized Dilthey’s influence on Baeck, especially on the latter’s attempt to find a Gestalt underlying Judaism
and being a Jew (Friedlander, Teacher of Theresienstadt, 20–2, 62–3). In this, Friedlander is following the
Alexander Altmann, see Alexander Altmann, “Theology in Twentieth Century German Jewry,” Leo Baeck
Institute Yearbook 1 (1956): 199. 57 Howard Tuttle, Wilhelm Dilthey’s Philosophy of Historical Understanding: A Criticial Analysis (Leiden: E.J.
Brill, 1969), 9. I return to the role of Erlebnis in Dilthey’s and Baeck’s thought in the next chapter. 58 Michael Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1978), 311; cf. Charles Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1995), 145: “In Dilthey’s interpretation, consciousness is never ‘pure’ or absolute but exists only within
the context of human life, which is temporally and culturally determined. Thus consciousness is always a
specific consciousness, my consciousness.”
84
fundamental question is whether or not Harnack’s method can achieve its goal. In “Harnack’s
Lectures on the Essence of Christianity” Baeck seems to answer in the negative. It is in The
Essence of Judaism that Baeck provides an alternative.
3.2 The Essence of Judaism
The title of The Essence of Judaism already marks it as a clear reply to Harnack. As Uriel Tal
carefully documented, there appeared even prior to Baeck’s several presentations of “the
essence of Judaism” at the turn of the century.59 Indeed, the compound “essence of Judaism”
can be traced to the rising popularity of the Christian concept of the “essence of Christianity”
in modernity.60 Baeck’s work shares basic traits with some of these works insofar as content
is concerned, i.e. it offers a presentation of the essence of Judaism that is meant as an
alternative to Protestant theological readings of Judaism.
The structure of The Essence of Judaism implies both its content and its method. The
book is divided into three main chapters: the first, “The Character of Judaism,” is divided into
three different subsections: “Unity and Development,” “The Prophetic Religion and the
Community of Faith,” and “Revelation and World-Religion.” The second chapter, “The Ideas
[Ideen, also in the sense of ideals] of Judaism” is divided into “Faith in God” and “Faith in
Human”, the latter in turn is also threefold: “Faith in Ourselves,” “Faith in Our Neighbor
[Nebenmensch],” and “Faith in Humanity.” The last chapter, “The Preservation of Judaism,”
contains just one subsection – “The History and the Task.” With the exception of the
introductions to later editions of the work, Baeck does not comment systematically and in a
unified manner on the method for determining the essence. Yet the methodological critique is
59 Tal, “Theologische Debatte” 60 Friedrich Niewöhner, “Judentum, Wesen des Judentums,” ed. Joachim Ritter and Karlfried Gründer,
Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie (Basel: Schwabe, 2007 1971), 649–53; Walter Homolka, Jewish
Identity in Modern Times: Leo Baeck and German Protestantism (Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995), 25–6.
Although by no means representative in and of itself, a Google-books Ngram examination gives indication of
this tendency. The expressions “das Wesen des Judentums” and “das Wesen des Christentums” were cross-
searched between 1500 and 1950.
(https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Wesen+des+Christentums%2CWesen+des+Judentums&year
_start=1500&year_end=1950&corpus=20&smoothing=5&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CWesen%20des%20C
hristentums%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CWesen%20des%20Judentums%3B%2Cc0 Last viewed: May 19th,
2015). The graph clearly shows a rise in the use of the concept from the beginning of the nineteenth century,
with a peak at the beginning of the twentieth that can be attributed to Harnack’s work. The important point to
note is the correlation between the popularity of the “essence of Christianity” and that of the “essence of
Judaism”. The eighteenth century appearances are in my estimation mostly a result of the number of books
scanned, and following them shows unfortunately no relevance to the research at hand.
85
the stronger and more interesting aspect of The Essence of Judaism. In order to highlight this
neglected aspect of the work, I forego a section by section presentation and begin instead
with Baeck’s questions about the content, “what is the essence of Judaism?” before moving
to the methodological question “how is the essence to be known?”
3.2.1 Essence as Ethics
The essence of Judaism according to Baeck is to be found in the religious emphasis on the
commandment as an obligation toward God and fellow-humans: “it is not only that Judaism
is ethical, but ethics forms its principle, its essence.”61 The obligation toward God, and this is
a point Baeck is never tired of emphasizing, is conducted through a sense of duty [Pflicht]
and acting [Tun] in this world.62 The notion of the ethical duty can be readily traced back to
Kant, and in this particular case to the influence of Hermann Cohen, the neo-Kantian Jewish
philosopher from Marburg.63 Although many of Cohen’s more important essays regarding the
Jewish foundation of ethics and the relation between Judaism and philosophy appeared only
after the first edition of The Essence of Judaism, his importance cannot be overstressed.64
Baeck for his part recognizes Cohen’s philosophical enterprise in the endnotes to The
Essence of Judaism, where he mentions three essays by Cohen as having special importance
for him: “The Problem of Jewish Morality,” Ethics and Philosophy of Religion in Their
Interrelation, and “Love of the Neighbor in the Talmud.”65
61 Leo Bäck, WdJ, 39 - emphasis in original. 62 In the next chapter, I claim that Baeck emphasizes this worldliness as a worthy reply to the gnostic challenge.
For the present of the current discussion, however, it is sufficient to trace its origins and importance with regard
to Harnack’s method. 63 Alexander Altmann shows in a brief sketch the extent to which German-Jewish theology depended upon
Cohen, and notes the high regard that Cohen had for Baeck. See Altmann, “Theology in Twentieth Century
German Jewry,” 198; similarly, Robert Gibbs (Gibbs, Correlations, 17–23) sees in Cohen the centre of what can
be identified as family-resemblance between various Jewish philosophers such as Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel
Levinas. Given his early reliance on Cohen, and Cohen’s own perception of Baeck’s work, one can possibly add
Baeck to this distinguished family, with the caveat that the correlation between Judaism and philosophy is not as
explicit in Baeck. 64 I have in mind here in particular the following: “Religious Postulates” (1907), “The Inner Relations of Kant’s
Philosophy to Judaism” (1910), The Concept of Religion in the System of Philosophy (1915), and of course the
posthumously published Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism (1919). There is no evidence that
Baeck knew Ethics of Pure Will (1904), which was published only shortly before The Essence of Judaism
appeared. 65 Hermann Cohen, “Das Problem der jüdischen Sittenlehre: Eine Kritik von Lazarus’ Ethik des Judenthum,”
Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 43, no. 9 (1899): 385–400; Hermann Cohen, Ethik
und Religionsphilosophie in ihrem Zusammenhänge (Berlin: Adolf Alkalay and Sohn, 1904); Hermann Cohen,
“Liebe und Gerechtigkeit in den Begriffen Gott und Mensch,” Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur
3, no. 1 (1900): 75–132.
86
The first point in which Baeck shows similarity with Cohen is in his understanding of
God. For Cohen the idea of God [Gottesidee] is a religious as well as a philosophical problem
and as such it should be treated with the proper methodological tools of neo-Kantian critical
idealism. As a reader and interpreter of Kant, Cohen found Kant’s critique of metaphysics
convincing, but Kant’s own postulate of God unsatisfactory. Cohen tries to follow the
Kantian logic further than Kant. Postulating immortality of the soul and claiming God’s
eudemonistic role as a guarantee of happiness, according to Cohen, is not warranted. God, or
better said the idea of God, is necessary as a theoretical and ethical concept, precisely in the
connection between the two. In Cohen’s work, God becomes the condition of the possibility
of the unity of ends.66 Gottesidee as a theoretical idea of God is manifested in terms of
practical reason in the form of God as Idea of the Good in the Platonic sense. In order to be a
guarantee of the unity of ends, God must have complete detachment from the empirical
world. This idea of God is a point of connection also between philosophy and religion. At
that time, Cohen believed that religion is to be subsumed eventually into the philosophical
study of ethics.67 He nevertheless notes that monotheism has an important moral value. In the
lecture Ethics and Philosophy of Religion in Their Interrelation, Cohen claims this idea of
God as separated from the world is one of the greatest contributions of Judaism to morality:
This is the unique, eternal worth of the Jewish idea of God: that it does not assume any mixture with
the human. The ground of the human, of the moral human, lays in God. Therefore God cannot be at the
same time human. The transcendence of God is the deepest security of the immanence of human
morality.68
This is a critique of Christian claims to the divine and human nature of the Godhead. God’s
oneness is not simply numerical, One as opposed to many, but qualitative: God is unique
(Einzig) and hence different from the world (Ber’eshit Raba 68:9). Baeck accepts this
interpretation of Jewish monotheism by Cohen. Commenting on the most important Jewish
66 Hermann Cohen, Kants Begründung der Ethik, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Bruno Cassirer, 1910), 364–6; cf. Irene
Kajon, “Critical Idealism in Hermann Cohen’s Writings on Judaism,” in Hermann Cohen’s Critical Idealism,
ed. Reinier Munk (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 375; and Reinier Munk, “The Idea of God in Cohen’s Ethics,” in
Hermann Cohen’s Ethics, ed. Robert Gibbs (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2006), 105–14. 67 Andrea Poma, The Critical Philosophy of Hermann Cohen (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1997), 307; Irene Kajon summarizes some of Cohen’s Jewish essays from this period: “he regards the religious
idea of freedom as ‘purity of heart’ or ‘obedience to divine commandment’ or ‘choice of life’ only as a step
toward the philosophical idea of freedom; he sees the theory which explains the specific concepts of Judaism
only as a preparation for ethics as a philosophical doctrine; he prefers the scientific style, which is characteristic
of philosophy, rather than the poetic style which is peculiar to the Prophets in the determination of morality.”
(Kajon, “Critical Idealism in Hermann Cohen’s Writings on Judaism,” 377). 68 Cohen, Ethik und Religionsphilosophie, 15.
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affirmation of faith, the Shema—“Hear O Israel, the Lord is Our God, the Lord is One”
(Deut. 6:4)—he states that God’s oneness is also his otherness, it should be understood as a
qualitative difference, as uniqueness.69
In line with his understanding of the idea of God as described above, Cohen reads the
philosophy of Maimonides as rejecting any human attempt to assign positive attributes to
God. By its definition, God’s essence cannot be described. The only possible statements
about God are what Maimonides called the “ways of God”, his ethical effect in the world.70
As the name of the essay implies, in “Love and Justice in the Concepts of God and Human,”
Cohen subsumes the thirteen traditional attributes (middot) of God (Ex. 34: 6-7) under two
major attributes: love and justice. As two aspects of the idea of God, they are interlinked:
“Only the God of justice is the God of love for humanity. Without justice there is no love for
historical humankind.”71 Yet God’s otherness means that we cannot just imitate divine
actions. It is naïve to think that God’s love, for example, has any connection with human
affection. The opposite is true: if God could feel human feelings, God would be like me, thus
losing the foundational role God has.72
Cohen argues instead that God’s attributes of love and justice are manifested in
human ethical virtues, such as love of the neighbor. Love of the neighbor is something that
according to Cohen was never arrived at by Plato. Philosophy discovered only the general
humanity but not the particular person next-to-me (Nebenmensch).73 Describing the religious
69 Bäck, WdJ, 63–4. 70 Cohen, “Liebe und Gerechtigkeit in den Begriffen Gott und Mensch,” 77–9; in the Ethics of Maimonides
(1908), Cohen offers a fuller analysis of Maimonides’ thought. He explores the method by which Maimonides
speaks about God, namely by a “negation of privation.” For example, to say that God is omnipotent means that
God is to described as the negation of everything powerless, see Hermann Cohen, Ethics of Maimonides, trans.
Almut Bruckstein (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004); Cohen has already developed this kind of
argument in Logic of Pure Cognition but Martin Kavka notes that the full consequences of the argument are
drawn in the essay on Maimonides: the focus on creation of something from nothing as constituting the
foundation for ethics and messianism (Martin Kavka, Jewish Messianism and the History of Philosophy [New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2004], 107). 71 Cohen, “Liebe und Gerechtigkeit in den Begriffen Gott und Mensch,” 118. 72 Ibid., 81. 73 Ibid., 85–6, 92; for Cohen this move is achieved through the concept of the Noahide, i.e. the idea that the non-
Jew also follows moral percepts and she should be treated justly. The Noahide is thus a border-concept
connecting the theoretical and theological with the practical and political, see Hermann Cohen, Die
Nächstenliebe im Talmud: Ein Gutachten dem königlichen Landgerichte zu Marburg erstattet (Marburg: Elwert,
1888); cf. David Novak, “Universal Moral Law in the Theology of Hermann Cohen,” Modern Judaism 1, no. 1
(1981): 101–17; the centrality of the concept of the Noahide for contemporary Jewish philosophy has been
emphasized by David Novak. Among other see David Novak, The Image of the Non-Jew in Judaism: The Idea
of Noahide Law, ed. Matthew Lagrone (Portland: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2011); David Novak,
Natural Law in Judaism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
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relation to the idea of God in terms of human virtues of acting in the world maintains a
demarcation line between ethics and religion while showing the value of religion as part of a
coherent ethical system.74 Cohen uses the term correlation to describe this conceptual relation
between God and human.75 Correlation is the relation between two concepts that determines
both of them while maintaining their separateness, e.g. the concept of God is unthinkable
without the concept of the human, which is in its turn defined by its relation to the concept of
God. As concepts emerge and develop, so does the correlation and their relation to other
concepts: if one thinks of God as Father, this might be inaccurate conceptually, but it means
that she is a child of God. It also means however, that the human next-to-her is also a sister or
brother, since all humanity are children of God.76 The ethical task in the world is expressed in
religion through the act of love of the neighbor, an act which is manifested through helping
the weak and the poor in society. Through a relation to God, one develops a relation to the
fellow human, and in turn to humanity.
Baeck follows Cohen in emphasizing the love of the neighbor.77 The relation to the
next-human [Nebenmensch] in Baeck’s description is based on the relation to God. The other,
in her alterity, can be treated as fellow because of our relation to God.78 This is why the
structure of the section on “The Ideas of Judaism” begins with the faith in God, which
follows faith in ourselves, in the next-person and in humanity. This progress does not indicate
a chronological order, but a conceptual one: one need not have prior faith in God in order to
have an ethical relation with other humans; such a relation properly understood, however,
already presupposes a conceptual relation to the divine.
An important difference emerges with regard to the human-divine relation: Cohen
analyzes it with the concept of correlation, whereas Baeck chooses to describe it in terms of a
74 Cohen writes that even without the “head” that is God, the torso of ethics will remain intact, see Cohen, Ethik
und Religionsphilosophie, 19. 75 Correlation is a central concept for Cohen’s thought and system as a whole. Alexander Altmann shows the use
of this term already in the Logic of Pure Cognition as part of the infinitesimal method of producing something
from nothing. Cf. Alexander Altmann, “Hermann Cohens Begriff der Korrelation,” in In zwei Welten: Siegfried
Moses zum fünfundsiebzigsten Geburtstag, ed. Hans Tramer (Tel Aviv: Bitaon Verlag, n.d.), 366-99; cf. Gibbs,
Correlations, 85–7; and Andrea Poma, “Correlations in Hermann Cohen’s Philosophy of Religion: A Method
and More than a Method,” in Yearning for Form and Other Essays on Hermann Cohen’s Thought (Dordrecht:
Springer, 2006), 61–85. 76 Cohen, “Liebe und Gerechtigkeit in den Begriffen Gott und Mensch,” 83; 98–9. 77 Bäck, WdJ, 70. 78 Ibid., 113.
89
series of interrelated paradoxes, thereby emphasizing the divine-human tension.79 These
paradoxes can be traced back to the relation between God and human: first, the fact that there
can be a relation between infinite and finite; second, there is an utter dependence upon God
yet the human is free; finally, life is of eternal value, but it is worthless without human virtue.
Albert Friedlander, Baeck’s most important interpreter, argues that Baeck’s understanding of
the human condition is based on these notions of polarities and paradoxes, which are present
in every religion.80 I agree with Friedlander’s analysis. Yet focusing on the polarities might
lead to substituting or creating unwarranted parallels between sets of poles. Furthermore,
while the tension between poles seem to be such a connecting line running through Baeck’s
oeuvre, it ignores the fact that different sets of oppositions and paradoxes, e.g. romantic-
classic and mystery-commandment, emerge under historical conditions and in a very specific
moment of dialogical apologetics, i.e. different oppositions are responses to the changing
context of conversation. The next chapter offers a closer examination of some of these
categories, as well as the problems that emerge when a religion swings the pendulum in the
direction of one of the poles without maintaining the tension.
Despite the important differences between them, Baeck shares with Cohen the
Kantian notion that the ethical task is never ending. This is because there is always more to
be done in this world: when contrasted with the Idea of God, the present state is always
lacking.81 Yet it is precisely this correlation to God that calls for the realization of the ethical
task. The correlating concept for the need for realization is the idea of the messiah. It is
through it that the ethical demand, incomplete by definition, turn into active force in history:
the messianic idea makes the certainty of the realization of the ethical task sensible. It is only
with the grasping of the messianic idea as a universal force that we understand the notion of
world-history, of humanity working together to realize the ethical task in this world.82 Like
Cohen, Baeck sees the relation between God and human as leading to an infinite task and
79 Albert Friedlander notes the influence of Cohen’s concept of correlation on Baeck in the following words:
“Forcefully and logically, Cohen showed him the correlation in the world of ideas. Baeck could accept that. But
Baeck could not stay solely in the realm of ideas” (Friedlander, Teacher of Theresienstadt, 153). 80 Bäck, WdJ, 70, 80, 86. See Friedlander, Teacher of Theresienstadt, chp 6. 81 This idea is already part of Cohen’s ethical theory and appears most clearly in the Jewish context in his later
thought when Cohen meditates on the verse “you shall be Holy, for I am Holy” (Lev. 19:2), which suggests that
the human being is still in the process of achieving the good, hence not-yet there. See Hermann Cohen, Religion
der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums (Wiesbaden: Fourier Verlag, 1988), 111, 127. 82 Cohen, “Liebe und Gerechtigkeit in den Begriffen Gott und Mensch,” 131.
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messianism as the certitude in the fulfillment of this task.83 A task that is fulfilled, he writes,
is in fact no task at all.84
The presentation of the main ethical message of The Essence of Judaism showed its
reliance on Hermann Cohen in emphasizing the ethical monotheism as the core teaching of
Judaism. At the same time, Baeck’s methodological concerns are different than those of
Cohen. His enterprise is not concentrated on bringing together philosophy and Judaism as
was Cohen’s. In fact, Baeck states that religion is not to be constrained by philosophical
systems.85 The real value of Baeck’s work, and its relevance for today, lies not in its content
but in its argument about the definition of essence.
3.2.2 Method as Critique
3.2.2.1 Essence and the History of Religions
Baeck’s description of the essence of Judaism is meant as a refutation of Harnack’s
denigrating presentation in The Essence of Christianity. As opposed to Harnack, Baeck
argues in the name of Judaism for its rightful place in the world: Judaism is the ethical
religion par excellence and should be considered an ethical force in the world not just as a
precursor to Christianity but in and of its own. For that reason, and against attempts such as
Harnack’s to ignore subsequent developments in Judaism, Baeck intentionally and constantly
refers to the Talmud, claiming that the rich citations from the Talmud in The Essence of
Judaism are justified given “the history of its misjudgment.”86
In making the case for Judaism being the highest form of ethical monotheism Baeck
resorts to discursive strategies popular in academic circles at the time: the History of
Religions School (Religionsgeschichtliche Schule) and the related paradigm of World
Religions. The first is evident in Baeck’s emphasis on the aforementioned uniqueness of God
in Jewish monotheism. For Baeck, this is not the result of historical development but a
83 Bäck, WdJ, 90: “In the willing belief in the good consists the optimism of Judaism. It is a belief in God and
from that follows belief in the human: in God, through which the good has its reality, and in the human, who is
able to realize the good”; on messianic certitude, see for example ibid., 37, 60. 84 Bäck, WdJ, 251–3. 85 Ibid., 25. 86 Ibid., 162; Baeck breaks here from the more radical aspiration of the early Reform movement’s leaders such
as Abraham Geiger, who in a private letter wrote to Leopold Zunz that “the Talmud must go.” See Abraham
Geiger, Nachgelassene Schriften, ed. Ludwig Geiger, vol. 5 (Berlin: L. Gerschel, 1875), 155–6; Heschel,
Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 35–6.
91
ground-breaking event, a tectonic paradigm-shift: there is no movement or development from
polytheism to monotheism, the latter is a complete break from the former.87 In defining the
essence of Judaism as monotheistic and as a radical break, Baeck produces a twofold
distinction: first, between monotheistic and polytheistic religions; and second, between
Judaism and other monotheistic religions.
Baeck’s reliance on the problematic category of “World Religions”—invented and
propagated mostly by Christian scholars as part of the process of classification and hierarchy-
formation—is evident in some of his comparative attempts.88 Baeck contrasts religions as
grounded in optimism or pessimism, the former is exemplified by Judaism and the firm
messianic belief at its centre whereby the latter is identified with Buddhism, which Baeck
describes as godless and goal-less with regard to ethical life.89 Baeck admits that there are
pessimistic tones in the Hebrew Bible—one thinks of Job and Ecclesiastes—but he insists
that they are meant to stress ethical monotheism and the belief in the One God.90
In making this distinction between optimistic and pessimistic religions and using
Judaism and Buddhism as his examples, Baeck inverts the distinction between “religions of
salvation” and “religions of law,” already standardized in his time bz Otto Pfleiderer’s 1878
The Philosophy of Religion on Historical Basis, a work that treats Buddhism as a religion of
salvation and Judaism as a religion of law.91 In claiming Judaism as a prophetic, ethical
87 Bäck, WdJ, 63–4. 88 Among the vast literature on the subject, the work that has inspired a critical look at Western scholarship is of
course Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 2003); for the direct relation to the invention
of the category of world religion, and the argument that the language of pluralism in the study of religion today
preserves this hierarchy see Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, Or, How European
Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 14–
20. For Baeck’s usage of the term see the section titled “Revelation and World Religion” Bäck, WdJ, 39–59; and
his contribution to a compendium of world religions: Leo Baeck, “Religion of the Hebrews,” in Religions of the
World: Their Nature and Their History, ed. Carl Clemen, trans. A. K. Dallas (London: G.G. Harrap, 1931). 89 Bäck, WdJ, 59. Baeck contrasts Buddhism as the negative foil of Judaism several times throughout the work,
see also 29, 40. His knowledge and attitude toward Buddhism were, as far as I could tell, based only on
secondary sources or possibly some sources in translation. 90 Ibid., 60.; on Baeck’s reading of the book of Job see Yaniv Feller, “What Hope Remains? Leo Baeck as a
Reader of Job,” in Hope:, ed. Ingolf Dalferth and Marlene Block (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 353–68; and
Nahum Glatzer, Baeck, Buber, Rosenzweig Reading the Book of Job (New York: Leo Baeck Institute, 1966); on
the “discovery” of Buddhism by the academic study of religion in the nineteenth century, see Masuzawa, The
Invention of World Religions, 126: “one might say that Buddhism as such came to life, perhaps for the very first
time, in European philological workshops.” 91 Otto Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie auf geschichtlicher Grundlage (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1878), 725; cf.
Claus-Dieter Osthövener, Erlösung: Transformationen einer Idee im 19. Jahrhundert (Mohr Siebeck, 2004), 4–
5; nowadays mostly forgotten, Pfleiderer was one of the leading scholars of his time and the shapers of the
category of world religion. See Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, 197–204.
