Introduction
On Monday, September 9, 1940, in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), Rabbi Dr. Louis Finkelstein gave the opening address at the inaugural Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion in Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life (CSPR). In the first in a series of annual meetings that would last until 1968, JTS's recently appointed president warned his audience that “the military struggle in Europe [was] but one phase, perhaps a minor phase, of a far greater conflict, namely that between ideas which make for the development, and those which make for the destruction of human civilization.”Footnote 1 In line with the description in Time magazine's 1951 cover story that pictured him as “a reasonable modern facsimile of an Old Testament patriarch,” Finkelstein worked to fashion American leaders to serve God for the good of mankind.Footnote 2 In the face of the threat of political totalitarianism abroad and increasing intellectual polarization at home, America needed to protect its foundational liberal ideologies of pluralism and freedom.
Those assembled that day at JTS were neither the next cohort of young rabbis-in-training nor a meeting of Jewish clergy and educators; rather, the congregation Finkelstein addressed included Protestant and Catholic theologians, natural and physical scientists, and academics from across the humanities and burgeoning social sciences. Then–New York governor Herbert H. Lehman articulated his belief, which Finkelstein shared at the CSPR's first session, that only such a broad contingent could effectively serve as “moulders of American thought.”Footnote 3 In such an unstable political and intellectual atmosphere, Finkelstein imagined that his seminary, which hosted and funded the conference,Footnote 4 could be the incubator for rearticulating America's moral, intellectual, and political footing, and that he, its leader, should assume the role of American prophet. As a place of study and worship that carried on the lineage of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, including their heirs, the Pharisees who founded Rabbinic Judaism, JTS was already an “ethical ‘abode’” for the American democratic ethos.Footnote 5
In one oft-cited analysis of the ubiquitous, and nebulous, midcentury invocation of America's Judeo-Christian foundations, the CSPR is described as the quintessential example of “[a]ntifascist affirmation of a shared religious basis for western values … [among] liberal academics and intellectuals.”Footnote 6 If totalitarianism was an all-out attack on democratic values that had hijacked Western thought for pernicious ends, the war effort could not neglect the need for a unified intellectual and moral front to protect the American way of life.Footnote 7 The formation of what scholars have dubbed a “trifaith America,” the alliances among Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, was a core constituent of this effort at collaboration,Footnote 8 although the Judeo-Christian alliance, in reality, “was neither as productive of stable cultural consensus nor as liberal, tolerant, or inclusive” as the progressive narrative of increased tolerance suggests.Footnote 9 Furthermore, within a fractured American liberal subculture, there existed widespread animus between Catholics and liberal Protestants; Jews struggled to chart out places in the public sphere as secular subjects and religious voices;Footnote 11 and others rejected traditional religions and placed their faith exclusively in the methods of modern science.Footnote 12
Those who chose to participate in the CSPR were driven by a shared faith in democracy to cultivate alliances among not only religions but also philosophical stances and epistemic systems. In the shadow of increasingly authoritative modern science, culture wars not only pitted religious fundamentalists against modernists who embraced the epistemic challenges of modernity, but also produced questions among modernists about how to best draw on scientific and religious systems for the sake of democratic governance.Footnote 13 Finkelstein sought to engage in an experiment in methods of “corporate” thinking, reflective of a belief in scientific management that could formulate a unifying philosophy that would likewise protect intellectual autonomy.Footnote 14 As Fred Beuttler has argued in his extensive analysis of the CSPR, the goal of developing a maximally inclusive “moral pluralism” should be viewed in large part as the attempt to create an “institutional structure” to manage and build a “moral framework that would support democratic values.”Footnote 15 As an effort to formulate a mode of pluralistic governance reflective of and fitting its intellectual and political context, the CSPR became a semipublic forum, housed in a Jewish seminary, to contend with America's Protestant-dominated intellectual, social, and political institutions.Footnote 16
The CSPR was but one among a number of academic conferences in this period that directed intellectual energies toward establishing social and political stability.Footnote 17 New York University's 1932 centennial conference, “The Obligation of Universities to the Social Order,” had succeeded in putting religious conservatives and technocratic progressives on the same program; however, it had created as many questions as answers about how to relate “spiritual values” and “specialized scientific expertise,” each of which was represented by a group of men who claimed they held the necessary, and even sufficient, key to modern democratic life.Footnote 18 Later, to rival the CSPR, a group of pragmatists and secular humanists, led by John Dewey, founded the Conference on the Scientific Spirit and Democratic Faith (CSSDF), which met annually between 1943 and 1946.Footnote 19 During this same period, interfaith organizations and religious leaders came together around their belief that religion was fundamental to a stable American democratic social order.Footnote 20 The CSPR attempted to include representatives of all these groups, although some, including pragmatist Dewey, declined the invitation.Footnote 21
Stories of binary opposition dominate the historiography of the period. The CSPR and the CSSDF, for example, are cast as representing “opposing teams” in the fight between logical positivism and Judeo-Christianity, groups whose “captains” were “Catholic theology and pragmatism,”Footnote 22 respectively. To treat the conferences in these terms risks reproducing problematic, simplistic narratives of clear-cut divisions between religious liberalism and conservatism, and of religion and science as distinct, ideologically isolated bodies of ideas and practitioners. Midcentury historical actors had already begun to question the pervasive ideology that modern science was value-neutral and point out flaws in efforts to surgically extract the history of science from the tissue of institutional religion.Footnote 23 Scholarship on the period has also challenged the integrity of the category “science” in the period's debates about the best bases for public policy by showing how natural, physical, and social scientists disagreed about the political relevance of their expertise.Footnote 24 In parallel, scholars of religion have critiqued the narrowness, exclusiveness, and coherence of religious liberalism, pointing to the way Protestants deployed the category to the exclusion of others, especially Catholics; to groups, such as Conservative Jews, that defy the terms of this taxonomy; and to the breadth of Protestant theological positions within it.Footnote 25 The mélange of religious traditions and scientific theories in popular “spiritual cosmopolitanism,”Footnote 26 and the ways that the elite scientific study of religion integrated religious values of sympathy with scientific methods for the “regulated encounter with difference”Footnote 27 further challenge the category's integrity. This article, by complement, does not take these categories as “natural objects,”Footnote 28 but rather as historical formations, and approaches Finkelstein's CSPR as an encounter among representatives of “multiple cultures” invested in American liberalism.Footnote 29 By doing so, it is able to show how science was instrumental to, and how non-Protestant models of religion shaped, the terms of negotiations of midcentury American pluralism.
