Albert Schweitzer's engagement with Judaism, and with the Jewish community more generally, has never been the subject of substantive discussion.Footnote 1 On the one hand this is not surprising—Schweitzer wrote little about Judaism or the Jews during his long life, or at least very little that was devoted principally to those subjects. On the other hand, the lack of a study might be thought odd—Schweitzer's work as a New Testament scholar in particular is taken up to a significant degree with presenting a picture of Jesus, of the earliest Christian communities, and of Paul, and his scholarship emphasizes the need to see these topics against the background of a specific set of Jewish assumptions. It is also noteworthy because Schweitzer married a baptized Jew, whose father's academic career had been disadvantaged because he was a Jew. Moreover, Schweitzer lived at a catastrophic time in the history of the Jews, a time that directly affected his wife's family and others known to him. The extent to which this personal contact with Jews and with Judaism influenced Schweitzer either in his writings on Judaism or in his life will in part be the subject of this article.
This article, then, is predominantly a piece of intellectual biography that attempts to illuminate a significant, yet under-studied, aspect of one of the twentieth century's most important public intellectuals. In accomplishing its task, it will look again, and from a different perspective from the normal one, at Schweitzer's New Testament oeuvre, including his highly influential Von Reimarus zu Wrede. Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung and Die Mystik des Apostels Paulus.Footnote 2 The attitude that Schweitzer takes toward the Jews within these works, either explicitly or implicitly, will be placed in the wider context of contemporaneous New Testament scholarship, especially in Germany, and its understanding of ancient Judaism, a subject that in recent times has become highly contested.Footnote 3 An attempt will be made to show the distinctiveness of Schweitzer's position on this matter. Consonant with this interest, the article constitutes a case-study of Jewish-Christian relations in the early to mid-twentieth century, albeit through the prism of a singular and atypical personality.
Judaism in Schweitzer's New Testament Scholarship
Arguably, Albert Schweitzer's most important contribution to academic study comes in his works on Jesus and Paul, which were published between 1901 and 1930.Footnote 4 These should be understood as a whole for they constitute an interconnected account of Christian origins. In his understanding both of Jesus's ministry and the theology of Paul, Schweitzer attributes a central role to the idea of eschatology and, insofar as he invokes the use of parallel material to explain the thoughts of these two individuals, he uses Jewish material.
Jesus
Schweitzer understands Jesus as a messianic figure who believed that God's kingdom would arrive in the immediate future, bringing about God's final act of redemption. When this occurred, Jesus, who conceived of himself as the Messiah but only in secret, would be transformed into the Son of Man, conceived of as a heavenly messianic figure, and his followers would also undergo a transformation. In the midst of his ministry, Jesus sent out his followers to announce the arrival of this kingdom and to call the people to repentance in the face of the coming judgment (Matt 10:23), believing that, before they returned, the kingdom would have arrived. But it failed to come, and Jesus, experiencing a moment of crisis, vowed to bring about its arrival by engineering his own death, a decision arrived at through reflection on the Suffering Servant in Deutero-Isaiah.Footnote 5 His final journey to Jerusalem was the beginning point of a strategy to provoke the authorities into killing him. Against this reconstructed background, the key to understanding the Last Supper lies in Jesus's words about not drinking again of the vine until he had drunk of it in paradise (Mark 14:25 and parallels), understood by Schweitzer to mean that Jesus's death would bring about the advent of the kingdom.
This account, which attributes a high degree of historicity to the Synoptic Gospels (in particular to Matthew and Mark), is based on a view that Jesus operated within a body of thought that was eschatological and Jewish, or “Jewish-eschatological,” as Schweitzer puts it. Thus, Schweitzer, in order to lay out Jesus's aims, starts with a discussion of the development of Jewish eschatology from the prophets’ understanding of the kingdom, beginning with Amos and running through the book of Daniel and later apocalyptic writings such as 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch.Footnote 6 In this context Schweitzer observes a movement from a this-worldly expectation brought about by changed ethical circumstances (the prophetic view), to one that posits an otherworldly, heavenly reality brought about by a heavenly messianic figure (associated with Daniel and given some expression in Enoch), to one that synthesizes the two previous views by positing a temporary messianic kingdom followed by a transcendent and eternal reality in a general resurrection of the dead (associated with 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch)—the position that Schweitzer thought prevailed at the time of Jesus.Footnote 7
The similarities between Jesus's eschatological vision and the perspectives described above is not the subject of the present article, but a few observations are necessary. While Schweitzer is clear that Jesus operated within the basic framework of an eschatology that he had inherited,Footnote 8 he argues that Jesus substantially revised aspects of that eschatological inheritanceFootnote 9 or, at least, that his eschatological views show clear differences from those known to have existed at the time in which he lived. These relate both to Jesus's understanding of the character of the Messiah (an earthly secret appearance, followed by a transcendent heavenly transformed state in the new kingdom) and to the nature of the new kingdom (a single, otherworldly kingdom preceded by a general resurrection and marked by the transformed state of the predestined, a kingdom that will not just include the last generation but all previous generations).Footnote 10 The fact that Jesus, along with John the Baptist, saw the coming kingdom as imminent also, according to Schweitzer, marked him out for messianic expectations that were little in evidence among Jesus's contemporaries.Footnote 11 Most of the distinctive elements in Jesus's thought show him, in Schweitzer's view, to be a brilliant and sovereign spirit and the promulgator in some respects of a new teaching,Footnote 12 solving complex problems that had emerged in the development of Jewish eschatology.Footnote 13
What observations might we make about this reconstruction as it relates to the subject under discussion? First, the issue of Jesus's Jewishness is not as such a subject of concern for Schweitzer, at least not in any explicit way, in spite of the fact that Schweitzer argues that Jesus should be understood exclusively as an individual who thought within categories inherited from his Jewish background. Schweitzer is certainly aware of the extent to which some of his predecessors went to distance Jesus from Judaism.Footnote 14 He makes this point, for instance, when discussing the work of Julius Wellhausen on Jesus.Footnote 15 And more particularly, he develops this observation in a lengthy treatment of Wilhelm Bousset's work of 1892, entitled Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum.Footnote 16 Schweitzer states that the latter's attempts to treat the leading ideas of the preaching of Jesus (which clearly reflect the world that molded his thought) as of secondary importance are wrong. Consistent with this, Schweitzer overtly rejects the approach in studies of Jesus that assumes that his Jewishness, understood as his eschatology, was no more than the superficial husk of a distinctive core that concerned itself with Jesus's apparently universal message.Footnote 17 But in spite of these comments, the importance of the problem of Judaism for an account of Jesus's life does not constitute a specific concern of Schweitzer: it is only a concern insofar as it touches on the issue of eschatology.Footnote 18