92
religion that is optimistic and future-oriented, Baeck attempts to claim Judaism as a religion
of redemption in a way that it has been denied in the scholarship of his day. He reiterates this
claim in his contribution to Carl Clemen’s Religions of the Earth: Their Essence and Their
History (1927), where he shows his commitment to comparative religion while using it to
challenge prevailing biases against Judaism. Baeck suggests that, with the exception of
Buddhism, all other world religions, meant are Christianity and Islam, owe their origins to
Judaism, which is the true revolution in religious history.92
By claiming for Judaism a leading role among the world religions, Baeck challenges
Christianity’s claim of superiority, but he is able to do so only at the price of maintaining a
negative relation to other religions, thereby perpetuating the stereotypes associated with the
study of religions in his time in order to contradict other stereotypes.93 Although he never
denounces his earlier position, by the 1920’s Baeck introduces new typologies—such as the
categories of “romantic” and “classical” religion to which the next chapter is dedicated—that
allow him to confront Christianity in a more direct manner, thereby diminishing de facto the
role of Buddhism as a negative foil in his thought.
Baeck’s typology functions only under the common definition of religion in his time.
In the essay “Christian Culture” (1909), Baeck offers a concise working definition of religion
that is in line with this paradigm and with the emphasis on ethics in the study of religion.
Religion, writes Baeck, “has to do with the personality, with the individual world of the soul,
which should be made moral [versittlicht] and refined through the constant content of the
religion.”94 This means that the ethical content of Judaism that was described in the last
92 Leo Baeck, “Das Judentum,” in Die Religionen der Erde: Ihr Wesen und ihre Geschichte, ed. Carl Clemen
(München: Goldmann, 1927), 283; the English translation is misleading for our purpose because it translates
“Wesen” for “Nature,” thereby missing the reason why Baeck was selected. More significantly, it translates
Baeck’s essay not as “Judaism,” but as “Religion of the Hebrews” (Carl Clemen, ed., Religions of the World:
Their Nature and Their History, trans. A. K. Dallas [London: G.G. Harrap, 1931]); Tomoko Masuzawa might
have followed the English too closely on this point, which might explain her puzzlement about the category of
“Religion of the Hebrews,” as “something that looks like Judaism” but is not called so. See Masuzawa, The
Invention of World Religions, 298. 93 As Masuzawa notes, it is a matter of speculation whether Clemen or other scholars who contributed to
Religions of the Earth would have agreed with Baeck’s position (Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions,
299). A clue might be that Baeck is presented in the table of contents as “Rabbi Leo Baeck.” This can be
interpreted either as showing that it was important for them to bring a Jewish authority to speak in the name of
Judaism. On the other hand, it might be meant to paint his opinion as less scientific. Despite the fact that Baeck
held a doctorate from Berlin University, he is not presented with the “Dr.” whereas other scholars in the volume
are presented with the titles of professors or doctors. 94 Leo Baeck, “Christliche Kultur (1909),” in Werke 6: Briefe, Reden, Aufsätze, ed. Michael Meyer (Gütersloh:
Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 61.
93
section becomes the main part of the definition of religion itself. It is a clear adoption of the
way Christian scholars of religion defined their object of study at the time. Yet attributing it
to Judaism already implies an inversion. The essence of Judaism can thus be described as a
form of supersessionism turned on its head: instead of the new being the better, now it is the
older religion that serves as the basis and measuring stick by which other religions,
Christianity included, are to be measured.
This definition of religion and Baeck’s emphasis on the ethical character of Judaism is
in line with a strand of “Jewish Protestantism,” a modern turn to Judaism qua “religion”
based on ethics and a notion of inwardness.95 In this aspect Baeck and Harnack are the same:
it is not just about Judaism and Christianity but also about the definition of “religion” as a
general universalizing category, a position that, as argued at the beginning of this chapter is
no longer tenable or shared by scholars of religion.96 Baeck’s adaptation of Harnack’s
position, however, is far removed from identification with it. In fact, as the next chapter
shows, Baeck reserves his harshest critiques for Protestantism.
3.2.2.2 The Prophets between Ethic and Method
Despite dedicating the entire book to the question concerning “the essence of Judaism,” the
first edition of the Essence—although commenting on the concept at times—does not offer a
systematic treatment of how to grasp this essence.97 Yet it is precisely in the implication of
his position on this question that Baeck shows divergence from Harnack: it has to do not only
with the content of the work—the idea that Judaism is better than Christianity—but also with
the form and method of defining the essence.
There are moments where Baeck comes close to a working definition of his method.
At one point he suggests that the correct knowledge of the essence is based only on the
highest forms it takes. Shortly thereafter he writes that “not full identity, but a constant
95 Cf. David Myers, “Hermann Cohen and the Quest for Protestant Judaism,” The Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook
46 (2001): 197–98; and Yitzhak Melamed, “Review of Micha Gottlieb’s Faith and Freedom: Moses
Mendelssohn’s Theological-Political Thought,” The Journal of Religion 92, no. 3 (2012): 449; for a presentation
of modern Jewish thought as based on this premise, see Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion: An
Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 96 Zank, “Vom Innersten, Äußersten und Anderen,” 42. 97 Micha Brumlik argues that Baeck is completing the hermeneutical method of Dilthey. While I accept that
Baeck might have learned the problems of historicism from Dilthey, my emphasis on the open-ended essence
rejects such a close identification between Baeck and Dilthey. Cf. Micha Brumlik, “Leo Baecks Theorie des
Judentums als Vollendung der geistwissenschaftlichen Hermeneutik,” in Aus dem Stamme von Rabbinern, 172–
80.
94
relation, a continuity of different epochs gives the entire [ganzen] history of Judaism its
unifying character.”98 These statements might sound similar to Harnack’s method of
identifying the essence, but they show important divergences: Baeck qualifies them by noting
that these are not necessarily the first, or present, manifestation, and by stressing relation of
elements and epochs rather than origins.
Harnack claimed that the essence of Christianity is to be found in the words of its
founder, Jesus of Nazareth. The founder of the religion is the one that determines its content.
Baeck agrees with Harnack’s emphasis on the role of “great personalities.” For Judaism these
are the prophets, who left the most profound impact on the essence of Judaism and their
teaching always remained essential. These teaching of the prophets are practical-ethical in
character and not speculative-theological, they did not care according to Baeck about
theology or metaphysics.99 Christian Wiese suggests that the appropriation of the prophets
and ethical monotheism in the Wissenschaft des Judentums—a tradition to which Baeck
belongs—is meant to establish a counterhistory that serves as a repudiation of the Protestant
bias:
Prophecy, with its universally and socially shaped message, was elevated to the normative ‘center’ of
the Hebrew Bible by the Protestants and became the core of a new interpretation of Judaism; it ascribed
a normative function to the prophetic element, as opposed to the traditional emphasis on Mosaic
legislation. This was also the most important basis for a liberal apology of Judaism: it was not
considered only as a creator, but rather – with its belief in one God, its universalism, and its social goal
of a messianic humankind – as the most important bearer of the universally valid idea of prophetic
‘ethical monotheism.’100
In focusing on the prophets, Baeck combats the Protestant study of religion, which
distinguished between different layers of the Hebrew Bible: the prophetic layer was ascribed
to the development of Christianity, with Jesus as its fulfillment, whereas the “legalistic” layer
98 Bäck, WdJ, 8. 99 Ibid., 18–19; in stressing the practical as opposed to natural and metaphysical knowledge of the prophets,
Baeck echoes here Spinoza, perhaps contra Maimonides, but only to a certain extent: he does not share
Spinoza’s negative overtones and does not treat “Christ” as possibly the highest level of prophecy. Whereby
Spinoza relegates the prophetic to the realm imagination, for Baeck it is part of practical knowledge. Cf.
Spinoza, TTP, 13–42. 100 Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse, 241; for the Wissenschaft des Judentums as a counterhistory, see
Wiese, “‘The Best Antidote to Anti-Semitism?’ Wissenschaft des Judentums, Protestant Biblical Scholarship,
and Anti-Semitism in Germany before 1933,” 169–72; Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus; the
centrality of the prophets in German-Jewish liberal theology is already present in Geiger’s work. See Abraham
Geiger, Judaism and Its History, trans. Maurice Mayer (New York: M. Thalmessinger, 1865), 47–49. See also
Michael Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1988), 95–6.
95
was seen as belonging to Judaism. In arguing for the prophets as central for Judaism, Baeck
thus offers an alternative account of Judaism using the very tools of Protestant scholarship.
Furthermore, throughout his discussion Baeck points out that Christianity’s ethical roots are
grounded in and inseparable from Judaism. Liberal Protestantism, with its rejection of dogma
and emphasis on the ethical teaching, is predicated upon Judaism.101
The reading of Baeck as engaging in counterhistory supports the claim that he is
concerned with dialogical apologetics. I contend that his critique and subversion of Harnack
goes much deeper, to the concept of essence itself. It is not merely that the words of the
prophets contain the essence of Judaism in the same way that the words of Jesus are the
essence of Christianity. Baeck presents the prophets as embodying the essence of Judaism in
order to decentralize the concept of essence itself. There is a difference of kind between
claiming that a group determines the essence or an individual: a religion that is centered on
one personality—as is Harnack’s Christianity with its focus on Jesus as the founder—will
quickly exhausts itself and its development with the end of this person; one that is based on a
group’s relation to God will not.102 In other words, the dogmatic distortions of Christianity
which Harnack bemoans are embedded in its essence. In Judaism, by contrast, the essence
has an open-ended character: it is the entire community that should be taken into account.
The carrying on of the religion is a task to be undertaken by all the people, all people
participate in the struggle for self-definition of their religion.103 This is an important
extension of the concept of essence from an individual to a community, all the while
maintaining that the religion still focuses on the individual. The category of “the prophets”
also spans time and space, thus pointing again to the open-ended character of Judaism.
Finally, the perceived unity of this category of “Prophets” (Nevi’im) alongside the
101 This point has been made by other Jewish critics of Harnack as well, such as the Königsberg rabbi and
Orientalist Felix Perles. See Felix Perles, “Was lehrt uns Harnack?,” in Jüdische Skizzen. (Leipzig: G. Engel,
1920), 183: “Harnack’s work is, without that he want or even suspects of it, the brightest justification of Judaism
that we could have only wished for”; Baeck’s assessment of Christianity’s current “re-Judaizing” appears
explicitly several years late in his essay “Die Umkehr zum Judentum” (1909). Literally translated as “The
Return to Judaism”, the word Umkehr also has the connotation and translation of teshuva, of repentance thus
implying that Christianity’s return to its Jewish roots is its repentance. Leo Baeck, “Die Umkehr zum Judentum
(1909),” in Werke 6: Briefe, Reden, Aufsätze, 63–9. Since the target is liberal Protestant Christianity, it is no
wonder that the Ritschl School is discussed in this essay. For a discussion of this essay and the controversy it
sparked with the Christian theologian Ferdinand Kattenbusch, see Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse, 307–
14. 102 Bäck, WdJ, 12. 103 Ibid., 2–3.
96
Pentateuch (Torah) and the Written (Ketuvim) in the Hebrew Bible, shows that the category
itself implies treatment of a group in its development.104
3.2.2.3 “Fragments of a Great Confession”
Baeck identifies two factors in the development of religion, and hence of the essence thereof:
steady elements and driving forces.105 The Hebrew Bible expresses both these elements: on
the one hand it is the holy book, the fundament of the Judaism and its never-changing basis.
It is in this sense that prophetism [Prophetismus], the ethical teaching, remains the ideal and
the religious duty. On the other hand, the Bible, understood as the word of God constantly
spoken, is always present. Every generation finds in the Bible its own concerns and demands,
its fears and hopes, “each generation acquired its own Bible.”106 This duality in the character
of the Bible is expressed in its “system-less” form. The Bible, and by implication Judaism, is
not a closed antiquated book, but rather “fragments of a great confession.”107
“Fragments of a great confession” is a citation from Goethe’s autobiography Poetry
and Truth. This is the designation Goethe gives to his oeuvre, claiming that his biography
attempts to complete these fragments.108 The use of this citation invites several possible
interpretations: first, it might be a direct polemic against Harnack, who cites Goethe
throughout his work, among others as an epigram to History of Dogma:
The Christian religion has nothing to do in philosophy. It is in itself a powerful essence [Wesen] by
which dejected and suffering humanity has re-elevated itself from time to time, and when one grants it
this influence, it is raised above all philosophy and does not require any support from it.109
104 The importance of perceiving the unity of the Bible played an important role in Buber-Rosenzweig’s
translation of the Bible, with Rosenzweig once commenting that for them the R (Redakor - editor) is Rabbenu -
our rabbi. See Franz Rosenzweig, “Die Einheit der Bibel,” in Die Schrift und ihre Verdeutschung, ed. Martin
Buber and Franz Rosenzweig (Berlin: Schoken, 1936), 47. 105 Bäck, WdJ, 9. 106 Ibid., 11. Baeck refers here the famous Talmudic story on Moses not recognizing his own teachings, the
“Torah le-Moshe me-Sinai,” when he sits at the Beit Midrash of Rabbi Akiva (Bavli Menachot 29b). 107 Ibid., 13. 108 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Leipzig: Nachfolger, 1903), 203. 109 Harnack, History of Dogma, xvi. Harnack’s reverence for Goethe was noticed by his friends and critics alike
during his lifetime, see Ernst Troeltsch, “Adolf von Harnack and Ferdinand Christian von Baur,” in Harnack
and Troeltsch: Two Historical Theologians, by Wilhelm Pauck (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968),
103–14; cf. Wilfrid Barner, “Adolf von Harnack zwischen Goethekult und Goethephilologie,” in Adolf von
Harnack: Christentum, Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft, ed. Kurt Nowak et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2003), 143–62; Thomas Hübner claims that this reverence might be one of the sources behind
Harnack s interest in the natural sciences, in particular in the mathematical method of “complete induction”. See
Hübner, Adolf von Harnacks Vorlesungen über das Wesen des Christentums, 22–34; according to Kurt Nowak
Harnack attempts to re-Christianize Goethe by bringing him into conversation with Augustine, see Kurt Nowak,
“Theologie, Philologie und Geschichte: Adolf von Harnack als Kirchenhistoriker,” in Adolf von Harnack:
97
Harnack uses this citation in order to reject dogma. Baeck uses a different reference by
Goethe, one that is not limited to the Christian religion, in order to make a claim about
Judaism in opposition to Christianity.110 Harnack’s Christianity has dogmas as its husk.111
Baeck agrees with Harnack that dogmas are problematic for free thinking and the modern
world. As mentioned, Judaism for Baeck is never dogmatic; there was never an enforceable
set of beliefs. The Bible as “fragments of a great confession,” and the Talmud, dialectical and
containing dissenting opinions, are the foundations of Judaism, foundations that are
themselves, despite a process of canonization, creedless and open-ended in structure.112
This leads to the second meaning of the expression “fragments of a great confession.”
The essence of Judaism is open-ended because the ethical task is never-ending. As an ethical-
prophetic religion, Judaism is future-oriented and treats the essence that way. Harnack turns
backwards, to the words of Jesus, and sees Christian history, and the emergence of dogma in
particular, as deviation from this core. The important point for Baeck is that the essence
present in the early stages of the religion can only be fully determined from the end of the
development. It is a future-oriented understanding of essence and history. The concept of
world-history, to which the messianic idea gives formulation, is ethical and understood only
Theologe, Historiker, Wissenschaftspolitiker, ed. Kurt Nowak and Otto Gerhard Oexle (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 227. 110 Dogma and creeds of faith can be thought of as a form both of exercise of power and the declaration of
heresy. At the same time, they are also sites of resistance and dialogical apologetics. According to Menachem
Kellner, dogma arose in medieval Judaism as a response to similar trends by the majority Islamic and Christian
societies. There was no agreement on the number or content of articles of faith, see his Dogma in Medieval
Jewish Thought: From Maimonides to Abravanel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 2–6. At the
modern period, however, the tide has changed and the notion of thought unencumbered by theological pre-
conceptions was preferred, which forced Jews to respond to these new claims by means of their own.
Mendelssohn, and later Baeck, represent these views. Dogma and the denial of its importance are two sides of
the same apologetic coin. 111 There are some exceptions for Harnack: Marcion, partly Augustine, definitely Luther, and maybe Harnack
himself. Yet they are exceptions because the tried to go back to the kernel. I deal with them, and with Baeck’s
response to Harnack’s claims about Marcion in particular, in the next chapter. 112 For the rejection of Jewish dogma in The Essence of Judaism, see Bäck, WdJ, 2–3; for a slight but important
change of Baeck’s position, see Leo Baeck, “Hat das überlieferte Judentum Dogmen?,” in Aus drei
Jahrtausenden, 12–27. Here Baeck argues that Judaism does not have dogmatics but does have “basic
teachings”. This shows incorporation of the critique made on him, among others in the MGWJ, but also by
Rosenzweig in “Apologetic Thinking”. It also bears the mark of Cohen, cf. Cohen, Ethik und
Religionsphilosophie, 10:“Whereas one today under the imitated expression ‘the essence of Judaism’ does not
define the problem with methodological clarity. The Philosophy of Judaism is the essence of Judaism; and
without philosophy this essence cannot be grasped. If it is possible to present and ground the essence of
Christianity without philosophical expertise, we do not want to go into this question.” Baeck would not have
gone so far as to claim only philosophy as the basis for essence, but he does accept the idea of basic teachings.
98
post factum.113 The criterion for religious novelty lies therefore not in newness per se but in
the creativity of making new out of the given:
The highest level of originality [Originalität] is not in the primordiality [Ursprünglichkeit] of each
spiritual element, in a kind of Adamite pastlessness […] The point is to have the force of spiritual
appropriation and contention, the fight-capability for the soulful individuality and personality, through
which the given is first formed and truly created.114
Those who search for “embryology” in philosophy of religion, writes Baeck, are missing the
entire point: it is not about finding a Spinozist before Spinoza, but about recognizing
Spinoza’s quality as a thinker.115 Harnack recognized Jesus’ Jewishness while stressing his
novelty and Baeck appears to apply the same method with regard to the Israelite religion, thus
calling Christian study of religion to adopt a unanimous set of criteria.
Third, the use of a citation by Goethe to characterize the Hebrew Bible might point to
the fact that the origins of writing “fragments of a great confession” such as those of Goethe
are Jewish.116 German culture cannot disavow this heritage. This is a Jewish late participation
in the Kulturkampf, in the debate that took on at the 1880’s in the recently unified German
state about the relation between religion and state and the role of religion in the culture of the
modern state.117 Evidence of Baeck’s criticism of the Leitkultur is to be found in the
aforementioned article “Christian Culture” and the accompanying article “Jewish Culture,”
both from 1909. In the first, Baeck denied the claim that the unifying factor of Western
culture is Christianity. On the contrary, he claims that it is “everything but Christian.” After
the Enlightenment, European culture is in fact anti-Christian. It is only in the monasteries that
true Christian culture, a medieval phenomenon, is to be found. In attempting to capture and
define the entire culture of the land, Christianity became too concerned with earthly powers
113 Bäck, WdJ, 135; Baeck’s understanding of history might be once again influenced here by Cohen, see Gibbs,
“Hermann Cohen’s Messianism: The History of the Future.” 114 Bäck, WdJ, 6. Here again Baeck uses a citation by Goethe, this time from Maxims and Reflections, for the
purpose of stressing his point. This is also a contribution to the Babel-Bible debate regarding the originality of
the Israelite religion and the literary value of the Bible. Bäck, WdJ, 162n4; on the debate, see Wiese,
Challenging Colonial Discourse, 230–9; and Klaus Johanning, Der Bibel-Babel-Streit: Eine
forschungsgeschichtliche Studie (New York: Lang, 1988); 115 Ibid., 7–8. 116 On the importance of Goethe for German-Jewish Bildungsbürgertum, see George Mosse, German Jews
beyond Judaism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985), 44–6. 117 On the Kulturkampf and its influence on Jews in Germany, see Tal, Yahadut ve-Natsrut Ba-’Raikh Ha-
Sheni’, 53–82; Ari Joskowicz have shown how this inner-Christian debate about the nature of the German state
has at times led Jews to adopt anti-Catholic sentiment, and in other cases to create an intellectual coalition with
Catholic leaders. See Ari Joskowicz, The Modernity of Others: Jewish Anti-Catholicism in Germany and France
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013).
99
such as the state and economic conditions. It forgot the individual and her soul, the basic
working units of religion according to Baeck, and therefore ended up in self-alienation in a
dialectical manner, losing particular individual in its attempt to make a claim for its absolute
character.118 Jewish culture, by contrast, could remain a potent religious force because the
Jewish religion was not attached to the state. Jews could thus contribute to the general culture
precisely thanks to them remaining Jews.119
The essence of Judaism, unlike that of Christianity, is based on a group and not an
individual. Furthermore, it is future-oriented and open-ended. Such a definition significantly
changes Harnack’s method and can be read as an implicit critique of the academic study of
religion. The question remains whether Baeck thought that this method of determining the
essence is valid for the study of religion as a whole, or did he see in his criteria a particular
unique method for determining the essence of Judaism only. These options are best explored
in conversation with two Christian responses to Harnack, that of the Protestant theologian and
historian of religion Ernst Troeltsch and that of the Catholic theologian Alfred Loisy.
Essences in Conversation: Troeltsch and Loisy
4.1 Alfred Loisy
The most impressive of the early critiques of The Essence of Christianity came from the
French Roman Catholic priest and university professor Alfred Loisy (1857-1940).120
Identified as a Modernist within the Catholic Church, his critique of Harnack, published in
French as The Gospel and the Church (1902), was the straw that broke the camel’s back: the
work was condemned shortly after its publication by the Cardinal of Paris and in December
1903 several of Loisy’s works were put in the Index of Forbidden Books. Loisy’s system was
118 Leo Baeck, “Christliche Kultur,” 59–61. Baeck is partially following, and changing, Hegel here. He reads
Christianity’s relation to culture as the same problem with which the Enlightenment was entangled according to
Hegel, namely the fact that the Spirit cannot create a distinction within itself. But whereas for Hegel the problem
is in the consciousness of Enlightenment, for Baeck the problem is with Christian consciousness as it attempt to
devour culture and is thereby negated by it. Cf. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, ed.
J. N. Findlay, trans. Arnold Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 349, par. 574. 119 Leo Baeck, “Jüdische Kultur,” in Werke 6, 62-3. 120 John Macquarrie, Twentieth-Century Religious Thought: The Frontiers of Philosophy and Theology, 1900-
1980 (New York: Scribner, 1981), 182; Sykes, The Identity of Christianity, 127–30.
100
called “the synthesis of all heresies” and in 1908 he was officially excommunicated after
refusing to retract his positions.121
The irony in the excommunication of Loisy for his critique of Harnack deserves
elucidation: The Gospel and the Church is a work that can be read, at least on one level, as a
defense of Catholicism against liberal Protestantism, yet it was perceived by some Catholic
insiders as an attack on their faith and not as a defense thereof. This is the tension in Loisy’s
project, which is, on the one hand, a defense of Catholicism while, on the other, an attempt to
introduce critical biblical scholarship as a vital and necessary part of Catholic teaching and
thought.122 The Gospel and the Church fights on two fronts at the same time: both against
Harnack’s interpretation of Christianity and, within the Catholic establishment, against those
who reject all attempts to introduce historicism. The work also exposes the price of self-
exposure: Loisy paid dearly for publishing this work and refusing to retract it.