In this vein, this article models an approach to twentieth-century American religion that groups science with religions, inclusive of Judaism, Protestantism, and Catholicism. By replacing “trifaith America” with “tetrafaith America,” it resists a facile slippage into discourses of commensurability among the “religions” and emphasizes that these traditions all have ethical, philosophical, epistemological, and political dimensions in which Americans place faith. To describe a collaboration among faiths, however many, is to imagine an idealized alliance that risks masking their competition and conceals a great deal of difference within categories for the sake of analytic tractability. Like trifaith America, the tetrafaith model recognizes the normative force of one partner in setting the terms of comparison, as well as each constituent tradition's history of defining its identity in opposition to the others.Footnote 30 By reading the CSPR as a site of lived pluralism, this article seeks to cast light on some of the intellectual affinities and fault lines that structured horizontal ties among diverse American elites, the verticality of relationships between elites with differing public authority, and the strategies that Finkelstein deployed to navigate and manage representatives of America's faiths.Footnote 31
At the center of the story this article seeks to tell is Finkelstein, who deployed his religious and intellectual tradition to sketch the contours of tetrafaith collaboration for the sake of public, democratic governance. As he joined a chorus of voices calling for American unity whose foundation would be the “religions of democracy,” Finkelstein was neither immune to the scientism of his time nor naïve about the “cultural force” of Protestantism in defining the category of “religion.” Not only did Finkelstein recognize science as a countervailing force to Protestant authority in public life, he celebrated scientific methods for producing and organizing knowledge at the CSPR and in his own scholarship. Two decades prior to Herberg's civic religion, Finkelstein conceptualized the “democratic way of life”; it responded to, and was informed by, his vision of Judaism as an intellectual tradition with relevance for public governance of a nation whose faith combined science and Judeo-Christianity.Footnote 32
Finkelstein recalled that the idea for the CSPR emerged in conversation with Henry Sloane Coffin, president of the neighboring Union Theological Seminary, about a decade before the first conferenceFootnote 33; this article shows how Finkelstein's Jewish tradition served as a non-Protestant model of encounter that shaped the CSPR. As a leader of Conservative Judaism, Finkelstein championed a ritualistic and legalistic vision of the Jewish tradition based on rabbinic texts while acknowledging modern Judaism's necessary entanglement with the legacies of the Reformation and Enlightenment.Footnote 34 Finkelstein spoke in the idioms of “nonspecific Protestantism,” but infused and disrupted them with particularly Jewish ones, too. He claimed that his own tradition's modes of thought and practice had created and supported the “metaphysical scheme that made possible and governed” America's Protestant religiosity and secularism.Footnote 35 History, Finkelstein argued, had shown that before and behind Protestant religiosity, modern science, and the secular democratic state, his historical, legal, practice-based tradition made the American way of life possible.
The legacy of the CSPR has been minimized, overshadowed by criticisms about the lack of concrete accomplishments and engrained factionalism. Alternatively, its legacy is presented with a sense of optimism about its potential as a model for interfaith collaboration.Footnote 36 Finkelstein's approach to the study of Judaism and to the CSPR was scientific and sympathetic but not submissive: Steadfast in his convictions and confidently contrarian, Finkelstein has a lot to offer to contemporary scholars of American religion. The CSPR's most significant legacy, then, may be what it can teach us, those invested in the academic study of religion in the twenty-first century, not only about the players in the collaboration but also about the politics of history and comparison in making the American “democratic way of life.”
The article begins by introducing Finkelstein's presentation of the Jewish tradition and its relationship to science in a selection of his publications from the 1930s and 1940s. It then traces how Finkelstein deploys a Jewish political theology at the CSPR.Footnote 37 In his statement of purpose for the conference, he articulated a positive vision for collaboration among scientists and religious leaders based on his account of Judaism's fundamental contributions to “the “Democratic Way of Life.” The statement, in turn, set the terms of debate for the first meeting of the CSPR's Executive Committee in 1939, for which the meeting transcript shows that scientists and Protestant theologians pushed back at Finkelstein's effort to cut their authority down to size. When the founding members met a year later, in the face of debate over democratic stability and the question of epistemic certainty, Finkelstein defended the possibility that modern Judaism could lead American public culture. Finally, this article turns to the 1940 CSPR to show how Finkelstein managed competing epistemologies using the tools of the Jewish textual tradition to frame his authoritative, direct connection to a universal, accessible God.
Toward an American Great Assembly
Finkelstein was hardly the first American Jewish leader to claim that modern Judaism, heir to the Hebrew prophets, was an ideal democratic faith that had universal value; nor was he alone in securing a place for Jews in America by suggesting that Jews, practitioners of the “core” of “the Judeo-Christian tradition,”Footnote 38 could serve as a living moral and political model for a peaceful world.Footnote 39 What distinguished Finkelstein was his claim that Rabbinic Judaism, initiated by the ancient Pharisees and developed continuously over the course of two thousand years, augmented the Prophetic tradition with essential contributions to democracy and the development of modern science. Totalitarian regimes and their ideologies of progress not only put the Jewish people in existential danger but also threatened to destroy Jewish intellectual achievements, which included democracy, religion, and science.Footnote 40
This section lays out how Finkelstein's understanding of Rabbinic Judaism, and his position as a Talmud scholar, rabbi, and leader of JTS, shaped the contours of the CSPR. Beginning with his scientific studies of Jewish history and rabbinic texts, it shows how Finkelstein culled political, philosophical, theological, and scientific insights from the Jewish past. It then proceeds to his public scholarship and leadership to demonstrate how his understanding of Conservative Judaism undergirded his conceptualization of the CSPR and his role as a leader of a coalition of democratic scholars and theologians.