Schweitzer's lack of interest in the question of Jesus's Jewishness is striking because those liberal Protestant theologians who sought to write lives of Jesus and whose work was a central concern of Schweitzer were much taken up with this issue. For if Jesus was to be interpreted nondogmatically and in his historical environment, how, then, was his uniqueness to be understood?Footnote 19 Their answer often lay in a polemical interaction with what was known, tendentiously, as “Late Judaism” (Spätjudentum), and often these theologians pointed to the particularism and legalism of the Judaism out of which Jesus emerged in their attempt to show how Jesus preached a gospel in opposition to these. This is the central thrust of the work of Bousset, Adolf von Harnack, and even of Schweitzer's teacher, Heinrich Holtzmann, though to differing degrees. Schweitzer is aware of the issue, and, on one occasion in his Quest, he notes that it is unsurprising “that it is precisely the representatives of the study of Late Judaism who lift Jesus out of the Late-Jewish world of thought. . .. It is only the expression of the fact that here something new and creative enters into an uncreative age, and of the clear consciousness that this Personality cannot be resolved into a complex of contemporary ideas.”Footnote 20 While Schweitzer appears in these comments to assent to a liberal view of the uniqueness of Jesus in relation to the world into which he entered (on this see below), in the comment that follows, he shows his awareness of the debate that I have just outlined: “But the question cannot be avoided whether the violent separation of Jesus from Late Judaism is a real solution”—and, in a qualified vein, he answers no.Footnote 21
It is perhaps interesting in this context that Schweitzer fails to mention the work of the scholars associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums school, men such as Abraham Geiger, Leo Baeck, Felix Perles, Ismar Elborgen, and others. Footnote 22 They often drew attention to the relationship between liberal theology and anti-Judaism and sought to defend Judaism against what they saw as its unfair representation by liberal theologians.Footnote 23
A second point relates to the question of Schweitzer's own presentation of Judaism at the time of Jesus and to the manner in which he describes Jesus's interaction with that phenomenon. At one level, it is relatively free from the usual sharply negative comments about “Late Judaism” found among his contemporary liberal theologians and others. Without any reluctance and in an apparently wholehearted, minimally qualified way, Schweitzer describes Jesus's worldview as Jewish-eschatological.Footnote 24 Yet, as will become clear in our discussion of his appraisal of Paul, ancient Judaism interests Schweitzer principally as a tool for understanding Jesus's ministry, and he understands Judaism almost exclusively in terms of its eschatological character—Judaism is, in some sense, eschatology, and Schweitzer's knowledge of Judaism beyond the Bible and certain apocryphal and pseudepigraphical works is superficial, even on occasions faulty, not least in his account of the existence of a Jewish-eschatological dogma (or a “Late Jewish” view, as he dubs it) at the time of Jesus.Footnote 25
Schweitzer's perception of Jesus's Jewish background is also not immune from certain well-known prejudices. Schweitzer's assertion, to which reference has already been made, that Jesus entered an uncreative age,Footnote 26 hints at a negative view of “Late Judaism.” So, for instance, in his comments on the Pharisees in his popular Gespräche über das Neue Testament, published in a liberal Protestant church newspaper between 1901 and 1904, Schweitzer writes about the so-called “externalization” (Veräusserlichung) of religion apparently manifested in the customs and prescriptions of the Pharisees, and he presents Jesus as an opponent of this. His comments, however, are not uniformly hostile and are, at times, even sympathetic.Footnote 27 Nevertheless, Schweitzer is clear that rabbinic Judaism offers little or no insight into Jesus's ministry, marking, as it does, a decline from the period represented by, for instance, 4 Ezra. As he writes in his Quest, “Jewish theology completely lost contact with the wider spiritual movements, became rigid and involved itself in unproductive commentary on the Law.”Footnote 28 Consistent with this implied critique is Schweitzer's claim that Jesus's eschatological position led him not to disobey the Torah but to move beyond it to a more internalized, absolute ethic at the center of which stands the Sermon on the Mount.Footnote 29
Also significant are aspects of Schweitzer's portrayal of Jesus. While he depicts Jesus as an individual who reflects the culture out of which he emerged, he also asserts that Jesus interacted with it creatively and in a uniquely sovereign manner. So, in describing Jesus's engagement with Jewish-eschatological thought, and in depicting his own distinctive contribution to it, Schweitzer writes “of the deliberate shaping of a superior and thoughtful spirit,”Footnote 30 reflecting the liberal concern to depict Jesus historically but in such a way that his uniqueness is preserved.Footnote 31 Schweitzer is not keen, however, to use such assertions of Jesus's uniqueness to escape the specifics of his setting, and this is the case even when he comes to talk about the absoluteness of Jesus's ethical demands—these still emerge out of the eschatological orientation of his thought, and it is consideration of this fact in its fullness, and in a way that eschews forms of spiritualization, or attempts to differentiate between the “nut and husk” of his message, that gives Jesus's thought its greatness.Footnote 32 And yet Schweitzer, who is more explicit than any of his contemporaries about the implications of the eschatological specificity of Jesus's message and life—what he terms at one point the “too historical” aspect of his reconstructionFootnote 33—and more agonized in his discussions of its hermeneutical implications,Footnote 34 still develops ways of allowing Jesus to transcend that specificity and to become “the one great man.”Footnote 35 Not only has Jesus, according to Schweitzer, by his death and apparent failure, destroyed the old eschatological view and so allowed his followers the right to lay hold of what transcends that setting,Footnote 36 but Schweitzer also argues that Jesus's ethical enthusiasm (understood by Schweitzer in terms of a commitment to the kingdom), which transcends the particularity of his own setting, can still be appropriated by his followers.Footnote 37 He can restate such views in ways that make him sound like a typical theological liberal in his commitment to a transcendent ethic with its origins in Jesus:
The mighty thought underlying the Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount, that we come to know God and belong to Him through love, Jesus introduces into the late Jewish, Messianic expectation, without being in any way concerned to spiritualize those realistic ideas of the Kingdom of God and of blessedness. But the spirituality which lies in this religion of love must gradually, like a refiner's fire, seize on all ideas which come into communication with it.Footnote 38
It would be wrong, then, to argue that Schweitzer's presentation of Jesus as an eschatological enthusiast, enmeshed in his own world, implies that he, Schweitzer, was somehow an enthusiast for the “Late Judaism” from which Jesus emerged. As has already been noted, he sometimes betrays, in muted form, the prejudices against “Late Judaism” that were typical of his age, and one could argue, too, that like most liberal theologians committed to historical study, he can still present a Jesus who breaks out of his own particularity and appears in some sense a unique and transcendent figure.Footnote 39 But, importantly, he does this without engaging in extended polemic about the supposed “Late Judaism” of Jesus's day, which was so much a mark of German theologians of his era. Moreover, he does not make such stereotypical representations of Judaism, insofar as they have any place in his account, a key factor in his explanation of Jesus's ministry and aims. In part this might be explained by the fact that Schweitzer chooses eschatology as the key to understanding Jesus,Footnote 40 or more broadly the Jewish apocalyptic tradition, with the result that his account is less taken up with negative assertions about Judaism—Jesus, after all, is not a religious reformer, but principally a teacher, as he often is for other liberal theologians, and so the need for the establishment of difference at an ideological level is not Schweitzer's main concern. Hence, though Schweitzer may have entertained views about Judaism's particularity, as this expressed itself in its apparent legalism, these barely feature as significant elements in his reconstruction of Jesus's ministry.Footnote 41 Jesus, for Schweitzer, is not the teacher of universalism amidst a people taken up with nationalistic and legalistic concerns. He is an apocalypticist whose face is set absolutely on the kingdom of God—such a vision is Jewish-eschatological even if it also results in something eternal and binding, which is not Jewish, or rather eschatological, but universal.Footnote 42 But such an observation, whatever its merits, should not detract from the fact that Schweitzer's work on Jesus, in its attitude to Judaism, is singular and distinctive; without a sense of embarrassment or difficulty, he identifies the central fact of Jesus's ministry as a specifically Jewish characteristic.
