The study of Judaism within the modern university would not be possible without the legacy as well as the methodological approach of the small group of young scholars and students in Berlin who founded the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden in 1819. Although outside the walls of the German university, these scholars endeavored to make inroads within the discipline of Orientalistik while standing firm in their hope that the Hegelian spirit of the day might give Judaism its determinate recognition in the light of Absolute Spirit and give the Jews their citizenship.Footnote 1 The methodological focus of the Wissenschaft des Judentums aimed at legitimating and justifying Judaism in modernity. For scholars such as Leopold Zunz, the greatest symbol of modernity was the general nineteenth-century German interest in “Wissenschaft,” or science.Footnote 2 As a symbol of “methodology,” Zunz notes, Wissenschaft found its noblest expression for many in the German academy of the 1820s as philosophy. For Zunz, however, even philosophy was subject to a higher form of historical knowledge. Zunz writes,
Even this higher view befit for science, which, outlives all earthly pettiness, countries, and nations; only it can lead us once and for all through a true history of Jewish philosophy, wherein the ideational carriage of minds must be evened out and understood and must be pursued with a parallel comprehensiveness as of the formation of the earth, according to the strict regulations specified by history.Footnote 3
Much like rabbinic literature, Zunz places philosophy under the strict rule of history, which analogizes the history of ideas upon the model of a causal history of the natural world.Footnote 4 Both rabbinic and philosophic thought, therefore, share this common fate in the eyes of Wissenschaft: they are representatives of a seemingly un-modern and unscientific valuing of ideas over history.
This article argues that particular strands of both rabbinic thought and Jewish philosophy of the later nineteenth century provide an alternative account of modernity to that of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, particularly as it relates to the “scientific” study of Jewish religious ideas. In order to reconsider the role of Wissenschaft, however, we must take some critical distance from the exclusively German geographic and linguistic context of Wissenschaft des Judentums that underscores Zunz's restrictive historical understanding of “science.” When understood according to its Hegelian elaboration, the term Wissenschaft connotes more than natural scientific method alone; Wissenschaft becomes a science of the idea, an “idealism.”
It is this idealist dimension of nineteenth-century Jewish thought that I want to explore by focusing upon two variations on the meaning of science for modern Jewish knowledge production. By examining what Zunz's classification might describe as “premodern” or “antimodern” conceptions of law, I will argue that what I choose to describe as idealist Jewish thought adopts a distinct understanding of history, namely as the scope of a tradition. By placing emphasis upon legal ideas, my goal is to unpack the ideal of scientific modernity in order to renegotiate the problematic subordination of traditionalism in the history of modern Jewish thought.Footnote 5 This article therefore interrogates the relationship between a “scientific” or “historical” understanding of Judaism and the problem of multiple modernities,Footnote 6 according to the geographical difference between German and Eastern European forms of Wissenschaft. When understood as method, idealism reveals the variety of Jewish thinkers attempting to modernize the study of the Jewish textual and religious tradition through the scientific ideal. In contrast to this scientific idealism, we find that the historicist framing of the German Cultur-Verein often associated with Jewish modernity is but one version of this scientific modernity. This article therefore expands the meaning of “modernity” to include other trajectories than those influenced by the historicism of nineteenth-century German thought, particularly by focusing upon the turn toward ideas. As a strategy for justifying ideas and concepts drawn from the Jewish past with an eye toward their future application, I will suggest that idealism helps narrate neglected trajectories of Jewish thought. Further, I will argue that idealism can be found in both Eastern and Western European contexts of Jewish modernization and in both philosophical and rabbinic thought.
The article proceeds as follows: I begin with a brief description of the historicist dimensions of the Wissenschaft des Judentums and how this paradigm has dominated conceptions of Jewish modernity. I next turn to the modern tradition of Kantian and Hegelian philosophy to unpack what I mean by idealism. In the hands of Hermann Cohen (1842–1918) in particular, Wissenschaft adopts a different shade, wherein the “science of Judaism” requires the justification of concepts and ideas drawn from Jewish texts and sources and an idealization of normative problems of the past that speak to the ethical concerns of the future. Using Cohen's framework of “scientific idealism” as a conceptual vehicle for unearthing alternative strategies of modernizing Judaism, I will then turn to an underexplored but contemporaneous development of such an idealism in nineteenth-century Eastern European Jewish thought emerging in the Lithuanian Yeshivot (talmudic academies), namely, talmudic conceptualism or Lomdus. Footnote 7 While talmudic conceptualism's method of abstraction from practical application and consideration earned it a reputation of being a conservative or reactionary movement resisting the eastward spread of the Jewish enlightenment, or haskalah,Footnote 8 I argue that this use of idealized hermeneutic categories is a strategy of scientifically studying the legal sources of rabbinic Judaism and should be seen as another iteration of Jewish modernity. As an Eastern European expression of idealism, talmudic conceptualism shares a similar fate with Jewish philosophical idealism in the Western context and therefore provides us with a more holistic picture of modern Jewish thought in Europe. Viewed together, therefore, I conclude that idealism provides a neglected framework for understanding nineteenth-century strategies of Jewish minority modernization in both philosophical and rabbinic, Eastern and Western European contexts.
Wissenschaft and Modernity
The ascendant nineteenth-century philosophies of history of Johann Gottlieb Herder (1744–1803), Friedrich Karl von Savigny (1779–1861), and Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886), understood each people (Volk) and time-period to generate its own specific values and attitudes. Known mainly as “historicism,” this general approach to historical peoples and their cultural productions was highly influential for the founder of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, Leopold Zunz (1794–1886). Historicism was a philosophical stance concerned with the nature of ideas and values, while rejecting timeless essences or universals as the bases for ideas.Footnote 9 Ideas needed to be narrated in time and individuated in space.Footnote 10 And different, individuated peoples in history were presumed to have produced their ideas differently. Thus, the Wissenschaft sought the idea of Judaism as a way of justifying Judaism in modernity. In other words, Judaism became an object of study. Its religious and cultural institutions were timed and understood according to their individuated historical conditions. However, in order to study the idea of Judaism, the Wissenschaft turned away from traditional methods and even textual canons of studyFootnote 11 —from “Jewish” ideas—particularly the seemingly rote and uncritical ideas of law and ritual.