Political Histories: The Jewish Source of and Guide for Democratic Governance
Finkelstein put history to work to secure the “democratic way of life” and to justify the continued relevance of Jews and Judaism within America. Finkelstein's writing of history was a political act that blurred past and present. He drew on his training in modern historicism in the secular academy and a theological understanding of the Jewish covenant as a continually unfolding narrative to transform Rabbinic thought into a living guide for American governance.Footnote 41 In his scholarship, including historical accounts of Jewish communal life and technical philological studies of rabbinic manuscripts, he did not hesitate to include statements about the contemporary relevance of historical models. Furthermore, he projected modern epistemic values, especially objectivity, back onto sacred biblical and rabbinic texts,Footnote 42 holding them up as true records that could be culled for timeless ethical values and models of democratic governance.
In Finkelstein's interfaith work, including his participation in the CSPR, he would call on scholars and religious leaders to recognize “their common responsibility for the welfare of our country”Footnote 43 and develop methods for consensus, “mutual consultation,” and the “integration of the totality of our experience” for the sake of “democratic life.”Footnote 44 From his knowledge of the Talmudic record, Finkelstein recognized that history was repeating itself. In the Foreword to The Pharisees, Finkelstein observed that contemporary society was showing symptoms of the same “prosaic, self-centered, materialistic, and cynical” culture, rotted to its spiritual core, which had brought ancient Rome to its knees. The Pharisees, as “profoundly spiritual” intellectuals who resisted assimilation to the decaying culture around them, could offer “guidance” for the contemporary crisis, hopefully preventing the same kind of “weakened sense of communal responsibility, particularly on the part of the intellectuals” that had preceded Rome's demise.Footnote 45
To make a case for the relevance of ancient history for twentieth-century America, Finkelstein traced a continuous line from modern Judaism back to the Second Temple Period sect, and by analogy, linked the Puritan origins of America to those of Rabbinic Judaism. “Pharisaism was Prophecy in action,” Finkelstein argued, because they had rekindled “the words of the ancient seers … like flames of fire out of their own hearts.” In turn, he explained, “Pharisaism became Talmudism, Talmudism became Medieval Rabbinism, and Medieval Rabbinism became Modern Rabbinism.” Although the names changed and practices evolved, “the spirit of the ancient Pharisee survive[d] unaltered.” The Pharisees were not only an anchor for Jewish leadership, but also an intellectual bridge between East and West, having drawn out vital “energies” from the Arabian Peninsula and cultivated a revival of “thought, commerce, and even government.”Footnote 46 Through this argument, Finkelstein fought back against supercessionist narratives claiming that European Aryan roots came from Hellenic, rather than Hebraic, sources.Footnote 47 By describing the Jewish spirit as a light within the Dark Ages, he likewise disrupted the Enlightenment–Reformation synthesis that fused the birth of Protestantism and the revival of Greek thought, as he denaturalized the ties between Protestant political theology and the American “democratic way of life.”Footnote 48
To root Jews in American soil and to anchor America to Jewish sacred narratives, Finkelstein also drew a parallel between the ancient Israelites and the Puritans. In the language of class, values, and destiny, Finkelstein wrote the story of a shared fight by the righteous against the powerful, enacted through piety and devotion, that culminated in “the Talmud of Babylonia” and “the culture of New England.” At a time when Protestant liberals were backing away from their Calvinist roots, and anticipating the Protestant accusation that Jewish (and Catholic) tradition was legalistic, he reminded his readers that America, too, was built on the Puritans’ religious legalism.Footnote 49
In Jewish history, Finkelstein also located specific models of leadership that could guide a troubled modern world in the struggle to maintain freedom and deal with “social conflicts” that were “once more with us, though in somewhat new form.” In the face of the “collapse of Palestinian civilization,” which had come “to parallel … the eclipse of reason in our own day,” Rabbi Akiba could serve as a political, philosophical, and ethical guide, as he had for Maimonides and Aquinas: “Artisans have been succeeded by factory hands; Samaritans and Ammonites by powerful nations; scriptural studies by modern science,” but Akiba's “solutions still remain strangely applicable to our own time” and serve as invaluable resources for “the statesman and the sociologist, as well as to the historian and the general reader.” By writing his biography, Finkelstein hoped to render Akiba's insights, “found on almost every page” of the Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmuds, accessible to his democratic partners.Footnote 50 In doing so, he was carrying on the legacy of another hero, Maimonides, who, like the best-trained modern jurist, could navigate the Talmud, “that great reservoir of Jewish tradition which like the sea, to which it is so frequently compared, contains unparalleled treasures for him who knows where to find them.”Footnote 51
Finkelstein also located a series of historical models of a council of experts convened to solve communal issues. From the “Great Assemblies” of Ancient Israel,Footnote 52 to the Rabbinic High Courts (the Sanhedrins), to the Rabbinic Synods of the Middle Ages, Finkelstein identified a continuous thread of democratic leadership that included not only patricians or priests, but also plebeians, and which based membership on scholarly, not heredity, qualifications.Footnote 53 These meritorious groups were ethical, political, and juridical bodies whose expert knowledge of tradition not only guided practice but also preserved minority opinions that were not codified as law. The result was a rich archive that modeled the value of tolerance and preserved Hebrew culture when threatened by powerful outsiders.Footnote 54 These Jewish bodies were thus responsible for the creation and maintenance of what Americans valued as truly democratic government.
Although Finkelstein did not explicitly describe the CSPR as a kind of Great Assembly, the parity among bodies of diverse experts brought together in times of crisis was no coincidence. Like the historical figures he held up as heroes, from the biblical Simeon the Righteous, to Rabbis Akiba and Hillel of Talmudic literature, to Maimonides and other rabbis across European and Muslim lands in the Middle Ages, Finkelstein understood himself as a textual interpreter and communal leader responsible for managing grave, “international” crises. Finkelstein's historical scholarship, then, was not merely an “inverted image of practice”Footnote 55 in written word, but rather a practice that could transcend the page, entering the lecture hall or the meeting room, and steering the helm of an institution or conference.