Paul
Schweitzer's work on Paul, consisting of two major publications, is a continuation of his work on Jesus. This is explicitly stated in his preface to Paul and His Interpreters of 1911 (ET 1912): “Any one who deals with the teaching and the life and work of Jesus, and offers any kind of new reading of it, ought not to stop there, but must be held under obligation to trace . . . the pathway leading to the history of dogma.” Outlining what that might mean he asks: “How could the doctrinal system of Paul arise on the basis of the life and work of Jesus and the beliefs of the primitive community; and how did the early Greek theology arise out of Paulinism?”Footnote 43 It is the call for an integrated account of the history of early Christianity that forms the background for Schweitzer's own work—hence the need for a clear account of the motivating forces of Paulinism. Indeed it is exactly the radical character of Schweitzer's own account of Jesus's ministry that makes the need for an account of Paul and of the development of Christianity beyond Paul necessary.
Schweitzer's understanding of Paul's theology, hinted at in Paul and His Interpreters and presented more fully in The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle, can be briefly summarized. It is Schweitzer's contention that Paul, like Jesus, thinks within Jewish-eschatological categories. The fact of Christ's death and resurrection as the Messiah means that the conditions of redemption have in part begun. Just as in Jewish apocalyptic texts such as 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch the Messiah and those whose salvation he effects are identified with each other, so Christians because of Christ's death and resurrection begin proleptically, through the spirit (understood as the spirit of Christ), to experience their own salvation “in Christ.” As such they find themselves enabled to act in a manner that allows them to become ethically other than the world, suffused by a sense of love, as captured in Paul's account of love in 1 Cor 13.Footnote 44 The fact of the Christians’ changed status—that they inhabit a different world, albeit in anticipation of the actual coming of the kingdom, as 1 Corinthians 15 indicates—also has a consequence for their attitude towards the Jewish law. That law is now regarded as no longer having any hold over them, for it comes from the natural world of which the Christians are no longer a part; in fact, the law and eschatology are understood to have always been incompatible “because of the intrinsic impulse of eschatology to an immediate and absolute ethic.”Footnote 45 But if this is the case, why does Paul appear to support Jews who observe the law? The answer lies in what Schweitzer terms Paul's theory of the status quo ante, which holds that the state in which people are called to be Christian should be the state in which they remain (see 1 Cor 7:2). It is important to note, then, that for Schweitzer Paul's supposed antipathy to the Jewish law only arises out of his own eschatological convictions, and it is only where the issues about Gentile adherence to the law arise, as in Galatia, that Paul feels forced to address the question of the law at all.Footnote 46
Schweitzer, then, claims that a correct understanding of Paul construes him as thinking from within Judaism. “Paul,” he writes, “belongs to Late Judaism.”Footnote 47 And he continues:
To apply the comparative method to Paul would, therefore, generally speaking, mean nothing more or less than to explain him on the basis of Late Judaism. Those who give due weight to the eschatological character of his doctrine and to the problems and ideas which connect it with works like the Apocalypse of Ezra are the true exponents of ‘Comparative Religion.’Footnote 48
“Late Judaism” is again understood, as in the case of Jesus, as the Judaism of those Jewish writers taken up with questions of eschatology (Schweitzer, in Paul and His Interpreters, excludes any consideration of rabbinic material from an assessment of Paul, passing over it with a few negative comments as with his work on JesusFootnote 49). And Paul, like Jesus, adapted such thoughts in the light of changing circumstances—that is, according to Schweitzer, he adapted them thoughtfully. But such adaptation is not the equivalent of the formation of a new religion. As Schweitzer writes, refuting the idea prevalent among some scholars that Paul founded a new religion:
For him [Paul] there was only one religion: that of Judaism. It was concerned with God, faith, promise, hope and law. In consequence of the coming, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, it became its duty to adjust its teachings and demands to the new era thus introduced, and in the process many things were moved from the shadow into the light and others from the light into the shadow. “Christianity” is for Paul no new religion, but simply Judaism with the centre of gravity shifted in consequence of the new era. His own system of thought is certainly for him no new religion.Footnote 50
In asserting the Jewish identity of Paul so strongly Schweitzer was flying in the face of a number of tendencies within the scholarship of his own time. Amidst a growing enthusiasm for the study of the “Orient” and its religions, a number of Christian scholars had sought to argue that Paul's thought was best understood against the background of the world of Hellenistic religion, not least that of the so-called mystery religions. Scholars such as Richard Reitzenstein, Adolph Deissmann, and Wilhelm Bousset had argued this case with vigor,Footnote 51 and their conclusions were one of the chief targets of Schweitzer's work on Paul. Among other things, such exponents of the so-called “history of religions” (Religionsgeschichte) approach had, in Schweitzer's opinion, created a huge gap between Jesus and Paul, believing the latter to be the second founder of Christianity. Schweitzer, by asserting Paul's background in Jewish-eschatological thinking and so his identity as a Jew, was directly refuting this assertion.Footnote 52 But in arguing such a case Schweitzer went against a more ingrained tendency in German theological scholarship, in part linked to what has been described above. Building on the Lutheran assertion that the center of Paul's gospel lies in his doctrine of justification by faith, this tendency asserted that Paul was the advocate of a religion of moral universalism over against Jewish particularism with its emphasis on nationality and law. This view, advocated with great clarity by F. C. Baur, was one from which much German scholarship failed to emancipate itself.Footnote 53 By arguing for the primacy of the idea of eschatological mysticism in Paul's theology, and in partial extension of this view, for the subsidiary role of justification within that system,Footnote 54 Schweitzer, a Lutheran minister, and the son, nephew, and grandson of the same, removed a central pillar in the universalist reconstruction of Paul. Paul, on Schweitzer's account, is not primarily a critic of prevailing forms of Jewish religiosity, nor a critic in any essentialist or qualitative way of the Jewish Torah nor by extension Jewish particularism, but an exponent of what it means to be the follower of the dead and now raised Messiah, Jesus, in a new eschatological age.Footnote 55 W. D. Davies notes this point, claiming that Schweitzer's description of justification as a subsidiary crater in Paul's thought means that the way was opened to considering Paul as fulfilling, rather than opposing, Judaism.Footnote 56 As Schweitzer was to claim, for Paul Christianity is the true Jewish religion.Footnote 57
But Schweitzer was not interested in pursuing this apparent implication of his work. As E. P. Sanders has pointed out, Jewish apocalypticism serves simply as the point of departure for his description of Paul's thought,Footnote 58 and Schweitzer's conclusions do not lead to detailed reflection on the nature of the relationship of Pauline Christianity to Judaism, nor indeed to considerations, at least explicitly, of why it is that a movement that began within Judaism became Christianity.Footnote 59 But, while neglecting any explicit engagement with these matters, Schweitzer, as with his work on Jesus, is wise to the fact that the Jewishness of Paul is an ongoing concern of commentators. So in seeking to explain why it is, in his opinion, that scholars generally prefer to argue that Paul is the beginning point of the so-called hellenizing process of Christianity, he suggests that this is “because he [Paul] detached Christianity from Judaism, and because otherwise his thoughts do not seem to be easily explicable.”Footnote 60 After all, if Paul's views are assumed to be purely Jewish-eschatological, the problem of how the gospel became hellenized becomes more acute (precisely these points had been made to explain why scholars had sought to avoid eschatological interpretations of Jesus's ministry). Schweitzer, then, goes on to explain further why scholars have generally moved away from a view of Paul as what he terms a Jewish-eschatological thinker:
