“It is true,” conceded the Russian Minister of Education on 17 March 1841, those “fanatics” who held fast to the Talmud “were not mistaken” in ascribing a missionary impulse to his project of enlightening Russia's Jewish population. The Jews’ anxieties were understandable, Count Sergei Uvarov admitted, “for is not the religion of Christ the purest symbol of grazhdanstvennost’ [civil society]?”Footnote 1 Since conquering Polish-Lithuanian lands in 1795, the Russian government had been unable to establish a consistent policy for integrating its Jewish population into the social and political fabric of the Empire. Most notably, it restricted Jews to living in what was called the Pale of Settlement, a geographic region that includes lands in present day Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Moldova, Belarus, and Lithuania. The Jews of the Empire were highly observant, spoke their own languages, and occupied specific economic roles. Buoyed by the reformist initiatives that had begun to take hold in Jewish populations based in western European countries, Uvarov hoped to begin a similar process among Russia's Jews.
Uvarov's ambiguous words have long been a point of contestation for analysts of the Russian Empire's treatment of its Jewish population. Virtually all the major Russian Jewish historians until the end of the twentieth century asserted that the Russian Minister of Education, his superiors, and deputies had nefariously sought to convert the Jews to Christianity. The Russian government, they claimed, had plotted to wean Jews away from the Talmud, cultivate within them a love for the Bible, and eventually convert them to Orthodox Christianity or, if all else failed, at least enlist them in the Russian army, separating them from their families and communities.Footnote 2 More recently, Michael Stanislawski, John Klier, and Yochanan Petrovsky-Shtern have each offered more nuanced interpretations of the government's position on the Jewish question. Klier has noted that the Russian government's public support for missionary activities was not geared at conversion, but rather only at the promotion of Christian ideals.Footnote 3 Stanislawski even argued that Uvarov was attempting to promote “not the conversion of the Jews . . . but their europeanization through education.”Footnote 4 Shtern has asserted that, while the government had conversionary intentions, such policies were part of a larger governmental program that targeted all Russian subjects.Footnote 5
But while much has been written about the actions of the Russian government, far less is known about how Jews responded to these initiatives and why they perceived the government's enlightenment project as synonymous with Christianity. In the first half of the nineteenth century, there were many more missionaries circulating in Halle and London than in St. Petersburg.Footnote 6 Yet, it was Russian Jews who most often associated the idea of governmental reform with missionizing. The handful of scholars who have examined the Russian government's attempt to convert Jews have observed that Tsar Alexander I granted the English-based missionary group, The London Society for the Promotion of Christianity Among the Jews (LSPCJ), the right to spread its gospel throughout the Empire.Footnote 7
This paper will build on this insight by examining the European-wide controversy surrounding the publication of the work of Alexander McCaul, the London missionary's most well known theologian and author of The Old Paths: Or, the Talmud Tested by Scripture; Being a Comparison of the Principles and Doctrines of Modern Judaism, with the Religion of Moses. It will argue that the perception of the government being in cahoots with Protestant missionaries was partly a function of the overlap between Uvarov and McCaul's criticisms of the Talmud. Moreover, this perception led Jews in Russia to formulate a counter-theory of Judaism based on the Catholic and Orthodox notion of tradition. While scholars have often portrayed modern Jewish acculturation in terms of Jews adopting Protestant religious ideals,Footnote 8 this paper argues that the Jewish responses to McCaul testify to an eastern European model of Jewish acculturation—one based on Catholic and Orthodox theories of religion.Footnote 9
Old Paths was not only a theological treatise that aimed at converting Jews to Christianity or reforming Judaism in line with Protestant beliefs. It was also an explicitly political work directed at governments across Europe that were considering whether or not to grant their Jewish populations equal rights, as some western European nations had done.Footnote 10 Its author, Alexander McCaul, served as the LSPCJ's leading missionary in Warsaw from 1821–1830.Footnote 11 There, he was in close contact with Jews and Russian governmental officials. Though written on the heels of England's emancipation of Catholics in 1828, Old Paths was aimed at audiences across Europe and targeted governments that ruled over large populations of observant Jews who held fast to the dictates of rabbinic Judaism. Within twenty years of its first publication, it was translated into German under the title, Nethivoth olam, oder, Der wahre Israelit: ein Vergleich zwischen dem modernen Judenthum und der Religion Moses und der Propheten (Frankfurt a. M.: 1839), French under the title, Nethivoth olam: les sentiers d'Israel (Paris: 1842), Polish under the title, Dawne ścieżki, czyli, Porównanie zasad i nauk dzisiajszego judaizmu a religiją Mojżesza i proroków (Warsaw: 1843), and Italian under the title Gli antichi sentieri ovvero confronto dei principj e dottrine del moderno giudaismo colla religione di Mosè e dei profeti (Pinerolo: 1857).
McCaul's argument, briefly, was that most Jews continued to follow the pernicious and obscurantist dictates of rabbinic Judaism. Not only did the most canonical of rabbinic works, the Talmud, evince a hatred of gentiles, but such a position could also be found in the broad spectrum of rabbinic texts from Maimonides to present day Jewish liturgy. He was impressed by the initiatives of certain reformist sectors of Jewish life in Prussia and England. However, he was deeply suspicious that Jews were attempting to gain the same rights as Christians without truly embracing the axiom of brotherly love. McCaul thought that Christ's message of universal love was a precondition for a tolerant and peaceful state. Thus, he instructed governments to demand that Jews disavow their ties to the Talmud and recognize the Christian origins of emancipatory politics. To be an upstanding political subject one had to adopt Christian ideals and values.Footnote 12
McCaul's work prompted strong responses from all over Jewish Europe.Footnote 13 The first and most in depth rejoinders came from the two leading Russian Jewish thinkers, the elder statesman and dean of the Russian Jewish enlightenment Isaac Ber Levinsohn of Kremenets and the young Samuel Josef Fuenn of Vilna. Levinsohn's Zerubavel and Fuenn's Darkhe Hashem attempted to refute McCaul's arguments specifically, and disentangle the granting of civil rights from the project of Christianity. Levinsohn and Fuenn wrote their works for both Jewish and Christian audiences, with the expectation that their words would be translated into Russian or English. They sought to defend Judaism and the Talmud by marshaling the Catholic and Orthodox idea of tradition to explain the Talmud to those living on Russian and Polish lands.