Pluralistic Guardians of Thought and Practice
To stem the tide of anti-Semitism, Finkelstein partnered with organizations like the National Council for Christians and Jews (NCCJ)Footnote 56 and started initiatives internal to JTSFootnote 57 to present Judaism to non-Jewish audiences in terms recognizable to Christian neighbors.Footnote 58 He was careful to frame Jews as a religious minorityFootnote 59 rather than as an ethnic or racial group, bound not by blood but by a covenant with God.Footnote 60 The Jewish people upheld that covenant, passed on across the generations, through a specific set of laws and practices overseen by learned and sagacious scholars. Although it had become popular in Christian civilization to caricature Phariseeism as “narrow bigotry,”Footnote 61 rendering the legal and ritual elements of Judaism as liabilities for Judaism's public relevance, Finkelstein argued that the primary mode of Jewish worship, the “study and practice of the Talmudic Law,” was essentially democratic.Footnote 62 That his Judaism did not resemble Protestant religion, Finkelstein insisted, did not mean it was foreign to American values, nor was it an antiquated relic out of step with modernity.
JTS, Finkelstein argued in his 1939 address for its semicentennial celebration, had been founded in the wake of nineteenth-century intellectual challenges, from Darwinian evolutionary theory to biblical higher criticism, when moderns had lost faith in the wisdom of centuries of great thinkers. Unlike those who “think that we have but two alternatives, to reject or to accept the law, but in either case to treat it as a dead letter,” the Seminary's founders refused the simple choice between Reform and traditionalism.Footnote 63 Conservative Judaism's vision was rational and adaptive. It maintained Judaism's historical genius that created the tradition as a living body whose skeleton was a flexible, just legal system, not a fossil in a museum or an inert stone tablet like the Code of Hammurabi. As such, JTS was a place of study, worship, and leadership led by rabbinic experts who could be trusted as “clear-sighted” in the fog of modernity without being “blinded” by secular promises of progress.Footnote 64 The Conservative Movement's approach, Finkelstein suggested, required neither belief nor the sacrifice of reason, and thus did not render Judaism an irrational possession, out of step with disenchanted modernity; rather, it was predicated on rigorous intellectual principles.Footnote 65
Finkelstein's insistence that Judaism was necessarily rooted in Jewish law stood in contradistinction with the Reform Movement's rejection of ritualistic and legalistic forms of practice. Public voices of Reform Judaism, notably Gustav Gottheil and Abba Hillel Silver, argued that their version of Judaism represented a democratic faith, as they maintained the universal, ethical nature of Judaism.Footnote 66 Finkelstein, by contrast, felt that the Reform Movement had abandoned the laws and practices incumbent upon all Jews as a fulfillment of the covenant between God and the Israelites. Still, he was careful to present all Jews as a unified whole, whose different institutions and forms were not sectarian divisions, and whose people shared the undying Jewish spirit born of covenantal theology, regardless of a person's knowledge or practice.Footnote 67
Finkelstein introduced Judaism to interfaith audiences by explaining that “rigorous … discipline, as ideally conceived in Jewish writings,” was meant to render everyday practice a mode of “communion with God.” Jewish law and ritual not only reinforced ethical engagement with neighbors, but also made Jews ideal citizens, capable of living as loyal members of secular states. Phariseeism preserved what had become the basis of Judeo-Christian religions: “[T]he principles of the Fatherhood of God and the dignity and worth of Man as the child and creature of God.” Footnote 68
Judaism likewise grounded hope for a stable future because of its historical relationship to science. Against the common argument that modern science was rooted in Hellenistic culture, Finkelstein affirmed the popular view that “[t]he Greeks contributed method and ideas to science” while insisting that “the Hebrew prophets endowed it with much of its dynamic power and its ability to persist in the face of obstacles.” The Hebrews, always making finite steps toward a transcendent infinite, inspired the search for absolute truth in nature while Greek science remained tentative. When rabbinic culture encountered Greek ideas, in turn, they extended an “urge to know the truth … [that had been] expressed primarily in a desire to understand the will of God as revealed in Scripture … [to] the whole realm of human thought and experience.”Footnote 69 Finkelstein wanted scientists, like Christians, to know of their debts to Rabbinic Judaism.
In the ethical, legal, and scientific genius preserved in the Talmud and subsequent Rabbinic commentaries, Finkelstein found the fundamental enactment of democratic principles, tried and tested through millennia of crises, to guide the people through troubled times. Finkelstein was adamant that his Judaism, rooted in “study and action, Ma'aseh and Talmud,”Footnote 70 created and sustained universal values that had, over centuries, been woven into the fabric of Western civilization, stretching to meet changing needs. It is no coincidence that the CSPR's Executive Committee described its mission in the same terms as Finkelstein's Judaism: The CSPR was an “active collaboration on the levels of both thought and action.”Footnote 71
Renewing the American Experiment: Louis Finkelstein's 1939 Vision of a More Perfect Union
In the introduction to a statement he drafted in preparation for the CSPR Executive Committee's first planning meeting in 1939, Finkelstein wrote that America's “contribution [to the spiritual life] is the more significant because it has been made by no individual or group of individuals, but by the people, and is inherent in the very fabric of her existence.” Echoing his sociological study of ancient Pharisaic culture and his description of Jewish tradition, Finkelstein argued that American democracy was not merely a “political device” but an entire “way of life and thought, based on the religious faith in human dignity and immortality.” The fundamental values of “liberty and human equality,” he added, were neither “secular” nor “anti-religious” but “part of a religious tradition.”Footnote 72 Like other Jewish leaders of the period, Finkelstein Judaicized America's founding political philosophy as he set the terms of debate for the 1940 CSPR.Footnote 73 In it, Finkelstein infused the familiar terms of “nonspecific Protestantism” with his particular Jewish political theology and emphasized the role multiple faiths had played in American history.Footnote 74