Loisy begins The Gospel and the Church by calling Harnack’s work a “profession of
a personal faith in the form of a historical overview,” an expression that resembles Baeck’s
complaint.123 There are two methodological aspects of Loisy’s critique that deserve
elaboration here: first, Loisy thinks that Harnack’s essence is an abstraction that does not
leave any room for development. Second, Harnack’s presentation of the essence as based on
“filial sentiment” at its center is a Protestant bias that does not do justice to the historical
context of Jesus.124 Loisy rhetorically asks about the price to be paid in the quest for essence:
To determine such an essence in Christianity, it must be transformed into a metaphysical entity, into a
logical quintessence, into something resembling the scholastic notion of species, that certain
theologians still fear to corrupt by admitting the idea of evolution. Herr Harnack seems also to fear that
his essence of Christianity might be spoiled if he introduced into it any idea of life, of movement and
development.125
Despite different terminologies, Loisy and Baeck agree on the central point: both reject
Harnack’s understanding of essence as abstraction that is separated from life. Essence cannot
121 For Loisy’s biography and his relation to Catholic Modernism, see John Ratté, Three Modernists: Alfred
Loisy, George Tyrrell, William L. Sullivan (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1967); Bernard Scott’s introduction to
Alfred Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, trans. Christopher Home (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1912), xv–xlii;
on the reception of Harnack’s work in France, see Pascale Gruson, “Entre la crise moderniste et les exigences de
la modernité: Quelques questions posées par aa Réception de ‘L’essence du Christianisme’ en France,” in Adolf
von Harnack: Theologe, Historiker, Wissenschaftspolitiker, 319–32. 122 Cf. Bernard Scott’s introduction to Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, xii. 123 Ibid., 1; Bäck, “Harnack’s Vorlesungen,” 98–99. 124 Cf. Sykes, The Identity of Christianity, 137–38. 125 Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 14.
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be separated from the way people experienced and manifested it in their concrete, temporal
existence. In order to grasp the essence properly, writes Loisy, one must take into account the
“fullness and totality of life” a description similar to Baeck’s attempt to understand Judaism
in its historical complexity.126 The methodology of taking into account both the dynamic and
the static elements of the religion is employed by both thinkers, even if the sources of
inspiration are different, with Baeck relying more on Dilthey and Cohen and Loisy on
Newman.127
Loisy argues that Harnack’s method and his insistence on an isolated, ethical kernel,
tears apart all that was fruitful in the kernel’s development to begin with:
Herr Harnack does not conceive Christianity as a seed, at first a plant in potentiality, then a real plant,
identical from the beginning of its evolution to the final limit and from the root to the summit of the
stem, but as a fruit, ripe, or rather overripe, that must be peeled, to reach the incorruptible kernel; and
Herr Harnack peels his fruit with such perseverance, that the question arises if anything will remain at
the end. This method of dismembering a subject does not belong to history, which is a science of
observation of the living, not of dissection of the dead.128
Harnack might not have identified himself in this last point of critique: for him the attempt to
define the essence is precisely in order to allow Christianity to live in the modern world, it is
meant to invigorate the living, not dissect the dead. Baeck, Harnack and Loisy are in
agreement on this point, even if they fail to see that.
The emphasis on tradition as the defining factor of the essence allows Loisy to
maintain, with greater historical accuracy and in opposition to Harnack, Jesus’ Jewishness. If
development is to be given its due and not just the novelty in the origin, then the problem of
Jesus in his historical context does not arise for Loisy.129 Harnack sees a series of breaks:
between Jesus and Judaism and between Jesus and the first generation of disciples and later
Christological interpretation. For Harnack these are necessary for his description of the
“gospel within the gospel,” of the essence of Christianity. Loisy’s logic of tradition demands
undisturbed continuity from Judaism to Jesus as well as from Jesus to his disciples and
126 Ibid., 16. 127 Bernard Scott’s introduction to ibid., xxxii. 128 Ibid., 19. 129 Ibid., 10, 68, 97, 263; cf. Bernard Scott in ibid., lviii: “For Loisy, Jesus was a Jew whose mission and
existence made sense only within the framework of the nationalist expectations of that people. There was no
essence of Jesus that was not Jewish, nor was there any teaching that was not impregnated with Jewish tradition.
For Harnack, Jesus in his essence stood above Judaism.”
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onward. The connection of Jesus to the Jewish people and Judaism is something that Baeck
and other Jewish scholars could have appreciated.
Baeck and Loisy diverge in their assessment of the ethical dimension of religion:
Baeck, like Harnack, maintains the liberal assumption on the connection between religion and
ethics and therefore suggests an ethical tendency; Loisy, on the other hand, is polemicizing
against liberal Protestantism and therefore identifies the essence of Christianity as
eschatological. The kingdom of God as the core of Christianity is not ethical and inward but
rather the “great hope” that started with the work of Jesus but this hope still develops and is
presented and experienced in different ways throughout history.130 The historical figure of
Jesus is just the beginning of this hope, which is developed in Christ and the Church. Baeck
would agree with Loisy’s assessment of the kingdom of God as future-oriented. He would
claim, however, that Jesus is neither the alpha nor omega of this hope but just one Jewish
teacher participating in the conversation. The two also differ regarding the relation between
history and hope. Loisy’s biography shows active resistance to papal authority on the grounds
of historical research. At the same time, his historical position taken in extremis runs the risk
of Ivan Karamazov’s Grand Inquisitor, i.e. the Church would develop an absolute claim for
authority, with no higher standard available than the Church itself.131 For Baeck, the essence
is tied to a transcendent, it is historically developing but it is always in relation to God. Since
history and this world are always lacking, the standard is not being a Jew in and of itself, but
fulfilling the relation to God in an ethical manner.
Loisy and Baeck, a Roman Catholic priest and a liberal Jewish rabbi, are unlikely
bedfellows. Their dialogical apologetics, done in different contexts and for different
audiences, are occasioned by the same event and work and so share some features even if
their self-presentation is vastly different.132 They agree on important points, from the
130 This is evident throughout the section “The Kingdom of Heaven” (Loisy, The Gospel and the Church, 59ff.). 131 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 246–54. 132 Despite these parallels, there is no evidence that the two read each other’s works or were in any way
influencing one another. Given the times of publications, however, this cannot be completely excluded. It might
be that Baeck was aware of Loisy’s work, especially after its publication in German in 1904. It is highly
unlikely that Loisy was aware of Baeck’s early essay on Harnack from 1901, which was published in a Jewish
scholarly journal. Although we do not know if Harnack read Baeck, he did read Loisy, praised him for his
courage as a free spirit in the Catholic Church and recognized some of his claims, not as contradiction of his
own but as supplements to them. See Adolf Harnack, “Review of Alfred Loisy’s Evangelium und Kirche,”
Theologische Literaturzeitung 29, no. 2 (1904): 59–60; on Harnack’s relation to Catholic critical scholarship
and Loisy’s teacher Louis Duchense, see Manfred Weitlauff, “‘Catholica Non Leguntur’? Adolf von Harnack
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importance of taking the totality of religion seriously in the determination of the essence and
up to Jesus’ Jewishness. This surprising convergence of Loisy and Baeck is the result of their
shared understanding of tradition and its transmission not as secondary to the essence but
rather part of it.133
4.2 Ernst Troeltsch
Harnack’s friend and fellow historian Ernst Troeltsch wrote in 1903 that Loisy’s The Gospel
and the Church is “the most intelligent and beneficial critique of Harnack that has come into
my hands.”134 Indeed, Troeltsch accepts some of the major points of Loisy’s critique,
especially the claim that Harnack lacks a developmental understanding of essence.135 In the
essay “What Does the ‘Essence of Christianity’ Mean?” (1903, rev. 1913), Troeltsch uses the
occasion of Harnack’s lectures on the essence of Christianity as a springboard for a series of
sustained and thoughtful epistemological reflections on the study of essence.136
Troeltsch makes several important observations about the concept of essence and its
possible meaning.137 First, it is a thoroughly modern concept that belongs to the field of
history. As an abstraction that is inherent to the historical method, it does not function with
the same set of presuppositions as dogmatic Christianity, in particular with regard to the
miraculous and supernatural origins of Christianity.138 At the same time, the “purely
und die ‘katolische’ Kirchengeschichtsschreibung. Mit einem Briefanhang,” in Adolf von Harnack: Theologe,
Historiker, Wissenschaftspolitiker, ed. Kurt Nowak and Otto Gerhard Oexle (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2001), 296–305. 133 Albert Friedlander suggests to think about this question in Baeck’s thought in terms of toldot, the chain of
generations. This is a helpful way to look at Baeck’s thought, but it diminishes his wider contribution to the
broader discussion of the concept of essence (Friedlander, Teacher of Theresienstadt, 61, 113). 134 Quoted in Lori Pearson, Beyond Essence: Ernst Troeltsch as Historian and Theorist of Christianity
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard Theological Studies, Harvard Divinity School, 2008), 63. 135 Cf. Troeltsch, “What Does ‘The Essence of Christianity’ Mean?,” 126–7, 135. 136 There are some important differences between the two editions, with the later showing an even more critical
stance toward the concept of “essence of Christianity” and of “essence” as a useful historical category. These
differences are important for the purpose of understanding Troeltsch’s intellectual development, but are not as
crucial for the comparison with Baeck. For a summary and analysis of the changes, see Stephen Sykes notes
ibid., 180–1; and Sykes, The Identity of Christianity, 157–8, 163–5. 137 Pearson notes four different uses of “the essence of Christianity” in Troeltsch's essay (Pearson, Beyond
Essence, 40): 1)”conceptualize all Christianity under one essence"; 2) “conceptualize diverse forms of
Christianity as corresponding to different versions of the essence of Christianity”; 3) “Conceptualize different
forms of one kind of Christianity.” I follow her careful reading but use slightly different definitions in order to
bring to light the convergence and divergence with Baeck’s thought. 138 Troeltsch, “What Does ‘The Essence of Christianity’ Mean?,” 128, 131, and see also 137: “I presuppose that
the historical method, which is most intimately connected with the whole modern world of ideas and which has
established itself in thoroughly tested critical work, is in the right”. This is also the starting point of a related
essay from the same time. Cf. Ernst Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity and the History of Religions,
trans. David Reid (Richmond: John Knox Press, 1971), 45–6.
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historical” method, in taking the historical occurrences seriously, also rejects any
interpretation of Christianity that relies on a single factor or force, such as the case with the
Hegelian development and evolution of the Spirit. Harnack is in this sense not sufficiently
historical, because he bases all of his analysis on the origins of Christianity and its ethical
teachings as expressed in the words of Jesus.139 In a later essay, in a Festschrift honoring
Harnack, Troeltsch states that he cannot accept Harnack’s notions of ethics and love as
unambiguous and as lacking any traces of metaphysics.140
Second, based on the understanding of essence in this context as a “purely historical”
concept, Troeltsch stresses that the “essence of Christianity” is to be understood in its
complexity, not only in the words of Jesus. Rather, Troeltsch argues, “if we are to speak of
the essence at all it cannot be an unchangeable idea given once and for all in the teaching of
Jesus.”141 Along with the words of Jesus, Troeltsch sees in Paul’s Christology a second
driving force that shapes Christianity, the dualism of the origins is also manifested in
subsequent developments in various forms.142 Although these are the two major driving
forces, an understanding of the essence is possible only by taking into account all of the
historical complexity:
The essential in Christianity is not that about it which corresponds to a general truth with a basis of its
own, such that everything which did not correspond with it would be the inessential. The essential is no
more and no elsewhere less than the epitome of the fundamental ideas which makes itself clear from
within its own manifestation in history, which determines consciously and unconsciously its own
development, which stands at the centre of its own thinking and willing, and which is never complete
and closed as long as it belongs to history in a living way.143
This call for a “totality” of the expression of the religion to be taken into account in
determining the essence is, as we have seen, something shared also by Baeck and Loisy.
139 Troeltsch, “What Does ‘The Essence of Christianity’ Mean?,” 138, cf. 152: “There is no logically necessary
dialectical law which can be constructed for the step by step emergence of the essence, but only a continuum
which spreads through everything and which contains within itself rich possibilities of development”; Troeltsch
refers to this attitude as “evolutionary apologetics,” and, as have been mentioned above, sees Harnack and
essence definitions also at fault in this regard see Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity, 63–6. 140 Troeltsch, “Adolf von Harnack and Ferdinand Christian von Baur,” 114. 141 Troeltsch, “What Does ‘The Essence of Christianity’ Mean?,” 151. 142 Ibid., 154–6. 143 Ibid., 132. Even here, when describing the “essential” aspects of Christianity, Troeltsch in fact only provides
criteria and not a working definition.
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Third, the determination of essence should be historically objective.144 The
“empirical-inductive” aspect of determining the essence allows the historical method to claim
objectivity. Troeltsch calls this method “purely historical” (rein historisch), as different from
Harnack’s version of purely historical (rein geschichtlich).145 This method offers not only an
analysis of the historical data in all its complexity, but also an “immanent criticism” by the
scholarly community. Troeltsch is adamant in his position that although the need to identify
the essence requires taking into account also everyday socio-political conditions, the decision
as to the determining factors belongs ultimately to the exclusive, small scholarly community
of experts.146 Baeck does not reflect directly on this question, although given the influence of
historical scholarship of the time on his work, it is possible to surmise that he would have
accepted Troeltsch’s understanding of the historical profession’s “immanent criticism,”
which Baeck practices in his first review of Harnack’s lectures.
Fourth, essence is not only objective, it also contains an aspect of evaluation and
judgment based on the historian’s assessment as to the most important facts and their
relevance to a better understanding of contemporary life. One “cannot ultimately be satisfied
with such a neutral, objective, conception.”147 The essence of Christianity is also a normative
critique and evaluation of the contemporary situation.148 “To define the essence,” writes
Troeltsch, “is to shape it afresh.”149 Indeed, Troeltsch believes that despite its shortcoming
with regard to the “purely historical” method, this is precisely the strength of Harnack’s book,
namely its emphasis on the normative aspect of the concept of the essence of Christianity.150
Baeck does not reflect in such a systematic manner on the subjectivity-objectivity problem in
the study of essence, but his definition of essence also aims at shaping it afresh. One can
144 Ibid., 160. 145 This distinction is noted by Pearson, Beyond Essence, 21n6. Pearson is right to note that Troeltsch’s “purely
historical” is not easily equated with “objective.” At the same time, all of the three suggested meanings of
“purely historical” (against dogmatics, against Hegelianism, in defense of the historical as data) assume in fact a
degree of objectivity. Cf. Ibid., 48–51. 146 Troeltsch, “What Does ‘The Essence of Christianity’ Mean?,” 143: “Various competent historians are in a
position to correct each other, and by so doing to further perfect the analysis. The amateurs, the doctrinaire, the
fanatics, the narrow-minded, beginners and specialists, on the other hand, should leave the matter alone.” A
critique of Troeltsch's position is offered in Sykes, The Identity of Christianity, 156. Such a “community of
experts,” Troeltsch seems to suggest, would be one following the German style and method of writing history.
Thus not only an elitist but also a chauvinist tone creeps in, cf. Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German
Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1969), 341–2. 147 Troeltsch, “What Does ‘The Essence of Christianity’ Mean?,” 143. 148 Ibid., 156–7. 149 Ibid., 162. 150 Ibid., 164.
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think about it as one of the ways by which Judaism regenerates itself, as a specific, modern
form of this move toward regeneration.
In his discussions of essence, Troeltsch makes claims for the superiority of Protestant
Christianity. At the time of the essence debate in Germany, in the essay “The Absoluteness of
Christianity and the History of Religions” (1901), he claims that Christianity is the highest—
even though not “absolute”—among the “great religions,” because it incorporates multiple
traditions and shows a “vital inner connection” to Western culture. In support of his claim,
Troeltsch enlists the typology, already discussed above, of “religions of salvation” and
“religions of law.” Judaism is considered for him a religion of law. Religions of salvation are
clearly preferable and among them, Christianity stands as the “personalistic religion” par
excellence, a religion that is concerned with the individual personality and its redemption.
There is therefore no higher religion for Troeltsch, and it is most improbable that there can
ever be one.151
Baeck could object to Troeltsch based on critiques similar to those aimed at Harnack
and the study of religion.152 These were discussed throughout this chapter but are worth
summarizing in the context of Troeltsch’s argument. First, Baeck does not see in Christianity
the basis of Western culture. Secondly, Baeck believes that it is Judaism, and not Christianity,
which is the true religion that leads to redemption of the world. That is why the Jews—and
this includes rabbinic and contemporary Jews—have an ethical mission in the world. Finally,
instead of Troeltsch’s description of Christianity’s origins in Jesus and Paul, Baeck insists on
Jesus’ Jewishness while claiming that Paul is the founder of Christianity. This has important
consequences for Baeck’s analysis of the relation between ethics and Christianity, the topic of
the next chapter. Troeltsch and Baeck agree on some of the important analysis, on the essence
of Christianity as a developmental concept and on its origins, but they diverge in their
151 Troeltsch, The Absoluteness of Christianity, 108–12. Masuzawa exposes this type of claims in Troeltsch’s
work and its relation the broader discourse on “world religions” (Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions,
309–24). 152 I say “could,” because Baeck does not respond to directly to Troeltsch on these points and there is no
evidence that he read him at this point, although the possibility could not be excluded. A direct Jewish response
to Troeltsch came in 1917 from Hermann Cohen, but it was not directly concerned with the methods of essence
as such but with Troeltsch’s interpretation of the prophets, whom he claimed function within a national context.
Jesus—promoting other-worldly radical eschatology—is the one making the breakthrough to universalism
according to Troeltsch. Hermann Cohen argued against this position that it is a misunderstanding of the
prophets, who promoted not a national god, but the One God who redeems all humanity. On this controversy,
see Wendell Dietrich, Cohen and Troeltsch: Ethical Monotheistic Religion and Theory of Culture (Atlanta:
Scholars Press, 1986), esp. 29-43.
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assessment of it, in their evaluation of this essence as an ideal concept. It is on this point that
their paths diverge, with important consequences.153
Troeltsch and Loisy are probably the two most influential Christian reflections on
Harnack’s The Essence of Christianity.154 Although no direct links could have been
established between Baeck’s work and theirs, all three share similar methodological
concerns, albeit with very different goals in mind. Baeck’s presentation of the essence of
Judaism bears resemblance to Loisy and Troeltsch’s critiques of Harnack while maintaining
its difference with regard to the evaluation of Judaism and its place in the modern world.
Thought of as part of this constellation, Baeck’s The Essence of Judaism emerges as
dialogical apologetic that uses the prevalent discourse of essences in order to provide a
critique of it as well as self-presentation.
Baeck’s Subsequent Methodological Reflections
The discussion so far focused on the first edition of The Essence of Judaism, as it represents a
direct reply, written in the midst of the essence debate. In the introductions to subsequent
editions—the second (1921), fourth (1925) and most clearly to the English translation
(1936)—Baeck further reflects more on the question of essence and its determining factors.
In the latest of these he explains that his work attempts to portray,
[t]he veritable essence or nature of the Jewish religion. It seeks therefore to show the permanent and
vital speciality of Judaism as well as its universality. For the universal depends upon, and issues out of,
what is special and individual.155
Baeck goes on to identify three complementary ways in which this essence is to be grasped:
the historical or knowledge of the actual facts, the systematic or knowledge of the unifying
factors, and the psychological or the spiritual relation of the writer both to the details and to
153 Troeltsch’s discussion of essence shows epistemological sensitivity that has only increased throughout his
career. In contrast with his earlier quasi-supersessionist claims, his later work shows a growing discontent with
the notion of essence, which Troeltsch ends up abandoning altogether. Lori Pearson suggests that the difference
between the 1903 and 1913 editions of the essay are related to Troeltsch’s historical work The Social Teachings
of the Christian Churches (Pearson, Beyond Essence, 182–185). Troeltsch serves therefore as an example of the
ways in which Harnack’s account of the essence was already highly contested not only with regards to its
content but also to the method underlining it. He goes a step further in this regard than Baeck, offering critique
and a set of consideration that could be valid for the study of every historically continuous phenomenon. 154 Other important critics included Wilhelm Bousset, Eduard von Hartmann, Franz Overbeck, and Albert
Schweitzer. For a summary of many of the critiques see Hübner, Adolf von Harnacks Vorlesungen über das
Wesen des Christentums, 98–157. 155 Leo Baeck, Werke: Das Wesen des Judentums, ed. Albert Friedlander and Bertold Klappert, vol. 1
(Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 423.
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the whole. He calls it the attempt to identify the “main road” of the history of “one
fundamental idea” that is traceable throughout the history of Judaism. Religion “may be
considered to be all that wherein this fundamental idea lives and grows, is enriched and
renewed. Everything else […] is of minor import and unessential”156
This later presentation of essence challenges my claim that Baeck understands
essence as open-ended. I believe, however, that it is part of the inherent tension in Baeck’s
concept: on the one hand, as ethical orientation; on the other, as a methodological critique of
essences. This tension is due to Baeck’s attempt to provide a multilayered reply to Harnack, a
reply that in a way prefers various positions over a systematic treatment. First, the context is
crucial to the understanding of a dialogical apologetic. This introduction was written for a
readership, most probably Jewish although hardly only Jewish, in 1936, when Baeck was
already serving as the official representative of German Jewry under Nazism. A possible
allusion to this time of tribulation in Jewish history is made in Baeck’s remark in the
introduction that Judaism is a historical force “which henceforth cannot be removed, even in
thought, from the spiritual life of humanity.”157 Given these circumstances, it is perhaps little
wonder that Baeck wishes to show the vitality and unity of Jewish life, and its essence.
Second, although Baeck never abandons the concept of essence, his emphasis on the tension
between subjective-emphatic, objective-factual, and systematic-abstracting understanding of
the essence, shows awareness of the complexity of the epistemological consideration
involved in the determination of essence, a more nuanced presentation of the problem that
was already present implicitly in the first edition.158 Finally, the English introduction attempts
to provide clarity regarding methods, terminology and the development of the essence, yet it
does not tell its reader the content of the “one fundamental idea.” This one fundamental idea
is the prophetic ethics, but I suggest that this is no coincidental omission but rather another
gesture toward the open-endedness of this “one fundamental idea,” whose manifestations are
always in a flux.
156 Ibid., 424. 157 Ibid., 423. 158 Although I could not locate direct evidence that Baeck read Troeltsch’s relevant essay, the latter’s influence
cannot be excluded, because by that time it seems likely that Baeck has been familiar with Troeltsch’s work. In
fact, the two participated together in a meeting of Hermann Graf Keyserling’s Darmstadt-“School of Wisdom”
in 1922. See Manfred Bauschulte, Religionsbahnhöfe der Weimarer Republik: Studien zur Religionsforschung
1918-1933 (Marburg: diagonal-Verlag, 2007), 181.
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The Open-Ended Wesen
In “Apologetic Thinking,” Rosenzweig quipped that Baeck is more concerned with “essence
of Judaism than essence of Judaism,” claiming thereby that Baeck is more concerned with the
universal than with the particular aspects of Judaism taken together in their totality.159 This
chapter has shown that such an assessment is based on a misguided reading of Baeck that
implicitly equates his notion of essence with that of Harnack. Defining the essence, I argued,
is dialogical apologetics in action, an answer to a challenge that allows Baeck to present
Judaism in a way that both answers the critics, serves as a self-presentation, and allows him
to think what it means to search for a Jewish essence at the turn of the century.
Rosenzweig seems to be thinking of an essence in a manner similar to Harnack, but
Wesen (German for essence) holds several meanings which support the reading of essence in
Baeck’s thought as open-ended.160 Wesen originally describes lingering, or remaining in a
place (Aufenhalt, verweilen). Second, it can mean existence, living, being-there (dasein).
Third, it can also mean substance (substantia), with the related theological and philosophical
connotations of God as the essence, and of essence as the true nature, the true being of a
thing.161 Fourth, Wesen can also mean property or character (Beschaffenheit). Fifth, the word
also acquires the meaning of life and life form (lebensform, lebensweise). These overlapping
meanings already allude to the tension within the concept between essence and existence:
having constant properties, aspects that remain stable, is connected to the existence and life of
the object connected with these properties. Wesen contains both, to use Baeck’s terminology,
“steady elements” and “driving forces.” Sixth, although its origins are unclear, around the
eighteenth century the word acquires also the meaning of public relation or of acting in public
(öffentliche Verhältnisse, gemeinwesen). This recalls Baeck’s emphasis on the communal
159 Franz Rosenzweig, “Apologetic Thinking,” in Philosophical and Theological Writings, ed. Paul Franks and
Michael Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), 107. Emphasis in the original. 160 The English etymology of “essence” functions similarly. It stems from the Latin esse, which refers to the
nature of a thing, to its defining necessary character, it is “that by which a thing is what it is”. Theologically and
philosophically it also refers to the terms substance and existence. It already incorporates it might refer to some
kind of unchanging, definitive core, to Harnack’s “kernel”, and on another level it already incorporates within it
the notion of existence and therefore, in the case of temporal beings, of the temporality of essence. See T. F.