One reason scholars have not analyzed these responses as part of the debate over Jewish rights in the 1840s is that they were prevented from being published in the 1840s.Footnote 14 Russian censors saw Levinsohn's defense of the Talmud as politically subversive; it was not released until 1863.Footnote 15 Fuenn's tract never even made its way to the printing press. The Russian government's dismissal (or at the very least disinterest in these Jewish defenses of the Talmud) reveals the contradictory policies of what the historian Robert Crews has described as the nineteenth-century Russian “Confessional State.” The Russian government's “backing the construction and implementation of ‘orthodoxy’ within each recognized religious community”Footnote 16 came alongside a deep ambivalence toward the role of the Talmud within Judaism. While Russian governmental officials at times were prepared to hand over certain responsibilities to Jewish religious leaders, at other times they actively sought to undermine central tenants and texts of Judaism, such as the Talmud, betraying the very inconsistencies of their own strategies.Footnote 17
Fuenn and Levinsohn's defenses of the Talmud penned in the 1840s therefore had little immediate political impact. They circulated clandestinely among a rarified sphere of Jewish intellectuals. However, they are critical sources for understanding how Jewish enlighteners understood their own project of reform vis-à-vis the critiques of Christianity and how the government's anti-Talmudic expressions came to be equated with a missionary agenda. Finally, Fuenn and Levinsohn's responses express the unique ways in which observant Jews would employ Catholic and Orthodox models of religion, most notably the idea of tradition, to make their external practices and rituals intelligible within the context of Western life and thought.
This paper will proceed by laying out McCaul's arguments, the reception of his work in the Russian Empire, and the similarities and differences between his and Uvarov's positions on the Jews in the early 1840s. It will then offer an analysis of the Jewish response to McCaul and Uvarov's critique of the Talmud, focusing on Levinsohn's previously unexamined response to the English missionary and Fuenn's manuscript, which I accessed at the archives of the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem (ARC. 4* 1527). Careful attention is given to Fuenn's and Levinsohn's use of Catholic theologians.
The Talmud as an Obstacle to Equal Rights
English missionary activities among the Jews of Russia began in 1818 when an enthusiastic Englishman Lewis Way (1772–1840) traveled with much fanfare eastward, where he was given an audience with Tsar Alexander I. There, he successfully petitioned the Russian leader to allow missionaries associated with the LSPCJ to work in concert with the Russian-based Society for Israelite Christians in spreading the gospel among Jews residing on Russian lands.Footnote 18 In his travels throughout the region, Way was accompanied by the Polish Jewish convert, Nehemiah Solomon, who was granted imperial permission and protection to missionize on Russian lands without impediment.Footnote 19 Alexander I recognized the Protestant missionaries in Russia under the wide banner of a “Christian nation.” The government's conversionary projects were not limited to promoting orthodoxy but rather Christianity more generally.Footnote 20 With the support of the mystic and freemason Prince Alexander GolitsynFootnote 21 the missionaries soon arrived in Minsk, Warsaw, Vitebsk, Smolensk, and Shklov, where they distributed bibles and sought to persuade Jews to convert to Christianity.Footnote 22 Until 1820 when the LSPCJ's privileges were curtailed to locales within Congress Poland, the missionaries circulated throughout the Pale of Settlement.Footnote 23
In the summer of 1821, the London Society's best-known emissary Alexander McCaul (1799–1863) arrived in Warsaw, where he lived until roughly 1830. There, McCaul studied Hebrew and preached to local Jews.Footnote 24 Some claim that he was able to converse with eastern European Jews because in his youth he had studied Jewish texts with a Lithuanian rabbi.Footnote 25 McCaul and his colleagues’ missionizing efforts, however, produced minimal results. From 1821–1854 the LSPCJ managed to persuade but 361 Jews (out of roughly two hundred and fifty thousand Jews living in Congress Poland) of the validity of Christ's message, averaging eleven converts per year.Footnote 26
But McCaul was able to gain the attention of Jews across the Pale, and for that matter governments around the world, with the serial publication of his anti-Talmudic invective The Old Paths: Or, the Talmud Tested by Scripture; Being a Comparison of the Principles and Doctrines of Modern Judaism, with the Religion of Moses. Footnote 27 First published in English in April of 1836 and translated into Hebrew as Netivot Olam in 1839,Footnote 28 McCaul's work became a sensation in governmental and ecclesiastical circles. Some estimate that as many as 10,000 copies of single numbers of the Old Paths were put into circulation in the very first year.Footnote 29
McCaul was far from the first to write a sustained attack against the Talmud. Already two hundred years earlier in Prussia, Johann Eisenmenger had published Entdecktes Judenthum (1700), blaming the Talmud as the source of alleged Jewish hatred against gentiles.Footnote 30 Eisenmenger's treatise was but the first of a rash of similar tracts. In France, Dom Augustin Calmet's printed his Lettres de l'auteur du Commentaire littéral sur La Genèse (1710) in which he questioned the historical validity and claims made by the rabbis of the Talmud. In Russia in the 1830s alone, there had been two government-sponsored assaults on rabbinic Judaism's most revered work, one written by McCaul's colleague at the Warsaw University, the Italian-born abbot, Luigi A. Chiarini and the other by the Mogilev apostate, Asher Temkin.Footnote 31 Old Paths shared a good deal in common with these works. All maintained that the Talmud was the cradle for Jewish hatred toward gentiles and a valid criterion upon which to debate the granting of Jews rights in gentile society.
Even with the support of the government, neither Chiarini nor Temkin's works made much of an impression on Russian Jews. Chiarini's book appeared in French and was read mainly by western European audiences. While Nicholas authorized a Russian translation of Temkin tract, it was McCaul's attack that raised the hackles of Jewish leaders from Europe to the Middle East, but especially in Russia. Reflecting on the late 1830s and early 1840s, Isaac Ber Levinsohn wrote to the Lithuanian Talmudist Rabbi David LuriaFootnote 32 that “McCaul's work was read widely, circulating in Vilna and St. Petersburg.” He recalled McCaul's work making “a deep impression across all lands.”Footnote 33 Aside from its accessibility—made possible by the LSPCJ printing operations and various translations—Old Paths was recognized for its comprehensiveness, addressing rabbinic literature from the Talmud to contemporary rabbinic homiletics. Levinsohn admitted that McCaul was “very knowledgeable,” his work distinguished in both its “learnedness” and “thoroughness.” Old Paths, he believed, was unique in “collecting nearly all the critiques previously expressed against rabbinic works.”
