Judaism, the word and the thing

In a short text entitled “Judaism” (1974), Gershom Scholem asked: “Judaism cannot be defined according to its essence, since it has no essence. Judaism cannot therefore be regarded as a closed historical phenomenon whose development and essence came into focus by a finite sequence of historical, philosophical, doctrinal, or dogmatic judgments and statements. Judaism is rather a living entity which for some reason has survived as the religion of a chosen people.”

The word and the thing: an open dynamic

David Lemler does not cite this bold and abrupt thesis in The Invention of Judaism, perhaps because he has intimately assimilated it and recorded it as a challenge to us. If this thing that we conventionally call “Judaism” is in perpetual transformation, and if we are nevertheless able to trace its historical trajectory, it is precisely, according to Lemler, because of the quest for its essence, continually revived by those whom it concerns most, namely the Jews. If there is therefore a continuity of this ideal object (in its phenomenological meaning), but one devoid of essence, if it does not dissolve over time, it is because it must have a principle that nourishes it, giving it a recognizable unity despite its metamorphoses. This force is like a launch pad, recharged each time, propelling it forward. What is launched is a question, the one Jews ask themselves when they wonder what they are. Hence Lemler’s interpretive method: he replaces the historian’s question “What is X?” with the question that Jews themselves constantly ask about what they adhere to and what they are part of. This gap between the word and the thing is the foundation of an open dynamic.

What matters to David Lemler, then, is not so much that Judaism is an “invention,” as all historical phenomena are by definition, but that it is a reflexive object: it manifests itself as a question/answer structure, with each era producing a variant that is tailored to it.

What matters to David Lemler, then, is not so much that Judaism is an “invention,” as all historical phenomena are by definition, but that it is a reflexive object: it manifests itself as a question/answer structure, with each era producing a variant that is adjusted to it. By reviewing the successive articulations between “reflexivity” (the movement of self-questioning, the quest for an ever-provisional essence to which this ideality can be related) and “facticity” (the empirical bearer of the question, namely Jews immersed in changing socio-historical constellations), Lemler reconstructs the recapitulative trajectory of these singular crystallizations. Armed with this interpretive framework, he systematically unfolds his program, isolating the hegemonic core of meaning that circumscribes, for each era, the contours of this collective belonging for those who recognize themselves in it. It matters little that the word Judaism only emerged in the modern era, as it is just one of many words that refer to the same thing. it is only one of the ad hoc, provisional answers to the question tirelessly repeated by those who feel the need to reformulate it in order to establish a new foundation, adjusted to the objective coordinates of the environment that includes them and in which they participate.

Historical crystallizations 

It is immediately apparent that David Lemler is taking on an immense challenge. Armed with a scholarship capable of embracing the centuries and a panoramic view that never loses sight of the unity of this historical phenomenon conveniently called “Judaism,” he distills, for each of the major eras, the significant core around which the foundation of these Jews’ existence revolves. Rabbinic Judaism, a product of exile, focuses its response on the covenant, of which the Torah, understood as their revealed law, is the focal point. An essentially legal phenomenon, it simultaneously establishes the place of Jews among the nations and of each of them in the surrounding society. The medieval period, which inherited this, was unique in that it drew Jews into the competitive space of the two great expansive monotheistic religions, leading Jews to think of themselves as an affinity group, a collective to which one belongs. The motif of belief, which had been unimportant until then, became prominent with the confrontation with Christianity and Islam, which were built on it; medieval Jewish intellectuality then became closer, at least in the Iberian Peninsula, to what is commonly called a religion. It was in the Muslim world, where the affinities of Jews with a law-centered Islam became evident, that this shift was particularly pronounced, giving rise to the tutelary figure of Maimonides. The modern era, which led to emancipation, then marked a decisive turning point by gradually redefining the focus of the response around a universal ethic. The latter was conditional on the entry of Jews into the course of universal history and was conceived as the result of a development that placed them at the forefront of modernity. This involves a redeployment that takes place within the framework of the integration of Jews into the nation states in which they live, while developing their own contribution to the common task, which places them in a historical temporality synchronous with the modern project.

The historical, recapitulative view we take of the trajectory of which we are the tip separates ever more profoundly the Jews, the Jewish fact, its facticity, and that ideal object called Judaism, that star without a core around which we revolve.

David Lemler’s historical tableau reveals a layered architecture, since each new pair of questions and answers does not cancel out the previous one, but builds on it, altering and transporting it. The unity of each of them is sufficient for the author to order them as paradigms that follow one another, retaining the previous ones in the very process of their transformation. Paradigms, yes, but not in the strong sense of Thomas Kuhn, where each scientific revolution strips the worn-out paradigm of all legitimacy: here, a paradigm stumbles upon the limits drawn by the objective transformations of the era and is reflexively understood as a work of adjustment or accommodation to the new situation. Paradigms are therefore not strictly speaking defeated and replaced by the next one, but rather displaced, so that the new one relays and extends the old one, which remains recognizable within it.