Finkelstein began by celebrating religious freedom and pluralism, choosing the term “Prophetic Faiths” rather than “Judeo-Christian,” which many considered code for assimilation to Protestant norms.Footnote 75 In the opening pages, he honored the Catholic founders of Maryland and Baptist founders of Rhode Island, who had been trailblazers in the establishment of religious freedom. “The spirit of the Republic,” he continued, was symbolized not by the traditions of any particular group but by the universal celebration of American civil religion, Thanksgiving Day. This festival commemorated Native Americans and Protestants who joined together based on “the firm rock of belief in God, and in human brotherhood and dignity,” values he rooted in Judaism. This idealized pluralism maintained unity without forcing assimilation in a “melting-pot … [of] colorless and meaningless universalism.”Footnote 76 Through this founding myth, Finkelstein resisted the secularization and Protestantization of America and its history.Footnote 77
He turned next to the specific contributions of Judaism to Western civilization and, using Jewish idioms, he articulated the present threat posed by atheistic and pagan “totalitarian ‘religions.’” German and Soviet societies were dangerous reincarnations of Rome: Their beliefs were based in the apotheosis of Hitler and mummification of Lenin (like an ancient Pharaoh) and they were capable of reversing ethical growth and sending America back to the Dark Ages. These modern foes were particularly dangerous because of their appropriations of efficient scientific tools and deployment of pseudoscientific racial theories and falsified histories, which they effectively promoted through “subtle propaganda.” With evocative flourish, Finkelstein warned that liberty of thought and ethical standards were being “sacrifice[d] to the Moloch of irreligion and anti-religion.”Footnote 78 Secularization, the “replacement of God, by the social group, as the primary concept of the ethical life,” leaves society vulnerable to a pervasive rot that threatens the very “fabric” of civilization. He cited signs of decaying religious tolerance and trends away from state religious disestablishment in America. Likewise, he noted popular amnesia about the essential links between the preservation of science and “the Christian monasteries and the Jewish Rabbinical Schools,” and between Prophetic faith and America's Puritan origins. He then quoted Benjamin Franklin, who, as he concluded the Constitutional Convention, “warned us” that to avoid despotism and maintain democracy, the people had to gird themselves against corruption. Contemporary scientific geniuses—“an Edison, a Marconi, a Rockefeller, a Ford, and an Einstein”—could not animate the Western soul like the “imaginative writing” of the humanists of past eras: “Shakespeare, Milton, Keats or Wordsworth.” Americans were in desperate need of spiritual inspiration.Footnote 79
Against those who claimed that history was cyclical, and that the degradation of democracy into despotism was inevitable, Finkelstein propounded a progressive history born of Prophetic faith. “Democracy as a form of government can never be outmoded, for it is the final aim toward which political theory and organization has been moving since the beginning of history.” Parallel to his writings on Judaism, where he explained that, “like early Christianity,” ancient Jews established legal and ritual “regulations” “to prevent reversion to paganism,”Footnote 80 he reinforced the importance of religion as a prophylaxis against totalitarianism. His statement echoed a common refrain in his writings: “If Democracy is to survive, it must be reestablished on its permanent logical foundation—the Prophetic doctrine of the Fatherhood of God and the dignity and equality of men,” which God handed the Jews at Sinai, and which had proven, over thousands of years, capable of withstanding even the most trying “political and economic stress.” When compared with the “efficiency,” “power,” and “discipline” of totalitarianism, democracy could not “survive as a secular phenomenon.”Footnote 81
In his proposed modern gathering of experts where “the various faiths and sciences [would] cooperate,” Finkelstein strategically emphasized the importance of minority faiths. He made a special overture to Catholics, whose faith Protestants had long vilified as antidemocratic, and who had historically been less sympathetic to the ideals of interfaith collaboration.Footnote 82 He imagined a school run by scientific and religious experts, inspired by “Averroes the Mohammedan, Aquinas the Christian, and Maimonides the Jew,” whose philosophies “contain formulations of the element common to the three faiths” and who demonstrate that science and religion are compatible and complementary.Footnote 83 It went without explicit comment that these religious icons and medieval geniuses lived in an era before the youngest “Prophetic Faith,” Protestantism, and that Muslims were not part of the American pluralistic imaginary. Immediately, Finkelstein introduced the figure of Francis Bacon, a devout Protestant natural philosopher who understood that the sciences needed religion. Paraphrasing Bacon, Finkelstein noted that sciences, like youth, needed to lean even more heavily on established wisdom to steer them away from atheism and “to bringeth them about to religion.”Footnote 84 This was all the more true of the “newer” social and psychological sciences. By the end, it was clear that the statement was as much a “national self-critique”Footnote 85 of the current balance of public authority as a call to intellectual arms against totalitarianism.
Throughout his statement, Finkelstein argued that the degradation of American spiritual life was a disease that could sever the roots of liberal society and erase a history of epistemic compatibility and cooperation. His proposal inverted the assumption that the scientific was universal and the religious particular and refused the externalization of religious influence on science. Rather, Finkelstein championed the revival of historical models for integrating scientific epistemology, democratic political ideas, and religious values. The foundation of Finkelstein's imagined tetrafaith America, however, was also infused with Jewish narratives and served Jewish interests. As the next section shows, although other men of faith and science supported Finkelstein's goal of protecting democracy, they resisted many of the basic premises of Finkelstein's proposal.
The First Run of the Experiment: The 1939 Executive Committee Planning Meeting
$$ds^2 = \displaystyle{{e-g(t)} \over {{\left(1\displaystyle{{4r^2} \over {R_{\rm o}^2 }}\right)}^2}}(dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2)-dt^2$$On November 3, 1939, pointing to this equation, a foreign expression in a room full of men who knew Greek, Akaddian, and Aramaic, Professor Harlow Shapley, an astronomer and director of Harvard College Observatory, presented his faith to the group: “I wrote down one expression here and I wonder if it has been excelled by any passage of script or any poetic flight in the history of the world, and still it is not in the language you know.”Footnote 86 A self-described “naïve and … crass experimentalist type,”Footnote 87 Shapley sought to reorient the group away from “questions that [were] far beyond [him] and of the doctrinal sort.” Instead, he used “the partial differential equation of the expanding universe” as part of his rhetorical spectacle of scientific power: It “is the Shakespearian poesy of today—a bit of Holy Writ that includes the mechanical, the mystical, the imaginative, the beautiful,” but which “transcends anything … Shakespeare ever thought.”Footnote 88 The assembled gentlemen laughed, although one can only conjecture at whether, or for whom, it was a chuckle or a snicker.