Moreover, the theological study of history is apt, even though unconsciously, to give ear to practical considerations. At bottom, it is guided by the instinct that whatever in the primitive Gospel is capable of being Hellenised may also be considered capable of being modernised. It therefore seeks to discern in Paul's teaching—as also in that of Jesus—as much as possible that “transcends Judaism,” that has the character of “universal religion” and “essential Christianity.” It is haunted by the apprehension that the significance of Christianity, and its adaptation to our times, is dependent on justifying the modernisation of it on the lines hitherto followed and in accordance with the historical views hitherto current.Footnote 61
For Schweitzer, as in his studies of Jesus, it is a Christian desire to modernize Paul, to make him a man amenable and relevant to the present age, which makes a view of him as a Jewish-eschatological thinker uncongenial. In these short and undeveloped comments as to motive, which are more prominent in Schweitzer's earlier work on Paul, Paul and His Interpreters, than in his later work, Mysticism,Footnote 62 nowhere does he mention the role of anti-Jewish prejudice, no doubt because he saw the fault of interpreters as emerging from their essentially intellectual and hermeneutical concerns. Furthermore, Schweitzer is uninterested in pursuing the wider theological consequences of his “Jewish” view of Paul. In fact it is unclear that Schweitzer really has a strongly developed sense of the Jewishness of Paul, in spite of his apparently unambiguous comments on this matter. In his reflections at the end of Mysticism, for instance, he engages with the question of the ongoing relevance of Paul. For Schweitzer the apostle becomes the beginning point of what one might term the demythologization of eschatology, and by extension, the Jewish-eschatological view, precisely because his Paul begins to see the future promise of eschatology invading the present.Footnote 63 And in such a conclusion, Paul, rather than being a Jew, becomes the patron saint of Christian thinkers.Footnote 64 Reading this conclusion, one can see why Schweitzer could at one point claim that Paul “detached Christianity from Judaism.”Footnote 65 But in this concluding chapter Schweitzer is wrestling with hermeneutical issues that his own work so acutely raises. It still remains the case that the historical Paul is a Jew thinking Jewishly and with no intention of founding a new religion, wherever his thoughts may have led. In making such an assertion and doing so in books almost entirely free of anti-Jewish censure, Schweitzer was, among his contemporaries, strikingly distinctive.Footnote 66
Judaism as a Religion in Schweitzer's Non–New Testament Work
Albert Schweitzer was very interested in what one might now term “comparative religion.” He wrote one general book on the subjectFootnote 67 and a book devoted to Hinduism and Buddhism.Footnote 68 He took an interest in Zoroastrianism and wrote extensively on Chinese religious thinkers,Footnote 69 though much of this work was published posthumously.Footnote 70 And yet, beyond his comments on Judaism in his books on New Testament subjects, Schweitzer remained uninterested in the history of Jewish thought and religiosity. So, in his extant works, Judaism is only ever discussed as a prelude to the discussion of Christianity, and normally then in relation to the evolution of the idea of the kingdom of God, or the development of what Schweitzer refers to as the Jewish-eschatological view. For Schweitzer, “Amos and Isaiah have created the conception of the Kingdom of God. Late Judaism developed it in fantastic ways, no doubt partly under the influence of ideas from Zarathustra's religion, with which exile made the Jews acquainted. Jesus brings the Kingdom idea to its ethical perfection, without inveighing against its late-Jewish form.”Footnote 71 In the same book and elsewhere he argues that it was precisely Christianity's movement away from this Jewish-eschatological heritage, and its adoption of a more individualized theology of redemption, based on the sacraments, which led to a diminishment of Christian theology. As he writes: “This much, however, is certain: as the Jewish outlook is abandoned, the ideas which constitute the uniqueness and greatness of the teaching of Jesus—the ideas of the Kingdom of God and of an ethic directed toward the Kingdom—lose their vitality in the Christian religion.”Footnote 72
Given these comments, some might think it striking that the book Religions of the World contains no further discussion of Judaism. In what is essentially a qualitative comparison between religions, which Schweitzer typologizes in terms of the extent to which they are optimistic or pessimistic, monistic or dualistic, and influenced by ethical motives,Footnote 73 Schweitzer chooses to discuss chiefly Christianity and the Indian and Chinese religions. And further failure to engage with Judaism beyond the so-called “Late Jewish” period, roughly the middle of the second century, can be seen elsewhere in his own works on the New Testament, as discussed above, and in other religio-philosophical works.Footnote 74 Because of this apparent lack of interest in post–New Testament Judaism—coupled with the sense that Schweitzer finds post–New Testament Judaism problematicFootnote 75—some might argue that Schweitzer reflects Christian forms of supersessionism. While it is true that there are moments when Schweitzer can sound a supersessionist-like note,Footnote 76 these are rare, even in sermons, where one might expect it,Footnote 77 and they never approach a clear statement that the Christian church replaces Israel; Schweitzer is not sufficiently interested in ecclesiology for this to be a concern of his and nowhere in his writings do we see a clear and unadulterated expression of this idea.Footnote 78 Perhaps “absorption” might be a better word than “supersession,” capturing the sense that Christianity takes up aspects of Judaism in a different form, what Schweitzer means when he says that Christianity is for Paul “no new religion, but simply Judaism with the centre of gravity shifted in consequence of the new era.”Footnote 79
Notable also is the fact that even when Schweitzer had the opportunity to engage in what, for want of a better term, one might describe as Jewish-Christian dialogue, he did not appear to take it up, at least in explicit form. This is illustrated eloquently in his correspondence with Martin Buber, which took place over an extended period from 1928, when Buber wrote to Schweitzer asking him to participate in a conference in Karlsruhe,Footnote 80 to 1965, the year in which both men died. The correspondenceFootnote 81 gives evidence of a strong mutual respect. Both men sent each other copies of some of their books, and Buber in particular shows signs, not so much in his correspondence with Schweitzer, but rather in his own works,Footnote 82 of a detailed engagement with some of Schweitzer's work, especially on Jesus and Paul. So Buber, who could on one occasion refer to Schweitzer's “distinctive proximity to Israel” (eigentümliche Israelsnähe),Footnote 83 was in strong agreement with Schweitzer that the key to understanding Jesus's ministry lies in his preaching on the kingdom of God and in an appreciation of his ethical achievement. While broadly enthusiastic for Schweitzer's work on Paul,Footnote 84 he disagreed with Schweitzer's assessment of Paul as a Jewish thinker rather than one influenced by the Greek world. So in his well-known work of 1950, Zwei Glaubensweisen,Footnote 85 in which he sought to explore the differences between Christianity and Judaism in reference to their different understandings of faith or belief (Glaube), he states, here commenting on Schweitzer's Mysticism: “I, however, can connect the Pauline doctrine of faith . . . only with a peripheral Judaism, which was actually Hellenistic.”Footnote 86 With Schweitzer's other work, Buber appears less well acquainted.Footnote 87