Lemler’s serialization of them bears witness to this, sometimes despite himself. To understand the era of rabbinic Judaism, it is already necessary to adopt the later, rationalizing view of the medievalists. To accurately gauge Maimonides’s effort at refoundation, our reading is already guided by Hermann Cohen’s exploration of the legalism of the medieval masters. And to describe the Wissenschaft des Judentums’ endeavor to bring Jews into the historical world of nations, we are forced to interpret this gesture as a departure from the historicity specific to rabbinic Judaism, as indicated by the case of Franz Rosenzweig, who sums up and concludes this trajectory in the form of a return. Intellectual asceticism is of limited help here: we moderns can only access ancient forms through subsequent elaborations. And yet we collect them. What allows and obliges this collection is precisely the disorder in the accumulation, with ancient strata remaining in a changing world and sometimes resurfacing unexpectedly when the however freshly elaborated response proves fragile or illusory. It is as if the dynamic space of Judaism remained fluid and circulatory, despite the arrow of time pointing toward the future—the oldest paradigm remaining available and activatable at a time when it seems to have lost all relevance. Such is the case with the Zionist proposal, which is certainly modern, but which was born precisely in this fluid space, made up of fragments of answers drawn from previous forms.

Contemporary dispersion

The closer David Lemler gets to our present, the more difficult it becomes to grasp the core meaning of the ideal object. It is not surprising that he, and we with him, are bogged down in a landscape that is muddled, if not chaotic. The fact that no new paradigm seems to be emerging today can be explained by our lack of historical perspective. Or perhaps it is due to the extreme dispersion of available answers to the Jewish question, which itself results from the uncertainty of the objective coordinates of our current situation. Thus, the historical, recapitulative view we take of the trajectory of which we are the tip separates ever more deeply the Jews, the Jewish fact, its facticity, and that ideal object called Judaism, that star without a core around which we revolve. We can assume that this dispersion of meaning results from the diffraction, in the same space-time, of the condition of Jews since the era of emancipation. And it is certainly the most massive effect of a transformation of reflexivity itself, which no longer operates exclusively through the centrifugal force of established authorities, but is democratized by spreading in the minds of Jews, taken one by one, whom nothing can channel anymore.

The survival Scholem speaks of, not as certainty but as uncertainty, has indeed become the mode of existence that is strictly contemporary to us.

Yet our current condition compels us to continue the gesture, for we must rearticulate facticity on a sense of totality, at least if the singular adventure of the Jews matters to us. At the risk of breaking down along the way, we must therefore supply it with fuel capable, for all practical purposes, of charging the launch pad. The difficulty with this relaunch stems from our awareness of the absence of an essence of Judaism, coupled with the awareness that it is not affected by the obsolescence of old answers. This tangle of answers is the product of a crisis, if we accept, as David Lemler would agree, that none of them is self-evident. The centripetal force we are experiencing is the most tangible consequence of this. It can be explained first of all by a modern hypertrophy of the pole of facticity—the being-there of a people, a nation, a culture, and now also that of a state that bears the Jewish name—in the face of which reflexivity disperses and exhausts itself. It is also due to our disorientation, to the illegibility of the configuration in which we are immersed, which, with the Shoah, reaches its peak, shifting the endless questioning of the essence of the thing towards the abyss of the very disappearance of the Jewish fact, thus placing it in the anxious horizon of doubt about its durability. If the pole of facticity wavers, reflexivity would no longer have any purpose. That is where we are now.

The enigma of survival

This brings us back to Scholem who, after positing that Judaism has no essence, immediately adds: “Indeed, for such a people to have endured for three thousand years as a recognizable entity, a phenomenal fact for which nobody has any truly sufficient explanation, is itself an enigma. The continued survival of the Jewish people seems to suggest that the Jews have in fact been chosen by someone for something.” If Scholem describes Judaism as a “living entity” on this occasion, it is because Lemler’s recapitulative gesture itself stems from the modern awareness of his mortality. The survival Scholem refers to, not as certainty but as uncertainty, has indeed become the mode of existence that is strictly contemporary to us. Scholem’s proposition inevitably leads to a redoubled enigma, one that has stumped many. Isn’t that the nature of an enigma? David Lemler reviews recent attempts, always partial, to unravel the mystery, without reaching a conclusion. He cannot, because with the enigma, we all come up against the limits of historical science and the consciousness that correlates with it. Scholem suggests that at the heart of the enigma lies election, as if the thesis of the absence of essence were immediately modulated by the mystery of election, and therefore by the question of its meaning. Does this enigma not then point to the most archaic stratum, which is also the most nebulous, the most unquestioned, namely the promise of eternity, to which all past forms that cement, each in their own way, the word and the thing, have remained riveted? However, this promise—and this is the whole problem—has been betrayed before our very eyes. Betrayed “by someone, for something,” to use Scholem’s expression. This impasse may contain the core of meaning that will emerge in the future, when the reflexive gesture, currently marked by powerlessness in reviving the historical dialectic, succeeds in crystallizing a paradigm around the betrayed promise. Whether this betrayal is reflexively surmountable or remains insurmountable, whether it alters the ideal object to adjust it to the post-extermination era—which is inseparably the era that saw the emergence of a state for the Jews—or whether it leads to a tragic paralysis of reflexivity, such is the Jewish question that remains before us.