Old Paths charged that the Talmud prevented Jews from being tolerant and trustworthy. Aside from its missionary aspirations, Old Paths offered answers to precisely the questions being posed in Russia regarding the political status of Jews who adhered to rabbinic Judaism: namely, could they be loyal subjects? It provided a set of theological guidelines for governments weighing whether to grant Jews equal rights. McCaul claimed that Jews in Bavaria, Prussia, and France were being dishonest and misleading in their attempt to win rights from their respective governments. Meanwhile, statesmen and governmental officials had been derelict in failing to carefully investigate what Jews actually believed, preached, and studied.
McCaul targeted Napoleon and his brother Jerome's mishandling of France's Jewish subjects.Footnote 34 Famously, in 1806, Napoleon had convened a Sanhedrin, a synod of leading rabbis to respond to lingering doubts about Jews’ ability to be loyal citizens. Following the establishment of the Kingdom of Westphalia in the same year, Napoleon's brother Jerome had assembled a similar gathering. Both posed a set of questions to rabbis, which ranged from whether a Jew was permitted to marry a gentile to whether Jews could serve in the military.
The rabbis’ answers at that time could have been described as congenial; they straddled a fine line between fidelity to the rabbinic tradition and loyalty to France or Westphalia. Specifically, McCaul pointed to the slippery language used by the synod's rabbis when answering the query about whether Jews considered Frenchmen to be their brethren. The Paris Sanhedrin, led by the traditionalist rabbi David Sinzheim of Strasbourg, had answered in the affirmative. “By all means,” the council asserted, “Love thy neighbor as thyself, is expressly laid down by the Holy Scriptures in reference to the non-Israelite.”Footnote 35 Its members continued, “we are bound by a Talmudist, to love as brethren all those who observe the Noachide Laws.” The Bavarian rabbis, led by the founder of Reform Judaism Israel Jacobson, had similarly answered Jerome: “We are bound in everything . . . to treat the non-Israelite, who sojourns with us, with justice and with love as we would treat an Israelite.”Footnote 36
While both sets of responses seemed at first glance innocuous, McCaul argued, they were in fact egregiously deceptive. With the eye of a trained Talmudist, McCaul pushed the rabbis to cough up the rabbinic source for their blanket declaration that Jews were bound to treat all non-Israelites in the same manner as they treated Jews. McCaul placed a magnifying glass on the careful wording of the Paris Sanhedrin's use of the singular “a Talmudist,” and the vague language of the Bavarian rabbis who tried to skirt the issue by not even citing a rabbinic source for their position.
McCaul noted that while there may have been one “Talmudist” who adopted liberal views on gentiles, it was certainly not the position of the Talmud. Furthermore, he argued that a careful reading of Maimonides's “Laws of Gentiles” (10:5) revealed that Jews were only obligated to adopt a principle of toleration to gentiles “for the sake of keeping peace with them.” According to McCaul's reading, Maimonides was merely a pragmatist and applied this principle only while Jews were living in the Diaspora.Footnote 37 McCaul maintained that “Even according to the enlightened Moses Maimon, currently, the gentiles were in power, and so it behooves Jews to act in a kind manner to them.” However, McCaul conjectured, “when the tables are turned” Jews would punish those they deemed idolaters (read: Christians). McCaul noted that the rabbinic principle of “‘for the sake of the ways of peace’ can be interpreted as the Bavarian [rabbis] (catechism) render them, for the good of society.” However, if this is so, McCaul conjectured, “then the good of society is to be consulted only whilst the Jews are in captivity: but as soon as the Jews get the power, ‘the good of society’ can be safely disregarded.”Footnote 38
McCaul argued that so long as the Jews pledged allegiance to rabbinic Judaism they could not be trusted as political subjects of Christian states. He contrasted Maimonides's conditional rulings about acting peacefully to gentiles with the New Testament's unconditional love of all nations. McCaul cited Paul (in Acts 19:11 in which he claims that he even prays for Israel to be saved) as embodying a true sentiment for loving even those who express different beliefs. McCaul was not interested in proving that the Bavarian and French rabbis secretly hated gentiles. He was convinced that they honestly saw Frenchmen and Germans as their brethren. However, McCaul thought Napoleon's rabbis were being dishonest about the provenance of their newfound universalistic sentiments. “We hesitate not to say,” McCaul deduced, “that they learned it from the New Testament, for there it is taught plainly and repeatedly.”Footnote 39 In other words, Jews were being duplicitous by not admitting that in fact they had broken with Talmudic teachings.
For all these reasons, McCaul supported Jewish emancipation, but only on condition that Jews admitted that citizenship entailed embracing ideals that grew out of the Hebrew Bible and were only clearly fulfilled in the New Testament. Emancipation would finally bring Jews to admit that they had been wrong about Christ and that they too, in one way or another, had adopted Christian teachings.
The Russian Jewish Enlightenment and the Idea of Tradition
The Russian government would be especially interested in McCaul's work. Just two years after it was translated into Hebrew, the Russian government began addressing the place of Jews in its society. While the possibility of Jewish emancipation was not being considered, those such as Uvarov were deeply influenced by attempts of central European governments to establish an ordered policy toward Jews and encourage their economic productivity. Uvarov first turned to Jewish educational institutions, hoping to put in place a system of government-sponsored schools that would make Jews loyal and productive subjects of the Empire.Footnote 40
In his first foray into reforming Jewish life in Russia, Uvarov put front and center what he considered to be the problematic nature of the Talmud: it was not only comprised of irrational ideas but also preached intolerance. These unseemly features of Judaism's most cherished rabbinic work were also apparent in contemporary Jewish society. Even some Jewish intellectuals sarcastically claimed that McCaul's depiction of the way Jews defined the Talmud reflected the way the most observant sector of Jews treated its content: for both parties every word of the Talmud (a corpus spanning thousands of folios) was to be read literally.Footnote 41
The Russian government implemented an educational program to combat the influence of the Talmud among Russia's Jews. The government-sponsored Jewish school system “would eliminate the Talmud from the subjects of teaching, not only compulsory but also elective subjects.”Footnote 42 Uvarov believed that the chief reason for Jewish backwardness in the Russian Empire was due to the fact “that nowhere is the influence of the Talmud so strong as it is here, in the Polish kingdom . . . where ignorance reigns among the Jews.”Footnote 43 While other religious minorities living in the Russian Empire privileged similar works, Uvarov maintained that “the Talmud acquired an importance that neither the early Muslims nor the early Church placed on the commentators of Scripture.” This was a critical distinction that would presage the seemingly contradictory responses of governmental officials toward the confessionalization of Judaism within the Empire.