Schweitzer clearly read Buber (he possessed fourteen of his books, some of which are heavily marked), and in his correspondence he mentions, with some warmth, his experience of reading the latter's translation of the Old Testament into German, and his Zwiesprache.Footnote 88 Also mentioned are Das verborgene Licht,Footnote 89Die Frage an den Einzelnen,Footnote 90 and, at greater length, Zwei Glaubensweisen.Footnote 91 But Schweitzer did not take an interest in Buber's more obviously Jewish work, such as that on Hasidism or Moses, or with the Jewish dimension of the work he has read, though at one point he does note how much life there is in rabbinic Judaism.Footnote 92 Consistent with this is the fact that discussion of Buber's work in the correspondence barely picks up on the implications of the latter's thought for Jewish-Christian dialogue. So in Schweitzer's listing of questions and observations relating to Zwei Glaubensweisen, in a letter dated April 4, 1951, he does not allude to Buber's disagreement with his own Jewish portrait of Paul (a disagreement already referred to aboveFootnote 93), and he never discusses the book's central thesis about the different approaches of the two religions to the idea of faith/belief, construed in Judaism as trust and in Christianity as belief in a set of principles. In some ways one might say that insofar as Schweitzer interacted with Buber, he interacted with him as a thinker and even an exegete, but not obviously as a Jew and the creator of a Jewish perspective with which he wished to wrestle. That is not to say that Schweitzer was unaware of the Jewish dimensions of Buber's thought, but that was not something he was interested in highlighting, at least in the extant correspondence. In one sense this is unsurprising: Schweitzer's own Christian faith was unconventional insofar as it was ethical rather than traditionally Christological. For this reason he may in fact have seen less difference between himself and Buber, who, like him, was often regarded with suspicion by his co-religionists.
Contemporary Jews and Judaism in Schweitzer's Life
Albert Schweitzer's Alsatian Context
The extent of Albert Schweitzer's contact with Jews and his awareness of issues relating to them during his own lifetime merits some discussion. He was born into a part of the world, Alsace, that boasted a reasonably large Jewish population,Footnote 94 and one that had been the victim of bouts of anti-Semitism for centuries, not least because Jews were often involved in the business of money-lending in a mainly agricultural economy, which lacked adequate credit institutions until later in the nineteenth century.Footnote 95 The French Revolution, which led to the extension to the Jews of citizenship rights, had brought about, if at an uneven pace and in spite of anti-Semitic conflict, increasing assimilation, especially among urban Jewish populations. Reaction to Prussia's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 was especially negative among members of the Jewish cultural elite, who feared that rights gained in the French Revolution might be removed by the less liberal Prussian state.Footnote 96 As a result of this quite a number “opted” to move to France (the so-called optants).Footnote 97 Many also, though perhaps for different reasons, emigrated to the New World, and between 1875 and 1900, the population of Jews in Alsace decreased from 2.7% of the total to 1.9%.Footnote 98 Immigration into the area by German Jews, who became an increasingly important part of the annexed territory, compensated somewhat for this loss,Footnote 99 but also caused tensions with indigenous Alsatian Jews and served to deepen a feeling among the latter of strong allegiance to France.Footnote 100 However, attitudes began to change among Alsatian Jews toward the end of the century, partly as a result of the Dreyfus affair, which broke out in 1894. Dreyfus himself was an Alsatian JewFootnote 101 and anti-republican forces in France, who tended to oppose Dreyfus's release from prison on a charge of treason, engaged both in anti-Alsatian and anti-Semitic rhetoric. Alsatian Jews, faced with this kind of prejudiced language, became more willing to accommodate themselves to Prussian rule,Footnote 102 especially as the new regime sought, in various ways, to take a firm stand against anti-Semitism.Footnote 103 A sign of the more liberal position being adopted toward Jews was seen not only in the elevation of certain Jews to positions of importance in society, but also in the University of Strassburg, which was re-founded after the annexation as the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Universität,Footnote 104 and which Schweitzer was himself to attend. Both in terms of the number of distinguished Jews on its staffFootnote 105 and the number of Jewish students,Footnote 106 it proved itself more liberal than universities in Prussia itself (though not devoid of anti-Semitic tendencies).Footnote 107
In his short autobiographical work, written in the early 1920s, entitled Memoirs of Childhood and Youth,Footnote 108 Schweitzer recalls how a Jew called Mausche,Footnote 109 who dealt in cattle and land, used occasionally to pass through Günsbach, the village near Colmar, in which Schweitzer lived, with his donkey cart. Schweitzer notes that because no Jews lived in the village, this was an event for the boys each time it occurred, and they would run after Mausche and make fun of him, with some of the boys making their jackets look like pigs’ ears and jumping up and down beside him. Schweitzer says that he joined in this general baiting, which evidently arose from Mausche's Jewish identity. Schweitzer then comments on how the boys would pursue him to the end of the village but that Mausche would bear all their teasing in silence, and then occasionally turn around and smile at the boys. Such benign stoicism, Schweitzer remarks, impressed him, and made him aware for the first time of what it meant to suffer silently in the face of persecution. “He [Mausche],” Schweitzer writes, “became an educator to me.” He continues his account by stating that from then on he greeted Mausche in a kindly manner and that as a high school student he used to shake his hand and travel with him a little of the way. In spite of rumors that Mausche was a usurer and an unscrupulous real-estate shark, his example of forbearance continued to affect Schweitzer positively.Footnote 110
This story is important not only because it indicates the existence in Schweitzer's childhood and beyond of the kind of anti-Semites not atypical of Alsace,Footnote 111 but also because of its apparently profound effect on Schweitzer's developing moral sensibilities. Schweitzer chooses, however, to describe these in general terms rather than as they specifically relate to his attitudes toward Jews. In the end the story is not about the Jewishness of Mausche, but about its importance for the moral development of Schweitzer and by extension the lesson that it carries.Footnote 112
Schweitzer tells us that he was fascinated by politics,Footnote 113 and it is probably the case that he took a strong interest in the Dreyfus affair, which convulsed France at the end of the nineteenth century and led to huge conflict within French society and beyond. Interest, as we have noted, would have been greater in Alsace as Dreyfus was himself from that region, and Schweitzer mentions his own mother's strong interest in the affair and her pro-Dreyfusard views.Footnote 114 Of course, the matter transcended the issue of French attitudes toward Jews and took on a dimension of its own in which a cluster of political, religious, and other specifically French and national questions were raised. But the exposure to this controversy would have made Schweitzer more deeply aware of the existence of anti-Semitic forces in society. This point becomes more likely when we consider that during the period in which the scandal rumbled on (roughly from 1894 to 1906), Schweitzer was a frequent visitor to Paris through his involvement in the Paris Bach Society. Moreover, by 1908, it seems, he had become a friend of the French classical scholar, historian, and politician Théodore Reinach, who, together with his brothers, Salomon and the campaigning journalist Joseph—all of them liberal Jews—became among the most prominent advocates of Dreyfus.Footnote 115 It also seems that he and his wife Helene enjoyed a very close friendship with Théodore's wife, Fanny, who contributed a generous sum of money to Schweitzer as he attempted to gather funds before he set off to Lambaréné.Footnote 116 Moving in the society associated with the Reinachs, and in particular, Théodore, Schweitzer would have been at the center of liberal Jewish French support of Dreyfus, even if by the time he became acquainted with the latter, it was after the height of the controversy.Footnote 117
Schweitzer's attendance of the University of Strassburg would have brought him into contact with Jews. While it is unclear that any Jews studied Protestant theology, Schweitzer was also a student of philosophy, where there is evidence of some Jewish students, though no Jewish lecturers, and he subsequently studied medicine in a faculty that had the largest number of Jews in the university, making up about 15% of the student cohort.Footnote 118 Of the effect of all of this on him, we can say nothing as Schweitzer at no point reflects on such contacts, either in published works or correspondence.