Hoad, ed., “Essence,” The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1993). 161 This understanding of essence is exemplified also in Heidegger’s interest in the concept of essence, as it
relates to truth, Being, and concealment. See Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Truth,” in Pathmarks, ed.
William McNeill, trans. John Sallis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 136–54.
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nature of the essence of Judaism and the claim that it is shared by all the people and not
centered on one person.162
The linguistic web that spreads from the word Wesen prefigures the tension in the
concept of essence. The translator Walter Kaufmann writes—in the introduction to his
translation of Buber’s I and Thou—on the difficulty of translating Wesen:
Sometimes ‘essence’ is clearly what is meant; sometimes ‘nature’ would be slightly more idiomatic;
but quite often neither of these terms make any sense at all […] Any contrast of essence and existence
is out of the picture […] Doing something with my whole being or my whole essence is the same.163
Kaufmann’s description of Wesen in Buber’s work should not be conflated with Baeck’s
understanding of the word, as he is clearly describing the word’s connotations in a Buberian
way, both in style and in the emphasis on dialogical encounter. These are not as evident in the
first edition of The Essence of Judaism. Yet Kaufmann’s comments nonetheless hold true for
an interpretation of Baeck in a different way: his emphasis on the ethical act in the world as a
manifestation of the essence of Judaism can indeed suggests that Baeck understands Wesen as
incorporating both essence and existence.
In a statement in the last pages of The Essence of Judaism, Baeck captures these
nuanced meanings of Wesen, when he writes: “also the existence can be a mission, already
the bare being [das bloße Dasein] is a vivid sermon.”164 The essence of Judaism is tied to its
ethical mission, which is activity in the world; essence and existence are in this regard
inseparable. Baeck does not reflect on the etymology of the word, but his thoughts on the
topic reflect an understanding of the essence of Judaism as part of a process that is intimately
related to the existence and lives of Jews in their particularity. The Essence of Judaism is just
as concerned with Judaism as it is with essence, because the essence is intertwined with
Jewish existence. Baeck’s understanding of essence has a group, future-oriented, open-ended
aspect to it. Debating the method of determining the essence is entangled with the quest for
an understanding of Judaism.
162 For these various meanings, see “Wesen,” Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (Leipzig:
dtv, 1971). 163 Walter Kaufmann’s introduction to Buber, I and Thou, 46. 164 Bäck, WdJ, 149 - emphasis in the original.
111
Baeck’s contributions to the essence debate were his first foray into the challenges
posed by Harnack. They were not the last. When Baeck revised The Essence of Judaism for
publication during the time of Weimar Republic, much of his critique remained the same. Yet
a new tone and emphasis enters into this revised edition as a result of a new challenge by
Harnack, the challenge of Marcionism.
112
Chapter 4: Paul and Gnosticism
Old Wine in a New Skin
In 2013, Notger Slenczka, Chair of Systematic Theology at Humboldt University Berlin,
published an essay titled “The Church and The Old Testament.”1 Despite its innocuous title
and academic publication venue, it managed to spark a debate transcending the academy
thanks to its conclusion: the Old Testament belongs to the “prehistory” of the Christian
community. It does not stand at the core of contemporary Christian faith and can no longer
serve as the basis for preaching. The Church is “not spoken to” in the Old Testament:
Once the consciousness developed that this book [the Old Testament] is not of the Church, but rather
deals with and speaks to a religious community from which the Church has separated, the relation of
the Church to this corpus of writings becomes highly problematic. […] This awareness of the
difference between Church and Judaism as two religious communities has asserted itself—in any case
in Western Christianity—and it has also settled [niedergeschlagen] in the interpretation of the relation
of early Christendom to contemporary Judaism. With this, however, the Old Testament becomes a
document of a religious community, with which the Church is no longer identical.2
For the Christian, argues Slenczka, the Old Testament does not share the same canonical
status as the New Testament. The former should therefore be treated as an apocryphal text.
This theological claim—Judaism and Christianity do not share the same foundational text—
has consequences for much of contemporary Jewish-Christian dialogue.3
Denying the canonical status of the Old Testament in post-Holocaust Germany can
easily be understood as an anti-Jewish act, and in the contemporary German public sphere
such statements are often considered offensive and illegitimate. Slenczka insists, however,
that his thesis is not anti-Jewish. On the contrary, he argues that he offers a new vista in
Jewish-Christian dialogue by insisting on the particular revelation to Israel as separate from
the one to the Church. The revelation of the Old Testament belongs to the Jews and the
Jewish tradition, but does not stand at the heart of Christianity despite its historical
1 I thank Elad Lapidot for drawing my attention to this important debate. 2 Notger Slenczka, “Die Kirche und das Alte Testament,” Marburger Jahrbuch Theologie 25 (2013): 118. 3 Ibid., 84. Slenczka is aware of this fact and cites “Dabru Emet,” a recent statement of leading Jewish scholars
on Christianity, as one instance in which the premise of a partially shared corpus is made the basis for dialogue.
For the full statement and its philosophical and theological explication, see the essays in Tikva Simone Frymer-
Kensky et al., eds., Christianity in Jewish Terms (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000).
113
background and “that Jesus Christ was born a Jew.”4 This reading, argues Slenczka, gives the
revelation to the Jewish people its proper respect and avoids Christian supersessionism.
“The Church and the Old Testament” is a well planned provocation.5 It took the
provocation a couple of years to hatch, but in 2015 a heated debate began, among others
because of a public accusation of anti-Judaism. Pastor Friedhelm Pieper from the Society for
Jewish-Christian Cooperation called Slenczka’s text a “substantial scandal in contemporary
German Protestantism” and the popular media soon chimed in: “Professor Promotes the
Abolition of the Old Testament,” declared a headline at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung,
“Anti-Judaism in New Cloth?” asked the Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung.6 Harsh reactions and
comments were also made in theological circles in Germany, and Slenczka’s views have been
compared—among others by some of his colleagues at Humboldt University—to those of
Nazi theologians. A disputation, several conferences and articles have been dedicated to this
thesis, with many contesting it passionately.7
In arguing in favor of displacing the Old Testament from the Christian canon,
Slenczka grounds his thesis in the Protestant tradition. In particular, he cites several
prominent figures including Luther, Schleiermacher, and Rudolf Bultmann. He relies first and
foremost, however, on Adolf von Harnack, whom we met in the last chapter.8 The author of
4 Slenczka makes this point clear in a lecture following the controversy, see Notger Slenczka, “Was soll die
These: ‘Das AT hat in der Kirche keine kanonische Geltung mehr’?” (Berlin, 2015), 14,
https://www.theologie.hu-berlin.de/de/st/was-soll-die-these.pdf. See also his letter to Pastor Friedhelm Pieper
Notger Slenczka, “Antwort auf die Stellungnahme der Gesellschaft für christlich-jüdisch Zusammenarbeit,
Pfarrer Friedhelm Pieper,” March 18, 2015, 3, https://www.theologie.hu-
berlin.de/de/st/slenczkaantwortpieper18-03-2015.pdf: “I have not spoken of ‘expulsion’. I have affiliated myself
with Harnack; I am enclosing an unpublished lecture (that you do not know), in which I explicitly hold [the
view] that there will never be a Christian Bible without the OT.” 5 Slenczka begins the essay with the definition of “provocare” as “calling out” [herausrufen] (Slenczka, “Die
Kirche und das Alte Testament,” 83–4). 6 For Pieper’s quote see: n.a., “Streit ums Alte Testament,” Der Tagesspiegel, April 30, 2015, sec. Wissen,
http://www.tagesspiegel.de/wissen/hu-theologe-notger-slenczka-streit-ums-alte-testament/11713196.html; see
also Reinhard Bingener, “Professor fordert Abschaffung des Alten Testaments,” Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, April 21, 2015, sec. Politik: Inland, http://www.faz.net/aktuell/politik/inland/berlin-professor-fordert-
abschaffung-des-alten-testaments-13549027.html; Micha Brumlik, “Antijudaismus im neuen Gewand?,”
Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung, April 23, 2015, sec. TENACH, http://www.juedische-
allgemeine.de/article/view/id/22056. 7 Among the response, see Tilmann Asmus Fischer, “Versöhnte Verschiedenheit,” Evangelische Zeitung, July
26, 2015, 30 edition, sec. Christsein im Alltag; Tilmann Asmus Fischer, “Außerchristliche Gotteserfahrung?,”
Die Kirche: Evangelische Wochenzeitung, July 19, 2015, sec. Akutelles; Friedhelm Hartenstein, “Zur
Bedeutung des Alten Testaments für die evangelische Kirche: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit den Thesen von
Notger Slenczka,” Theologische Literaturzeitung 140, no. 7/8 (2015): 738–50; Andrea Feldtkeller, “Vom
Reichtum der ganzen Bibel: Die Zusammengehörigkeit von Altem und Neuem Testament aus der Perspektive
interkultureller Theologie,” Theologische Literaturzeitung 140, no. 7/8 (2015): 752–65. 8 Slenczka, “Die Kirche und das Alte Testament,” 89–91.
114
The Essence of Christianity published in 1921 an important monograph on the second century
CE heretic Marcion. In it, he claimed that the Old Testament has no place within the
Christian canon properly understood. If Slenczka propagates a return to Harnack, then
examining the responses to Harnack in his own time is a timely task. Such an examination
enables a better understanding of the theological and political stakes involved in this debate.
Harnack’s work on Marcion and its relation to the contested category of “gnosis” and
the theological climate during the Weimar Republic is discussed next. It is followed by
Baeck’s understanding of “romantic religion,” a cipher for Marcionite and gnostic
Christianity. After making the case for this interpretation of Baeck’s work, the dangers that
Baeck saw in the Marcionite position are elaborated. According to Baeck, Harnack treads a
path that can lead to dangerous consequences, both for Jewish-Christian relations and for the
possibility of ethics. Finally, Baeck’s response is presented as dialogical apologetics, as an
answer that is also self-examination, as responding to the challenge by looking both
outwards, pointing to the flaws in the opponent’s position, and inwards, as participating in an
inner-Jewish debate.
Harnack’s Marcion
2.1 Marcion and Gnosticism
Even more than the History of Dogma or The Essence of Christianity, it is Harnack’s 1921
monograph on the arch-heretic Marcion that had proven to be of lasting scholarly value. With
an apparatus almost twice the size of the text itself, Harnack’s achievement—despite many
faults—still dominates the scholarly investigation for almost a century.9
Little certain is known about Marcion of Sinope (ca. 85-160 CE), since the
information available comes his opponents, mostly Justin to Irenaeus and Tertullian.10
Marcion posed the most serious challenge to what became the established Church: he held a
9 Judith Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic: God and Scripture in the Second Century (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2015); Dieter T. Roth, The Text of Marcion’s Gospel (Leiden and Boston: Brill
Academic Publishers, 2015); John W. Marshall, “Misunderstanding the New Paul: Marcion’s Transformation of
the Sonderzeit Paul,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 20, no. 1 (2012): 1–29. 10 Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic, 56; Harnack suggests that Marcion might have had Jewish roots
that he rejected, which psychologically can explain his animosity to the “God of the Jews.” As far as I can tell,
such a position is not followed in contemporary scholarship, see Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of
the Alien God, trans. John Steely and Lyle Bierma (Durham: Labyrinth Press, 1990), 15.
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dualistic world view that separated the Creator, the God of the Jews, who created this evil
world in which we exist, and the true good God, the Redeemer, who must therefore be—this
is the fundamental logic of Marcion—completely separated from this world and can have
nothing to do with it.11 This God is the Alien God.
In the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, historians of
early Christianity followed the Church Fathers and discussed Marcion in connection with
another category of heresy: gnosis [γνῶσις], lit. knowledge, and “Gnosticism,” the latter used
to describe deviant groups for whom gnosis was central.12 Historians used, and sometime still
use today, the umbrella terms gnosis and Gnosticism—regarded in contemporary scholarship
as inadequate scholarly constructions—as an analytical-scientific category, lumping together
various groups identified as sharing a core theological worldview that separates a creator
God, described as malicious Demiurge, from a the good redeeming God.13 In a generalized
description of this worldview, the human is torn from within and is alien to this world: on the
one hand, humans are bound to this physical existence, to the world of the evil Demiurge; on
the other, however, the human contains within herself a spark of the divine, of the good God.
It is through mystical, not normally accessible knowledge (gnosis) that the human is
redeemed and is freed from the created world.14
11 Gill Quispel, “Gnosticism: Gnosticism from Its Origins to the Middle Ages,” in The Encyclopedia of Religion,
ed. Mircea Eliade, vol. 5 (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 571: Marcion was "a religious genius with one
overpowering idea: God, the Father of Jesus, was not the Hebrew YHVH". 12 Heresy also had an effect on the genres utilized by the Church. The emergence of a “hersiological tradition”
in the Church and the development of the genre of “refutation” is unthinkable without the trope of Marcion.
Lieu, Marcion and the Making of a Heretic, 87; for the general argument regarding heresy, without a focus on
Marcion, see Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 37–44; on the problematic of bringing together the categories of gnosticism and
heresy, see Michael Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), esp. 33-51. 13 The fact that—at least until the findings in Nag Hammadi of texts of ancient Christian groups that deviated
from what became orthodoxy—almost all our information on Gnostic groups, which did not refer to themselves
as such, comes from the Church Fathers, and the fluidity of this category, as led contemporary scholars to call
for the abandonment of the category altogether. Cf. Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”; Karen L. King, What Is
Gnosticism? (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 14 Even though his work is slightly later than the period under discussion, Hans Jonas’ work beginning with the
first volume of Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (1934) and culminating in the more popular The Gnostic Religion
(1958) can be seen as epitomizing this view of Gnosis. Cf. Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of
the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963), 42–7; Harnack’s summary of
Gnostic teaching is comprised of five elements, which are basically in agreement with Jonas (even though the
two would disagree on the origins of Gnosticism). Cf. Adolf von Harnack, History of Dogma, trans. Neil
Buchanan (New York: Dover Publications, 1961), 233–4; for a brief history of Gnosis research, with special
emphasis on the scholarship in the period under discussion here, see Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, xiv–xvii;
Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton:
116
Where did Gnostic teachings come from? Harnack sees the origins of Gnostic
theology in “the acute secularization, or Hellenization of Christianity.”15 Despite claims
about a pre-Christian Jewish Gnosticism or Persian origins, this was the most influential
definition of the time.16 In their attempt to make Christianity universal, writes Harnack,
Gnostics tried “to capture Christianity for Hellenic culture and Hellenic culture for
Christianity… [They] gave up the Old Testament in order to facilitate the conclusion of the
covenant between the two powers, and make it possible to assert the absoluteness of
Christianity.”17
Marcion shares with the Gnostics the interrelated questions of a dualistic worldview
and the place of the Old Testament in Christianity. Yet for Harnack “Marcion cannot be
numbered among the Gnostics in the strict sense of the word.”18 First, in order for Marcion’s
Alien God to be truly alien, it can have no share in this world, which means there is no
“divine spark” in the human as there is in other Gnostic teachings. Second, the Alien God
comes from the outside purely out of grace, out of his love for humanity. It is only faith in
this love and not knowledge that is central for redemption.19 Finally, Harnack argues that
Marcion and the Gnostics shared a disdain for syncretism. Yet the Gnostics failed in
purifying Christianity: they avoided the Old Testament, but only at the price of introducing
myths borrowed from the mystery-cults, thereby creating “syncretism from another side.”20
Marcion shared the Gnostics’ desire for a religion free of the Old Testament, but he
succeeded where they failed, offering “no syncretism, but simplification, unification and
clarity of what bore the Christian label […] Marcion is the consistent one; true religion must
Princeton University Press, 2008), 28–9; Manfred Bauschulte, Religionsbahnhöfe der Weimarer Republik:
Studien zur Religionsforschung 1918-1933 (Marburg: diagonal-Verlag, 2007), 241–72. 15 Harnack, History of Dogma, 1.227. 16 The argument for a pre-Christian Jewish Gnosticism was put forth in Moritz Friedländer, Der vorchristliche
jüdische Gnosticismus (Farnborough: Gregg Press, 1972); it was later adopted by Gershom Scholem, see for
example Gershom Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition (New York:
Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1965); for a discussion of Scholem’s use of gnosis and its relation to
his scholarship on Kabbalah, see David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 129–34. 17 Harnack, History of Dogma, 1.228. 18 Harnack, History of Dogma, 1.267; cf. Lazier, God Interrupted, 30: “Harnack’s statement was and remains
the most forceful in favor of a non-gnostic Marcion.” 19 Harnack, Marcion, 1990, 67; Harnack, History of Dogma, 1.267. 20 Harnack, Marcion, 1990, 9; David Brakke follows Harnack’s reading of a non-gnostic Marcion. He claims
that one of the demarcation lines is the Old Testament. See David Brakke, The Gnostics: Myth, Ritual, and
Diversity in Early Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010): “The Gnostics considered
the Jewish Scriptures a flawed witness to a demonic god; still, with revelatory guidance from the higher powers,
the biblical texts could furnish insight into salvation history. Marcion, in contrast, rejected the Jewish Scriptures
as irrelevant to Christians, indeed contradictory to the Gospel.”
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be plain and transparent, just as it must also be alien and absolute-paradoxical.”21 Although
their understanding of the content of Christianity is different, Harnack shows sympathy for
Marcion’s attempt to purify Christianity. The second-century heretic and the twentieth
century historian both seek the essence of Christianity as a simple and clear message.
Marcion’s third-way between the gnostic myth and the emerging Church’s reliance on
the Old Testament is described by Harnack as an adherence to Pauline theology. Paul “blazed
the trail to a clear understanding of the Christian message; but this is precisely what that
message as universal and as complexio oppositorum will not tolerate.”22 Marcion follows
Paul’s distinctions between works and faith, law and gospel, flesh and spirit etc., but he takes
them in extremis into their logical conclusion: whereas Paul maintains a constant dialectic
between two opposing elements, Marcion’s metaphysical dualism allows him to hold
antitheses by ascribing one side of the equations (law, flesh, works) to the Jewish Creator
God, and another (gospel, spirit, faith) to the Alien God. In this sense, Harnack suggests,
Marcion is the true disciple of Paul and not the emerging Church.23 The claim that Marcion is
the logical consequence of Paul, is one of Harnack’s most provocative insights: it puts one of
the founders of the Church and the person to which a large portion of the canon is attributed
in a close relation to the arch-heretic Marcion, thereby suggesting that the fundaments upon
which the Church of Rome was built are inherently flawed, i.e. there is still a
misunderstanding of the Christian canon.
2.2 Marcion and the Christian Canon
Harnack’s discussion of Marcion is historical, but, like his discussion of the essence, it is also
of contemporary relevance.24 Already as a student, Harnack wrote an award-winning essay on
Marcion (1870), in which he identified the heretic as a” “modern” and “the first reformer.”25
21 Harnack, Marcion, 1990, 12 (emphasis in the original); cf. ibid., 65. 22 Ibid., 8. 23 Ibid., 131; shortly before Harnack, Ernst Bloch has already presented the importance of Marcion as the true
follower of Paul, but Harnack’s stature as church historian, as well as the level of erudition in his monograph,
made his argument much harder to ignore. See Lazier, God Interrupted, 209n8. 24 The same can be said about discussions of gnosis at the time. Hans Jonas would later take this point further
and treat gnostic thought as an existential stand in the world, but the origins of his positon are already present in
the scholarship on Gnosticism since its inception. This point is most evident in the postscript to The Gnostic
Religion, titled “Gnosticism, Existentialism, Nihilism” (Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 320–40); Eric Voeglin has
also argued for the category's relevance. For him a gnostic mode of thought characterizes modern politics. Cf.
Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). 25 Adolf von Harnack, Marcion, der moderne Gläubige des 2. Jahrhunderts, der erste Reformator - Die
Dorpater Preisschrift (1870): Kritische Edition des handschriftlichen Exemplars mit einem Anhang, ed.
118
In the monograph, Marcion is described as a biblical theologian that takes the gospel
seriously at its word, with no allegorical method of interpretation. Nothing is allowed to stand
next to the gospel. It is in light of this strict and consistent theological dualism that Marcion
understood the Christian texts available to him: his main concern is the Alien God, the
redeeming Christ, and not with the life of Jesus. Based on this principle, Marcion is the first
Christian to try and form a canon, which for him consists of one Gospel, probably showing
similarities to Luke but edited in order to wipe out any elements of the “Jewish God,” as well
as ten epistles of Paul.26 It is possible that the formation of the canon in the emerging Church
at the time was a response to Marcion’s attempts to formulate a definitive corpus of texts.
It is specifically on the question of canon that Harnack sees Marcion’s relevance to
contemporary Protestant Christianity (and what Slenczka takes from Harnack). Near the end
of his 1921 monograph, in a chapter dedicated for Marcion’s contemporary relevance,
Harnack writes:
The thesis, to be established in what follows, is: the rejection of the Old Testament in the second
century was a mistake which the Great Church has rightly avoided; to retain it in the sixteenth century
was a fate from which the Reformation was not yet able to withdraw; but to still conserve it as a
canonical document in Protestantism since the nineteenth century is the result of a religious and
ecclesiastical paralysis.27
This provocative claim does not intend to do away with the Old Testament completely, but—
as Harnack explained in a later lecture—to relegate it to a secondary level and to treat it as a
collection of texts that is relevant for the prehistory of the Church but not to its essence.28 In
order to strengthen the kernel, Harnack wishes to minimize the relevance of the husk without
throwing it away. That Harnack needed to clarify his position shows how easily his argument
about the canon could be misunderstood.
Friedemann Steck (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2003); it is probably not a coincidence that Harnack publishes his
mature monograph on Marcion around the jubilee for the award of this prize, as he makes evident in the
foreward to the first edition, where he also describes Marcion as “my first love in church history,” a love that
has not weakened in the years that followed, see Harnack, Marcion, 1990, ix. 26 The chronological relation between Luke and Marcion’s gospel, as well as the question of possible influence
from other synoptic gospels, is still contested in scholarship. For an overview of literature on the subject, see
Roth, The Text of Marcion’s Gospel, 7–44; although not willing to commit on this issue, Roth suggests that his
reconstruction of the Gospel of Marcion tends to support a reading that sees Luke as prior to and a source for
Marcion’s canon, see ibid., 439. 27 Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Hinrich, 1924), 217 –
emphasis in original. 28 In a lecture outline from 1923 we find the succinct comment “I do not throw the O.T. out”. See Adolf von
Harnack, “Marcion: Der Radikale Modernist des 2. Jahrhunderets. Vortragskonzept (Uppsala, 13. März 1923),”
in Marcion, Der moderne Gläubige, 398.
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Luther is the one taking Marcion’s position again: he has purified Christianity and
woke it up from its theological slumber. The Reformation is nothing short of an attempt to re-
grasp the essence of Christianity, to facilitate “the return to the pure gospel.” Luther
shattered, writes Harnack, dogmatic thinking, even if he himself did not draw the full
consequences of his position.29 Comments about Luther are inserted in several strategic
places in Marcion. Writing on how Marcion expounded to the emerging church the difference
between gospel and law and how Marcion saw in his opponents Judaizers of the gospel,
Harnack adds “Who does not think here of Luther?!”30 Similar to the way in which the
essence of Christianity as identified by the words of Jesus has transcended the boundaries of
Judaism, so Marcion and Luther are seen by Harnack as rising above both the Jewish origins
of Christianity and the dogma of Catholicism.