Russian officials sought to create centralized religious school systems, clerical bodies, and at times even courts to assume responsibility for its various religious populations. Nicholas I undertook a program of enlightened absolutism toward Jews, Tartars, and Poles, whereby all religious groups were to promote internal reformist agendas that supported the ideals of the Empire.Footnote 44 But it is not clear that Nicholas I had rabbinic Judaism in mind when he declared that “all peoples inhabiting Russia praise Almighty God in different languages, according to the creed and confession of their forefathers, blessing the reign of the Russian Monarchs.”Footnote 45 The Russian government tolerated and supported some forms of religious difference within the empire, but it was not always prepared to recognize adherents to Talmudic Judaism under that rubric.
The government's proposed reforms relied upon a contingent of Jewish leaders prepared to speak on behalf of the Jewish community, staff the proposed schools, and develop a new cadre of clerics that would embrace the government's programs. There emerged a small group of Russian-based Jews known as maskilim (enlighteners) who endorsed Uvarov's plan with the hope of being hired to teach in the school system. This group was largely comprised of younger autodidacts who were raised in highly observant Jewish homes and schools but had come to embrace the idea of Jews gaining proficiency in foreign languages, becoming economically productive and studying secular subjects. However, nearly all of them continued to believe in the validity of the Talmud and rabbinic Judaism.Footnote 46
Uvarov's “Report” put Jewish enlighteners in a precarious position. While for strategic reasons they were not being asked to outright condemn the Talmud (as McCaul had hoped), Jewish enlighteners were now affiliated with a strategy for Jewish reform that was based on a seemingly Christian idea of eradicating Jews’ most revered text. They would teach in schools that promoted the values expressed in Uvarov's proposal. Though disturbed by the prospect of implicitly supporting a project that opposed rabbinic Judaism, the Jewish enlighteners saw Uvarov as an ally in their fight against more extreme sectors of Jewish life associated with the populist-spiritual group, the Hasidim.Footnote 47 Several of Uvarov's proposals, such as an increased emphasis on Hebrew in Jewish education, could be traced back to arguments made by Jewish enlighteners.
Threading the political-theological needle of supporting the Russian government's general educational program, but not degrading the Talmud in the process, led Jewish enlighteners to formulate a unique argument. Namely, Talmudophobia was a Protestant disease that was generated by Protestant missionaries. Thus, Catholic and Orthodox Christians should be immune from its side effects. The opposition to the Talmud, they maintained, might be important for Protestants, but had no bearing whatsoever on whether or not Jews could be loyal Russian subjects.
The most prominent Jewish enlightener to make this argument was Isaac Ber Levinsohn. Known as “the father of the eastern European Jewish enlightenment,”Footnote 48 Levinsohn spent most of his adult life in the Ukrainian town of Kremenets, with brief stints in Brody and Berdychiv.Footnote 49 In Teudah be-Yisrael (Vilna: 1828), he advanced the idea of Jews learning European languages, studying secular subjects, and embracing agricultural work.Footnote 50 Nicholas I supported his tract. Levinsohn, however, was deeply concerned by the government's directive to remove the Talmud from Jewish curricula. He had based his life's work on the very idea that the Talmud endorsed the reforming of Jewish education in line with the Russian government's project.
Levinsohn first came across the Old Paths in 1839. He believed that it speciously depicted the Talmud as a text that stood “in opposition to humanity in general and Christianity in particular.” He was concerned about a possible overlap between McCaul's argument and the Russian government's position. Levinsohn immediately set out to write a response under the title, Zerubavel, which ended up taking him twelve years to complete. It would not only address McCaul but also indirectly critique Russian government officials, whose names he was careful not to mention. Writing in confidence to David Luria, he demurred “how much I had to hide my words out of fear.” However, “if one looks closely at others’ criticisms and then compares them to what I have written in my book they will see that I have thoroughly refuted them as well.”Footnote 51 Instead of explicitly confronting the Russian minister or governmental institutions, Levinsohn directed his rebuttal at a safer target, one that was sufficiently detached from Nicholas's court.
The missionaries became a seemingly neutral site for Jews to critique the content of the government's policies without being accused of sedition. Levinsohn began writing two responses to McCaul with the hope of using the Protestant missionary's work as a foil to refute the general charges being made against the Talmud. Alongside his more scholarly Zerubavel specifically directed at McCaul, Levinsohn composed a play for popular consumption entitled Ahijah the Shilonite, the Seer. The title referenced the claim made in 2 Chron 9:29 about a lost book composed by the Prophet Ahijah the Shilonite detailing the reign of King Solomon. Levinsohn's play revolved around a debate between a Protestant and a Jew regarding the status of the Talmud. On the other hand, Levinsohn wrote Zerubavel “Seed of Babylon” with an elite Jewish and Christian audience in mind. He intimated to Luria that the book was written with the hope of winning over Christians.