Albert Schweitzer and the Bresslau Family
Without doubt, however, the most important Jewish association in Schweitzer's life was his wife, Helene Bresslau. Although Helene, along with her two brothers, was baptized as a Lutheran in 1886, both her mother and father were Jews who never converted. Her father, Harry Bresslau, was a distinguished historian of the medieval period,Footnote 119 who had spent much of his academic career in Berlin, and had only become a full Ordinarius (the top-ranking German professor) when he was appointed to this position in the department of history in Strasbourg in 1890, a sign of the more liberal attitude in that institution toward Jews. Bresslau had constantly been made aware, often in negative contexts, of his racial identity, and his advancement up the cursus honorum of German academia had been impeded on this account. When the historian Henrich von Treitschke, a former teacher of Bresslau, published his infamous essay, “Unsere Aussichten,” in 1879, precipitating the so-called Antisemitismusstreit,Footnote 120 Bresslau had felt moved to respond in some detail and with a personal toneFootnote 121 to each of his former teacher's points, surprising even von Treitschke with the vehemence of his defense of Jews within the Reich.Footnote 122 Bresslau's decision to have his three children baptized had its roots in his own life story and what he understood to be the implications of the Antisemitismusstreit.Footnote 123 In the more liberal atmosphere of Strassburg University, and Alsace generally, Bresslau appeared to thrive,Footnote 124 and in 1905 he was appointed the first Jewish Rektor of a German university.
Schweitzer's first meeting with Helene is difficult to date, but it probably occurred around 1900, and was initiated through a circle of friends, mainly from immigrant German families, with whom Schweitzer socialized. What is clear from letters written between Schweitzer and Helene from 1902 to 1913Footnote 125 is that from then on Helene became Schweitzer's chief confidante as he attempted, often in a state of psychological confusion and difficulty, to decide on a course in his life that would properly conform with his strong moral yearnings. Helene was to accompany him on his first trip to Africa, after they had married, but only occasionally after that, owing to ill health.Footnote 126 Her devotion to Schweitzer's cause was manifested in a variety of ways and never in doubt, even if the long absences and Schweitzer's reliance on a string of devoted female helpers would cause considerable strain on their relationship.
Schweitzer's association with the Bresslau family over a long period must have made him more sensitive than many Gentiles to issues pertaining to anti-Semitic prejudice. In a letter to Helene dated April 10, 1905, and written in the wake of the news of Harry Bresslau's appointment as Rektor of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Universität, Schweitzer states openly how much he feels for Helene's father after all his sufferings at the hands of “our race,” implying a strong sense of the difficulties Bresslau had experienced as a Jew;Footnote 127 and one need not doubt that conversations between Schweitzer and Bresslau touched on the issue of anti-Jewish prejudice. In his correspondence with his wife, however, nothing is made of her Jewish origins, and even though Helene herself was employed by Schweitzer to read his New Testament and other publications from this period, there is no substantive discussion in any of the letters of Schweitzer's interpretation of Jesus as an eschatological prophet of Israel's redemption, or of Paul as someone who thought exclusively in Jewish categories. Judaism as a subject is absent, except in the one case mentioned above.Footnote 128
In some senses this is unsurprising. As Verena Mühlstein, Helene's most recent biographer, has shown, every attempt was made by Harry Bresslau to assimilate his children to German culture with all that implied (their baptism was but one expression of that).Footnote 129 Neither parent was religious nor a practicing Jew in any form, though Helene's mother, Clara, came from a much more religious background than her father (Clara had a brother who had trained in Jewish theology); but she appears to have raised no objections to Harry's decision to have their three children baptized. Against such a background “it is in vain that one looks for a Jewish consciousness in Helene.”Footnote 130 Insofar as the latter possessed a developed sense of religiosity it could best be described as liberal Protestant.Footnote 131
Schweitzer and Nazism
Of greater significance, given the background of his wife and the personal history of his father-in-law, is Schweitzer's reaction to the beginnings of Nazi rule and its consequences for Jews. Schweitzer was clearly aware of the potential horrors of National Socialism, as his speech to a gathering of Germans in Frankfurt in 1932 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Goethe's death indicates. This does not refer directly to the disturbances of the day, but makes it plain that Germans were at a fateful hour, where the need to resist and preserve the moral spirit are presented as central planks in dealing with the impending future.Footnote 132 It was also during this time that Schweitzer attempted unsuccessfully to complete the writing of his own moral philosophy, in which, among other things, he adopted a strikingly more negative stance toward the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, partially influenced, one might argue, by Nazi usage of the philosopher's work to bolster their own beliefs.Footnote 133 He was also moved to address in some detail the whole question of the rise of what he termed “neoprimitivism” (Neoprimitivismus), an offshoot of which he assumed Nazism to be.Footnote 134 In letters dating from the end of 1932, he begins to express his considerable despair at the prospect of Nazi rule in Germany.Footnote 135 Hitler's elevation to chancellor in 1933 precipitated the relatively swift emigration of Helene's family (virtually all emigrated except her mother, who was too old and infirm to travel), and friends of Jewish origin that she and Schweitzer had made in pre-war Alsace. In such emigrations and in the fear expressed by their participants, Schweitzer was faced with the clear reality of Nazism's anti-Semitic character. While Schweitzer gives voice in a few places in his posthumously published third volume on cultural philosophy to the fact of mistreatment of the Jews, his observations are brief and undeveloped.Footnote 136 Never, however, did Schweitzer, a consistent opponent of nationalism,Footnote 137 make a public statement on the appalling events that were taking place in Germany, either as these related to the Jews specifically, or more generally, and this in spite of calls to him to speak out from a variety of quarters.Footnote 138 In 1933, for instance, the German mathematician Max Born, who, though a Lutheran, was classed a Jew under Nazi racial laws owing to his ancestry, pleaded with Schweitzer to return to Europe from Africa and call upon the world to rise up against the barbarism that was Nazism.Footnote 139 But Schweitzer replied that he thought the situation in Germany hopeless, and did not feel himself in a position to leave his patients in Africa. Max Planck also wonders in a letter to Schweitzer, dated August 9, 1938, what kind of effect Schweitzer would have if he decided to make Europe his zone of operation, opining that it would bring no fewer blessings than the ones he brought to Lambaréné.Footnote 140 Schweitzer's own niece Carolina Bresslau also asked Schweitzer to give clear expression to his contempt for a Germany that hailed such a dictator as Hitler. But all of this was in vain: Schweitzer remained silent.Footnote 141
There is, as far as I can see, nothing sinister about this silence. Schweitzer, as we have indicated, despised Nazism and all it stood for. He spoke against it in private, and after Hitler came to power he vowed never to set foot in the country until the latter had been deposed (in fact he only returned to Germany in 1948). He and his wife were assiduous in their attempts to persuade both their relatives and other Jews to leave Germany, and they helped a number of individuals resettle, often in the United States.Footnote 142 Moreover, it is difficult to discern any indication of an anti-Jewish streak in Schweitzer, a point supported by the fact of his warm relationship with the Bresslau family and also by his friendship with Martin Buber, to which I have already referred.