The bringing together of Marcion and Luther does not mean that Harnack offers a
complete endorsement of Marcion, even though his rhapsodic tone might at times suggest
otherwise. In a famous statement, Harnack writes that in the second century Marcion is the
only one who “took the trouble to understand Paul; but it must be added that he
misunderstood him.”31 After discussing the clarity and simplicity of Marcion’s message—
that gospel and law, Old and New Testament, do not belong together—Harnack adds:
Only Luther with his justification-faith manages to rival Marcion here; but since he holds fast to the
identity of the Creator-God and the Redeemer-God, he is able to combine with this faith the whole
wealth of salvation history and of the “traces of God” that Marcion was compelled to abandon.32
They share the same intention but Luther’s position is superior to that of Marcion because his
faith maintains the possibility to see salvation in the world, whereby Marcion’s strict dualism
does not leave this possibility. Put differently, Luther is a better interpreter of Paul than
Marcion. Harnack offers further objections to Marcion:33 First, he claims that there is
29 “Return to the pure gospel” from the lecture “The Present State of Research in early Church History” (1885),
in Adolf von Harnack, Adolf von Harnack: Liberal Theology at Its Height, ed. Martin Rumscheidt
(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 193; cf. Harnack, History of Dogma, 7.268: “the history of dogma comes to
a close with Luther. Any one who lets Luther be Luther [...] has the lofty title and strict obligation, to conclude
the history of dogma with him”; and Adolf von Harnack, “Die religionsgeschichtliche Bedeutung der
Reformation Luthers (1926),” in Adolf von Harnack als Zeitgenosse: Reden und Schriften aus den Jahren des
Kaiserreichs und der Weimarer Republik, ed. Kurt Nowak (New York: de Gruyter, 1996), 1.329–42. 30 Harnack, Marcion, 1990, 18. 31 Adolf von Harnack, “Marcion,” in Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. 17 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1911), 691. 32 Harnack, Marcion, 1990, 62. 33 For the following citations, see ibid., 134–6.
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“something expressionistic in the Marcionite discussion of God and the world; one could
even say that there is a certain avoidance of thinking.” A person inclined toward more
intellectual argumentation finds Marcion unappealing in this regard. Secondly, this
“avoidance of thinking” can easily lead to speculations and the creation of mythology, since
human beings, according to Harnack, are not comfortable living in a duality. As a modern
historian, Harnack rejects any mythologizing and therefore the consequences of a Marcionite
position. Thirdly, because Marcion detaches the Alien Redeemer and the world, he is left
with no concrete providence but only with future-oriented patience. Finally, love, which is
the gospel of the Redeemer, cannot lead to the strict asceticism and renounciation of
fecundity as promulgated by Marcion. Such a view, writes Harnack, “cannot be right, for it
would take away the basic presupposition of all positive thinking, namely, that life itself must
somehow be valuable.” Harnack thus affirms the first article of the creed, stating “I believe in
God the Father Almighty” and rejects the Marcionite position while maintaining at the same
time his importance for church history. Marcion’s significance lies not only in the attempt to
present a clear Christian message of love, devoid of the God of the Old Testament, but also in
his consistent method of purging the Christian canon.
2.3 The Contemporary Relevance of Marcion
Harnack ends the monograph by saying that in the “chaotic chorus of those who seek after
God,” it is easier to have conversation with those who espouse a Marcionite position than
with those whose opinions are a confused admixture.34 This is a reference to the spiritual
situation in the aftermath of the Great War and political upheaval in Germany. In this
moment of crisis, Harnack’s argument about the canon and Marcion found a wide and diverse
reception. At the risk of generalization, the responses from the Protestant side can be
categorized as follows: scholars specializing in the Old Testament rejected Harnack’s
position and tried to show the value of the Old Testament. Among liberal Protestants the
opinions varied, with some adopting Harnack’s position and some rejecting it. Catholic
theologians rejected it. Most disturbing, albeit hardly surprising, was the reception and
34 Ibid., 145.
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affirmation of Harnack’s thesis from supporters of racial and völkisch understandings of
Christianity such as Houston Stuart Chamberlain or Friedrich Andersen.35
Karl Barth, Harnack’s erstwhile student, came to be known as the leading tenor of this
“chaotic chorus.” Barth’s commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, especially in its
second edition (1st edition: 1919; 2nd: 1922), was nothing short of a theological earthquake: it
was a rejection of the prevailing liberal theology and its historical method. Instead, Barth
emphasized God’s radical otherness from the human and the world; God is the complete
Other (ganz Andere) to whom human beings can have no access whatsoever through their
own merit. Such a theological position resembles that of Marcion, as reviewers of Barth’s
work pointed out. Barth admits some parallels but refuses to conflate his position to
Marcionism, claiming that on the decisive points his thought departs from that of Marcion.36
In 1923, the vast gulf between Harnack’s historical-scientific position and Barth’s
dialectical approach became evident through a series of open letters in the prestigious journal
Christliche Welt. Provoked by Harnack’s “Fifteen Questions to the Despisers of Scientific
Theology”—Barth is not named but might as well have been—Barth replied and a debate
began concerning the methods and tasks of theology.37 The figure of Marcion is a leitmotiv in
this public exchange. Harnack understands Barth to “condemn all Christian pedagogy and
sever, like Marcion, every link between faith and the human. In my view you have the
example of Jesus against you.”38 Despite his earlier positive evaluation of Marcion, Harnack
35 For a presentation of the various positions, see Wolfram Kinzig, Harnack, Marcion und das Judentum, nebst
einer kommentierten Edition des Briefwechsels Adolf von Harnacks mit Houston Stewart Chamberlain (Leipzig:
Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2004), 116–45. 36 Karl Barth, Der Römerbrief (Zurich: TVZ, 2005), xxiv; For Barth, it is only through God’s grace, expressed
in his sending of Christ as his Word, in his election of the individual and the community that our world makes
sense, that we hear a Yes out of the No. This dialectical movement between affirmation and negation, between
Yes and No, can be seen as the common denominator of theologies that are together identified under the rubric
“dialectical theology.” Others associated with this direction in theology are Friedrich Gogarten, Emil Brunner
and others. See Jürgen Moltmann, ed., Anfänge der dialektischen Theologie (Munich: Kaiser, 1966), ix–xviii; cf.
Joseph Mangina, Karl Barth: Theologian of Christian Witness (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press,
2004), 15: “To stress God’s otherness is not to stress God’s indifference or impotence with respect to the human
situation. This is no Marcionite deity, too pure to interact with the material world, but a God who hides his face
so that he may reveal himself as the world’s creator.” 37 This exchange has been analyzed in detail in Martin Rumscheidt, Revelation and Theology: An Analysis of the
Barth-Harnack Correspondence of 1923 (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2011); see also George Hunsinger,
“The Harnack\Barth Correspondence: A Paraphrase with Commentary,” in Disruptive Grace: Studies in the
Theology of Karl Barth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 319–37. 38 Rumscheidt, Revelation and Theology, 37 - my emphasis. Harnack asked about the relation between Christian
education to goodliness and the separation of God and the world that Barth proposes and the latter has answered
only with “no one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him and I will raise him up at the last
day” (John 6:44).
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here lumps Marcion and Barth together as opponents to his own position, for which he uses
Jesus’ words as support. Barth replies that his point of view is theocentric and not
anthropocentric, he does not begin with the human. He further enlists Luther in support of his
approach and adds: “Is Luther to be suspected of Marcionism? According to Zwingli, yes, but
I think you and I understand him better than that.”39 Barth dismisses the accusation of
Marcionism by a reference to Luther, maybe with a tinge of irony, because Harnack indeed
saw a connection, at least with regard to the treatment of canon and the possibility of reform,
between Marcion and Luther.
The pages of the Christliche Welt in 1923 exemplify how the figure of Marcion is
being used by these two prominent theologians as a theological and rhetorical trope. Harnack
and Barth alike identify to a certain extent with Marcion. At the same time, both are also
quick to repudiate the idea that they follow the arch-heretic’s teachings. Barth, despite his
emphasis on the otherness of God, never called for a change in the canonical status of the Old
Testament; Harnack, who called for such a revision, did not follow Marcion with regard to
the otherness of God. The debate between Harnack and Barth, or more broadly between
Kulturprotestantismus and dialectical theology, is an example of how the figure of Marcion
looms over Christian theological discussions of the period.40
Jewish thought was not left untouched by the debates about Marcion, dualism, and the
Christian canon: Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Levinas, Hans-
Joachim Schoeps, and others have responded in their writings to the different challenges that
Marcion and gnosis came to represent.41 The proposition that the Old Testament is not
canonical was especially troublesome, because it denigrates the sacred text of Judaism as
particularistic and of lesser value, severs the relation between Christianity and Judaism, and,
by way of implication, might cast out the Jew in the Christian majority society, just as the
39 Ibid., 50. 40 Cf. Kinzig, Harnack, Marcion und das Judentum, 110–16, 136–9. 41 Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Martin Buber and the Metaphysicans of Contempt,” in Divided Passions: Jewish
Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 207–36; among
the more recent secondary literature see Randi Rashkover, Revelation and Theopolitics: Barth, Rosenzweig, and
the Politics of Praise (New York: T&T Clark International, 2005); Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other:
Emmanuel Levinas between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005); Yotam Hotam,
Gnosis Moderni ṿe-Tsiyonut: Mashber Ha-Tarbut, Filosofyat Ha-ḥayim ṿe-Hagut Leʼumit Yehudit (Jerusalem:
Magnes University Press, 2007); Lazier, God Interrupted; Yaniv Feller, “From Aher to Marcion: Martin
Buber’s Understanding of Gnosis,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 20, no. 4 (2013): 374–97; Benjamin Pollock,
Franz Rosenzweig’s Conversions: World Denial and World Redemption (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
2014).
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Old Testament should be cast out of the canon. Given the attention in recent scholarship to
the influence of Barth and the figure of Marcion on Jewish thought, it is striking that the
thought of Leo Baeck, whose work has been explicitly brought into conversation with that of
Harnack in the context of the “essence debate,” has not been sufficiently recognized as a
reply to the challenge of Marcionism.42
Romanticism as Marcionism
3.1 The Romantic
“Romantic Religion”—published in 1922 in a Festschrift for the jubilee celebration of the
Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums—was intended as part of a larger project,
never completed, on “Classical and Romantic Religion.”43 This essay, which offers Baeck’s
most explicit and harsh evaluation of Christianity, has been criticized as being unfair in its
description of Christianity.44 There is more than a grain of truth to this claim. But behind
Baeck’s critique of Christianity as a romantic religion stands a profound argument about the
dangers inherent in the growing intellectual popularity of a Christianity that attempts to
purify itself from Judaism à la Marcion. In order to understand the category of “romantic
religion” and the main thrust of this important essay, one needs to read it in light of Baeck’s
dialogical apologetics vis-à-vis Harnack’s work on Marcion.45
42 There are few exceptions, who mention it in passing without recognizing the full consequences of this
position: Hans Liebeschütz, “Judaism and the History of Religion in Leo Baeck’s Work,” Leo Baeck Institute
Yearbook 2 (1957): 13–14; Friedlander, Teacher of Theresienstadt, 125; Stendahl’s introduction to Leo Baeck,
The Pharisees and Other Essays (New York: Schocken Books, 1966), xvii; Hotam, Gnosis Moderni ṿe-
Tsiyonut, 182; and Ernst Simon’s introduction to Baeck, Ma’hut Ha’yaha’dut, 21–4. 43 Leo Baeck, “Romantische Religion,” in Festschrift zum 50jährigen Bestehen der Hochchule für die
Wiessenschaft des Judentums in Berlin (Berlin: Philo Verlag, 1922), 3–48. Ernst Rubinstein suggests that the
project was never completed because Baeck came to realize that The Essence of Judaism is already the
description of classical religion (Ernst Rubinstein, An Episode of Jewish Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweig’s The
Star of Redemption [Albany: SUNY Press, 1999], 31). 44 In “Apologetic Thinking,” Rosenzweig makes a reference to “Romantic Religion” and argues that Baeck’s
presentation of Christianity is flat, even if it is perhaps “mitigated by a certain methodological awareness which
deliberately poses the problem as a definite abstraction,” but abstractions do not necessarily help but rather
might increase the danger for the reader. (Franz Rosenzweig, “Apologetic Thinking,” in Philosophical and
Theological Writings, ed. Paul Franks and Michael Morgan [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000], 106–107); for a
similar assessment: Albert Friedlander, Leo Baeck: Teacher of Theresienstadt (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1973), 120. 45 Two important interpretations of this essay should be mentioned. Walter Homolka suggests that Baeck’s
polemic with Christianity finds its focus in his critique of Luther’s theology. As opposed to Luther’s notion of
grace, Baeck offers his notion of the commandment. (Walter Homolka, Jewish Identity in Modern Times: Leo
Baeck and German Protestantism [Providence: Berghahn Books, 1995]). Although Luther plays an important
part, second perhaps only to Paul, in “Romantic Religion”, such an explanation ignores the intellectual-historical
context described in the first section of this chapter, i.e. the looming figure of Marcion that is behind Baeck’s
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Baeck begins his essay with a distinction between two forms of religion: classical and
romantic, identifying historically the former with Judaism and the latter with Christianity.
The “romantic” is defined—following Friedrich Schlegel’s definition of the romantic book—
as “one which treats sentimental material in a phantastic form.”46 To this Baeck adds:
Tense feelings supply its content, and it seeks its goals in the now mythical, now mystical vision of the
imagination. Its world is the realm in which all rules are suspended; it is the work of the irregular, the
extraordinary and the miraculous, that which lies beyond all reality, the remote hereafter of all things.47
This is a generalizing claim: romanticism is not just a historical modern movement in this
scheme, but a general mode of thought that recurs throughout history.48 In this, it is similar to
the use of the term Gnosticism around Baeck’s time. God as the Other is not mentioned
explicitly, but the vocabulary used to describe the aspiration of the romantic to a world
“which lies beyond all reality” and to the “remote hereafter” suggests that romantic religion is
not concerned with this world. Baeck’s focus on romantic imagination supports this claim.
The longing for a flight out of this world into the realms of mythical stories of heroes, gods
and cosmogonies, as well as to mystical visions of the beyond, is characteristic of the Jena
Romantic.49 It is also present in many views labeled under Gnosticism. As we have seen,
Harnack argued that the development of elaborated myths, sometimes based on imagery from
the Hebrew Bible, is part and parcel of gnostic theology as it was understood at that time.50
discussion of Luther. Another important interpretation is that of Ernst Rubinstein. By juxtaposing Baeck’s essay
with Rosenzweig’s Star and Schelling’s The Philosophy of Art, Rubinstein offers a valuable reading of
“Romantic Religion” not only in light of Christian theology but also in terms of discussions on romanticism.
Baeck is thus presented as a figure with important insights especially on the latter (Ernest Rubinstein, An
Episode of Jewish Romanticism: Franz Rosenzweig’s The Star of Redemption [Albany: SUNY Press, 1999]).
Rubinstein’s work explains the sources of Baeck’s use of the category of romantic, and in this I follow his work,
but the reason for the emergence of the work, the “why?” as different from the “how?” is unintelligible in my
opinion without the debates on Marcion. 46 Leo Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” in Judaism and Christianity, trans. Walter Kaufmann (Philadelphia: Jewish
Publication Society of America, 1960), 189; Leo Baeck, “Romantische Religion,” in Werke 4: Aus drei
Jahrtausenden\Das Evangelium als Urkunde der jüdischen Glaubensgeschichte (Gütersloh: Gütersloher
Verlagshaus, 2006), 42; Baeck takes the definition from Friedrich Schlegel's "Conversation on Poetics"
(Friedrich Schlegel, “Gespräch über die Poesie,” in Kritische Schriften und Fragmente, ed. Ernst Behler and
Hans Eichner, vol. 2 [Paderborn: Schöningh, 1988], 211). 47 Baeck, “Romantische Religion,” 42; Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 189–90. 48 Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 195–6. 49 George Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Aesthetic Culture from Romanticism to
Nietzsche (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), chp. 1. 50 Harnack also points out that these myths were meant to solve broader philosophical and theological problems.
(Harnack, History of Dogma, 1.234; cf. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 48). The same can be argued for the
romantic myths.
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Baeck’s definition of romanticism has two advantages: first, it is based on an insider’s
perspective and can claim to portray romanticism as understood by its central representatives.
Friedrich Schlegel, along with his brother August Wilhelm, is by all standard accounts of
German romanticism one of the founders of the movement.51 Moreover, the paucity of
Baeck’s definition allows it to be utilized broadly and expanded behind the literary circles in
which it emerged. On the other hand, this definition has apparent shortcomings: it can be
easily dismissed for its ahistoric tendency and for overgeneralizing. Romanticism and the
romantic are broad terms and Baeck’s definition does not take into account regional and
temporal differences. This is especially problematic given the reinvigorated interest in the
romantic around his time. In fact, the term has been used in so many ways that in 1924 Arthur
Lovejoy concluded that “[t]he word ‘romantic’ has come to mean so many things that, by
itself, it means nothing.”52 Furthermore, Baeck does not properly follow his own implicit
criterion of defining the movement by the words of its important Jena representatives.53 As
Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy note, the program of the early romantics of this circle was
intentionally left indefinite by the Schlegel brothers.54 In fact, Baeck ignores not just the
broader discussions among the Jena circle but also the very next sentence in the text from
which he draws the definition of the romantic book. Schlegel writes:
Forget for a moment the common nasty infamous meaning of the sentimental, where one understands
under this designation almost everything that is flatly moving and tearful, and full of these noble
feelings, in which consciousness humans without character feel themselves so ineffably happy and
great.55
Baeck does not forget the “infamous meaning of the sentimental.” In addition, he never
recognizes that his own distinction between classical and romantic is in itself romantic and
can be traced to August Wilhelm Schlegel’s Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, where
51 When defining the “romantic project”, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy identify it with a place (Jena) and a
journal (the Athenaeum, founded by the Schlegel brothers). Cf. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy,
The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism, trans. Philip Bernard and Cheryl
Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), 7. 52 Arthur Lovejoy, “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms,” PMLA 39, no. 2 (1924): 232; cf. Carl Schmitt,
Political Romanticism, trans. Guy Oakes (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1986), 30; for an attempt to show the
multiplicity of “romanticism” while also answering to Lovejoy’s challenge through Wittgenstein’s notion of
“family resemblance”, see the editor's introduction to Michael Ferber, ed., A Companion to European
Romanticism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 1–8. 53 Beside Schlegel, Novalis and Schleiermacher are also cited. See Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 191–2. 54 Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, The Literary Absolute, 6. They quote Friedrich Schlegel’s ironic—and irony is a
central romantic category—comment to his brother August that his explication of the word “romantic” would
take 125 pages. 55 Schlegel, “Gespräch über die Poesie,” 211.
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he argues that classical texts and thought are concerned with the harmony of the universe,
romantic thought, by contrast, strives for the infinite that is not easily found in this world.56
August Wilhelm Schlegel further adds to his discussion of the romantic and classic,
by arguing that the romantic is an infusion of Christianity, “this sublime and beneficent
religion” that “has regenerated the ancient world from its state of exhaustion and
debasement,” with the influence of the “Germanic race of northern conquerors.”57 In
“Romantic Religion” Baeck follows Schlegel on this point without discussing this statement
explicitly. Yet unlike Schlegel, Baeck does not glorify the triangle romantic-Christianity-
Germanic race but abhors it. “Romantic religion” should be read as a rejection of such
tendencies, which Baeck identifies as inherent in Christianity when it strives to become
Marcionite. Before discussing the dangers involved, however, the genealogy of the romantic
in Christianity should be traced.
3.2 Paul and the Birth of Romantic Christianity
Christianity emerges according to Baeck from the encounter between Judaism and Roman
mystery cults. This thesis is an underlying theme of the entire essay: Christianity without
Judaism is cut off from its classical roots, it is purely romantic. In light of Harnack’s work on
Marcion, this is to be understood as the claim that a Christianity that cuts-off or ignores its
Jewish roots, as Marcion tried to do and as Harnack at times comes close to arguing, is
turning into pure romanticism.
The true founder of the Church and of Christianity in Baeck’s story is Paul, and not
Jesus, who belongs to the Jewish tradition.58 “What is called the victory of Christianity was in
reality this victory of romanticism,” writes Baeck, and adds that the romantic victory of Paul
is based on a powerful combination—that is Paul’s genius in the history of religion—between
the Jewish messianic idea and Hellenistic-pagan mystery cults.59 Although Paul in his own
56 August Wilhelm von Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black
(Philadelphia: Hogan & Thompson, 1833), 5–7. 57 Ibid., 8. 58 I have discussed Jesus’ Jewishness according to Baeck in the last chapter. In finding the separation between
Judaism and Christianity in Paul, Baeck follows a line of thought common in the Wissenschaft des Judentums of
his time, see Gösta Lindeskog, Die Jesusfrage im neuzeitlichen Judentum: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der
Leben-Jesu-Forschung. (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1973), 98, 310; Reinhold Mayer,
Christentum und Judentum in der Schau Leo Baecks (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1961), 50–2. 59 Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 198–9.
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mind perhaps never left Judaism, he in fact founded a new romantic worldview, one that had
Jewish roots but was no longer Jewish. This is evident in Paul’s emphasis on the process of
salvation as external to the world, in the centrality of the myth of the “romantic fate of a god
which reflects the inexorable lot of man and is the content of all life,” as well as in the
importance of sacraments and the separation of works from grace.60
Catholicism and Protestantism alike have adopted the patterns of romantic thought
from Paul, but Protestantism receives the lion’s share of criticism. Catholicism—despite
being a religion of sacraments—managed at times to follow the original to mitigate the
romantic element in Christianity by holding dialectically to the importance of works.61
Protestantism, by contrast, is figured as taking the romantic roots of Christianity more
seriously. Even when Luther is praised by Baeck, it is always with a caveat, e.g. Luther raised
the estimation of earthly vocational work but the price was ossified social stratification.62 In
seeing a close connection between Luther and Paul, Baeck follows Harnack and the Luther-
renaissance of the Weimar Republic.63 The affiliation between Luther and Paul, however, is
not meant as a positive affirmation of this position but rather as a warning: the romantic roots
of Protestantism are strong.64 When Protestantism is at its best, when it aspires for the ethical,
it returns to the Jewish roots of Christianity; at its worst, however, Protestantism considers
ethics nothing more than a romantic play, something that should be preached but not
practiced in everyday life.65
60 Ibid., 202–3; on sacraments 220–1. This is Baeck’s position throughout the 1920’s; the significant revision of
this position is in an article from 1952 is discussed below in section 7. 61 Ibid., 205, 215, 262. 62 Ibid., 213, 216, 225. 63 On the Luther-renaissance and its aftermath, see James Stayer, Martin Luther, German Saviour: German
Evangelical Theological Factions and the Interpretation of Luther, 1917-1933 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2000); Heinrich Assel, Der andere Aufbruch: Die Lutherrenaissance - Ursprünge, Aporien
und Wege - Karl Holl, Emanuel Hirsch, Rudolf Hermann (1910-1935) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
1994). 64 Luther is a contested figure in German-Jewish thought and responses to him range between admiration and
loath. In criticizing Luther this way, Baeck is decidedly breaking from a strand in liberal and reform Jewish
readings of Luther, who was praised as a model to be imitated. Just as Luther broke the shackles of the Catholic
Church and reformed Christianity, so the argument goes, modern Jews should Reform Judaism. For the different
and opposing readings of Luther in modern Jewish thought, see Christian Wiese, “‘Let His Memory Be Holy to
Us!’: Jewish Interpretations of Martin Luther from the Enlightenment to the Holocaust,” The Leo Baeck Institute
Yearbook 54 (2009): 93–126. 65 For the critique of modern Protestantism see Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 263–5; in an earlier essay, Baeck
expressed a similar critique but suggested that, if done properly, the modern Protestant emphasis on ethics is a
return to Judaism Leo Baeck, “Die Umkehr zum Judentum,” in Werke 6: Briefe, Reden, Aufsätze, ed. Michael
Meyer (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 63–9.
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3.3 Romanticism as Marcionism and Gnosticism.