Levinsohn supported his positions by citing the works of various Christian scholarsFootnote 52 he had read in the 1820s and early 1830s at the library housed in the local Catholic Lyceum in Kremenets.Footnote 53 Throughout his life Levinsohn enjoyed warm relations with Catholic priests, who read and commented upon his writings.Footnote 54 He also had strong ties to local Orthodox clergymen and seminarians; one of his works, Yemin Tsidqi (Warsaw: 1881), was explicitly written as a response to the theological questions posed to him by Russian Orthodox clerics.Footnote 55
Levinsohn believed that the English Jewish philanthropist Moses Montefiore would financially assist him in translating Zerubavel.Footnote 56 Montefiore originally also agreed to cover the costs of a translation, upon its completion, into Russian (and perhaps into English as well), a task that was to be undertaken by a young Kiev University student Rueven Kalishur (1828–1896) and the enlightener Leon Mandelstamm (1809–1889).Footnote 57 At the same time, Montefiore received similar requests for financial backing for the publication of another rejoinder to McCaul written by another Jewish writer in Russia, Samuel Joseph Fuenn. Almost thirty years younger than Levinsohn, Fuenn represented the next generation of Jewish enlighteners. In 1841, he published the first Jewish enlightenment journal in Russian lands and would soon be tapped by Uvarov to head one of the government-sponsored rabbinical schools. By 1843, Fuenn had written a 250 page response to McCaul under the title Darkhe Hashem.Footnote 58 It is not clear from the manuscript itself if Fuenn intended for it to be translated into English or Russian and exactly what audience he had in mind when writing the book. Fuenn, however, was in direct communication with McCaul himself. In his diary, now housed in a Jerusalem archive, he notes that on 25 February 1847 he sent “a letter addressed to Alexander McCaul, the author of the book Netivot Olam.”Footnote 59 Both men were in touch with one another. Right before the “Introduction,” of Darkhe Hashem Fuenn balanced a poetic jab at McCaul with the heartfelt words “written by an admirer and friend of the author.”Footnote 60
By the 1840s, Fuenn already had contacts with Christian clergy. Fuenn's letter to McCaul was delivered by Bonaventura Mayer, the Catholic Viennese Professor of Oriental Studies, author of Die Juden unserer Zeit, and a specialist on the Jewish question for the government of the Austrian Empire. Fuenn relates in his diary that he met with Mayer on 20 February 1847 in Vilna and spent “four or five hours” with him studying the Talmud and Catholic theories of allegorical interpretation. Fuenn noted that Mayer's “method of research followed the path of Catholicism. And in this way he followed in the path of reason [darkhe ha-sekhel].” Footnote 61
Levinsohn and Fuenn differed in important respects regarding the nature of Christianity and Judaism, but they proffered a similar basic line of defense against McCaul's charges. Namely, they both argued that–like Catholic teachings–the Talmud was but one expression of the Jewish tradition, which was based on reason and constantly being rearticulated and transmitted anew in each generation. In contrast to McCaul, who misunderstood the Talmud as a piece of sacred scripture, Levinsohn and Fuenn both employed the Latin word “tradition” to explain the Talmud and the development of the Oral Law. According to Levinsohn,
The Oral Law is what the Bible refers to as ‘lekah,’ and I understand this term to mean what is written in the Mishnah [the earliest rabbinic work], as mesorah and kabbalah, and in another language [German] what is meant by the words, carried, present, teaching, report, and telling. And this is exactly what in Latin is referred to as ‘Traditio’ (Tradition). The tradition is not to be found in the reading of books, but rather in the knowledge obtained through the intellect and through understanding and generous explanatory abilities even through Talmudic argumentation.Footnote 62
Similarly, Fuenn maintained:
The definition of all forms of Oral Law (Inbegriff) is all the laws and rulings and ideas and beliefs that are not written in a book that comprise the basis of the faith. And this torah flows necessarily from the Written Law because the writer revealed the foundations of the beliefs, ideas, and laws in his book and left after him many things that he did not find appropriate or necessary to reveal and detail. The writer's students learned these matters from the writer's life, his practices, and words and his commandments. Therefore, this is referred to also as a kabbalah or ha-hataqah (Tradition) and this can be found in all faiths, in the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim faiths and without it one could not fulfill the written law.Footnote 63
It is not a coincidence that Fuenn and Levinsohn both had similar conceptions of tradition. A letter in Fuenn's archive attests to his editing Levinsohn's earlier work.Footnote 64 Other Russian Jewish enlighteners who embraced this theory of tradition explicitly cite Levinsohn as the individual who put it into circulation. In 1840, we find “A Letter from a Learned Russian Israelite from Lithuania” published in the German newspaper Israelitische Annalen, which describes the distinctive features of Lithuanian Jewry and credits Levinsohn and the Galician enlightener Nachman Krochmal with helping him understand that
just because the new is novel does not make it preferable. Likewise, the old is not holy because it already exists. Rather, I would like to believe that neither can one throw out the Talmud nor follow it blindly. Rather, we need to determine exactly the way tradition assumed its shape through time, which changes everything . . . Tradition only reveals itself as the changing garment of the eternal unchangeable spirit.Footnote 65
The Russian Jewish enlighteners’ theory of tradition is best understood through a distinction independently drawn by the scholars Jay Harris and Kathryn Tanner. These two scholars distinguish between notions of tradition that emphasize “what” is being passed on and those focusing on the process “by which” something is transmitted.Footnote 66 For Fuenn and Levinsohn (and other Jewish enlighteners), tradition was not the “stuff” of inheritance but rather the idea and “process” of handing down or over to others. Tradition was the application of eternal doctrines to new situations through the use of reason and debate. Tradition was reflected in a style of Talmudic legal disputation that emphasized the use of logic to decipher the correct way to apply Biblical ideas. The rabbinic debates, and not the content of the rabbinic laws themselves, constituted the tradition or the Oral Law. Each generation created new laws and customs and discarded those that were no longer being practiced. “Jewish laws may be rescinded in wake of pressing social concerns,” Levinsohn explained.”Footnote 67 Levinsohn followed other Jewish enlighteners before him who emphasized what they believed to be the jurisprudential malleability of Talmudic dicta.Footnote 68 Customs could be adopted and eliminated depending on whether or not they contradicted reason or the needs of the time.
Both Levinsohn and Fuenn cited Jewish sources ranging from Maimonides to Mendelsohn as precedent for their concepts of the Oral Law. However, what stands out is their explicit and philosophically rigorous positive use of the Catholic and Orthodox idea of tradition. In this regard, they followed the theological pattern adopted by Jews living in other Catholic and Orthodox lands. Most notably, Simeon Luzzatto (1583–1663), writing in seventeenth-century Italy, also invoked the Catholic idea of tradition in order to argue that Jews shared more in common with Catholics than with Protestants.Footnote 69 Specifically, the Catholic and Orthodox nomenclature of tradition offered these thinkers two important arguments that they could not glean from Maimonides and rabbinic texts alone. First, it supplied them with a language with which to explain the idea of rabbinic law to Catholic (Polish) and Orthodox (Russian) audiences. Secondly, living on Russian and Polish lands, it armed Levinsohn and Fuenn with a socially and theologically acceptable weapon to fight back against the government's criticisms of the Talmud.