Shapley's challenge did not emerge out of thin air; instead, it was a response to Finkelstein's precirculated statement, analyzed in the previous section. The transcript of the 1939 Executive Committee meeting serves as a window into the competition among intellectual authorities, and, by extension, among scientific epistemologies and theologies, as the group negotiated the terms of their pluralistic collaboration. The Executive Committee that Finkelstein invited to JTS to plan the CSPR consisted of several leading lights of local Protestant seminaries, a prominent Catholic intellectual, and a Jewish historian who served as JTS's librarian, as well as a small contingent of influential natural and social scientists.Footnote 89 Finkelstein hoped to assemble a sympathetic group that could see the value in each other's expertise for the sake of the American covenant, although it seemed some might have preferred to understand the meeting as a democratic experiment. For all the potential of tetrafaith collaboration, it could work only if delegates could speak the same language.
Although the members of the Executive Committee addressed each other cordially, as peers, rhetoric like Shapley's was a vertical power play that laid claim to epistemic authority. This is not to say that Shapley's position was representative of all scientists. Arthur Compton, a physicist who had previously applied quantum theory to a philosophical investigation of free will, took an early command of the meeting as a champion for cooperation. Impressed by Finkelstein's account of the religious origins of modern science, Compton suggested it would be valuable to educate other scientists on their “debt” to religion through a series of lectures.Footnote 90
Protestant theologians then joined in to affirm the importance of religion but reaffirmed Protestant narratives that Finkelstein had attempted to unsettle.Footnote 91 Frederick C. Grant, for example, spoke of Christianity and religion as one and the same, as he pointed to a scholarly source that showed “that it was the insistence of religion, Christianity, on truth that made the scientific attitude really possible.” Arthur H. Compton responded by reiterating Finkelstein's argument that modern science could not have developed absent the rabbinical schools and Arab transmitters of knowledge. A pattern developed that continued through several iterations: a Protestant statement that linked the Reformation and Enlightenment rediscovery of the lost Greek Golden Age, followed by suggestive questions about the importance of minority traditions. Scholastic philosopher Anton Pegis then pushed the group to consider Aquinas's definition of science, which was not focused “merely” on truth, but also on “unity and perspective.”Footnote 92 There were, after all, ancient Aristotelian and medieval definitions that predated the Enlightenment.
Ignoring Pegis, Shapley interjected a non sequitur directed at Compton: “Are you here as a scientist or a theologian? I have just been listening to your remarks.” Shapley's statement challenged Compton's allegiances. The question made the conversation about personal loyalties rather than intellectual categories and reflected Shapley's effort to assert the independence of science. “How can I answer that?” Compton replied. This specialist on the theory of quantum indeterminacy, which guaranteed a limit to what was knowable, refused to embrace an epistemic hierarchy and pushed the group to continue discussing philosophical questions about experience.Footnote 93 Despite Shapley's best efforts, participants in this debate continually challenged the boundaries separating theology, social science, natural science, philosophy, psychology, and history. What ensued was a joint effort to develop a unified language and philosophy of sciences and religions, in which experts wove together their fields of knowledge and methods. This collaborative, synthetic effort was the context that led Shapley to write a relativity equation on the blackboard.Footnote 94
Against Finkelstein's claims that Judaism was the first, fundamental faith that united the group, and that humanists, not scientists, animated the human soul, Shapley forwarded his own narrative of scientific supersessionism. He argued that traditional religions were, at best, redundant to all-encompassing science.Footnote 95 The mystical, imaginative, mechanical, and beautiful relativity equation was not science's only spiritual resource. He also proposed that genetics, represented by Mendel's laws, could describe physical and spiritual traits. Furthermore, a branch of probability theory, the method of least squares, could evaluate sin. (The typist found this so foreign that it was twice rendered as “the Method of Lee Squares,” even after a request for clarification.) Dismissing MacKay's and Compton's attempts to rescue religion by suggesting that science's quantitative language complemented religion's qualitative one, Shapley concluded that “the exponent of the coefficient” of Heisenberg's equation encapsulated spirituality.Footnote 96 In Shapley's imagination, the relativity equation was transfigured, to use Weber's language, into a kind of “impersonal force” that had taken the place of the “old gods” in a secular age.Footnote 97 If science was to collaborate, he insisted that it take its rightful place—first—in the conference's title. And, thus, the CSPR got its name.
As the meeting concluded, the frustrated men were considering whether it was even practical for scientists and theologians to work together.Footnote 98 It seemed like the only thing they could agree on was their common, external enemy. Perhaps, it was exactly because he was a scholar of Talmud, texts whose model of authority was a “heteroglossia of dialogue,”Footnote 99 that Finkelstein was undeterred. Less than a year after this initial meeting, several hundred representatives of various “democratic faiths” gathered together at the first CSPR.
Epistemic Authority and the Problem of Certainty
Over the course of a year, influential intellectuals like Franz Boas, Jacques Maritain, Albert Einstein, George Sarton, and Paul Tillich joined the ranks of the CSPR's founding members, and, on August 9, 1940, a subset of this leadership team convened for a preliminary meeting.Footnote 100 As they discussed drafting a manifesto to present at the start of the CSPR in one month's time, Hoxie N. Fairchild, an English professor at Columbia, reflected back to the group what he understood to be the “common denominator” of their mission: “[W]hat we are after, I take it, is to grope, probably very slowly, fumblingly and inductively toward a certain amount of intellectual unity which we know perfectly well does not now exist.” In contrast to a precirculated paper by fellow attendee, Mortimer Adler,Footnote 101 which Fairchild described as “a pungent, forceful argumentative statement of fundamental principles,” he hoped the group could find a way to relate “the great intellectual disciplines” in the hope that “if the unity grew democratic intellect might some day have more solidity than it has now.”Footnote 102 Adler, who championed Aquinas's philosophy, represented a point of contrast to Finkelstein. Whereas Finkelstein presented Judaism as a vital faith that was the backbone of democratic governance, theistic ethics, and scientific thought, and, thus, constituted the very “common denominator” the group needed, Adler proposed resuscitating scholastic thought, which could offer universal stability.