The romantic roots of Protestantism are a direct result of Luther’s reading of Paul. But he is
not the only reader of Paul Baeck has in mind. The figure of Marcion, and of modern
Marcionism, looms large over “Romantic Religion.” When Baeck speaks of romanticism, I
argue, he means other “isms,” namely Gnosticism and Marcionism. But why then would
Baeck not simply name Marcionism and Gnosticism as his adversaries? There are several
possible reasons. To begin with, it is possible that Baeck uses romanticism instead of
Gnosticism and Marcionism because he wants to offer a broader typology for the study of
religion—remember that “Romantic Religion” was supposed to be part of a larger work—that
is broader than the context of ancient Christianity. Furthermore, romanticism has a
connection to claims about volk and land. Arguing using this term thus brings a connection
between a critique of Christianity and a critique of these romantic tendencies, evident already
in August Wilhelm Schlegel’s statement discussed above. Finally, as will be clear in what
follows, Baeck is concerned with present-day Christianity. Framing the debate in terms of
early Christianity thus slightly weakens the focus of his critique while keeping it in terms of
the romantic allows it to be presented as scholarly while maintaining its relevance.
Besides “Romantic Religion” itself, there are several telling pieces of evidence that
suggest that Paul, Marcion, and Luther are connected in Baeck’s thought. First, shortly after
Harnack’s monograph on Marcion, Baeck published the second edition of The Essence of
Judaism (1922). The work is significantly longer and contains several important changes.
Baeck is aware that this is not a mere republishing and describes the book as “an old book”
that is also “a new that now meets the reader. The layout remains the same, but what fills it
today differs from that in the past.”66 What is the old book and what is the new? Baeck argues
that the growth in content and size is mostly in the section about the ideas of Judaism. Ernst
Simon sketches the differences between the editions of The Essence of Judaism: first, there is
a new emphasis on the national character of Judaism, exemplified in the move from the word
“Volk” in the first edition to the word “Nation” in the second. Second, the relation to the
mystical elements in Judaism has changed and is now more positive; third, the role of the
commandment has changed, in particular in its relation to the “mystery.” Simon notes also
other changes, such as a more dialogical language or a slightly stronger emphasis on God’s
66 Baeck, Werke 1: Das Wesen des Judentums, ix.
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otherness, which he attributes to a possible influence by Rudolf Otto or Karl Barth.67 I argue
that all these changes point in an anti-Marcionite direction: the second edition is a “new
book” because it has a new adversary, or rather, it is an old-new adversary, it is still Harnack,
but now the new threat is Marcionism.
The first edition of the Essence contains no references to “gnosis.” The second
edition, by contrast, introduces this category in several places. Baeck follows here Harnack’s
historical analysis: Gnosticism does not emerge organically from within Judaism but as an
external factor, which Judaism has to confront.68 Sometimes this is part of an entire addition,
such as a paragraph, to be discussed later, in which the Torah is contrasted with gnosis.69 In
other cases, the changes seem minor but they allow us to note Baeck’s evaluation of gnosis.
Baeck writes in the first edition that the prophets opposed “natural philosophy, metaphysics
and mysticism.” In the second edition the prophetic religion becomes a defense against
natural philosophy and gnosis.70 This would suggest an equation between gnosis and
“metaphysics and mysticism.” By metaphysics Baeck probably has in mind ungrounded
assumptions about the world. That mysticism is eliminated as a negative factor and is
replaced by gnosis implies that gnosis is a specific form of mysticism that differs in some
crucial ways from other forms of mysticism. Furthermore, the contrast between gnosis and
the prophetic faith implies that the former is assessed negatively in terms of its relation to
God and ethics.
These subtle changes are not the only places in which Baeck shows awareness of
Marcionism. In “Judaism in the Church” (1925), an essay which is in many ways a
companion piece to “Romantic Religion,” Baeck explicitly refers to Marcion as continuing
the tradition of Paul and as being the apostle’s consistent interpreter. He singles out Marcion
as the one who strove most ardently to achieve “pure Paulinism.”71 “Judaism in the Church”
is even more explicit than “Romantic Religion” about the political implications of the
67 Ernst Simon, “Geheimnis und Gebot: Zum Leo Baecks 75 Geburtstag,” Aufbau, May 21, 1948. 68 In a 1927 essay, Baeck claims that Jewish texts with some mystical tendency such as Philo or the Wisdom of
Solomon “appear alien on Jewish soil” and “must be traced back to the influence of Gnosticism, a mixture of
Greek and Oriental mythologies and religions, which at that time flowered in the countries surrounding
Palestine”. See Leo Baeck, “The Origin of Jewish Mysticism,” in The Pharisees and Other Essays, 99. 69 Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, 46–7. 70 Ibid., 33–4. 71 Leo Baeck, “Judaism in the Church,” in The Pharisees and Other Essays, 75–6, 79. Baeck cites Harnack’s
History of Dogma when discussing Marcion.
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Marcionite position and its contemporary relevance. Baeck ends the essay by claiming that
most forms of Protestantism rely on Judaism, yet “[t]o be sure, there are ideas in German
Protestantism, most of them of an antisemitic inspiration, which, like the ideas of Marcion,
would blot everything Jewish out of Christianity.”72 A clear connection is made here between
antisemitism, Marcionism, and the erasure of the Jewish elements in Christianity.
Finally, in a letter to Franz Rosenzweig concerning his critique of “Romantic
Religion,” Baeck writes:
Is it correct then, to dissect or to pre-prepare a thought, to take it from the context of the work and to
demonstrate it as pure [?] Yet I thought that it could be valuable to present Christianity for once as
‘pure’ Paulinism, in order to depict the way it is, and in theory also has been, when it should or would
want to be freed from its Jewish [roots – YF], when it should or would want to be gnostic,
Marcionite—cf. Harnack: Marcion. That the pure romantic remains then residual, that this thus is the
‘pure’ Christianity […] A ‘pure’ Judaism-free Christianity had indeed not existed in praxi et historia.73
I have cited this letter at some length because it has been largely ignored in the discussions
surrounding “Romantic Religion.” It clearly points, however, to the true adversary Baeck had
to confront, i.e. the position that severs Judaism from Christianity, a tendency that Baeck
identifies as dangerous.
The Dangers of Pauline-Marcionite Christianity
4.1 Christian Erlebnis
The dangers of the romantic teachings of Paul, subsequently taken up by Marcion and Luther,
are a leitmotiv that recurs throughout “Romantic Religion.” At one point, by way of contrast
with classical religion, Baeck summarizes his argument about Pauline religion:
One might characterize the Pauline religion in sharp juxtapositions: absolute dependence as opposed to
the commandment, the task, of achieving freedom; leaning as opposed to self-affirmation and self-
development; quietism as opposed to dynamism. There the human being is the subject; here, in
romantic religion, the object. The freedom of which it likes so much to speak is merely a freedom
received as a gift, the granting of salvation as a fact, not a goal to be fought for. It is faith that does not
go beyond itself, that is not the task of life; only a ‘thou hast’ and not ‘thou shalt.’ In classical religion,
man is to become free through the commandment, in romantic religion he has become free through
grace.74
72 Ibid., 90. 73 Leo Baeck to Franz Rosenzweig, March 8, 1923, in Werke 6, 578. 74 Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 211.
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Classical religion is active in the world and ethical, oriented toward redemption of the world;
romantic religion is passive and tries to escape this world, its seeming redemption is limited
only to the individual.
The experience of faith stands at the heart of Pauline religion, which is concerned—
Baeck follows here Luther’s reading of Paul—with sola fide, faith for faith’s sake; the intense
inner-experience of faith [Glaubenserlebnis] is the Alpha and Omega of the romantic
religion.75 The term Erlebnis captures much of Baeck’s critique of romanticism. Erlebnis can
be translated as “living experience,” it comes from the same root as life – Leben. In Baeck’s
interpretation, Erlebnis as a lived experience is subjective; an inner and tense kind of
experience that leads to a detachment from the world.76
The term Erlebnis was popularized in the late nineteenth century among others by
Baeck’s teacher Wilhelm Dilthey, for whom it was a concept denoting facts of consciousness
that should be grasped not only as phenomena external to the subject but as part of the totality
of its lived—today one would say perhaps embodied—experience.77 Erlebnis in this sense
can be read as a technical term. In this narrow and methodological sense, Baeck would
probably have no qualms with Erlebnis. The term can also be understood, however, more
broadly, as the above mentioned intense living experience. It is in this way that the term was
used in philosophy of life [Lebensphilosophie], a strand of thought in late nineteenth and
early twentieth century that emphasized the need to live truly, to live Life as a full
experience, as it is erlebt.78 Yotam Hotam argues that twentieth-century Lebensphilosophie is
a modern, or rather inversed, gnosis: just as the era’s understanding of gnosis stressed
dualism, so does Lebensphilosophie identify an irreconcilable gulf between spirit and life, but
whereas gnostic thought claimed the former for its redemption, Lebensphilosophie argues for
75 On the centrality of faith, see ibid., 204, 208, 230, 236, 243. 76 As such, it is distinguished from Erfahrung, which has a more objective tone, or for the very least, this-
worldly connotation. Cf. Martin Jay, Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a
Universal Theme (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 11: “Although Leben can suggest the entirety
of a life, Erlebnis generally connotes a more immediate, pre-reflective, and personal variant of experience than
Erfharung.” 77 For this reading of Dilthey’s thought I relied on Otto Pöggeler’s introduction to Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Wesen
der Philosophie (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1984), xvii–xix; and Charles Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the
Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 152–60. 78 The broader understanding of the Erlebnis can be traced back to the romantics, among others to Friedrich von
Schlegel’s Vorlesnungen über die Philosophie des Lebens (1827) [Lectures on the Philosophy of Life].For the
struggle with a definition of Lebensphilosophie and its roots, see Nitzan Lebovic, The Philosophy of Life and
Death: Ludwig Klages and the Rise of a Nazi Biopolitics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 16–19; and
Jürgen Große, Lebensphilosophie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2010), chp. 2.
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the latter as the authentic. The dualistic structure is the same, but the gnostic transcendence is
exchanged for Life’s immanence.79 Baeck’s critique of Erlebnis might thus be aimed at more
than the Marcionite elements present in modern Christianity; it is also possible to read it as
pointing to the dangers of the modern gnosis that is Lebensphilosophie.
The centre of Baeck’s critique and his main concern remains Pauline Christianity,
which in his description took from the mystery cults “the exuberance of emotion, the
enthusiastic flight from reality, the longing for an experience [Erlebnis].”80 Such longing for
an Erlebnis and basing one’s own sense of self on this intense experience is unethical because
ethics happens in this world, in everyday life, whereas Erlebnis is self-centered. In another
place, Baeck writes that “the Erlebnis of redemption is everything” in the mystery world of
Pauline Christianity. The salvation is achieved through gnosis, or rather “gnosis is here
salvation, and ethos is here faith.”81 The person receiving grace in romantic religion is
already at the goal, no further action, moral or otherwise, is required on her part. An
anthropology of the person as striving for perfection as a goal of life is thus replaced with an
anthropology of the perfect, complete person. This notion of the perfect, complete human
[vollendete, fertige Mensch] can refer at once both to Jesus as the perfect human and to the
believer itself.82 Instead of treating life as a question and an ethical task, the romantic believer
already presupposes that the subjective experience is the whole truth. This for Baeck is a
heritage of the gnosis in Christian theology.83
The ethical act is not to be found in romantic religion. Baeck is a follower of Kant in
that he believes that the deed should come from a sense of ethical obligation. An act that is
based on a subjective whim, even if it is and is meant as a noble deed, cannot serve as a
foundation for ethics because it is contingent.84 The romantic believer “wants to be [dasein],
without being there independently [durch sich sein], he wants less to live [leben] and much
more to experience [erleben].”85 This longing for experience of grace is based for Baeck on a
79 Hotam, Gnosis Moderni Ṿe-Tsiyonut. 80 Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 196. 81 Leo Baeck, “Vollendung und Spannung,” in Werke 3: Wege im Judentum, 17. 82 Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 206. 83 Baeck, “Vollendung und Spannung,” 14–15. 84 Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 193, 209. 85 Baeck, “Romantische Religion,” 44; Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 193.
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“feeling of absolute dependence,” a definition he takes from Schleiermacher.86 It is no
coincidence that Baeck relies here on Schleiermacher, who fulfills a double task: he is both a
representative of the romantics due to his connection to the circle around the Schlegels and at
the same time he is a representative, and a very important promoter, of the Protestant
understanding of inwardness. His definition of the experience of grace, Baeck can therefore
argue, is emic to both the Protestant and the romantic the traditions, which are not easily
separated.
Baeck thinks the history of Christianity is the history of this passivity and “absolute
dependence”:
The Christian religion, very much including Protestantism, has been able to maintain silence about so
much that it is difficult to say what has been more pernicious in the course of time: the intolerance
which committed the wrongs or the indifference which beheld them unperturbed. Perhaps such
indifference is even more romantic than intolerance, for it is more passive.87
Redemption for the romantic is not a redemption of the world, it is a redemption from the
world. This recalls, not coincidently, a main tenet of the gnostic understanding of redemption.
Christianity, while not explicitly rejecting the God of the Old Testament, is rejecting the
Creator and his world by emphasizing passivity and Erlebnis. This is the reason Baeck thinks
Paul and Luther could not tolerate the Law, so-called “works,” which is based on acting in
this world. If the redeemer has truly come and salvation is to be sola fide, then human works
are meaningless. Presented this way, Erlebnis based on absolute dependence is no foundation
for ethics. One needs to choose, “either faith or ethics! That is the innermost meaning of the
fight which Paul and Luther waged against the Law.”88 Justice is no longer a task to be
endlessly fulfilled in this world; rather, it is performed on the human, which is entirely
passive.89
The rejection of the world, the Law, and acting in this world is a “Pauline
lawlessness” that is, in its very core, gnostic:
86 Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 192; Friedrich Schleiermacher, Der christliche Glaube nach den Grundsätzen
der evangelischen Kirche (Halle: O. Hendel, 1897), 13 (par. 4). 87 Ibid., 275. 88 Ibid., 250; Baeck ignores the possibility that there are Jewish teachings that suggest that when the messiah
comes the status of the Law radically change. Cf. Scholem, “Toward an Understanding of the Messianic Idea in
Judaism,” 19-21. 89 Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 242.
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The anarchical principle of Gnosticism, “everything is permitted,” is therefore only the new justice
carried to its logical conclusion. In principle and theoretically, it is a matter of indifference for the
Pauline doctrine how man behaves in action, whether he does good or evil. For deeds are deeds and
have nothing to do with religion; they always involve a valuation of the human subject and a denial that
only faith in grace remains.90
Paul was still too connected to the “Jewish soil” and could not completely discard the Law.
The gnostics did not have such a problem and “they took up the idea of romantic anarchy in
earnest […] Gnosticism is Christianity without Judaism and, in that sense, pure Christianity.
Whenever Christianity wanted to become pure in this way, it became gnostic.”91
One cannot stay on the high plane of Erlebnis forever. Paul found the solution to this
problem in the mystery cults: the longing for Erlebnis is satisfied in the sacrament, in which
the believer, who is only the recipient of grace but not an active agent in the process, is once
again made entirely passive.92 The sacrament enforces the passivity and absolute dependence
of Christian Erlebnis. “In the Church,” writes Baeck in “Completion and Tension” (1923), a
combination of two ways led to the foundation of the mystery of redemption,
the philosophy and the Erlebnis, the gnosis and the sacrament have allied in the certainty of the
completed, absolute human, of the redeemer and redeemed. Out of the two became one: the mystery
[Mysterium] as a work of art and the work of art as the mystery.93
This solution of redemption through sacrament is problematic. In time, the sacrament also
becomes ossified and “the all-important feeling culminates eventually in vacuity or in
substitutes, or it freezes and becomes rigid.”94 Once Paul introduced the sacrament not only
as a reenactment of a past event but as a present event, romantic religion institutionalized the
miracle, i.e. it introduced ceremony as an indispensable part of religion.95 Baeck is turning
the tables here: no longer is Judaism a religion obsessed with the “ceremonial law,” as was
90 Ibid., 250. 91 Ibid. Baeck writes that Paul and his followers shrieked from this bringing of their thought to its logical
conclusion. This claim would suggest that Baeck has not only Marcion in mind, because Marcion was not a
contemporary of Paul. However, as we have seen, Marcion does come to signify both “pure Paulinism” and
Gnosticism in subsequent writings, and possibly here. 92 Ibid., 202; 222. 93 Baeck, “Vollendung und Spannung,” 18. 94 Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 290- this quote is from the addition to the 1938 edition, but it is in line with the
general argument advanced in 1922. This is first and foremost a critique of Catholicism, but even Luther, who
sought to minimize the number of sacraments, could not solve the problem completely, and in a way made it
worse by placing the Word besides them as another form of sacrament. . 95 Ibid., 227.
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claimed by Christians. Now the ceremony, irrational and a relic of an undesirable past, stands
at the very heart of Christianity.
Pauline Erlebnis determines the relation to state power. Protestantism has no qualms
about letting earthly rulers rule over this world, because the longing of the believer is for a
flight from reality. The Marcionite and later Protestant believer is egocentric and is concerned
only with herself and her own redemption. This view Baeck finds most explicitly in Paul
(Rm. 13:1-7), it is a view that leads “to the point of first tolerating every despotism and of
then soon consecrating it.”96 Here again, Luther follows Paul closely. When Protestantism
comes to touch with state-power, its passivity is expressed either in complete compliance
with the state, or with indifference to the happenings in politics. In this, Protestantism is not
all too different from the Catholic missionizing with “the power of the sword and the art of
politics.”97 What matters for Luther is inner piety:
Much as was demanded of the state ecclesiastically, little was asked from it morally […] One can have
a strong faith and pious experience without being disturbed by slavery, torture, and public horrors. The
feeling of absolute dependence which is sensitive to sacred music is not disturbed by any of this.98
Protestantism, like Marcionism, can offer no moral alternative to state-action because its
entire enterprise is to flee this world. This is why Luther, who originally sought to establish a
“priestless Church,” ended up being the “guardian of state religion.”99
If the Church is the sole distributor of the sacrament, and hence of grace and
redemption, then a dichotomy of election could be quickly drawn: either one is part of the
church and is saved, or she is doomed. Such a claim still does not amount to Gnostic
thinking, because it does not assume metaphysical dualism. Baeck suggests, however, that in
the case of Christianity, for historical, psychological, and theological reason, the experience
of being elected can easily turn into a gnostic-like sense of election.
96 Ibid., 214. 97 Ibid., 287–8. Following the sword might also be an allusion to Rm. 13:4. 98 Ibid., 214; cf. Baeck, “Heimgegangene des Krieges,” 385. The mentioning of “slavery” and an earlier
reference to the “silent coldness” of the Protestant Church in Germany to “serfdom and human trafficking,” can
imply that Baeck thinks here of African slavery, although there is no mentioning of this topic elsewhere. 99 Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 232.
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4.2 Erlebnis as Election
A common trope in Christian theology contrasts the Jews as particularistic with the Christians
as universalistic, i.e. whereas Judaism is limited only to those of this people, the grace of God
in Christianity as brought by Jesus Christ is open to all.100 Baeck attempts to turn this
judgment around and that exclusivist tendencies are inherent to Pauline-Marcionite religion,
which is to say they are immanent to Christianity, especially Protestantism. Judaism for
Baeck is a world-religion, it is universal because the belief in one God leads to a belief in one
humanity. Separation was present in Judaism only by necessity, i.e. in order to preserve the
idea of the monotheistic God in a hostile environment.101
Judaism as a classical religion is universal and is open to everyone; Christianity, by
contrast, is exclusivist, because grace is limited to a selected group. The romantic Erlebnis as
an esoteric gnosis suggests that not everyone was made in the image of God because not
everyone shares it equally. Christian Imago Dei is different than its Jewish be’zelm elohim.
Baeck claims that the term likeness (εἶχον) in Greek preaching denotes something exclusive,
“not every man was the image of God, only the elect were so, who were raised up to the level
of the gods.”102 Such a reading is based on the idea of the “perfect human”, which in “Two
World Views Compared” (1923) is explicitly connected to gnosis. Here gnosis is presented as
“veiled in a peace of perfection” like a work of art that is consummated.103 Psychologically,
the person who feels herself redeemed through gnosis senses a perfection, which is
materialized in apathy or antipathy toward this imperfect world.104
The claim for perfection of those with gnostic knowledge suggests that all those who
did not receive grace are imperfect and less-worthy than the perfect, elected few. In
100 Not all Christian theologians hold this position, especially not in modern times. It was, however, at Baeck’s
time a common misconception, one that unfortunately still occupies some place in Christian theology. See Amy-
Jill Levine, “Bearing False Witness: Common Errors Made about Early Judaism,” in The Jewish Annotated New
Testament: New Revised Standard Version Bible Translation, ed. Amy-Jill Levine and Marc Zvi Brettler
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 504. 101 This position is already evident in the first edition of the Essence. See Leo Bäck, Das Wesen des Judentums
(Berlin: Rathausen and Lamm, 1905), 10, 45, 47–8; also Leo Baeck, “Two World Views Compared,” in The
Pharisees and Other Essays, 125–45; Friedlander, Teacher of Theresienstadt, 73–6. 102 Leo Baeck, “Greek and Jewish Preaching,” in The Pharisees and Other Essays, 119; cf. Baeck, “Romantic
Religion,” 270–2. These passage, under the heading “Humanity” argue that romantic religion does not recognize
the rqual humanity of all humans beings. 103 Baeck, “Two World Views Compared,” 129; the dating to 1923 follows Theodore Wiener, “The Writings of
Leo Baeck: A Bibliography,” Studies in Bibliography and Booklore 1, no. 3 (1954): 115. 104 Baeck, “Two World Views Compared,” 132.
137
“Romantic Religion,” Baeck identifies racial discourse as functioning with the same
motivating force. In it, the idea of the perfect human acquires a new, pseudo-scientific
meaning:
It has, indeed, created what might be called racial scholasticism, with its doctrine of salvation, with its
faith that this grace works through the dark abysses of the blood—this modernized pneuma—and give
the chosen everything, so that the finished man is once again the goal of creation. Wherever
romanticism is found, the conception appears by its side.105
The reference to pneuma as the signifier of this exclusive salvation in the discourse of racial
scholasticism alludes once again to a gnostic trope: the spirit [pneuma], or holy spark within
the person is awakened in the grace of the Alien God or his messenger. The gnostic-racial
pneuma offers a way out of the world, the releasing of the pneuma from its bodily and this-
worldly confinement. It is a promise of higher calling over and against this world. Along with
the disdain for politics, Pauline religion also runs the risk of becoming infatuated with its own
superiority and myths concerning this superiority. It is against this promise and its unethical
character that Baeck fights.
The Answers to Marcionite Religion
5.1 Judaism: Mystery and Commandment Combined
Baeck struggles with the categories of romantic and classical religion and what he considers
the ethical problems inherent in Christianity. Classical religion, the antithesis of romantic
religion, is based on the commandment and the mystery, the relation to God.106 This is clearly
an idealized picture of Judaism, but it signals a change from earlier versions of ethical
monotheism. We can understand Baeck’s response to Marcionism not only in relation to
Christianity, but also in relation to the Judaism of his time. Even though the start of a change
in his position can be traced to 1911, his dialogical apologetics vis-à-vis Marcionism helps
understand his position in inner-Jewish debates regarding Jewish law and mysticism.107
105 Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 207. 106 Cf. Friedlander, Teacher of Theresienstadt, 134: “Baeck’s point is that classic religion is not just rationalism
or ‘enlightenment’; it contains the nonrational within itself.” 107 Leo Baeck, “Die religiöse Parteien im gegenwärtigen Judentum in ihrer geschichtlichen Grundlagen,” ed.
Theophil Steinmann, Religion und Geisteskultur: Zeitschrift für religiöse Vertiefung modernen Geisteslebens 11
(1911): 71–82.