In particular, Fuenn and Levinsohn both pointed to the French Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet's (1627–1704) notion of tradition.Footnote 70 Levinsohn was already familiar with Bossuet's work as early as 1828.Footnote 71 But in Zerubavel Levinsohn explicitly defended the idea of the Jewish Oral Law by claiming, “I saw in the work of the well known Christian scholar . . . Bossuet's work that Christians also have an Oral Law, which they call ‘tradition.’”Footnote 72 Likewise, Fuenn cited Bossuet regarding the idea of a Christian “Oral Law.”Footnote 73
Both Fuenn and Levinsohn were referring to Bossuet's formulation of the idea of “tradition” in Discours sur l'histoire universelle (1681) “as being so adaptable to the light of reason, that it was unimaginable that such a clear and important truth could ever have been dimmed or forgotten among men.”Footnote 74 Bossuet argued that Christianity was not rooted simply in Scripture but rather, when “the [Nicene] council was formed, the Holy Scripture was propounded; passages of the ancient fathers, witnesses of the tradition, were read: There, at the councils it was tradition that interpreted scripture.” Footnote 75
In a footnote to Zerubavel, Levinsohn recommends, “those who wish to easily understand my ideas consult the pages listed in the index of Cramer's work under the word ‘Tradition.’”Footnote 76 Levinsohn was referring to Bossuet's work, Einleitung in die Geschichte der Welt und der Religion (Leipzig: 1757), translated into German and published by Johann Andreas Cramer's (1723–1788). Leveinsohn supported Bossuet's positive assessment of certain early Pharisaic groups’ notion of the Oral Law. Fuenn also employed Cramer's edition of Bossuet, citing it simply as “Cramer.” Footnote 77 Levinsohn disagreed with the Protestant Cramer and supported Bossuet's positive assessment of certain early Pharisaic groups’ notion of the Oral Law.Footnote 78 But while Bossuet believed that the Oral Law was passed on to the Church Fathers (and not the Rabbis of the Talmud), Levinsohn maintained that it was passed on to the Jewish Fathers, as found in the rabbinic work Pirqe Avot “Teachings of the [Jewish] Fathers.”Footnote 79 Levinsohn argued that just as the Church Fathers put down Church Doctrine in “books of theology,”Footnote 80 so too the Rabbinic Fathers transmitted Jewish Doctrine, through “the Mishnah, our theology book.”Footnote 81 The Mishnah, which was edited roughly around the same time as the proceedings of the Nicene Council, contained the rules (midot) and decrees (gezerot)—laws that are eternally binding but constantly being reinterpreted depending upon time and circumstance.
Most importantly, Levinsohn maintained, the Mishnah contained laws that were given by God to Moses at Sinai, which comprise the very essence of Judaism. The Talmud, however, was a book that simply expressed the attempt to apply these rules and principles. Its statements were not from Heaven or given at Sinai but rather prime examples of using reason and logic to apply Jewish doctrines to new situations.Footnote 82 McCaul had terribly erred in his assertion that for the Jews the Talmud was a canonical text that was treated in the same manner as Scripture. The Talmud was best understood through Catholic hermeneutic lenses as an expression of the tradition (Oral Law). When read as part of what Catholics and Orthodox Christians call “tradition,” the Talmud was not an obstacle to developing within Jews the capacity to be loyal and productive subjects. McCaul had misunderstood the nature of “religion” and how religious communities develop over time.
Similarly to the way Levinsohn defended rabbinic texts by comparing them to Christian religious traditions, he also attacked reformist sectors of German Jewry by equating them with Protestant reformers. Addressing Protestants, he wrote:
Furthermore, all other Christians consider you to have left your religion entirely and consider you to be heretics. For you do not hold to the beliefs of your ancestors. So too among us [Jews] there are many heretics, who stand in opposition to the Talmud. And even if we were to say to you, “look there are those of us who object to the Rabbis,” you would respond to us that “we are not at war with your heretics but rather with your believers.” Footnote 83
Levinsohn's defense of tradition was written “not for heretics . . . but only believing Jews and Christians (Orthodox).”Footnote 84 By arguing that each religion possessed its own independent tradition Levinsohn hoped to persuade Russian officials that supporting the Talmud was not in contradiction to the government's general attempt to enforce “orthodoxy” within each faith.
Fuenn concurred with Levinsohn that “most Christian denominations, were like Judaism, based on an oral transmission and transformed in each generation.”Footnote 85 However, he never explicitly denounced Protestantism or German Jewish reformers. In fact, in Darkhe Hashem, Fuenn was somewhat sympathetic to Cramer's critique of the French Bishop. He looked askance at the Catholic hierarchy and Papal infallibility arguing that they were not essential to Christianity and betrayed the ideals expressed in the New Testament. Instead of singularly relying upon Bossuet's notion of tradition, Fuenn also adopted certain ideas expressed in the radical Catholic theologian Felix Anton Blau's Kritische Geschichte der kirchlichen Unfehlbarkeit (Frankfurt a. M.:1791).Footnote 86 Fuenn cites Blau's criticism of the early Church Fathers, such as Ignatius of Antioch and Polycarp and various Popes for inventing ideas that differed from those expressed by the Apostles. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the subject of Papal infallibility was still being debated (it was not until 1870 that it became a dogma of the Church). Fuenn supported reformist Catholics, like Blau, who contested papal infallibility and instead believed in the tradition of “conciliarism,” which held that the Church should be ruled by the council of Bishops with the Pope as merely first among equals.