In his programmatic Etwas über die rabbinische Literatur (1818), Zunz mandated that with such scholarship “we are setting up the whole of Jewish literature in its fullest compass as an object of research, without worrying whether the total contents should be or can be also a norm for our own judgments.”Footnote 12 Scholarship must not seek answers to normative questions by means of its research. Though Zunz had likened the desideratum of the academic study of Judaism to the goal of strengthening Jewish emancipatory claims—demonstrating the cultural import of the Jewish literary tradition to the European Spirit—if this more general consequence could be achieved, it would be ancillary to the true goal of historical research. The goal of a Wissenschaft des Judentums was to “objectify” rabbinic literature as a cultural artifact of the past, to be studied as a material document, a relic of sorts. Such texts had no need of speaking to a present, let alone a future.Footnote 13 For Zunz, the primary goal of study was to imagine the “whole of Judaism” by means of replacing the ahistorical perspective of the rabbinic elite with a “positive-scientific” understanding of history.Footnote 14 This would be modern Judaism in practice.
Zunz's objectification of Jewish literature, however, is only possible by adopting the perspective of the end of history, enabling the historian to locate influences, shifting concepts, and textual variants that help explain the coming-to-be of an object that is determinately part of the self-consciousness of the modern era. Indeed, this explicitly Hegelian inflection of the Verein, recently explored by Sven-Erik Rose,Footnote 15 sees Absolute Religion as knocking at the door of human reason and culture and was something Franz Rosenzweig considered implicit in the entire nineteenth century's combination of historicity within theology as well as the human sciences.Footnote 16 Thus, when Zunz describes history as presupposing the causal-like regularity of time, as though history were built upon the back of natural, biological time, his revolution lay in its emphasis upon Wissenschaft to justify Judaism on the plane of history, which he understood as the apex of culture in modernity and an account of self-knowledge.Footnote 17
While Zunz claimed history as the pinnacle of modern culture, the nineteenth-century development of historical consciousness did not generate the idea of history itself, but rather a new timing of history. As Reinhart Koselleck notes, the revolution of historical thinking was that
in the past, the natural course of time served as the immediate substratum for possible histories. The calendar of saints and sovereigns was organized by means of astronomy; biological time provided the framework for the natural succession of rulers, on which self-reproducing legal titles in the wars of succession depended—until 1870, symbolically enough. All histories remained rooted in “nature,” directly embedded in biological pregivens.Footnote 18
For Koselleck, a contemporary theoretical understanding of “historical time” must beware this reduction to natural, causal time. Historical time, insofar as its vehicle is writing, citation, and discourse, must be self-reflexive. We must not assume history is either wholly diachronic or synchronic; rather, “the conditions and determinants that, in a temporal gradation of various depths, reach from the past into the present intervene in particular events . . . In actu, all temporal dimensions are always intertwined.”Footnote 19 Time and the construction of the historical past cannot be hypostatized into a vacuum for the sake of causal narration; rather, each telling is a practice of blending the moments, of past, present, and future. This is the significance of distinguishing natural time from historical time. The historicism of the Wissenschaft is thus liable to be asked whether there is not an implicit “naturalism” in its timing history according to causal claims of influence and reductionism.
Idealism and History
This question of historical time in Jewish history is rarely approached philosophically,Footnote 20 but I'd like to suggest that it is a dominant theme in Hermann Cohen's idealism. While the distinction between “natural” time and “ideal” historical time may seem to be the insight of critical historiography, inherently post-modern in its representational focus, this very distinction is a crucial methodological posit in Cohen's system of critical idealism.
The term “idealism” refers to an explicitly philosophical program that, on the one hand, turns away from empirical contingency toward abstract necessity and, on the other hand, turns away from seeking knowledge of things-in-themselves toward things-as-they-are-known systematically.Footnote 21 Although often construed as “metaphysics,” in the wake of Hegel's system and its influence upon academic philosophy, the “idealism” of the later nineteenth century, in which Cohen was steeped, disavowed any metaphysical explanation of “ideas” in favor of a theory of knowledge that was responding to the scientific empiricism and materialism that had become the bedrock of humanistic knowledge.Footnote 22 Many idealist philosophers integrated the lessons of historicism into their study of ideas, undertaking what many referred to as a theory of knowledge (Erkenntnistheorie) that sought clarity about where and when our ideas emerged, Footnote 23 helping us make consistent judgments in the natural and human sciences. Idealism adopted the meaning of critique; that is, to unearth the origin of ideas by looking at the past and present reasons that make them valid. Hence, ideas gained a conscious past.
In this context, the idealism of Hermann Cohen should be understood as a modern strategy of justifying knowledge. Using the language of “normativity,” Cohen's idealism makes the crucial conceptual move to construing ideas as norms extracted from out of their individuated historical conditions and reframed in terms of their conceptual coherence and relation to other ideas. Akin to the Problemgeschichte characteristic of late nineteenth-century neo-Kantians and continued by Cohen's student, Ernst Cassirer,Footnote 24 this emphasis upon the idea as a norm distinct from nature is also foundational to the philosophical logic of Hermann Lotze.Footnote 25 But insofar as Cohen emphasizes the lawfulness of ideas (and their justification), his idealism reveals a methodological and hermeneutic mechanism of “idealization.” That is to say, the legal-historical dimension of concepts is the basis for their justification.
Returning to the distinction between ideal time and natural time, Cohen's Ethik des reinen Willens, first published in 1904, makes this distinction fundamental.Footnote 26 In the Ethik, history is treated as a positive canon of its organon, ethics, which Cohen refers to as the logic of the human sciences.Footnote 27 Logic and ethics share the methodological presupposition of Wissenschaft, which is the basis of philosophy.Footnote 28 Yet logic and ethics nevertheless concern themselves with different spheres. While logic grounds the natural scientific model of experience, ethics is concerned with the cultural life of humanity, in law, history, and state.Footnote 29 They share, however, the rational reconstruction and generation of cognitive knowledge from ideas alone. That is, Cohen considers both logic and ethics as sites for the performance of the transcendental method of inquiring into the conditions of possibility for these bodies of knowledge and ideas.Footnote 30 Cohen therefore characterizes his idealism as a method of “purity,” which relies upon neither sensible intuition nor empiricism. Rather, logic and ethics each have its own Faktum. For logic this is natural science, and for ethics it is legal science or Rechtswissenschaft. Because legal science seeks to comprehend the ideas extracted from historical statutes, legislative acts, and judgments as “norms,” history therefore becomes a presupposition for ethically ideal time, just as natural causality becomes a presupposition for logically ideal time.Footnote 31 By virtue of being a methodology, ethics is therefore independent from the natural sciences since “moral concepts do not have their methodological character in accordance with this relationship to scientific sensibility, to the scientific representation of actuality.”Footnote 32 Ethics therefore rationally reconstructs its object of cognition according to its a priori fact, namely, law.Footnote 33
Ethics casts aside natural time and its model of causality and gains for itself an ideal ontology distinct from that of any natural scientific being: the being of the idea and the idea of the “ought” in particular (das Sein des Sollens; the being of the ought).Footnote 34 Historicity and time are much more than events and institutions for Cohen. Because ideas have an autonomous time unto themselves, they can be justified beyond their enabling empirical conditions. Cohen therefore crystalizes the methodology of idealization, of always trying to identify the idea over the empirical reality, by asking what ought to be instead of what is.