At the August preliminary meeting and a month later at the CSPR, a near-unanimous consensus emerged on at least a single ground: Adler was a hostile party promoting an outmoded system. In his presubmitted paper, Adler diagnosed disciplinary distinctness as a root of the chaos that the CSPR sought to treat. The antidote was to impose a hierarchy of knowledge according to “proper function,” akin to the work of Maimonides or Aquinas for the modern age. Harmony, he argued, would never come about “so long as they are all asked to lie down together.”Footnote 103 The group needed “an intelligible order of questions,” without which, he stated, “there is nothing to talk about.”Footnote 104
Archaeologist and biblical scholar William Foxwell Albright succinctly laid out the problem with Adler's method. Regardless of any participant's personal feelings about Aquinas's philosophical system, “if we accept them we thereby, ipso facto, cut out all of the members of the Conference, including practically all the men of science and philosophers and theologians who are not scholastic philosophers.” Adler's memorandum not only “gave the specious appearance of everything being absolutely out and dried, fixed,” but also was hopelessly flawed by modern standards because “St. Thomas lived before the days of modern definitions of terms.” Although it would be “perfectly legitimate as the understanding of a group or as the representation of a minority,” it could not undergird a pluralistic, democratic conference. Professor Shapley would proclaim his intention to “speak in defense of Dr. Adler,” but his defense largely pivoted on the accusation that Finkelstein had not informed Adler that the CSPR was an experiment aimed at progress. With characteristic bluntness, Shapley stated that Adler's “dialectic” method was not what “modern intelligent people in a general exploratory investigation” were expecting. Even Catholic philosopher Anton Pegis, a potential ally, explained that, although he himself accepted Adler's system, “it seems true that history is against him.” In the post-Enlightenment, modern world, scholasticism was not a viable universal epistemic system.Footnote 105
Whether out of stubbornness or patience, Adler remained steadfast, explaining that he was willing to deliberate until eternity. To cure “the complete chaos which is democracy and democratic culture [and] contemporary corrupt liberalism,” it was necessary to talk and argue with the clear aim of changing other people's minds until agreement could be reached. “It might take infinite time. I am not saying how long it will take for two minds to work together, but unless their aim is—” Finkelstein jumped in before Adler could finish: “Professor Adler, Professor Maritain is a Catholic. I am a Jew. I mean to approach this problem together with him. I haven't the slightest intention of ever becoming a Catholic, and I haven't the slightest desire to ask Professor Maritain to become a Jew.” If people with different identities could not collaborate, Finkelstein concluded, the CSPR and all of “Christian civilization [was] hopeless.” He refused to accept that the only solution was conversion to sameness or an infinite debate: The Jews in Europe did not have time to endlessly deliberate.Footnote 106
For his positions, many called Adler a totalitarian. It did not bother him when he was called that at home, Adler replied, but in academic settings, he was disturbed by the implications. “If a man can't say that it is important for human beings to agree about the truth without being called a Fascist, then I want to be called a Fascist,” he concluded.Footnote 107 The group laughed, but the humor should not distract from the substance of Adler's response. Where one feels at home, it is safe to make demands, even of an unyielding order. This sense of at-homeness was something that Finkelstein was working tirelessly to create. In his interjection, one could hear Finkelstein performing in the legacy of the Pharisees, who “considered themselves teachers of Israel alone” and yet “were destined to become the mentors of mankind.” Finkelstein admired their distinct ability to provide universal knowledge and ethical teachings “without sacrifice of their individuality, or compromise of their principles.”Footnote 108 Extending the positive historical approach to Judaism, which balanced metaphysical belief in divine revelation with the epistemic values of modern empiricism, as well as adherence to traditional law with a commitment to adaptability, Finkelstein would demonstrate that he embodied the role of modern prophet.Footnote 109
A Prophetic Guide for the American Mind and Spirit
On September 9, 1940, Finkelstein presented the first paper of the CSPR, reciting the words on the deep intellectual rifts that threatened human civilization, which opened this article.Footnote 110 In his address, after mentioning the import of rabbinical and monastic schools for the creation of scientific thought, Finkelstein declared the need for timeless, stable religious traditions that could nonetheless remain relevant in the present. He addressed the assembled delegates using many of the same words he had to describe Judaism in his writings: “Each of us, following his own train of thought, has arrived at the conclusion that our own disciplines and traditions are more consistent with democracy than with totalitarianism. I believe that we all hold fast to the principle of dignity, worth and moral responsibility of the individual, as a child and creature of God.”Footnote 111 This was precisely the spirit of Finkelstein's Judaism, and he was the modern Jewish mind that was best suited to lead such a group.Footnote 112
It was necessary to develop a mode of unified thinking that was neither rigid nor ahistorical, and that was both rational and theistic. After referencing suggestions that what was necessary was “a super-Thomas Aquinas or Maimonides, a genius capable of assimilating the mass of modern learning, imposing architectonic order upon it, and above all, enabling his system to adjust itself to the dynamic character of modern science,” Finkelstein turned to Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain's measured vision of a “pluralistic but well regulated universe of thought” that could foster “mutual respect and understanding” by formulating “significant analogies.”Footnote 113 By tolerating a lack of closure on metaphysical questions, like how to “explain … at once the elements of uncertainty in electrons, and in human beings,” they could find a way to work together. He remained sure, however, that through the process, it would become clear “why certain ethical, philosophical and religious values transcend tentative scientific and historical constructions.” To close, Finkelstein quoted a specialist in medieval philosophy, Étienne Gilson, who argued at Harvard's 1936 tercentenary that “the conviction that there is nothing in the world above universal truth” was necessarily connected with “the very root of intellectual and social liberty.” Through the words of his Catholic partners, Finkelstein articulated his own Jewish values.