Fuenn employed Blau's historicism of Church beliefs and institutions to argue that neither the Church nor the Jewish Oral Law had a monopoly on divine ideas. He also followed Blau by trying to find a shared religious discourse between Jews and Christians. Fuenn maintained that “the difference between the religion of Judaism and the religion of Christianity is not that one religion interpreted God's word correctly and the other interpreted God's word falsely.” Rather, the difference between them was only that “the Jewish religion (da'at ha-yehudit) is older and can be found in the prayers offered at synagogues of the Jews, whereas Christianity is the faith (emunah) that is learned from the torah of the messiah that is located in the New Testament. Or in other words, that Judaism (ha-yahadut) is God's word as understood through the Oral Law and Christianity is God's word as understood through the New Testament.”Footnote 87
While Fuenn thought that Judaism gave greater credence to using one's intellectual capacities, he unflinchingly claimed that “the majority of Christian beliefs and positions were in no way opposed to Jewish beliefs and those that were could not be traced back to what was espoused in the New Testament.”Footnote 88 According to Fuenn this applied “even to those who annulled the practice of the commandments. They, too,” he believed, “did not seek to undermine the foundations of the faith and beliefs of the Mosaic tradition.”Footnote 89 Not only was Judaism structurally similar to Christianity with respect to the development of its oral tradition, but moreover, both religious groups substantively shared a “Mosaic Faith.” The shared faith was not simply based on reason but also contained within itself the essential theological features of both Judaism and Christianity. Fuenn went so far as to argue that Paul was a rabbinic Jew.Footnote 90 Even Paul's act of breaking the law to bring the gentiles under the covenant, he suggested, expressed a rabbinic worldview that demanded that the law be broken if one thinks the messiah has in fact arrived (a view Fuenn rejected).Footnote 91
At first glance, Levinsohn and Fuenn's invocation of Catholic ideas appears somewhat surprising considering the Russian Empire's relationship to Rome. The Russians had long associated Catholicism with Polish nationalist sentiments.Footnote 92 Many of the same harsh policies that were going to be enforced on Jewish education and clergy had already been implemented among Poles and Catholics.Footnote 93 While both Levinsohn and Fuenn saw the idea of tradition as transcending Catholicism, it still seems strange, if not dangerous, that they would invoke an idea so attached to the history of Catholicism. A careful examination of Uvarov's own writings, however, allows us to speculate that this decision was based on either a savvy understanding of the Russian Minister's broad intellectual horizon or, perhaps more likely, simply copying the intellectual proclivities of Russian intellectuals, who prior to 1863 did not see a contradiction in appropriating French (Catholic) and German (Protestant) thinkers for their own religious and political beliefs.
Russian Orthodox theologians in the first half of the nineteenth century distinguished between Catholic ideas (which they selectively employed) and Catholicism (upon which they looked down upon). “Catholic circles in Paris,” wrote the historian of Orthodox theology Georgii Florovskii, played an important role in the development of Russian thought.Footnote 94 “Roman Catholic elements can be found throughout the mystical syncretism” of the first decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote 95 Some Orthodox theologians expressed public sympathies for ideas originated in Catholic circles, such as the philosopher Pyotr Chaadaev whose worldview “was formed under the influence of French Traditionalism.”Footnote 96 Paul Bushkovitch has documented how beginning around 1825 Russian scholars, such as S. P. Shevyrev, started borrowing heavily from Catholic ideas regarding order and hierarchy, “with the unintended effect of rendering the Orthodox church of Old Russia suspiciously like the Catholic church of the 1840s.”Footnote 97
Thus, it is not surprising to witness the influence of Catholic thought even in the writings of the author of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationalism.” Scholars have noted the profound role Western European thinkers exerted on Uvarov's worldview. Most notably, he corresponded with the French defender of monarchy Joseph de Maistre, who was ambassador to Russia from 1803–1817.Footnote 98 Both De Maistre and Uvarov shared an appreciation for Bossuet. Uvarov cited Bossuet throughout his writings, basing his ideas about Divine Providence, death and evil on the French Bishop.Footnote 99
Uvarov specifically invoked Bossuet in his first major work written on Russian education, “On Teaching History with Respect to National Education.”Footnote 100 The short 28 page pamphlet published in 1813 contains in embryonic form the general contours of Uvarov's top-down education policy, starting with a multi-tier school system, retraining teachers, and eventually inculcating in students across the Empire a respect for God's law and Russia. He endorsed multiple tracks for different sectors of society and the use of catechisms for the teaching of sacred history. In one very striking curricular recommendation, Uvarov called for schools to teach about Moses, whom he considered an “inspired historian and legislator.”Footnote 101 More noteworthy, he cited Bossuet as maintaining “Moses to be the most ancient of historians, the most sublime philosopher, and the most sagacious of legislators.”Footnote 102 While it is doubtful that Jews thought that Russian governmental officials were sympathetic to Catholicism, Uvarov's invocation of Bossuet's theories of religious education could not have been lost on the Jewish enlighteners.
While some historians have claimed that lurking behind Uvarov's project were the ideas of Protestant missionaries,Footnote 103 in Uvarov's various reports and statements he only obliquely alluded to the missionaries when noting that, “today Protestant ministers know the Hebrew Bible better than the rabbis.”Footnote 104 Uvarov actually recognized that efforts to reform Jews were stymied if they were delivered through the mouth of Christian clergymen. As he noted in his report of 1841, “Jews are always suspicious of Christians meddling in their beliefs.” Rather, Uvarov reasoned, “Jews can be expected to change their religious opinions only when they themselves recognize their mistakes.”Footnote 105
Uvarov also explicitly argued against McCaul's tactics. He was concerned about the possibility of forcing Jewish leaders to publicly denounce the Talmud. “It seems to me,” he remarked, “that this would mean arming the majority of the Jews against the [government-sponsored Jewish] schools and to lose the support of those feeling [predisposed] to defend the Talmud. It would be senseless,” he continued, “if from the first moments [the leaders of the schools] separated themselves from their co-religionists.”Footnote 106 Instead, Uvarov defended his proposal by citing reform minded Jewish leaders residing in western European countries such as the Magdeburg rabbi Ludwig Philippson.Footnote 107 This approach would eventually lead Uvarov to appoint the Bavarian rabbi Max Lilienthal to head the government-supported Jewish enlightenment project.Footnote 108 As Stanislawski correctly notes, Uvarov's comments should not historically be equated with missionary impulses or even with missionary ideas; they could easily have been based on similar positions expressed by the Frenchman Abbé Grégoire.Footnote 109
The vast overwhelming majority of eastern European Jews, however, could not read Grégoire or for that matter any of the French, English, or German critiques of the Talmud. Luigi A. Chiarini's work, which provoked an outcry among western European Jewish intellectuals, did not register half as many Jewish responses as McCaul's magnum opus. The Jewish reaction to Old Paths was a function of it being written in Hebrew right around the time when Jewish civil rights were being hotly debated in Europe.