Historicism and Naturalism
Cohen's understanding of time stands in stark contrast to that of the German historicists. In the study of law, the methods developed by jurists in the Historical School of Law, for example, enabled a departure from the natural law tradition and helped jurists particularize legal norms and legal systems, which also became a crucial interest in the Wissenschaft des Judentums, as I noted above. Thus, for the post-Hegelian rise of historical consciousness in the humanities, positive law assumed an exalted status as the creation of a popular spirit, or Volkgeist.Footnote 35 Largely under the influence of the nineteenth-century legal historian Friedrich Karl von Savigny, this historicization of law decisively altered the framework through which ethics, law, and politics had been classified.Footnote 36 The nationalist tone of Savigny and other members of the historical school such as Friedrich Julius Stahl maintained that the very spirit of a people,Footnote 37 their “Volkgeist,” contained the seeds of its development toward freedom and true self-consciousness. Hence, the era of legislation and statutory interpretation represented the climax of this kind of historical consciousness reaching its fulfillment.
In many ways, Cohen's interest in the ideality of law and ideas was a reaction to this form of historical thinking, which he detected not only in the Historical School of Law of Von Savigny and Stahl but also in the Wissenschaft des Judentums, particularly in the work of his teacher at the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), when he was a student there from 1856–1861.Footnote 38 Cohen's idealism represents a philosophical response to the Wissenschaft, offering a critical revision of the strategy of “using history” to justify Judaism.Footnote 39 Most explicitly, Cohen challenged the lachrymose national history narrated by Graetz. In Graetz's monumental Die Konstruktion der jüdischen Geschichte (1846), he makes the nationalistic claim that the “objects” of Jewish history that are most readily apparent are precisely not ideas such as “refined monotheism” but the political, the blood and soil of the nation:
Judaism without the firm soil of national life resembles an inwardly hollowed-out and half-uprooted tree, which still produces foliage at the top but is no longer capable of sprouting twigs and branches. You may subject Judaism to a process of refinement, extract modern thoughts from the fullness of its content and trumpet forth this essence as the heart of Judaism with stupefying, resonant phrases and brilliant clichés; you may build a church and accept a creed for this refined and idealized Judaism “in a nutshell”; nevertheless, you still will have embraced only a shadow and taken the dry shell for the succulent fruit.Footnote 40
Graetz's essay provoked many critical reactions, including the editorial comments of Zecharias Frankel, defending the monotheistic idea as the very theme of the Shema prayer.Footnote 41 But for Cohen, since Graetz was methodologically willing to focus upon the history of Judaism as “not a religion of the past but of the future,” he thus saw something of implicit value in reconstructing the object of Jewish history in ideal (though not idealized) terms. Cohen took issue, however, with Graetz's methodological understanding of the object of Jewish history, even in its futural significance.Footnote 42
As Cohen would note again in his debate with Martin Buber, Jewish history cannot begin with an “anthropological” (read: empirical) concept of tribe along with such categories as soil, blood, and state.Footnote 43 Rather, following the example of his other teacher, Frankel, Cohen believed that only the law and its sources could demonstrate the idealism implicit to Jewish history. By contrast with Graetz, for whom Jewish law has a political function in the state as an expression of a people, Cohen places jurisprudence at the center-point of historical study in order to understand the history of the future, the ideality of historical norms. To write such a history is to understand how law enables a distinct form of cognition. This, Cohen claims, is “ethical” cognition, which raises human actions above mere causal nature. Human action can do things to change the world, and these changes narrate the life of humanity itself.
Despite the distaste for natural law and its historicist attempt to achieve a positive account of human institutions in history, Cohen saw Graetz's Konstruktion as a historicism that adopts naturalistic categories. That is to say, by replacing “nature” with “history” as a causal ground for the changes in world history, the natural objects of experience of empirical soil, blood, and people are said to change the world as though by natural necessity, rather than according to what was an ethical possibility, and idea from out of the past. As Cohen explains in his critique of historicism in his Ethik, the problematic meanings of legality and spirit, culture and history, have all been conflated in a theory of the individuated historical moment, in which
the concepts of naturalism merge into the internal connection of those of historicism, which is the naturalism of history. The psychological concept of experience is its tyrant. History is thought as though it were nature. Therefore, the past prevails. It assumes for itself the image of eternity.Footnote 44
Cohen's criticism of historicism focuses upon the attempt to make past ideas eternally sealed within the values they represent.Footnote 45 If historicism fails to acknowledge the forward direction in which ideas push ethical, historical, and political experience into the future, we are left with natural facts. By limiting law and the validity of ideas to individuated historical conditions, the past reigns supreme as a fixed grid. If ideas are merely caused by what came before them, claims Cohen, then what distinguishes between a “fact” of historical experience as described in terms of sensibility, physical actuality and the like, and the ethical lessons gleaned from history? By timing ideas in terms of their future as well as their past, idealization gives ideas their value. This is precisely how ideas function in law.
Graetz's history of the “idea of Judaism” therefore risks falling into the trap of naturalism since he refuses to idealize as a mode of justifying Judaism in modernity, preferring instead the “historical” categories of tribe and politics. For Cohen, the very idea of Judaism only exists by virtue of its absence from politics.Footnote 46 Judaism's understanding of “law” outside politics is thus already an idealization of history and lays the ground for Judaism's modernization.