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The term “mysticism” stood in the first edition of the Essence for something irrational
and was therefore criticized. In the second edition its position changed: the negative
comments are often eliminated and in many places there are additions, in which the term
mystery and concepts from Jewish mystical teachings appear.108 Judaism is now described as
containing an element that could be considered romantic, namely the mystery of encountering
the divine. This new understanding of the mystery is the main theme of Baeck’s essay
“Mystery and Commandment” (1921).109 The mystery and the commandment are two
tendencies present in the human soul. The former consists of the feeling of the sense of depth,
of eternity, of humility, of the feeling of being created; the latter is based on the feeling of
moral elevation, of infinity, of reverence, of the need to create a better world. In Judaism,
these two experiences [Erfahrungen] have here become one, and are experienced [erlebt] as one, in a
perfect unity […] From the one God comes both mystery and commandment, as one from the One, and
the soul experiences [erfährt] both as one. Every mystery means and suggests also a commandment;
and every commandment means and suggests also a mystery. […] all faith, the law, and all law,
faith.110
Baeck is careful to describe the mystery and the commandment as Erfahrung, which only
when combined become Erlebnis. The mystery is not a romantic-Marcionite flight from the
world, because it is tempered by the commandment.
Baeck admits that the mystery and the commandment were not equally present
throughout Jewish history.111 The two must nonetheless exist simultaneously if one wishes to
remain within the boundaries of Judaism. Even at times when the pendulum swung in one
direction, the other pole still exists. When one of them is completely lacking, it is no longer
Judaism. Where only the mystery exists, Judaism turns into Pauline Christianity. Where only
the commandment is present, Judaism becomes either Kantianism, when the commandment
is understood as ethical, or an empty following of custom, when it is understood as ritual
observance.112
108 For some examples, see Altmann, Leo Baeck and the Jewish Mystical Tradition, 15. 109 Originally given as a lecture in Hermann Graf Keyserling’s School of Wisdom [Die Schule der Weisheit] in
Darmstadt. For the relation between Keyserling and Baeck, see the correspondence in Leo Baeck, Werke 6,
586–91; on the Schule der Weisheit, see Bauschulte, Religionsbahnhöfe der Weimarer Republik, 181–4. 110 Leo Baeck, “Mystery and Commandment,” in Judaism and Christianity, 173; Leo Baeck, “Geheimnis und
Gebot,” in Werke 3, 35. 111 The essay’s rhetoric of presenting opposite poles and idealized form of religion function similarly to
“Romantic Religion”. 112 Baeck, “Mystery and Commandment,” 176–8.
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Throughout the twenties and thirties, Baeck published several essays on themes in
Jewish mysticism, e.g. works on Sefer Yetzirah and Sefer Ha-Bahir.113 In all these works,
Baeck understands Jewish mysticism as a feeling for the mystery that is connected to the
commandment. The turn to mysticism and myth is part of a broader trend in Germany, often
associated with neo-romanticism, which influenced the Jewish renaissance during the
Weimar Republic. The most well-known representative of this movement is of course Martin
Buber, known for having revived the interest in mysticism with his reworking of Hasidic
tales, but he was hardly the only one. Also among a growing group of liberal rabbis
mysticism was no longer dismissed but was seen to have a regenerating force in Judaism.114
Baeck uses the combination of mystery and commandment in order to reject a
romantic tendency. His emphasis on the interdependence between the mystery and the
commandment contributes to the debate during the Weimar period about Jewish religiosity
and its relation to religious observance. The discussion of this theme is encapsulated in an
open letter exchange between Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig.115 In the last of his
Addresses on Judaism, entitled “Herut: An Address on Youth and Religion,” Buber critiqued
the attempt to locate the Jewish religion in the “teaching” [Lehre] as a moral category and the
Law [Gesetz] as binding.116 Both ways—the liberal and the orthodox—fail to capture the
longing of the Jewish soul. Instead, one needs to reawaken the primal forces [Urkräfte] of
Jewish religious vitality; the mystery [Geheimnis] of the heart, argues Buber, is beyond the
limitations of teaching and Law.117 Buber uses the “mystery,” even if he does not define it
113 Collected in Leo Baeck, Werke 4, 251-91. The title of this section “Mystik und Religionsphilosophie”
already implies the interconnection of the two, like that of the mystery and the commandment. 114 Michael Brenner, The Renaissance of Jewish Culture in Weimar Germany (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1996), 43–6; see also David Groiser’s introduction to Martin Buber, Martin Buber-Werkausgabe 2.1:
Mythos und Mystik, ed. David Groiser (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013), 33–9. 115 Baeck published “Mystery and Commandment” (1921) before Buber’s addresses were published as a
collected work (1923), to which Rosenzweig replied in “The Builders” (1924). Baeck therefore does not
intervene directly in the debate, but his position can be seen as part of a broader constellation in German-Jewish
thought around that time. Paul Mendes-Flohr emphasizes the importance of this debate in Paul Mendes-Flohr,
“Law and Sacrament: Ritual Observance in Twentieth-Century Jewish Thought,” in Divided Passions : Jewish
Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 341–69. Mendes-
Flohr’s characterization of Baeck (347) as following closely ethical monotheism has more to do with the latter’s
reception and less, I would argue, with the complexity of his thought. For a reading of the debate in light of
Buber and Rosenzweig’s different understandings of temporality, see Leora Batnitzky, “Revelation and Neues
Denken: Rethinking Buber and Rosenzweig on the Law,” in New Perspectives on Martin Buber, 149–64 116 Martin Buber, “Cheruth,” in Der Jude und sein Judentum: Gesammelte Aufsätze und Reden (Cologne:
Melzer, 1963), 128. 117 Ibid., 140.
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that way, in order to reject narrowing down Judaism into ethical monotheism [Lehre] or
orthodox following of the Law [Gesetz].118
In “The Builders,” Rosenzweig follows Buber in arguing that the notion of ethical
teachings or Law is an unhappy simplification from both sides.119 He further agrees that the
Law appears to the contemporary Jew ossified. Yet this does not mean, as Buber claims,
doing away with the Law and adopting a Jewish religiosity independent of it. The task is
rather the opposite: the meaning of the Law should once again be actualized, the Law should
have the character of “todayness” [Heutigkeit], because behind the Law [Gesetz] stands a
living and relevant commandment [Gebot].120 This Buber fails to see. While Buber claims
that Jewish law is subjective and conditioned upon the believer hearing the call, Rosenzweig
offers a different interpretation: the Jewish law, the “ought,” is objective and valid, the
subjective aspect is only the “can” – the Jew is limited in her or his ability to perform the
Law, but the aspiration should be to fulfill every Law as a commandment.
Rosenzweig’s position includes two complementary meanings of the commandment:
first, it has the usual connotation of the 613 commandments (mitzvot) in Judaism. Second, in
his system as expressed in The Star of Redemption, behind all commandments there is a
deeper theological meaning, one commandment unites them all. It is God’s commandment
“love me!” which is in the pure present tense.121 Yet the human cannot respond to it by loving
God reciprocally, but by the love of the neighbor.122 The commandment “love me!” is
therefore present at the heart of the ethical and the Jewish law, it is behind all commandments
and serves as the foundation of the Law. Furthermore, the commandment in the present,
118 Because of his rejection of the Law, Buber was described as antinomian, most famously by Gershom
Scholem, who called Buber a “religious anarchist” (Gershom Scholem, “Martin Buber’s Interpretation of
Hasidim,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, 240–241); and more
recently Yossef Schwartz, “The Politicization of the Mystical in Martin Buber and His Contemporaries,” in New
Perspectives on Martin Buber, ed. Michael Zank (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006), 216; for a more sympathetic
reading of Buber on the Law, and on how he paves a third way between antinomianism and mere obedience, see
Michael Fishbane, “Justification through Living: Martin Buber’s Third Alternative,” in Martin Buber: A
Contemporary Perspective, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities,
2002), 120–32. 119 Franz Rosenzweig, “Die Bauleute,” in Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3 (Haag:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 704; cf. Franz Rosenzweig, “Das Wesen des Judentums,” in Der Mensch und sein
Werk, vol. 3, 524-6. 120 Rosenzweig, “Die Bauleute,” 707–8. 121 Rosenzweig, Star, 191. 122 Ibid., 230.
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when performed in the world, contributes according to Rosenzweig to the future, to the
process of redemption.123
When we position Baeck in this constellation, similar questions to those raised in the
Buber-Rosenzweig exchange arise: Should the modern Jew follow the Law? Who
commands? To do what? And is the commandment universal or particular? An
understanding of the Law as an unchangeable God-given is far from the liberal rabbi Baeck,
who is closer to Buber on this point. He takes seriously the historical contingency of some of
the laws and does not treat the entire Oral Torah as the word of God. This suggests the
possibility of modification of laws throughout history.124 In “Religion of Law and the Law of
Religion” [Gesetzesreligion und Religionsgesetz], for example, Baeck distinguishes between
the laws pertaining to the human’s relation to God, a relation that is comprised also from the
ethical commandment, and the laws of the religious community, which serve as a hedge
around the Torah (Avot 1:1).125 A common distinction in rabbinic literature is between
commandments and laws pertaining to inter-human relations and to God-human relations
(mYoma 8:9). Baeck seems to offer a different distinction, one that departs from rabbinic
convention in favour of a different distinction between ethical and community laws. Ethical
laws structure the inter-human encounter but, because they are ethical, will fall under the
category of the relation to God.
123 Ibid., 433; on the relation between Law, commandment and the messianic future in the Star, see Robert
Gibbs, “Gesetz in The Star of Redemption,” in Rosenzweig als Leser: Kontextuelle Kommentare zum “Stern der
Erlösung,” ed. Martin Brasser (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004), 395–410. 124 Baeck was active for example in securing an equal status for women in the synagogue, claiming that since
the separation is more a custom (minhag) than a strict Law (halakha), it can be changed. Yet with the wish to
maintain the unity of the community, such an arrangement might be done in a section for families in the
synagogue, while in another section the separation in seating will be maintained. This is perhaps a compromise,
but it does not derive solely from pragmatic or political reasoning. True, this position and similar solutions were
derived from the fact that Baeck—unlike Buber and Rosenzweig—held official positions as a rabbi and, as
discussed in the introduction, as the representative of German Jewry. He had a community to keep together,
partly at extremely difficult times. Yet there is more than just political compromise in this position by Baeck.
His desire to keep the community united, the notion of Einheitsgemeinde, is here decisive. The unity of the
community, of kelal Israel, is seen as a value in and of itself, the adjective liberal or orthodox is in this sense
secondary for Baeck to the substantive, to Judaism: “[W]e must not primarily stress the adjective ‘progressive’
and lay too weak a stress on the noun ‘Judaism.’ Judaism remains the substantive. And Judaism does not begin
with us; we have inherited it and are to carry it on […] We are Jews, that means to say, we are a community,
from which we must not separate nor remove ourselves, which me must not forget nor forsake, a community of
history, of the spirit and of the future” (Leo Baeck, “Die Prinzipien der progressiven Bewegung des Judentums,”
in Werke 6, 522); cf. Michael Meyer, “‘Ich bin der Ewige, dein Gott, du sollst!’: Das Vermächtnis Leo Baecks
für das progressive Judentum heute,” in Leo Baeck: Philosophical and Rabbinical Approaches, ed. Walter
Homolka (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2007), 43–4. 125 Leo Baeck, “Gesetzesreligion und Religionsgesetz,” in Werke 6, 93–4; cf. Bäck, WdJ, 10.
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Michael Meyer summarizes that whereas for Buber God says “you” to the person, for
Baeck God speaks “you shall,” i.e. the revelation is not without content but is accompanied
by an ethical demand.126 Baeck, in Meyer’s view, is insisting only on the one commandment,
on “doing good” as an ethical imperative.127 This is true to a certain extent: Baeck does speak
about the commandment in the singular and he does not specify the content of the
commandment but rather its ethical character. Especially in his early writings, Baeck
discusses the distinction between religious duty [Pflicht] and ceremonial laws and customs,
between the “great” and the “small,” the ethical message and the rules that are meant to keep
the community together.128
Yet the separation between Law and commandment is not as straightforward as it
seems. The price for Meyer’s reading, which places Baeck firmly within the liberal horizon,
is glossing over some of the complexities involved: How is Baeck’s position different from
Kantian autonomy, from the person commanding herself? Why is the mystery even needed in
such a case? Baeck himself explicitly rejects treating Judaism as Kantianism, writing that
“[t]here is no such Judaism which is nothing but Kantian philosophy or ethical culture, nor a
Judaism in which the idea of God is merely a decorative embellishment or a crowning
pinnacle.”129 It is true that Baeck recognizes Judaism as an ethical teaching. It is also the
case, as argued in the last chapter, that his understanding of the essence of Judaism suggests
that there is no Torah without the fence surrounding it, no kernel without a developing and
changing husk. Hints at this position, discussed in the last chapter, can be seen with regard to
the Law already in the very early essay “Orthodox or ceremonial?” (1896/7):
[T]he religion appears in reality only as historical religion, which is handed over throughout the
centuries. It cannot be transmitted as pure soul, because it is too little comprehensible, it must step
closer to the human in a certain embodiment and symbolization. A so-called natural religion
[natürliche Religion] exists only in system, but not in life.130
126 Michael Meyer, “‘Ich Bin der Ewige, dein Gott, du sollst!’: Das Vermächtnis Leo Baecks für das progressive
Judentum heute,” 39. 127 Michael A. Meyer, “The Thought of Leo Baeck: A Religious Philosophy for a Time of Adversity,” Modern
Judaism 19, no. 2 (1999): 108–9; in support of Meyer’s position one can also add Baeck, “Du Sollst!”, in Werke
6, 124–5. 128 Leo Baeck, “Orthodox oder ceremoniös?,” in Werke 6, 29–35; Leo Baeck, “Religion des Volkes und
Religion des Individuums,” in Werke 6, 36–40; Leo Baeck, “Das Kleine und das Grosse,” in Werke 6, 40–3. 129 Baeck, “Mystery and Commandment,” 177. 130 Baeck, “Orthodox oder Ceremoniös?,” 33.
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Religion and ethics are never abstract but always manifest themselves in historical
communities.
In the essays from the 1920’s, when Baeck incorporates the mystery into his thought,
the Sabbath plays a prominent role. It is not just an ethical day of rest, but the pinnacle of
Jewish religious experience: the Sabbath maintains the tension between the infinite God and
the finite human, it is where the commandment—to remember and keep the Sabbath (Ex.
20:8; Dt. 5:12)—meets the mystery. The Sabbatical in the Law, as Baeck calls it, educates
and calls the mystery forth, without which the commandment becomes ossified and the
uniqueness of the Jew withers. In “Mystery and Commandment” Baeck sometimes speaks of
the “so-called ‘Law’” because he is aware of the negative associations of Jewish law—also
among many Jews—as an outdated and unneeded set of regulations. When he expresses his
position, however, the scare-quotes disappear and the Law’s positive aspect in awakening the
mystery in the person is highlighted.131 The Sabbath is an epitome of the connection between
the mystery and the commandment, but it is not the only example. It is true that not every
religious law has validity according to Baeck, but many of them can indeed be reendowed;
because they have “the Sabbatical,” the mystery, in them, many laws can be discovered anew
as commandments. It is in this sense that humans can “create the Sabbath” for themselves.132
This is Baeck’s consistent position. In an essay from 1950, titled “The Law in
Judaism,” Baeck differentiates between the universal sense of the Law, manifested to all
humans in ethical and natural Law, and the Jewish law. To exemplify the former, Baeck cites
Kant’s famous comment from the Critique of Practical Reason on the “starry heaven above
and the moral law within.”133 His greater focus, however, in on the latter: There is also the
specific Jewish meaning of the Law, which is of religious significance, the so-called
“ceremonial law.” Baeck insists that “they were always clearly distinguished from the
essential religious duties and tasks. Observing them was never counted ‘a good deed’; only
religious moral action was so called.”134 This is in line with reading the essence as ethical and
131 Baeck, “Mystery and Commandment,” 182–4; Baeck, “Tod und Wiedergeburt,” 44–7. 132 Baeck, “Tod und Wiedergeburt,” 67. 133 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2008), 5:161; cited in Leo Baeck, “The Law in Judaism,” in Werke 5: Nach der Schoa - Warum sind Juden in
der Welt? Schriften aus der Nachkriegszeit, ed. Albert Friedlander and Bertold Klappert (Gütersloh: Gütersloher
Verlagshaus, 2006), 522. 134 Leo Baeck, “The Law in Judaism,” 523.
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with Meyer’s reading of the commandment. Yet in the same essay, Baeck also makes clear
that the “hedge around the Torah” should not be dispensed, it is necessary:
these ‘laws’ in their true meaning, are not without significance for religion. They have their relation to,
and their value in the religious sphere. They can and should be the constant reminder of, and aid to, the
faithful life […] Man’s life is a struggle between poetry and prose: all day long prose tries to displace
poetry, and the dignity of our life is ever endangered. Against this peril those laws are directed, and are
able to lend assistance.135
Originally, the idea of putting a “hedge around the Torah” was establishing rabbinical decrees
meant to ensure that Jews will not fail in following the commandment. For example, although
one might be allowed to pray the evening prayer until dawn of next day, it was decided to
limit the time to midnight in order to ensure that one does not wait too long and in the end
fails to pray at the proper time (mBerakhot 1:1). In Baeck’s usage, however, the hedge
receives a different meaning; it is now understood as giving meaning to Jewish life and
maintaining the alterity of the community.136
Baeck is closer to Rosenzweig than to Buber on this point, for he too suggests that the
laws can turn into commandments, i.e. the mystery can be felt in them.137 Like Rosenzweig,
Baeck would further claim that following the commandments—both in the narrow ethical
meaning and because it keeps Judaism alive—contributes to the process of redemption.
Indeed, this can be considered the lesson that Baeck learned from Jewish mysticism: the
deeds of the Jews in the world have cosmic significance.138
5.2 Re-Judaizing the Canon as an Answer to the Gnostic Challenge
Baeck believed Christianity to be in danger of becoming Marcionism. In its infatuation with
the imagination and the passivity of grace, it can lose connection to the world, and therefore
to ethics. There has never been in history, however, a Christianity that is completely
Marcionite. “Romantic” and “classical” are ideal types, means of typology, not accurate
historical presentations. Judaism, as the classical religion that combines mystery and
commandment, nonetheless can run the danger of forgetting the mystery. The threat to
135 Ibid., 524. 136 Baeck, “Why Jews in the World? A Reaffirmation of Faith in Israel’s Destiny,” 520. 137 Baeck believes the feeling of the Law as commandment, with its religious depth, can be taught. Cf. Leo
Baeck, “Die religiöse Erziehung,” in Werke 4, 362–82. 138 Leo Baeck, “Ursprung der jüdischen Mystik,” in Werke 4, 248.
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Christianity is to forget the ethical relation to the world. Christianity’s emergence out of
Judaism should serve as a guarantee that it will “remain determined by it within certain
limits.”139 Judaism is Christianity’s solution to Marcionite world-denial.
The different Christian denominations can be sorted out according to the strength of
the Jewish component in them. Although Baeck criticizes Catholicism for its use of the
“mystery” of the sacrament, he regards Protestantism as the most romantic and least Jewish,
hence the denomination that poses the greatest threat to ethics. On the other side of the
continuum, Calvinism is considered positively, because of its emphasis on worldly works.140
Predestination, the doctrine that one’s fate—whether one is elected or not—is determined by
God before creation, seems to posit an obstacle to Baeck’s generous reading of Calvinism.
Yet even this doctrine, which can suggest that there is no meaning to acting in the world, is
interpreted positively, probably under the influence of Max Weber: Calvinist moral behaviour
is so that “right conduct becomes the sign of God’s election.”141
The answer to the Marcionite threat and its political implications is the
reincorporation or strengthening of the Jewish roots of Christianity. In the second edition of
the Essence, Baeck adds a paragraph on gnosis, and the antidote against it:
[The Torah] confronts thereby as the universal and humane every other particularistic, separatist
[sondertümliche] view—present elsewhere—that the essential in religion is gnosis, that epiphany
brought through the wonder of faith, through the gift of grace, and which is therefore entailed only to
the chosen few.142
Against the danger of feeling elected by means of gnosis as special knowledge, Baeck
suggests that the Torah is universal. It is important to reiterate that Baeck does not mean to
eliminate Jewish particularity. He never denies that the Torah was given to a particular
people, to Israel, but since the mission of this people is the redemption of the entire world
through ethical action, the “gift of grace” is not limited to this people or to any person or
group. One can learn the Torah and be guided by its ethical teachings without needing an
139 Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 189; Baeck to Rosenzweig, March 8, 1923 in Werke 6, 578. 140 Baeck, “Volksreligion und Weltreligion,” 204; Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 213. 141 Baeck, “Judaism in the Church,” 86; for Weber’s discussion of predestination in Calvinism, see Max Weber,
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Routledge, 2001), 64–7; cf.
Hans Liebeschütz, “Between Past and Future: Leo Baeck’s Historical Position,” The Leo Baeck Institute
Yearbook 11 (1966): 16; Reinhold Mayer, Christentum und Judentum in der Schau Leo Baecks (Stuttgart: W.
Kohlhammer, 1961), 66–7. 142 Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums, 46–7.
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Erlebnis of election. It is only through maintaining a relation to Judaism that Christianity can
avoid becoming unethical. The Church needs to reincorporate the Torah, its Old Testament,
as an answer to the gnosis. Its Jewish heritage of ethics is the only alternative to the romantic,
unethical aspects introduced by Paul. Similar to the way that Jewish life needs to reinvigorate
the commandment by the mystery, lest it be ossified, so do Christians need to do the opposite:
use the commandment in order to temper the romantic tendency.
Baeck approves of the mystery when it is tempered by the commandment. He is
highly suspicious, however, regarding romantic myths. The former is part of human existence
and relation to the divine; the latter is all too often unrestrained imagination gone astray. In
his negative assessment of myth, Baeck follows a long tradition that claimed that the
imagination must not overstep its realm. Religion should always remain “within the
boundaries of reason alone.” Although Baeck might have Kant in mind when writing
“Romantic Religion,” his analysis of the romantic danger shows closer parallels to Hermann
Cohen, who suggested a demarcation line between myth and religion: myth is a lower level of
religion because of its tragic notion of fate, which places the guilt of the tragic hero, of
personal human suffering for itself. It therefore cannot discover himself as an active sinner
and the other human being as a suffering subject.143 In other words, myth cannot lead to the
discovery of compassion and responsibility toward the other human being, something we
have seen in Baeck’s description of romantic religion. Put in Baeckian terms, the same can be
said of the gnostic and romantic, who are so infatuated with their own passive grace,
imagination, and inner-experience that they cannot recognize the suffering of the other.
Christianity that detaches itself from the Old Testament, especially in a Marcionite fashion,
risks losing its monotheism and be left only with the myth but without ethics.
The Realization of Marcionite Religion
Many lamented Baeck’s presentation of Christianity in “Romantic Religion” as a caricature
and it is certainly true that in the context of the debate on modern Marcionism, Baeck held
not only the shield of apologetics but also the sword of polemics. He believed that the
contemporary attempts to “purify” Christianity of its Jewish heritage can only end in
143 Consequently polytheistic beliefs based on myth cannot develop proper ethical orientation in the world.
Cohen reiterates this point several times, see Hermann Cohen, Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des
Judentums (Wiesbaden: Fourier Verlag, 1988), 23, 158–9, 166–8.