After his talk, Finkelstein opened the floor for discussion. Shapley immediately directed the conversation to “the practical problems that might be ahead of us,” anticipating the presentation of Adler's paper the next day, although Finkelstein explained that Adler was not going to attend after all.Footnote 114 Akin to what had been said in the smaller group a month prior, several members of the group dismissed Adler's position. Finkelstein then encouraged a pivot to practical suggestions on how to run a democratic meeting that, to paraphrase several participants, could “tolerate dogmatic positions” without “formulating a creed,” as well as appreciate the contributions of diverse traditions without defensive, or offensive, posturing for authority. After a long discussion along these lines, Albright spoke frankly of his “strong suspicion that one of the principal reasons why our Conference is succeeding so well as it promises to succeed is that our Chairman is neither Protestant nor Catholic, nor liberal Jew, nor liberal Protestant, nor scientist.”Footnote 115 This biblical archaeologist and son of evangelical Methodist missionaries continued: “He is a conservative Jew. He knows from the outset that we cannot achieve unity and that this is not a parliament of religions, it is not a conservative congress; it is a congress where we all aim at one kind of unity, and that unity is a unity of goal.” Albright recognized that Finkelstein's Great Assembly welcomed and respected all voices and did not push for shared belief but sought a coherent, practical way forward, framed through common values.
Wednesday morning, September 11, 1940, the penultimate session of the CSPR, at which the natural scientists presented their papers, proved to be a chance to test Finkelstein's blend of theistic and rational thought. Through comments and discussions, several scientists, philosophers, and theologians in the room debated the relative value and merits of science and religion for democratic thought. An exiled German Protestant, Richard Kroner, felt compelled to reply to the scientists’ aggressive “invasions” into metaphysics and philosophy, and the blind arrogance by which they claimed superiority and confused mathematics for God's speech.Footnote 116
Amid contentious debate, Finkelstein rose to voice his own ideas on the subject. “[I]t is quite conceivable in my opinion that a man may work in the laboratory for a number of years and not come across anything in his experience which definitely demonstrates the existence of a God or would lead him to engage in any form of worship,” Finkelstein postulated. The scientist's “tools” and “technique” were not equipped to facilitate access to “such experience.” Finkelstein accused those who, lacking the experience, had argued that day that “the belief in God and worship is an unnecessary hypothesis” of committing a grave and logical error that betrayed their own epistemic values.
Scientists frequently endangered society with such claims from authoritative podiums. The prior day, Finkelstein recounted, “three very eminent philosophers” and “three eminent sociologists, approaching the problem from quite a different point of view,” had all, after years of devoted study, reached the same conclusion: God exists. And, yet, Dr. Albert Einstein, whose paper was read in absentia, “indicated that so far as he was concerned he didn't see that science necessarily will require the conception of a God to whom one could pray.” The public took the scientist's tentative denial over the positive assertions of devoted experts. That a microphone, a scientific product, amplified his voice for the room to hear did not make the expertise of either natural or applied scientist relevant to how he should reach God when he would “say [his] afternoon prayers.” This, too, represented a “hierarchy of disciplines” akin to the one the group had so adamantly protested in reaction to Adler, whose pre-Enlightenment philosophy diminished modern science. To contend with positivist claims that denied his theistic worldview, Finkelstein looked to the wisdom of a Jewish sage and scientist who, he hoped, “might not strike the scientists as being quite so humiliating to them.”Footnote 117
Referencing, although not citing, a passage from The Guide for the Perplexed, Finkelstein illustrated the fundamental difference between permanent and temporal truths. “[Maimonides] speaks of the study of phenomena as being outside, on the campus; and the study of philosophy as being somewhat in the inner room; and the study of theology as being in the very shrine itself,” Finkelstein explained. “Well, it is all the same ground, you see, but one is outside, one is inside, one is right there.”Footnote 118 The room erupted in laughter and applause. The center, where God resided, produced truths that would “never be superseded.”Footnote 119 It was there that a person could find “a transcendent value, a value which gives him at-homeness in the world, which no natural scientific theory can give him.” Finkelstein did not demand his fellow citizens believe in the existence of the inner sanctum, but rather that they respect the expertise of those who had experienced it. Unlike the rarified halls of the laboratory, where scientists dazzled the world with equations only intelligible to an elite few, theologians could guide any willing person to experience God.Footnote 120
The house where Maimonides and Finkelstein's God resided was open and accessible to the American public and could be the solid foundation American democracy needed. Although Finkelstein was willing to accept that “these and these are words of the Living God”Footnote 121 when they were spoken from the mouths of fellow theologians, those who made claims that the universe was disenchanted were rebuked using their own positivist terms. As a modern Jewish prophet, who inherited the perseverance and patience of the Hebrew prophets and the methods and wisdom of the Pharisees, Finkelstein could lead the group, finite step by finite step, to political stability.Footnote 122
Conclusion
By following Finkelstein's efforts to unsettle popular Protestant and scientific hegemony, this article questions the terms central to the study of midcentury American pluralism. Far from a simple story of conflict or competition among scientific and religious experts, the CSPR's participants, all figures of authority, debated the epistemic, spiritual, ethical, and political strengths of their respective traditions. The pluralism that emerged through these negotiations, however, cannot just be understood in terms of collaboration among (unequal) partners vying for authority; rather, it also shows how participants brought tools, techniques, and experiences to the table to cultivate sympathy and discover what each member could contribute.
In its pre-Aristotelian usage, the term ethos refers to a rhetorical space, a dwelling, where individuals who “reliably and recognizably” perform the society's ethical system could reside.Footnote 123 Faced with external threat and internal fracturing, American intellectuals, desperate to build structures that could secure a stable future for their “democratic way of life,” were eager to find such a space. Finkelstein's CSPR, like his narrative of American democratic life, was built on an ancient Jewish foundation that rabbinic authorities had successfully adapted to meet the needs of a changing world for millennia. Because his seminary's Judaism was the common denominator of prophetic faiths and modern science, and because he, as its leader, was a modern authority on the tradition that was the ethical, political, and epistemic fabric of Western civilization, Finkelstein contended that there was no better place or leader to convene a council of experts to protect democratic life. As representatives of America's four faiths came together to shape American thought and practice, Finkelstein did not seek to dismantle familiar forms of American civic discourse, but rather to reattribute their source to his historical tradition.