For Cohen, “law” therefore becomes the vehicle for justifying Judaism both in terms of history and in contemporary culture. Jewish “law” must be divorced from Paul's polemic against “legalism” and instead philosophically translate an idea of normative ethics,Footnote 47 since “the law is to be valued as the ground of the ethical world (das Gesetz will als Grundgesetz der sittlichen Welt gelten).”Footnote 48 In idealizing Jewish law into a normative ground for something like ethical public law, Cohen saw a strategy for justifying Judaism in the light of reason and modernity. But this idealization was also inherently “historical” since
the law in its rigid strictness, as well as in its living flexibility, can only be understood in its historical significance, in which it is a model for the problem of cultural and historical influence in general, to the extent that, namely, it is ideas or ethical customs (Sitten) and uses that are the prevalent forces for preserving and developing spiritual phenomena.Footnote 49
The law becomes the example of Judaism's ability to contribute normative dimensions to general ethical discourse and to help shape Judaism anew alongside the cultural “spirit” of modernity. Law becomes the key to idealizing and justifying a modern Judaism.
In sum, Cohen proposes that legal history reveals the conceptual mechanism of “ideality.” Idealization reframes the “historical object” as a normative construction that brings past and future to bear upon a conceptual value. Specifically developed out of legal concepts, idealization therefore helps us better understand the “timing of history” that Cohen sees in Jewish history. By contrast to the historicism of the proponents of Wissenschaft des Judentums, Cohen's philosophical interest in ideas focuses upon the idea's persistence beyond any one moment of influence. This is still a kind of history. How else can we explain an idea's “timeless” appearance if it remains unclear what “times” it transcends? That is, the discussion of ideas persists across the divide of individual time-periods. But Cohen's identification of the “law” as the vehicle for idealization is not haphazard, and I believe it constitutes his unique attempt to integrate a historical consciousness into his reading of Kantian idealism.
Toward a Conceptual History of Halakhic Idealism
Having established what I mean by “idealism” as a term of art, I now want to reflect on a parallel hermeneutic strategy of idealization developed in nineteenth-century Eastern European rabbinic thought. Responding to the challenges of the modern world, such as emancipation, and the lure of assimilation, a new strategy emerged in Eastern Europe with which rabbinic Judaism sought justification in “scientific” and systematic terms. By focusing upon ideal constructs of Jewish law and by positing a distinct conceptual form to talmudic thinking, the talmudic conceptualism known as Lomdus responded to the perceived challenges of the modernizing Haskalah. As early as the sixteenth century, as Adam Teller and Elchanan Reiner have noted, access to rabbinic texts was no longer limited to the rabbinate and no longer exclusively for the purpose of practical legal decision (pesaq). With the rise of print culture and the book trade, rabbinic thought became a genre of printed literature in its own right and a source of textualized knowledge. The Talmud now grounded philological and logical knowledge as the model of the “perfect text.”Footnote 50 But with increasing access to these texts and new secular educational opportunities for many students, the method of pilpul and ḥilluqim (the casuistical, exhaustive dialectic of raising hypothetical ramifications for any one talmudic passage or ruling and creating logical solutions without a definite practical or even textual goal)Footnote 51 led many to deride pilpul as an atavistic lack of “method” fueling skepticism over the historical veracity and social relevance of rabbinic law in the modern world.
With the rise of a new conceptual approach, critics of talmudic study would no longer be in a position to deride the apparent lack of methodology, the true mark of modernity.Footnote 52 Talmudic conceptualism therefore presented a justification of the Jewish past according to legal ideas and categories designed to breathe new life into Jewish law and Talmud study, precisely by opening up a space for the particularist spirit of Jewish knowledge in methodological congruence with the modern world.
By referring to Lomdus as “idealism,”Footnote 53 I therefore want to unpack this focus upon ideas as norms or, put differently, idealized historical sources in this methodology of late nineteenth-century Lithuanian Yeshivah study. Such normative ideas, or ideas about how other ideas can be justified systematically, is what I believe to be so modern in this approach. By not reducing “truth” to the material or empirical world, it shares similarities with the approach of late nineteenth-century idealism, as I explored above. Rather, truth or objectivity becomes manifest within the internal coherence of the law. Therefore, I am interested in how these rabbinic thinkers experience modernity as a call to justify rabbinic Judaism and its ritual practices through an idealizing strategy.
In order to understand how an idealist tradition emerges in the Yeshivot of Eastern Europe, I first want to give some intellectual-historical context to this tradition, which grows out of the Mitnagdic or non-Hasidic rabbinic ideology that traces its roots to R. Eliyahu b. Solomon of Vilna (1720–1797), known as the Vilna Gaon. The Gaon has been revered by subsequent rabbinic minds for his combined erudition in the traditional canons of talmudic texts and medieval commentaries as well as kabbalistic literature in addition to his use of mathematics and natural scientific knowledge to elucidate his own metaphysical understanding of the nature of the created universe.Footnote 54 But the Gaon also undertook a sustained defense of the Oral Law and in so doing developed a method of study that employed textual emendations and editorial reconstructions of manuscripts that often led him to reinterpret legal rulings found in codes such as ’Arba‘ah Ṭurim and Shulḥan ‘Arukh, on the basis of re-narrating arguments in the Talmud.Footnote 55 This interpretive method, which Eliyahu Stern has called the Gaon's “hermeneutic idealism,” provides the kernel for the kind of idealist modernism in which I am interested.Footnote 56