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Marcionism. But Baeck also understood that Judaism faces a danger if it completely ignores
the feeling of the mystery. By inscribing the mystery in the commandment and vice versa,
and in emphasizing Christianity’s need of a source for the commandment, Baeck engaged in
a process of dialogical apologetics, of thinking not only about the challenges to Christianity
but also the threats to Judaism. “Romantic Religion” and Baeck’s essays on Christianity
during the 1920’s are therefore not just critique for the sake of mocking the adversary: Baeck
saw the growing danger of Marcionite and gnostic trends in the Weimar Republic and warned
against them. When Harnack is praising Marcion for the rejection of the Old Testament, he
removes the foundation for ethics in Liberal Protestantism, the very movement that takes
pride in its ethics. Unwittingly, it is precisely the attempt to “purify” Christianity and make it
more ethical that results, according to Baeck, in an unethical religion with dire political
consequences: detachment from the world that leads to political apathy, succumbing to state-
power, and at the same time a feeling of being elected that leads to exclusivism.
“Romantic Religion” was written in 1922. Reprinted in 1938 in Aus drei
Jahrtausenden [Out of Three Millennia], it reads as an act of defiance against the Nazi
regime and a bold proclamation of the loss of ethics in Germany. The book and this essay
were also understood as such by the Gestapo, which ordered the destruction of the book
before it reached its public. Less than ten copies survived. The spiritual resistance in
reprinting “Romantic Religion” is due to its unwavering message: there is no Christian ethics
as such without relation to the so-called Old Testament. Without the Hebrew Bible, the
gnostic-romantic tendency in Christianity can take over and create new myths, unencumbered
by the commandment and the relation to the One God. Baeck lived to suffer through the
emergence of the unrestrained myth of the redeeming figure, the Führer, and the selected
group, the Aryan race, predestined for redemption. This focus on redemption combined with
the myth—a trademark of Pauline teaching according to Baeck in the 1920’s—and the
obsession with blood and volk, with a new world and a new Reich in which the Jew had no
place, all these, even when they were given pseudo-scientific support, would probably have
been considered by Baeck as the mythical substrata of Nazi ideology. To be clear, I am not
suggesting a causal explanation, i.e. that romantic religion is a factor that created Nazism, but
rather that Baeck’s position was a means of understanding the spiritual and theological crisis
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as influencing the political sphere.144 This would have been evident for him, for example, in
The Myth of the Twentieth Century by Alfred Rosenberg, a chief Nazi ideologist whose
bestseller is a hateful book that propagates the supremacy of the German volk.145 Rosenberg’s
work could be read as an expression of the “racial pneuma” of which Baeck was afraid.
Rosenberg himself saw the myth as mostly neo-pagan, but a new mythology found its way
also to Christian theology in the form of the German Christians [Deutsche Christen]
movement and in the more academic “Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish
Influence on German Church Life.”146
After the Holocaust, Baeck wrote Gershom Scholem that myth was “sanctified by the
Nazis as a personification of the German Torah.” “I still remember,” he adds, “how at that
time its canonization was taught in German schools and universities: he is ‘the totality of
faith and worldview forces of the people,’ to a certain extent the pleroma from the Epistles to
the Colossians and Ephesians.”147 This is a striking statement that encapsulates the
materialization in the political sphere of what Baeck feared theologically: the mythological
escape into a redeeming figure, which is left unchecked due to the abandonment of the
Hebrew Bible. The term pleroma [πλήρωμα], lit. fullness, shows the connection Baeck
continued to see between Paul, modern manifestations of gnosis, and the myth of the Führer.
144 On the importance of the myth for the Nazis, see George Mosse, “The Mystical Origins of National
Socialism,” in Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality (Detroit: Wayne State
University Press, 1987), 197–214; on the general tendencies for messianism in its various manifestations in
disciplines and political orientations, see Klaus Schreiner, “Messianism in the Political Culture of the Weimar
Republic,” in Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, ed. Peter Schäfer and
Mark Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 311–61. Schreiner observes that the fascination with a redeeming hero figure
is not unique to Germany (360). 145 Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelisch-geistigen Gestaltenkämpfe
unserer Zeit (München: Hoheneichen, 1935). 146 Doris Bergen, Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1996); Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians and the Bible in
Nazi Germany (Princeton University Press, 2008). 147 Baeck to Scholem, August 22, 1950, in Werke 6, 651. Baeck could not know it, but in the 1940’s, from
within his prison cell, a Christian theologian felt similarly and attempted to regain the Old Testament. In a letter
dated 5.12.1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote to Eberhard Bethge: “my thoughts and feelings seem to be getting
more and more like those of the Old Testament, and in recent months I have been reading the Old Testament
much more than the New. It is only when one knows the unutterability of the name of God that one can utter the
name of Jesus Christ; it is only when one loves life and the earth so much that without them everything seems to
be over that one may believe in the resurrection and a new world; it is only when one submits to God’s law that
one may speak of grace; and it is only when God’s wrath and vengeance are hanging as grim realities over the
heads of one’s enemies that something of what it means to love and forgive them can touch our heart. In my
opinion it is not Christian to want to take our thoughts and feelings too quickly and too directly from the New
Testament” (Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge [London: SCM Press,
1976], 156–7 - emphasis added). Despite the apparent dichotomy between law and grace, and wrath and love,
this is a remarkable statement. On Bonhoeffer’s life and work, see Charles Marsh, Strange Glory: A Life of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer (New York: Vintage, 2015), 368–72.
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Eph. 3:19 along with Col. 2:9, the references by Baeck, have been associated with groups
labeled gnostic, such as Valentinus and his disciples. In particular Eph. 3:19—“and to know
[γνώσεως] the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled [πληρωθῆτε]
with all the fullness [πλήρωμα] of God”—makes a connection between gnosis, love, and the
fullness of God.148 The gnostic love that is in Christ in all its fullness is now expressed in the
Führer: the Führer-myth has turned into a German Torah. Gnosis is once again opposed to the
Torah of Israel.
Reclaiming Saul of Tarsus
The main weaknesses in Baeck’s analysis—lack of historical argument and presenting a
caricature of Christianity—and their possible reasons are obvious and are the result of
Baeck’s desire to think through and present the problem of romantic-gnostic Christianity as
an ideal type in order to point out its political dangers. A stronger objection to Baeck’s thesis
would be to argue from within the Christian tradition: Jesus’ moral teachings, a favorite trope
in Baeck’s time, seem to challenge his presentation of romantic Christianity. If Jesus can
serve as the foundation of Christian ethics, one does not need the Hebrew Bible in the
Christian canon; texts such as Sermon on the Mount should suffice. Indeed, this seems to be
part of Slenczka’s argument in our days: Christianity has no need for the Old Testament other
than as its prehistory, as apocrypha; it is background but not a ground for the Christian
believer.149 From Baeck’s perspective such a position is untenable, because the gospel—at
least in its “original form”—belongs to the Jewish tradition and can be understood only in
light of this tradition. As a historical person, Jesus is to be understood from the perspective of
Second Temple Judaism. His words are not said in a vacuum but rely on the Old Testament.
This means that the Old Testament is not just a background, or a prehistory. The opposite is
true, it is the ground, the foundation of any understanding of the New Testament.150 The only
148 Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,
1975), 122, 138–9; Scholem and Baeck assessed Gnosticism in completely different ways. While Baeck saw in
it the danger—discussed at length in this chapter—Scholem thought of Gnosticism, as it is also manifested in
Kabbalah, as a creative force from within Judaism. Nonetheless, Scholem carefully distinguished between the
gnostic pleroma and the kabbalistic cosmogony. When referring to pleroma, Baeck might also have in mind this
affirmation of an important difference between gnostic and Jewish teaching. For Scholem’s position see
Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), 45, 73. 149 Slenczka, “Was soll die These: ‘Das AT hat in der Kirche keine kanonische Geltung mehr’?,” 3–6. 150 Leo Baeck, “Zur Frage der Christusmythe,” in Werke 6, 79.
150
way to avoid the Old Testament is perhaps by recourse to dogma, focusing not on the words
of Jesus per se but on the gospel of Christ.151
Jesus’ teaching is therefore not a theological obstacle to Baeck’s understanding of
Christianity and the possibility of Christian ethics. On the contrary, learning from Jesus—
with the Jewish historical and theological context in mind—can bring Christians closer to
Judaism and hence to ethics. It is not the gospels or the Hebrew Bible that poses a challenge
to ethics from within the Christian canon but rather their rejection. The logic of this possible
Marcionite rejection is present already in the epistles of Paul, the main villain in “Romantic
Religion”, the one who left Judaism and founded the Christian religion with its mysteries,
myths and emphasis on passive grace. A return of the Church to its Jewish origins would
therefore mean coming to terms with Paul’s teaching.
Given Baeck’s harsh critique of Pauline theology as the source of the romantic danger
in Christianity, it is remarkable that later in his life Baeck reclaims Paul for Judaism.152 In the
essay “The Faith of Paul” (1952), Baeck treats Paul as a Jew. Whereas in the 1920’s Paul is
described as leaving Judaism and “crossing the boundary,” in 1952 Baeck is able to write that
Paul is to be understood in Jewish terms: he was a “Jew of Tarsus, not a Syrian or Persian or
Egyptian of Tarsus,” he “never ceased to be a Jew,” “[t]he last Jew in the young Church was
its last apostle.”153 Even Paul’s apostolic message, his belief that the messiah had come, is
151 This position might be possible for Slenczka, but Harnack, given his consistent rejection of dogma, would
have had to deny it. Even on dogmatic terms, however, one can raise the objection that the question about the
relevance of the “Old Testament” to Christians is ill-formulated. The Christian theologian Robert Jenson has
recently suggested that the question is not why the church “accepted” or “took over” the Hebrew Scripture, but
rather why “Israel’s Scripture accepted—or did not accept—the church” (Robert W. Jenson, Canon and Creed
[Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010], 20). 152 In their introduction to the translation of Baeck’s essay “The Faith of Paul”, Albert Friedlander and Bertold
Klappert distinguish between three phases in Baeck’s interpretation of Paul: the first is the anti-Jewish-
ecclesiastical faith of Paul (1901-1905), in which Baeck works against Harnack’s interpretation of Paul. The
second they identify as the Hellenistic-sacramental faith of Paul (1922-1938), which they read as aimed against
the German-Lutheran image of Paul. The third phase in Baeck’s thought is that of the Jewish-Hellenistic faith of
Paul (1952-1956), a phase that is characterized by a reassessment of Paul’s Jewish context. See editors’
introduction to Leo Baeck, “Der Glaube des Paulus,” in Werke 5: Nach der Schoa - Warum sind Juden in der
Welt? Schriften aus der Nachkriegszeit, ed. Albert Friedlander and Bertold Klappert (Gütersloh: Gütersloher
Verlagshaus, 2006), 420–4. I diverge from this periodization in characterizing the second period as “against
Marcionite interpretation,” and therefore as another reply to Harnack. 153 Leo Baeck, “The Faith of Paul,” in Judaism and Christianity, 156, 142–3; for the 1920’s see for example
Baeck, “Romantic Religion,” 203; and Baeck, “Mystery and Commandment,” 177. It is worth noting that
Baeck’s reading of Paul in his Jewish context, might have contributed to the emergence of what later came to be
known as “New Perspectives on Paul” research. It is perhaps, I am only surmising, not a coincidence that Krister
Stendahl, often credited with the emergence of the modern readings of Paul in his Jewish context, also wrote the
introduction to the English translation of several essays by Baeck. See Stendahl’s comments on "The Faith of
Paul" in his introduction to Leo Baeck, The Pharisees and Other Essays, xiv–xvi; in his article on the subject,
151
presented by Baeck—who always stressed the endless task of Judaism—in line with a strand
in the Jewish tradition. Paul might have misjudged the era as the messianic coming, but his
thoughts about it, as well as his mission to the gentiles, were firmly rooted in Judaism.154
This is a significant reassessment of Paul.155 How can one account for this change
from “Paul the romantic” to “Saul the Jew”? Krister Stendhal offers the following
explanation: in “The Faith of Paul” Baeck expands his “program of reclaiming Judaism in
Christianity” even to Paul. Stendhal then claims, however, that this explanation is
insufficient, instead suggesting that this article signals a change in approach to Jewish-
Christian dialogue on behalf of Baeck.156 I am hesitant to quickly dismiss the idea that Baeck
reclaims Paul for the Jewish tradition.157 Stendhal does not take into consideration the
political implications of “Romantic Religion” and “The Faith of Paul”: reclaiming Paul for
Judaism after the Holocaust is an attempt to find a remedy for Marcionite Christianity and its
political implications from within. Now the problem is not Paul himself, he is still within the
Jewish tradition and therefore closer to the classic religion than to the romantic. Maybe even
Paul can be salvaged, or ethical teachings derived from him qua Jewish given the situation.
De-Judaizing Christianity is now perceived by Baeck not only as an attack on the Hebrew
Bible as a basis for ethics; it is also an assault on the texts of the New Testament, on the
gospel and Paul’s Epistles as Jewish texts. The fight over the canon, in which Marcion is a
symbol of the non-Jewish and unethical, is a fight over the moral deed in this world, a deed
proclaimed for Baeck by the Jewish tradition, but one present also in the New Testament,
both in the gospels and, as Baeck came to realize late in his life, in the epistles of Paul.
however, Stendahl does not cite Baeck, see Krister Stendhal, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective
Conscience of the West,” Harvard Theological Review 56, no. 3 (1963): 199–215. 154 Baeck, “The Faith of Paul,” 154, 163. 155 Mayer, Christentum und Judentum in der Schau Leo Baecks, 63. 156 Stendhal’s introduction to Baeck, The Pharisees and Other Essays, xvi. 157 Arguments for the “Jewish Paul,” albeit from a variety of motivations, are nowadays standard in scholarship.
See, among others, E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion
(Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1977); Jacob Taubes, Die politische Theologie des Paulus, ed. Aleida Assmann
and Jan Assmann (München: Wilhelm Fink, 1993); and Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of
Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
152
Epilogue
The visitor to the Jewish Museum Berlin, by far the most important Jewish museum in
Germany, encounters a portrait of Leo Baeck (fig. 1) near the beginning of the segment on
National Socialism. It is placed across from a wall depicting the progress of the Nazi terror:
from boycott to racist laws, to Kristallnacht pogrom, to genocide. The accompanying text,
titled “Dangerous Entanglement,” reads:
To this day rabbi and religious philosopher Leo Baeck is considered one of the leading personalities of
German Jewry.
In 1933, Leo Baeck became president of the “National Union of Jews in Germany”. When the
deportations began, the Union was forced to assist the Gestapo bureaucracy. Jews were registered,
robbed and had all their property expropriated. In a desperate attempt to stem the violence of the
Gestapo, the Union cooperated. Leo Baeck was deported to Theresienstadt in 1943. He survived the
concentration camp and emigrated to London after the war.
Although mentioning Baeck’s vocation as a rabbi and religious philosopher, the text, as well
as the location of the artwork, situates Baeck firmly within the context of National Socialism.
The Jewish Museum Berlin treats Baeck as a symbol and his portrait becomes the face of
political decisions in hard times.158
One can argue that the museum’s mandate is not to present religious thought but
objects that tell a story to the visitor. Yet even as an object in space, the placement of the
painting across from the “wall of persecution” does injustice both to its subject, Leo Baeck,
and its painter, Ludwig Meidner. The year the portrait was made in 1931, two years before
the Nazis came to power. As a commissioned work by the Berlin Jewish community, it is a
testimony to the status Baeck reached before the fateful years 1933-1945. Second, the
friendship between Baeck and Meidner, between the liberal rabbi and the orthodox Jew
critical of liberal Judaism, hints at the acceptance of Baeck among a variety of strands of
Judaism, a fact that would prove crucial for his appointment as the head of the
Reichsvertretung.159
158 I ignore the historically inaccurate and problematic conflation of the Reichsvertretung and the
Reichsvereinigung in the English text, because the German text makes the distinction, which suggests that the
problematic conflation was by negligence and not intentional. 159 On the relation between Baeck and Meidner see Erik Riedel, “Ludwig Meidners Bildnisse von Leo Baeck,”
in Leo Baeck, 1873-1956: Aus dem Stamme von Rabbinern, ed. Fritz Backhaus and Georg Heuberger (Frankfurt
am Main: Jüdischer Verlag im Suhrkamp Verlag, 2001), 204–11; and the correspondence in Leo Baeck, Werke
6: Briefe, Reden, Aufsätze, ed. Michael Meyer, vol. 6 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 628–32.
153
The painting itself tells a different story than its place in the Jewish Museum Berlin
suggests. Baeck’s 1931 portrait can be placed within the tradition of middle-class portraiture
common since the nineteenth century.160 Everything about Baeck in this painting, from his
beard to the suit and glasses, is meant to convey the German notion of Anständigkeit:
decorum, decency, and respectability. Yet just as the painting is an expression of the classic
genre of bourgeois portraits, so does it already symbolize the genre’s breakdown. It has some
unique features not found in other portraits of Baeck painted around the time, small changes
to the established tradition: Baeck does not hold a typical accessory symbolizing the
intellectual as in other portraits of him from the same time. Furthermore, the fact that Baeck
faces the viewer frontally, with a slight tilt of the head, is unusual.161 As a work of art, this is
an exceptional portrait of the late Weimar period and should be treated in this context.
Baeck’s unquiet look and his hands, grappling the chair with some unease, have led
some interpreters to speculate that Baeck, or maybe Meidner, almost presaged the catastrophe
to come.162 Placing the painting in the Jewish Museum Berlin at the beginning of the segment
about National Socialism implies agreement with this reading of Baeck: a tragic figure,
powerless in face of the tribulations of fate, facing a wall of persecution while grasping his
seat. This kind of presentation does not necessarily present Baeck as a subject without
agency. On the contrary, it succeeds in presenting a “dangerous entanglement,” a kind of
Faustian pact from which Baeck cannot retreat.
160 Carola Muysers, Das bürgerliche Portrait im Wandel: Bildnisfunktionen und -Auffassungen in der deutschen
Moderne 1860-1900 (New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2001); still useful is Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Die Kunst des
Porträts (Leipzig: F. Hirt&Sohn, 1908)- these works deal with the highdays of portrait paintings. Meidner
works within this tradition, even though he has a different model whom he engages, namely the portraits by
Max Liebermann. I thank Inka Bertz for an illuminating conversation on the subject. 161 Riedel, “Ludwig Meidners Bildnisse von Leo Baeck,” 205–6. 162 Riedel questions such an interpretation, suggested for example by Meidner’s biographer Thomas
Groschowiak (ibid., 207).
154
Figure 1: Ludwig Meidner, Portrait of Leo Baeck (1931).
Presented at the Jewish Museum Berlin on loan from Israel Museum
© Ludwig Meidner-Archiv, Jüdisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt am Main
The position taken by the Jewish Museum Berlin is one way, indeed the most common way,
of understanding Baeck’s life and work. Hannah Arendt’s “Jewish Führer” and Albert
Friedlander’s “Teacher of Theresienstadt” can be thought of as diametrically opposed
155
readings that share this basic presupposition with the Jewish Museum Berlin: the starting
point for the understanding of Baeck is the Holocaust.163
This dissertation attempted to avoid this pitfall, which leads to a skewed intellectual
biography and the obfuscation of Baeck’s contributions to contemporary discussions. I have
chosen a somewhat different path, beginning with a question about the task of Jewish thought
more broadly. On this question, discussed in the first chapter, Baeck offers a valuable
contribution. Franz Rosenzweig’s critique of Baeck in “Apologetic Thinking” and Baeck’s
subsequent reply allow us to examine the task of Jewish philosophy as negotiating one’s
theological and philosophical claims, indeed exposing one’s being, to the encounter with the
other. I termed this position “dialogical apologetics.”
This position is typical of minorities, who are forced to come to terms with the strands
of thought in their surroundings. Baeck rightly stressed, perhaps overly praised, Judaism as a
religion that always engaged the other while maintaining its unique character. Apologetics is
therefore an integral part of Jewish thought. The second chapter presented some famous
exemplars of Jewish dialogical apologetics: Josephus’ Against Apion, Judah Halevi’s Kuzari,
and Nahmanides’ account of the Barcelona Disputation. Indeed, they are no more than
exemplars because the intellectual history of Judaism could potentially be read as the history
of dialogical apologetics. These texts show dialogical apologetics at work, i.e. they are
framed as refutations and affirmation while at the same time exposing the influence of the
majority culture and offering a critical reflection on one’s own tradition in a way that allows
new questions to emerge. Taken as a whole, they allow us to better understand the complex
relation between apologetics and polemics, between a defense of oneself, self-examination,
and an attack on the other.
Leo Baeck’s The Essence of Judaism is in line with this long tradition of dialogical
apologetics. It is at once an answer to Adolf Harnack’s The Essence of Christianity, and a
self-standing presentation of Judaism. Baeck does not simply follow the tradition of ethical
monotheism prevalent in his day, although it undoubtly plays an important role in the work.
Rather, I suggest that The Essence of Judaism is as much about the meaning and
163 I say “can be thought” because Arendt is not interested in Baeck’s thought or life, but only in his activity
during the Nazi period. Friedlander does dedicate the majority of his Leo Baeck: Teacher of Theresienstadt,
indeed of what can be seen as his lifework, to an analysis of Baeck’s thought, even if the title implies otherwise.
At the end of the day, however, he constantly resorts to “the man,” to Baeck’s biography.
156
determination of “essence” as it is about “Judaism.” For it is this question that makes the
book relevant for our understanding of Jewish thought’s relation to the academic study of
religion, where every discussion of essences is treated with suspicion, if not outright
dismissal. Baeck, with some similarity to Christian critics of Harnack such as Ernst Troeltsch
and Alfred Loisy, offers a much more nuanced concept of essence than has been heretofore
recognized. Essence in The Essence of Judaism can be thought of as a dynamic concept, and
not simply as an unchanging and eternal core.
Another challenge to Jewish thought in the 1920’s was Marcionism, a Christian
dualistic worldview that entails a rejection of the Hebrew Bible from the Christian canon.
Baeck’s dialogical apologetics engages here once more Adolf Harnack, this time the latter’s
important monograph on Marcion. Notger Slenczka’s recent suggestion to treat the so-called
Old Testament as apocrypha is by no means dualistic. Yet his proposal, with its reliance on
Harnack on many fundamental points and contested reception, shows that the debate about
the Christian canon and Harnack is as relevant as it was in Baeck’s time. And so is Baeck’s
rebuttal of Harnack. Baeck emerges as a sharp critic of Protestantism, seeing in it a romantic
religion that can quickly descend into dualism. The problem with this dualism is for Baeck
ethical: without the God of the Old Testament, without “works,” he argues, Christianity loses
its moral basis in transcendence and is left only with the Erlebnis, with intense inner-
experience of infatuation and self-absorption that leads either to a disdain for the mundane
sphere of politics or to the adoption of grandiose new myths. In both cases, the political
implications are dire. The republication of an expanded edition of this essay in 1938 can be
read as a bold act of protest in light of the new mythology of race, blood, and Führer. The
way to save Christianity from itself, Baeck suggests, is by reminding it of its Jewish roots, of
the commitment to the One God of the Hebrew Bible. But it is also Judaism that needs to find
a balance between experience and ethics. At its best, argues Baeck, Judaism contains both
elements: it is not a religious of static decrees but of commandments endowed with the
mystery of the divine. It is this combination between mystery and commandment that Baeck
thinks is both a characteristic of Judaism and a demand for his time, i.e. the reincorporation
of the mystery into the commandment and vice versa.
157
“As is well known,” Baeck once wrote, “laurels have no nutritional value.”164 The
same can be said of a thinker whose bust is crowned with laurels and after whom numerous
institutions are named, but whose thought is ignored or dismissed. I hope this work showed
that this need not be the case with Leo Baeck, whose questions—about minority position and
dialogical apologetic, the essence of religion, and the theo-political predicament—are very
much ours. Leo Baeck’s thought, no less than his life, can thus serve as a nourishment for
Jewish thought and the philosophy of religion.
164 Leo Baeck, “Aphorismen,” in Werke 6, 56. This citation is from an undated collection of aphorisms by
Baeck. The editors of the Werke assume they were written around the period in which he served as a rabbi in
Oppeln. I have slightly changed the sentence-structure. The German reads: “Lorbeeren sind bekanntlich kein
Nahrungsmittel.”
158
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