But while Schweitzer's failure to speak out publicly against the Nazis’ anti-Semitism does not imply any sympathy for Nazism, or deeply held antipathy to Judaism, it seems strange and even regrettable. After all, Schweitzer's wife was, according to the Nuremberg Laws, Jewish, as was all her family. Her father, who luckily did not live to see the Nazis in power, had, as we have seen, spoken out against von Treitschke in the Antisemitismusstreit about fifty years previously, and one of the slogans of that dispute, itself coined by von Treitschke, namely “the Jews are our misfortune” (die Juden sind unser Unglück), was daubed on the walls of many German towns in the period following Hitler's coming to power. Schweitzer's stock was high in Germany and while technically he was a Frenchman at this time, he was held to be a product of German Bildungskultur. As such he had been the recipient of some of its most esteemed distinctions, not the least of which was membership in the Preußische Akademie through which he had met opponents of the regime like Planck and Born. The sense of him as a significant figure in that culture, and indeed in European culture more generally, was voiced by those two men, and no doubt by many others who asked him to speak out against the horrors of the criminal Nazi state. Schweitzer's claim in the face of such requests that the situation in Germany was lost, rendering action against the Nazis pointless, seems odd coming from the man who had a strongly developed but positive sense of the role of resignation in ethical action. Those who sought to improve the world, but despaired at the impossibility of the task, should, Schweitzer claimed, accept the necessity of resignation and simply act out their moral vision.Footnote 143 Schweitzer might have been resigned to the uselessness of his intervention in German public life in the mid-1930s and beyond, but, according to his own philosophical position, that should not have prevented him from speaking out. And was not the promulgator of the theory of “reverence for life,” the absolute creed of non-violence, bound to say in public what he thought about the violent actions of the Nazis, actions that had directly affected the lives of members of his wife's family? Schweitzer's oversight here, which stands in stark contrast to his willingness, under pressure, to speak out against nuclear weapons in the 1950s as well as other phenomena, such as the forced emigration of German peoples from communist lands, is difficult to understand. Some have put it down to a desire to protect his friends in Germany at the time, who would, so the argument goes, have been endangered if he had spoken out publicly against the Nazis, but there is no evidence for such reasoning on the part of Schweitzer. Others have asserted that his silence should be recognized as a form of political protest, but this seems to be special pleading.Footnote 144 Perhaps it was based on a personal and political calculation: he felt that to express his thoughts on this matter would make him appear a less universal figure, for it would align him with a particular group of individuals; in other words such action could be seen as too political.Footnote 145 But one could respond that to speak out against Nazism would align him with universal values, and men like Planck, who had implored him to intervene, had themselves taken a very different stance. Whatever the reason, it might well have seemed, at war's end, that his silence on this matter had been a miscalculation, not to say a moral shortcoming.
A Sense of Guilt?
Such a view may find some support in an event that occurred later in Schweitzer's life. In 1963 Rolf Hochhuth published a play with the German title Der Stellvertreter,Footnote 146 translated into English as The Deputy.Footnote 147 Hochhuth's claim in the play is that Pius XII's apparent silence about the Holocaust makes him a culpable and tragic figure, and to this effect the play's central scene is a confrontation between the pope and a Catholic priest, Riccardo, who opposes his policy of studied neutrality. The play was an instant success and inspired a great deal of controversial comment. It seems that the publisher, Rohwolt Verlag, sent Schweitzer a copy of the play. Schweitzer, then, wrote back to them and his letter was to form the preface to the American edition of the work.Footnote 148 Why Schweitzer agreed to allow this letter to be published as a preface to the American edition is unclear but striking—as far as I know he wrote no other prefaces to books or plays, and tended not to want to associate himself with controversy of any sort for fear that it would detract from his own message of reverence for life, and it is clear that by the time his preface appeared, the play had been the subject of extended controversy.Footnote 149 While the preface is not long, its contents are intriguing. He begins by expressing his thanks to the Hamburg-based publishing firm for sending him the play. He notes that he was an active witness “of the failure which took place in those days, and I believe that we must concern ourselves with this great problem of the events of history” [italics mine]. He continues by stating that “we owe this to ourselves, for our failure made us all participants in the guilt of those days.” Schweitzer asserts that the failure was not just of the Catholic Church but of Protestants as well, who “became guilty by simply accepting the terrible, inhuman fact of the persecution of the Jews.” He repeats his view that the failure lies with philosophy and free thought. For Schweitzer the appearance of Der Stellvertreter is significant not only because it indicts a specific individual who placed on himself the great responsibility of silence, but also because it is a solemn warning to contemporary culture to forego any acceptance of inhumanity because it leaves us unconcerned. For Schweitzer Hochhuth's drama is not only an indictment of history, but also a clarion call to our time, which, in his opinion, is dominated by a naïve inhumanity.
There are a number of reasons why Schweitzer might have felt moved first to write to Rohwolt Verlag, and then to allow his letter to be used as the preface to the American edition of a highly controversial play. One might lie in his conviction that the world, faced with nuclear destruction (against which Schweitzer spoke so vehemently), had chosen simply to ignore it rather than protest against it. But it is surely also plausible to argue that Schweitzer's enthusiasm for a play that attacked the culpable silence of the pope about the Holocaust gave expression to a personal sense of guilt at his own previous failure to speak out in public against the reality of the persecution and destruction of the Jews in Germany and beyond.Footnote 150
Conclusion
This paper has sought to shed light on an important, but little-studied, aspect of Albert Schweitzer's life and work. It has fallen into two halves, one dealing with what Schweitzer says about Judaism in his written oeuvre, especially those works concerned with the New Testament, and the second dealing with his interaction with Jews and Judaism in his life. Whether the two halves complement each other or are mutually revealing, or both, will be discussed at the end of this conclusion.