The Gaon's idealism was built upon a distinction between divine wisdom and human reason. Both as a cosmology of the created world as well as a textual methodology, this distinction meant that language was a vehicle for ideal truths to be known, although in human minds language becomes a key to deciphering the primordial mathematical principles with which God created the world at the level of intellect.Footnote 57 Consequently, in defending the Oral Law elaborated in rabbinic texts, the Gaon charged that this law was intended to be part of a perfect construct and is such an ideality in the mind of God, but its codification and transmission is corrupted in the hands of human artifice and craft. Thus, by emending talmudic and post-talmudic rabbinic texts, the Gaon's method sought to correct the errors of material human work.Footnote 58 This relationship between divine and human, infinite and finite, grounds the “difficult labor” of editing and emending rabbinic texts as a metaphysical task of the “eradication of evil and error in society.”Footnote 59 Truth is located in the eternal ideas of God, whose knowledge humans must seek to cognize. By doing so, the ideal form of a rabbinic law can be reached only through the spiritual struggle of trying to decipher the ideal mathematical principles that undergird reality and, in turn, that ground ideal knowledge.Footnote 60 But this knowledge is not historical-empirical. Quite to the contrary, these emendations sometimes prove contrary to what manuscript research indicates as accurate interpretations of the text.Footnote 61 The Gaon thus employed a kind of metaphysical idealism, which is to say, a view of reality where the truth of things in themselves and of all reality must be sought after in the realm of ideas. The intellectual work of pursuing the perfection of knowing God cannot be guaranteed by the materiality of texts or their human presentation.Footnote 62
But the Gaon's method would find a different iteration in the institutional framework of the modern Yeshivah. Indeed, his idealism was quickly challenged by some of his own students. For example, R. Ḥayim b. Yiṣḥaq of Volozhin (1749–1821) was perhaps most well-known as the disseminator of the Gaon's worldview. As the founder of the Yeshivah of Volozhin,Footnote 63 he is also sometimes credited with the aim of implementing the Gaon's vision in a new institution of Jewish learning for the modern era.Footnote 64 However, by contrast to the Gaon's method of emendation, Ḥayim insisted upon a stark division between the rationality with which authors of talmudic and kabbalistic texts were authorized to emend texts and our own contemporary knowledge.Footnote 65 While generations of the past may have been able to decipher the reasons for the commandments (ṭa‘amei ha-miṣvot), we are not in a position to decipher and alter laws based on our reason; we are only to “guard and enact all that is in the holy written Torah as well as in the Oral Torah, in its legal rules as well as ritual rules, in their specified times, in their details, and in their precise determinations without emending a single alteration.”Footnote 66 If for the Gaon, the work of Torah study rectified human error and eradicated evil, Ḥayim took a decidedly different path to Torah study, in which the enterprise was firmly limited by finite human reason.Footnote 67 Yet Ḥayim also advocated an ideal truth. Human reason was just fundamentally unable to grasp this “highest of higher worlds of the holy Torah,” the “secret clothed in concealment” that is the true word of the divine Torah, “the infinite (‘eyn sof).”Footnote 68 The act of study thus became its own kind of communion with the divine since “His words and His will are identical.”Footnote 69 Rather than assume an idealism in which the thing in itself, the infinite (‘eyn sof) or ideality of Torah, could be glimpsed if only partially, Ḥayim's idealism considered “the holy One blessed be He, Torah (’orayta), and Israel [to be] as one,”Footnote 70 which required the study of Torah to be valued as an end in itself. Overcoming the Vilna Gaon's dualism between human and divine knowledge, Ḥayim sought monistically to relate Torah and knowledge of God in the only way that such knowledge could be possible, namely, within the historically situated reality of Israel (mi-ṣiddeinu). Rather than forge a path toward truth, Ḥayim's idealism proposed an inward turn to the perfection of the received tradition.
Within the walls of the Yeshivah, an almost parallel move occurs to that of Kant's rejection of Leibnizian-Wolffian metaphysics with a turn to understanding the discursive nature of human judgment, bringing the world of sense and the world of understanding into a harmony of spontaneous judgment, and the subsequent monistic turn of the speculative idealism of Fichte and Schelling.Footnote 71 Although no one-to-one correspondence should be intimated, Ḥayim of Volozhin's turn away from idealizing emendation in some ways parallels the immanent and monistic turn of speculative idealism, and Stern has recently shown how those working within Ḥayim's orbit, such as Yitsḥaq Ḥaver and Menaḥem Mendel of Shklov,Footnote 72 developed nuanced understandings of Kant's first Critique as the very destruction of metaphysical realism in favor of a kind of transcendental idealist justification for the study of kabbalah.Footnote 73 Indeed, Pinḥas Hurwitz's Sefer Ha-Berit can be interpreted along similarly Kantian lines when he claims that logic is limited to knowledge of human experience and that only the immanent tradition of kabbalah enables true knowledge of God.Footnote 74 Though presenting a problematic interpretation of Kantian idealism, this shift toward the internal coherence of the Jewish past is crucial. On the front of historical scholarship and in the wake of Ḥayim's ideological revisions, many nineteenth-century midrashic commentators also began adopting the modern historicizing methods drawn from the Wissenschaft, but intended only to help contextualize and support the traditional canon.Footnote 75 If history consisted of defense of the tradition, such a method could find resonance if, however, the sole occupation of the enlightened mind would be the study of Torah.Footnote 76 This unique historical trajectory of ideas had spread throughout the Yeshivah's ideology.Footnote 77 The immanence of the tradition had become a new worldview, an account of historical meaning for Judaism in the modern world.