The coinciding of the publication of McCaul's work and Uvarov's reform initiatives provided enlighteners with an opening to critique the Russian government's proposals without directly attacking Uvarov or Nicholas I's reform project. By the 1840s, the missionary's influence in Russia was severely waning. When Levinsohn finished writing his response to McCaul in 1853, Nicholas I had already fully turned on the LSPCJ and the idea of a larger “Christian Nation.” Instead, he had come to embrace a stronger nationalist position. The Crimean War pitted Russia against England and it seemed as though it was no longer politically dangerous to publicly denounce ideas associated with the LSPCJ. The missionaries, who at one point were connected but now sufficiently distinguished from the Russian government, were a perfect target for Jewish enlighteners. It might be speculated that enlighteners originally used the missionaries as a straw man to critique certain elements of the government's reform project, which only reaffirmed the speculation that the government's educational initiatives had “missionary” objectives.
Reflecting on the fate of the government's education reform projects in the 1840s, the first Russian Jewish historian to comment on the subject, Menashe (Michael) Morgulis, noted that the Russian government failed to listen to Russian Jewish enlighteners. They refused to recognize the possibility of Judaism being a process-based tradition. “The whole problem,” Morgulis wrote in 1871, “involved a misunderstanding of the canons of interpretation regarding the Talmud.” Footnote 110 The government claimed that “the Talmud was a legal codex, incapable of being changed” and thus responsible for the sorry backward state of the Jews. Levinsohn and Fuenn had specifically argued that the Talmud was anything but a code and that its mechanisms for change mirrored those of other religious groups. As Morgulis correctly noted, the enlighteners failed to impress upon the government the possibility of the Talmud being understood as part of a tradition. The government continued to see the Jews as treating the Talmud as a piece of Protestant scripture and, as such, a politically threatening religious document. It was this failed history born of mutual suspicion and mutual misunderstanding that explains the “traditional” as well as “reformist” character and unique trajectory of the eastern European Jewish enlightenment.
Conclusion
Fuenn and Levinsohn's defense of the Talmud based on the Catholic idea of tradition was not simply a strategic ploy. It colored their religious worldview, inspiring a robust debate over what constituted the rabbinic tradition. Their understanding of rabbinic Judaism as a tradition became the dominant ideology of Russian Jewish enlighteners, at least until the 1870s.Footnote 111
Fuenn and Levinsohn's theories of religion and Judaism (and for that matter eastern European Jewish thought more generally) have been elided by a Germano-centric and Protestant bias in the historiography of modern Judaism. While in recent years Jewish social and cultural historians have begun focusing their attention on Polish and Russian history,Footnote 112 most American and European scholars of modern Jewish thought and theology have ignored this shift in scholarly attention. This bias is largely the result of the field of modern Jewish studies being divided between eastern European historians who focused on the way Jews “lived” and scholars of modern Judaism who studied how Jews “thought.”Footnote 113 The basic contours of this divide continue to structure the study of modern Judaism in history and religious studies departments across the American academy.
With the exception of a few notable scholars analyzing the long term impact of the religious elements of Hasidism,Footnote 114 those researching modern Jewish thought and theology continue to reference and ruminate on a genealogy that begins in German lands and runs from Mendelssohn and Lessing to Rosenzweig and Barth and then onto Levinas and his French interlocutors. This genealogy has resulted in scholars of modern Judaism either ignoring or reducing the forms of Judaism appearing on Russian lands to how they either opposed or moderately incorporated versions of movements that emerged in Germany. For example, instead of seeing how Levinsohn's legacy was debated in the context of Russian Jewish nihilism and realism, Levinsohn is either dismissed or simply reduced “to the Russian Mendelssohn.”Footnote 115 Scholars have ignored the contribution of eastern European Jewish thinkers and movements distinct from how they relate to a Protestantization thesis that focuses on a select group of German Jewish thinkers.
Most notably, Arnold Eisen and Leora Batnitzky have claimed that modern Judaism should not be reduced to a Protestant definition of religion, but their work suggests just the opposite. Eisen himself admits that his own Rethinking Modern Judaism: Ritual, Commandment and Community “attends repeatedly . . . to the impact of Protestant notions on the practices of Jewish individuals and communities, both in synagogues and homes.”Footnote 116 One reviewer of Batnitzky's book, How Judaism Became a Religion, wondered if her thesis was that Jews are now all Protestants. Eisen and Batnitzky's genealogies narrow modern Judaism to primarily religious phenomena that emerged on German speaking lands, and they evaluate all other phenomena in terms of their conformity or divergence from Protestant notions of religion. Batnitzky goes so far as to claim that for eastern European Jews “the idea of Judaism as a religion was largely irrelevant.”Footnote 117 However, as this paper has argued, for eastern European Jews the modern notion of religion was anything but irrelevant. Eisen does not address eastern European Jewry even though he is not unaware that his call for “reconsidering” a Protestant framework for modern Judaism was based precisely on Jewish rituals, commandments, and communities that were actually most seriously developed and theorized on Russian and Polish lands.
With the waning influence of mainline Protestantism and the slow demise of the Jewish German-based denominational structures in American Jewish life, scholars should begin questioning the influence and importance of German-Protestant models of religion on eastern European and American Judaism. The German-Protestant model of religion simply cannot make sense of the religious phenomena produced by Jews who lived in Eastern Europe and the new spiritual terrains of American and Israeli Judaism.
In other fields the hegemony of German-Protestant scholarship has been contested; scholars of religion are now engaged in understanding a whole new set of religious phenomenon most notably, the construction of tradition, politics of rituals, pilgrimages and spiritual journeys, the consecration of sacred spaces, religious radicalism, and the role of materiality and nationalism in religious movements. Scholars of Judaism will find it difficult to address these topics by employing a German-Protestant model of religion as their starting point. It is in the wide and rich terrain of Russian and Polish Jewish life that scholars of Judaism will find fertile and uncharted fields to explore these features of modern religious thought and experience.