Attention needs to be drawn to a number of points. First, Schweitzer, in his studies of Jesus and Paul, is at ease arguing for the view that the key to understanding them lies in interpreting them against an exclusively Jewish background, understood as an eschatological one.Footnote 151 While Schweitzer sees both of them as thinking originally within inherited categories, he never indulges in what might be termed a sustained negative critique of their Jewish heritage, or in a well-developed Christian theological rhetoric of supersessionism, especially common among his German theological peers, not least those from a liberal background.Footnote 152 True, on occasion Schweitzer betrays, albeit in a muted form, some typical prejudices about the Pharisees or the rabbis, or related matters; and it is also the case that Schweitzer sees Jesus and Paul in their different ways as thinking out Jewish eschatology to a point where it can drop away and reveal a message of lasting and universal value, but he does so while attempting to retain the importance of what is specifically Jewish, albeit in an inevitably complex way.
Consistent with this attitude is the fact that Schweitzer comments on occasion on the reluctance of his peers to take full account of Jesus's and Paul's Jewishness. But Schweitzer does not make the inability of his peers to come to terms with this fact as he would see it, or the related phenomenon of their harsh comments on Judaism, a separate theme of his own historiography of the study of Jesus or Paul. It is, of course, there in Schweitzer's observations about scholars’ attempts to overcome, evade, or generally ignore Jesus's or Paul's eschatological message and actions. Such attempts, however, are rarely expressed as the overcoming of Jewishness per se, and more in terms of the positive, though ultimately distorting and failed attempt, of wanting to modernize Jesus and Paul.Footnote 153 Their opinions, for Schweitzer, result more from an interpretive error, from a hermeneutical need, than from a desire to de-judaize. In this context, it is striking, though perhaps not surprising, that Schweitzer fails to engage with the literature of those scholars associated with the Wissenschaft des Judentums movement, in whose work the issue of Christian anti-Judaism looms so large.
Related to some of the above is the fact that Schweitzer takes no real interest in the history of the development of Judaism after the time of Christian origins, and in spite of his remarks about the Jewishness of Jesus and Paul, is unconcerned with the question of Jewish-Christian relations, both as they developed in the ancient and later periods and in his own time, a point that emerges, for example, in his correspondence with Martin Buber. This latter point is especially significant as Schweitzer was interested in the study of comparative religions but never Judaism nor indeed Islam. In part this might be explained by Schweitzer's own derogatory, although not deeply informed, views about rabbinic Judaism, which he refers to at one point as “a sun-scorched plain.”Footnote 154 Such a lack of interest may also lie in Schweitzer's belief that in terms of the paradigms into which he divided the religions of the world—monistic and dualistic, optimistic and pessimistic, ethical and nonethical—Judaism comes very close to Christianity. Related to this observation, there is a sense in some of his remarks about Judaism, not least when he writes about its manifestation as a Kulturstaat, that he sees its most significant characteristics, understood as ethical characteristics, as being transmitted through Christianity. If this is a form of supersessionism, it is mild, as Schweitzer nowhere passes negative judgment on the fact of the ongoing existence of Judaism, even if he takes little interest in it.
Schweitzer lived at a time when it was difficult to escape the presence of anti-Semitism. While a student and young man he was exposed to it, not least in the Dreyfus affair.Footnote 155 More particularly, his close friendship with, and subsequent marriage to, Helene Bresslau would have brought the fact of Jewish suffering even closer to home, as Helene's father, Harry, had been the victim of such prejudice, had written against it at a time of heightened anti-Semitic feeling in the German Empire, and had had his children baptized because of it.
Some might be tempted to argue that Schweitzer's less polemical account of Judaism is best explained by reference to this background, while others might note that precisely such a background makes his failure to engage with anti-Jewish sentiment in Christian theology more problematic. Interestingly, Schweitzer's marriage to Helene does not appear to have increased his sense of curiosity about Judaism or his familiarity with it. But this is probably best explained by the fact that Helene came from a highly assimilated background in which the religious practices of Judaism played no part and where, encouraged by a desire to assimilate, Jewish identity was not overtly emphasized. The fact of Helene's family's Jewishness loomed larger when the Nazis came to power in 1933, and most members decided to emigrate. While expressing his deep loathing of Nazism's racist tendencies, and seeking to account for the rise of what he regarded as a form of neoprimitivism in his cultural-philosophical works as well as helping both family members and others emigrate, Schweitzer chose not to speak out publicly on the subject, in spite of pleas for him to do so. It is difficult to believe that he did not come to see this as a moral oversight, a point that might be supported by his decision to allow his comments on Rolf Hochhuth's play, Der Stellvertreter, to form the preface to its American edition, and from other comments.Footnote 156
Is there, then, a connection between Schweitzer's attitude to Judaism as expressed in his written works on the New Testament and elsewhere and his interaction with Jewish issues as these arose in his life? Some might argue that there is a strange disjunction between, for instance, Schweitzer's strong connection with a Jewish family and his failure to engage with Jewish culture beyond his interest in it as a means to understand the two major figures of the New Testament. I have sought, however, to account for this disjunction by arguing that the Bresslau family was highly assimilated and so uninterested, even positively opposed to, giving voice to their Jewishness. Others might argue, here more controversially, that there is in fact a problematic conjunction between his lack of interest in Judaism, beyond the New Testament, together with hints in his work at the idea of supersessionism, and his failure to speak out publicly against the Nazis and their anti-Jewish policies.Footnote 157 Against such a connection, we might note that Schweitzer experienced little difficulty in affirming Christianity's Jewish origins, and though he sought to show how the particularity of ancient Christianity was not an insurmountable obstacle to affirming its universal significance, he did this without engaging in extended polemic against Judaism. In fact his work appears strikingly free of anti-Jewish sentiment, or forms of supersessionism, when one considers the intellectual and social context out of which he emerged. Schweitzer, I would contend, did not have a problem with Judaism, at least not one to which he gave any expression. Moreover, we should be clear that Schweitzer's failure to speak out against Nazi oppression can be paralleled in his failure to protest against certain communist regimes—he wished not to be seen to be a partisan figure but one who somehow transcended the particularities of politics.Footnote 158 This does not, for obvious reasons, make his failure to speak out against the Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies any less problematic, as Schweitzer seemingly came close to acknowledging. But it makes it less easy to argue that Schweitzer's apparent lack of interest in Judaism beyond the period of the New Testament and his mild supersessionism can be directly linked to his failure to criticize in public the Nazis and their anti-Semitic policies. Some may dispute such a conclusion and think that the evidence I have presented points in another direction. It is, I hope, one of the contributions of this article to have presented the evidence as far as is possible, however one understands its interpretation.