By the latter half of the century, in many ways built upon this immanent turn, a different shift began to occur. Taking root within the same walls of Volozhin, one of the deans of the institution, R. Yosef Dov Ber Ha-Levi Soloveitchik (1820–1892), began developing a conceptually sophisticated method of study. Disregarding philological questions altogether, Soloveitchik began examining legal contradictions and disagreements that emerged in the legal past by breaking down these disagreements into plausible logical arguments representing the differing approaches of the various rabbinic thinkers’ positions. Soloveitchik thus prioritized the logical system of halakhic or legal reasoning over the context and sources for legal decisions. For just as Ḥayim of Volozhin had spoken of the holiness of the written Torah as the bedrock of the world, since talmudic reasoning is the product of thinking, for Soloveitchik reason must also be seen as the living “parchment of the oral law.”Footnote 78 While halakhic insight cannot be divorced from historical precedent, this attempt to systematize logical positions gave new life to human reason. The immanence of ideas had once again become holy.Footnote 79
Soloveitchik's son, R. Ḥayim Ha-Levi Soloveitchik (1853–1918), took this logical and conceptual focus to new heights. The younger Soloveitchik demonstrated a particular aversion to historical contextualization in his methodology, usually attributed to a reaction against the historical focus of the Haskalah or Wissenschaft,Footnote 80 and his method appears as though a return to the casuistry (pilpul) of the preceding centuries.Footnote 81 But in his monumental study of Maimonides's Mishneh Torah, Soloveitchik not only developed a unique interpretive strategy for understanding seeming contradictions in Maimonides's Code, he also flipped the very idea of Jewish law on its head. By transforming the Mishneh Torah, which had been historically treated as a practical code of law, into a work of theoretical jurisprudence, albeit with certain metaphysical overtones,Footnote 82 Soloveitchik's study of Maimonides fundamentally grapples with the question, what is the nature of the Oral Law? Rather than consider the practical decisions in case law and the responsa literature (she'elot u-teshuvot) as the historical-empirical development of the law, Soloveitchik sought to idealize rabbinic law completely into a system no longer dependent upon historical causality. By understanding the law in ideal categories, Soloveitchik did not see practical applications having any effect on the logical principles undergirding legal concepts.Footnote 83
But unlike ḥilluqim or pilpulistic casuistry, Soloveitchik developed a method that is not interested in abstraction for its own sake but rather in analyzing the alleged “systematic” components of the ideal halakha as they manifest in seemingly contradictory passages. Thus, he developed a number of conceptual distinctions to undertake his analysis (ḥaqira)Footnote 84 of law. These conceptual distinctions mark the modally distinct ways of viewing events that become legally meaningful, such as distinctions between legal causation and fact sets, between obligations upon subjects and the restrictions that fall upon objects, and the distinction between monetary civil law and ritual law.Footnote 85 In each of these instances of distinction between conceptual moments in a halakhic entity, what the methodology presents is a point of access to the overlapping laws and obligations woven together throughout the history of halakha. And through the precision in classification suggested by Soloveitchik, we not only gain access to the individual conceptual elements of the history of halakha, but we even witness the conceptual development of these laws and norms in relation to the world of nature.Footnote 86 By focusing upon the autonomous sphere of legal thinking, however, Soloveitchik's methodology offers a standard of “correctness” that concerns neither empirical reality nor historical objectivity. Rather, the halakha has normative reality in an ideal sphere of objectivity, which in turn helps us understand the conceptual history of the operative concepts of this method.
Analogous to Cohen's idealism, Soloveitchik's methodology transforms the Oral Law into a theoretical construct detached from any connection with natural causality. Instead of a practical-empirical cause for a law to be enacted, an ideal time in which legal categories ought to encounter each other undergirds the reality of legal objects.
For example, in his attempt to address seeming contradictions in Maimonides's Mishneh Torah,Footnote 87 Soloveitchik consistently seeks to vindicate Maimonides's reasoning as displaying an internal logic that breaks down these contradictions into conceptual categories so as to justify his legal rulings as representative of a systematic approach to law.Footnote 88 Thus, in one particularly difficult passage, in which an owner has asked or even hired a watchman to guard his animal, and the animal causes damages,Footnote 89 Maimonides seems to adopt a strict liability view of damages that occurred while a domesticated animal was under the watch of another.Footnote 90 The question many commentators ask is: how does the owner become obligated if his watchman assumed responsibility and kept the watch he was supposed to do and if the animal is not presumed likely to cause damage (the animal is tam)?Footnote 91 Is not the watchman assuming responsibility through this watch and, thus, the one liable for negligence and damages? Additionally, why should it be the case that an unpaid watchman is not liable in the instance of a less complete watch (shemirah peḥutah), since the question of liability for damages would seem to be his obligation to bear?
By ignoring the textual difficulties of squaring Maimonides's ruling with the talmudic passage upon which it is based as well as Maimonides's own rewriting of the law in a responsum indicating the ruling of the Mishneh Torah is a scribal error,Footnote 92 Soloveitchik interprets the traditional presentation of the passage as a logical problem of relating interwoven liabilities and obligations. Thus, Soloveitchik identifies the implicit logic of the ruling as a transfer of responsibility for the property and a consequent transfer of liability or a joint liability between watchman and owner; but in explaining away the textual difficulty, he connects the contractual liability to an additional layer of responsibility established by the tortious event, between victim and tortfeasor.Footnote 93 Soloveitchik therefore explains the ruling in terms of the complex relationship between contract and tort, a difficult problem that contemporary legal theorists know well.Footnote 94 As an ideal construct of legal obligations, Soloveitchik transforms the law into ideal obligations and relations, irrespective of the empirical fact of such an event occurring (or its textual veracity). The law is logical because it is divine.
Soloveitchik's focus upon the immanent logic of the law is an interesting synthesis of the idealism of the Vilna Gaon and that of Ḥayim of Volozhin. Soloveitchik is both committed to internally justifying the received law as well as to identifying the ideal version of that law and the immanent truth of the received tradition. But Soloveithcik's idealism differs from both the Gaon and Ḥayim of Volozhin in that he is interested in “ideal” objectivity or a more logically holistic portrait of normative law. Therefore, history is only a stimulus for arriving at that immanent coherence since the normative decision of later authorities differs on whether the fact of textual variants should affect the legal decision.Footnote 95 As a method, this kind of idealism is not interested in the causal relation between a rabbinic thinker and a normative ruling but is interested in what the law ought to be. It is this underlying conceptualism of the law that Soloveitchik attributed to Maimonides and has become representative of Lithuanian talmudic study.Footnote 96 Thus, Soloveitchik treated Maimonides's later ruling (pesaq) that the law of the Mishneh Torah was incorrectly recorded as he would any other quasi-empirical determination; his interest is not in the practical significance of the textual question but in what the law ought to be.
But it is precisely this refusal to understand the halakha in practical terms that perhaps begs the question of whether this turn to a scientific Lomdus is truly modern or simply a refusal to integrate a concern with reforming the law. Here, it is important to remember the Hegelian dimensions of this modernity, in which the seeming persistence of a traditional metaphysical meaning to the halakha is fused together with the importance of reasoning and thinking about halakhic ideas. Hence, as Shmuel Eisenstadt,Footnote 97 Mark Juergensmeyer,Footnote 98 as well as Dipesh Chakrabarty in a different manner, have all argued, the fact that “modernization” and “westernization” can no longer be understood as synonymous gives weight to the claim that the halakhic conceptualism of Soloveitchik in particular is an attempt to inhabit a space in which the divinity of ideas continues to exert a real force upon the world of thinking and acting. One may reason creatively about the law, but insofar as the law is a divine creation, we aim only at thinking with God. The world of this scientific idealism is still very much enchanted.Footnote 99 Hence, by shifting the focus of halakhic study from practical decision-making to uncovering the first principles of the conceptual logic within the Oral Law, Soloveitchik's method introduces a fundamentally idealist premise: there is an independent sphere of knowledge, halakhic knowledge,Footnote 100 that distinguishes between legal concepts and the “empirical” world that is correlated to these concepts or historical problems such as manuscript variants and the like.
