Abstract
The multitude of Jewish responses to the Holocaust and the creation of the modern state of Israel—twentieth-century events that profoundly impacted contemporary Jewish beliefs, practices, cultures, and identities—illustrate both the gifts and the challenges of Judaism’s profound heterogeneity. This chapter provides an overview of Judaism and contextualizes streams of Jewish thought that set the stage for Jewish responses to the developments of the twentieth century. The latter half of the chapter is devoted to investigating Jewish theological innovations that fall broadly into six categories: Auschwitz constitutes a new revelation; the covenant has been broken; God must be redefined; God is dead; a renewal of ethical obligation is required; and mystery and silence are our best response.
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Notes
- 1.
The exact nature of this revelation is debated. Examples of various approaches to continuous revelation are articulated by Elliot Dorff: “Some believe that God’s revelation at Sinai … consists of God’s own words … others believe that God inspired Moses to write what he did and has continued to inspire others … and others still believe that revelation consists of a human encounter with God to which the people involved respond, in part, by trying to articulate the nature and meaning of that encounter” (Dorff, Conservative Judaism [New York: United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, 1977], 201).
- 2.
There is evidence that a significant number of Romans , including members of the nobility, converted to Judaism during the Roman occupation of the Middle East. The Talmud also mentions that quite a few of its sages were converts or descended from converts. The Hebrew Bible also contains stories featuring prominent converts who become model Jews.
- 3.
The Mishnah (“recitation”) is the first piece of rabbinic literature, or commentary on the Hebrew Bible. The Mishnah is compiled around 200 CE by a group of rabbinic sages—specialists in the religious and civil laws derived from the Torah—called the tannaim (or “the repeaters”). The book itself is a recitation of multiple interpretations of the commandments of the Torah that had been passed down orally for centuries.
- 4.
Menahem Mor, The Second Jewish Revolt (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 471.
- 5.
S. Gürkan, The Jews as a Chosen People (London: Routledge, 2009), 34.
- 6.
Ibid., 35.
- 7.
These claims were always theological and polemical in nature, and became more frequent in the twelfth century. Jews were falsely accused of desecrating the Host, ritual murder (the murder of Christian children for Passover), poisoning wells, and treason. The first of these accusations was made in England in the year 1144 in Norwich, England, and massacres of Jews at London and York followed. The first known case outside of England occurred in France in 1177, and blood libel cases sprung up around the world in subsequent centuries. These accusations are rooted in Christian anxieties about Jewish beliefs and practices. For more on these issues, see Miri Rubin’s Gentile Tales (Philadelphia: U Pennsylvania P), 2004; Gilbert Dahan’s The Christian Polemic Against the Jews in the Middle Ages (South Bend, IN: Notre Dame UP, 1998); and Jacob Katz’s From Prejudice to Destruction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982).
- 8.
A pogrom is a violent attack against Jews by non-Jews that is allowed to continue unimpeded by local government and military. In some cases, these attacks were even encouraged by governments. The word pogrom typically refers to riots of this kind that occur in Russia and Eastern Europe. Victims of pogroms are often beaten, raped, or even murdered, and their property is stolen from them without legal recourse. Events of this kind occurred even after Second World War, when Jewish survivors of the Nazi regime tried to return home.
- 9.
Francis Galton, an Englishman who founded his ideas on Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species, is typically considered the founder of modern eugenics. An American scientist named Charles Davenport, however, enabled worldwide application and implementation of eugenics. Ideas when he received funding for his Station of Experimental Evolution from the Carnegie Institute. It is important to note that while some eugenics did not subscribe to the racist ideas now attributed to eugenics, these thinkers did not, in the end, most did. It is the latter who ultimately shaped the movement as a justification for segregation and Jim Crow laws in the United States, and later, the Nuremberg Race Laws of the Third Reich.
- 10.
This change in approach is attributed to the desire (and perceived need) of Jews themselves to see Jewishness as strictly a religion without ethnic or national connotations. This kind of reimagining was of a piece with the ways in which Jews tried to maintain their beliefs and practices while committing themselves fully to secular public life.
- 11.
The Dreyfus Affair is an infamous case of a French Jewish artillery office named Alfred Dreyfus who was accused of having passed top-secret documents to the Germans. Dreyfus was tried and convicted in 1894, and the political effects of the event had a profound and lasting impact on French politics and culture. The presence of significant anti-Semitism bubbled to the surface, and pitted the country against itself. For more on this see Nancy Green, “The Dreyfus Affair and Ruling Class Cohesion,” Science & Society Quarterly 43.1 (1979), 29–50; and Peter Rutkoff, “The Ligue des Patriotes,” French Historical Studies 8.9 (1974), 585–603.
- 12.
Irving Greenberg, “Cloud of Fire, Pillar of Smoke,” Auschwitz: The Beginning of a New Era?, ed. E. Fleischer (Philadelphia: KTAV, 1977), 23.
- 13.
Steven Katz, “Introduction,” Wrestling with God, eds. S. Katz, S. Biderman, and G. Greenberg (New York: Oxford UP, 2007), 368.
- 14.
S. Katz (“Introduction,” 368) suggests that there are six biblical models most often utilized by Jewish thought to cope with and make sense of the challenges posed by the Shoah: (1) The Akedah or the Binding of Isaac story found in Genesis; (2) Job; (3) the “suffering servant” doctrine in Isaiah; (4) Hester Panim, an idea that appears in various biblical texts which attempts to account for periods in human history when God seems conspicuously absent; (5) Mipnei Chataeynu, “because of our sins were are punished, sometimes called the deuteronomistic approach to theodicy; and (6) the “free will defense.”
- 15.
S. Katz, “Introduction,” 421–428.
- 16.
Emil Fackenheim, in S. Katz et al., eds., 505.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Irving Greenberg, “‘The Tremendum,’” Wrestling with God, eds. S. Katz, S. Biderman, and G. Greenberg (New York: Oxford UP, 2007), 625.
- 19.
Ibid., 626.
- 20.
Ibid., 641.
- 21.
Arthur A. Cohen, “The Holocaust in Jewish Theology,” Wrestling with God, eds. S. Katz, S. Biderman, and G. Greenberg (New York: Oxford UP, 2007), 669.
- 22.
Ibid., 680–681.
- 23.
Emmanuel Levinas, “Useless Suffering,” Wrestling with God, eds. S. Katz, S. Biderman, and G. Greenberg (New York: Oxford UP, 2007), 527.
- 24.
Ibid., 529.
- 25.
Ibid., 530.
- 26.
Wiesel, “God’s Suffering,” Wrestling with God, eds. S. Katz, S. Biderman, and G. Greenberg (New York: Oxford UP, 2007), 794.
- 27.
Elie Wiesel, “Preface to the New Edition,” Night, trans. M. Wiesel (New York: Hill), 2006, 1.
- 28.
Ibid., 11.
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Anderson, I. (2018). Judaism. In: Rodkey, C., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96595-6_43
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