Considered historically, this inward turn to ideas and an immanent frame of reference for the halakhic tradition can also be interpreted as a disavowal of the argument that the value of the Oral Law must be based upon its material conditions. In context therefore, the rise of Lomdus could be seen as a response to the liberal reforms in Imperial Russia and the ensuing social opportunities made available to young Jews,Footnote 101 which historically expanded the cultural world of Eastern European Jews in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. By systematizing or scientifically studying the history of halakha, this rabbinic “idealism” presents a system of ideas independent of the economic or social conditions of Jewish communal life. And Soloveitchik was not the only modern thinker to try and justify the original rulings of Maimonides.Footnote 102 Indeed, he participates in a broader line of interpretation that engages with a concept of historicity specific to rabbinic literature in need of conceptual historical exposition: namely, the concept of mesorah or received tradition. This term comes to represent the ratio juris for a thinker like R. Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz (Ḥazon Ish), whose own interpretation of Maimonides's problematic ruling acknowledges the responsum outright and nevertheless justifies the received textual meaning.Footnote 103 But it is precisely in this concept of received tradition, in which normative ideas obtain a distinct causal reality, that we see how this idealist hermeneutic offers a modernizing strategy. By vindicating a messy history of textual error and confusion with logical categories, the subversion of rabbinic law is stemmed at the source. This idealism becomes a hermeneutic tactic for addressing the challenges of modern historical scholarship and modernization altogether.
Tradition and Reason
As a modernizing tactic, the idealism of the conceptual method synthesizes the Mitnagdic ideology of Volozhin and offers a response to the historicizing trend of Wissenschaft, which attempts to demystify the methods of reasoning of the rabbinic authors of the Oral Law.Footnote 104 But what should we make of these transitions in the methods of study in Volozhin, from the Gaon's metaphysical realism, to Ḥayim of Volozhin's immanent truth of tradition, to the conceptual retrieval of reason? Is this a narrative of continuity or of revolution?
I suggest that the conceptual turn and logical study of halakha in the late nineteenth century is in fact a synthesis of both a modernizing historical consciousness as well as the Vilna Gaon's hermeneutic idealism. Indeed, rather than a turn away from history or a rejection of Wissenschaft by taking seriously the Gaon's hermeneutic idealism, as well as by taking seriously the immanent historicity of the halakha, what R. Ḥayim Soloveitchik and other Lamdanim such as R. Shimon Shkop, R. Moshe Avigdor Amiel, and others developed, was not a revolution but a radicalization of this hermeneutic idealism. They radicalized the kind of inward turn toward cohering ideas drawn from talmudic and rabbinic exegetical texts with a new iteration of what human reason should be able to achieve. By critically reexamining the language of the legal past and the juridical concepts of halakhic texts, the conceptual approach reinvigorates the role of human reason. Rather than the source of error and materiality, reason becomes a historically refracted reality of the Jewish past. That is to say, by integrating Ḥayim of Volozhin's inward turn toward tradition and the scrupulous observance of the commandments, the conceptual approach transformed reason into a living source of the Oral Law. In the hands of these conceptual thinkers, the ideality of reason therefore became a means of justifying a modern talmudic Judaism.
For example, Shkop's definition of reason (sekhel) pushes the very idea to a breaking point. Even as he claims that the rules of evidence in civil law are not based “in the positive commands of the Torah (ḥuqqim), but their basis is in the consistency of our reason,”Footnote 105 this is so only because “our reason acquiesces to hear the word of God, just as reason decrees that we heed what our sages warn us.”Footnote 106 Reason is both subordinate to the word of God and at the same time the source of logical consistency for civil procedure. It is both a human contrivance as well as the vehicle for submitting to the ideal truth of God. For Shkop, the significance of the breaking of the stone tablets at Sinai is that we must seize the overflow (shepha‘) of reason to Israel and “each person must prepare tablets for himself.”Footnote 107 Reason becomes a source of truth once more.
But this vindication of human reason is not to suggest that reason gains independence or an autonomous status from the history of the Oral Law. Rather, reason is the dialectical aggregation of determinate moments of the Jewish past. Hence, Shkop's student R. Moshe Avigdor Amiel in his magnum opus, Ha-Midot le-Ḥeqer ha-Halakha, criticizes the Wissenschaft methodology of Isaac Hirsch Weiss's monumental study of Oral Law, Dor Dor ve-Dorshav, and the attempt to historicize the halakha by mapping “the evolution of the oral law” in reference to external historical causes. Amiel believes such an approach fails because it does not consider the proper dimension of historicity unique to halakhic rationality itself. Thus, he writes:
Because [the proponents of Wissenschaft] consider the analysis of Talmud to fall under the rubric of “ḥokhmat yisra'el,” which is to say, not “torat yisra'el” but rather exclusively “ḥokhmat yisra'el,” and this arises for them as part of the “haskalah.” Thus the entire principle [of the enterprise] was based upon the ground of “the house of Israel will become like all other nations.” They wanted to teach by means of “ḥokhmat yisra'el” that we also have something akin to the other nations, and for this reason, they were able to further understand our poetry, our philosophy, even at times the aggadic portions of the Talmud, because to this end, [literary analogues] can also be found among the other nations, and can be distinguished. But the legal portion—and this is our most originary source, of which it is impossible for us to see examples of in their works in any comparable thing—in this we find them in no way interested to concern themselves with any aspect of it at all.Footnote 108
In other words, the fount of uniquely Jewish reason, according to Amiel, is talmudic knowledge. Talmudic knowledge is not, however, simply “logic” but is the historically developed rationality of Judaism.Footnote 109 Thus, it is through the scientific idealism of the conceptual approach of talmudic knowledge, or as he refers to it, “pilpul,” that we find the historicity of this legal science and thus locate the space for radicalizing the Hebrew language manifestation of Wissenschaft (ḥokhmat yisrael) with talmudic knowledge (ḥokhmat talmud). Thus, converting the Haskalic pejorative into an emphatically modern account of knowledge, Amiel idealizes pilpul as the methodology of talmudic knowledge.
Talmudic knowledge, which is Amiel's term for the conceptual approach, is an idealization of historically developed law. If the conceptual study of the Oral Law develops its own autonomous sphere of cognition, which as Amiel writes is the sphere wherein so-called “pilpul” is understood as the methodology of reason itself, “it is not just the curvature of reason (ha-sekhel), but on the contrary, the depth of reason, and this depth proceeds and deepens more and more from generation to generation.”Footnote 110 Talmudic knowledge is a cultural institution, not simply a collection of principles.Footnote 111 Indeed, talmudic knowledge sits atop the head of “all knowledge in the world” and, through the generational development of this knowledge, develops its principles through its proper methodology of “pilpul.” Hence, though an idealistic form of cognition, according to Amiel, it is not ahistorical since it is unlike
philosophy, for example, whereby in general [knowledge] does not emerge from appeal to sensible experience in man, but is only connected to the first principles a priori (muskalot rishonot she-hayu ba-teḥillah ha-rishonah). It is not so with talmudic knowledge, since from age to age, the first principles are multiplied.Footnote 112
The principles of talmudic knowledge, though they are ideal and persist from generation to generation, nevertheless develop upon that very temporal horizon. It is precisely because of the normative history of talmudic knowledge that the methodology of reason is identical with the development of its own principles. In other words, the historicity of these concepts emerges dialectically through the actualization of this knowledge and reason in time. The ideality of legal concepts means that the interpretation of rabbinic texts becomes a hermeneutic of idealizing and of conceptualizing the norms of law as they relate to each other and, thus, as they develop in that relation. Reason becomes an ideal institution developing in time, culminating in the modern self-consciousness of the conceptual approach, able to narrate the past in logical terms. Reason becomes tradition.
Conclusion
At this point, it might seem as though I've actually made a stronger case for the claim that the “historical” consciousness of the Haskalah and Wissenschaft is completely lacking in the Yeshivah world of Eastern Europe or even Cohen's idealism. Indeed, if the Vilna Gaon and R. Ḥayim Soloveitchik can completely ignore the historical provenance of rabbinic literature and reorient these texts according to their contemporary norms, perhaps this would suggest just the kind of arbitrary “confessionalism” Zunz had feared. Yet, I believe that by focusing upon this idealist hermeneutic, we can see that the methodological goal of this halakhic literature is not the willful ignorance of history but the idealization of the past into conceptual form. Such a work would indicate a completely novel standard of accuracy for judging the historical object in rabbinic literature.
Idealism thus finds expression in the late nineteenth century as a means of systematizing rabbinic law or, at least, the Jewish legal past. Cohen sought to temporalize ethical norms into legal judgment, rejecting the naturalistic explanations of historicism, and he identified a unique sphere of legal ontology that frees legal norms from the causal necessity of natural causality. Soloveitchik's method also frees halakhic norms from being reduced to historicized influences, decisions, and historical considerations. Just as reason becomes a developing institution of ideal norms and principles for Cohen, as a means of justifying Judaism in light of philosophical discussions of moral law and scientific cognition, Shkop and Amiel transform reason into the living knowledge of the Jewish people. Bringing these spheres together, I believe we gain a clearer picture of what we mean by a modern Jewish “historical” consciousness.
Of course, the lingering question remains whether the claim that both Cohen and Soloveitchik share this methodological distinction between natural-causal and legal ontology is sufficient to label both thinkers idealist. After all, Soloveitchik most certainly identified the legal ontology of the halakha as “binding” with a degree of “necessity” perhaps more fitting for causal nature. Furthermore, some might object to my use of idealism as a term that neither Soloveitchik nor Shkop and Amiel, yet alone the Vilna Gaon or Ḥayim of Volozhin, would have used to identify themselves. My answer is simply that idealism helps name the common hermeneutic tactic of turning to the immanence of ideas in history, which can be analyzed according to an autonomous sphere of cognition from that of natural causality or historical conditions that may affect how laws are legislated. Further, by using this appellation of idealism, I believe we gain insight into how “modern Jewish thought” remains an empty designation without trying to translate the conceptual structure of rabbinic interpretation into philosophical terms and vice versa. The idealization of historical disparities is aimed only at pointing to what I believe to be a shared idealist premise in Cohen, Soloveitchik, Shkop, and Amiel. This is the distinction between natural causal time and historically ideal time.
I therefore believe it is fair to characterize this facet of Jewish modernity as genealogically shaped by an idealizing hermeneutic strategy. For the thinkers I have investigated in this article, the ideal normativity they find in the historical sources of rabbinic law provides resources for developing what they believe is an internal logic of Judaism, one that is best adapted to modern historical consciousness. As I have argued, this is one way of intervening in the dominant focus upon the “historical consciousness” of nineteenth-century Jewish thought and pointing to a different trajectory. By referring to this minority tradition as idealism, I have tried to show how both philosophical and rabbinic thought, in both Eastern and Western locales of Jewish life in Europe, struggled with a similar hermeneutic problem of modern thought, of justifying rabbinic law as more than blindly received tradition but an internally coherent system of reasons that can be justified within the modern world. And while this form of reason may not obviously fit the shape of scientific rationality in the majority culture of Europe, I do believe we gain a more holistic picture of this piece of Jewish modernity by taking its conceptual idealism seriously.
Indeed, idealism becomes a strategy for justifying a modern Judaism. It is an immanent justification of the historicity of rabbinic law, but it is one that is implicit to the self-understanding of the modern rabbinic tradition. By turning to the received tradition, to mesorah, and its status as an object of study for Jews trying to justify their practices in modernity, my argument has suggested that, rather than reactions against or a rejection of some majoritarian discourse, by analogy to Cohen's idealism these methods emerging within the traditional Yeshivah world are conceptually apiece with some dominant ideas of modernity itself, which as Robert Pippin has argued, can be characterized precisely as idealism.Footnote 113 By suggesting that both Lomdus and Cohen's philosophy, which inspired the entire Weimar generation to follow, can be interpreted genealogically as understudied pieces of Jewish modernity, my hope is that such an understanding will contribute to a minority history of Jewish thought. I hope that such a reconsideration of the modernism of these idealist hermeneutic strategies can help shed further light on how Jews sought justification for their continued religious and cultural existence by resisting “scientific” assimilation.
