Abraham Geiger, as Ken Koltun-Fromm observes, devoted a good deal of his intellectual energy to the elucidation of “‘highest-order meanings’ such as ‘ethical monotheism,’ the ‘mission of Israel,’ and the Jewish ‘spirit’” (11). Judaism was, for Geiger, at bottom “a set of moral universal truths that continually reappear in Jewish history” (25). Forgoing any attempt to provide a comprehensive account of Geiger's understanding of these truths, Koltun-Fromm focuses his attention on Geiger's “penetrating analysis of religious authority that still resonates today for contemporary Jewry.” Koltun-Fromm is less concerned with clarifying Geiger's overall intellectual orientation than with reading him in a way that “can help us read ourselves, and enable us to uncover, and thus recognize those personal sources that motivate and inspire” (9). He has written a book about Geiger not so much to enable us to understand him better as to help us understand ourselves better, and thereby to assist us in building better Jewish communities.
What Koltun-Fromm appears to admire most in Geiger is his approach to the Bible in “his most prodigious work, The Original Text and Translations of the Bible in Its Dependence on the Inner Development of Judaism,” known in short as the Urschrift (41). For Geiger, as he skillfully shows, the biblical text was not so much a repository of vital truths as a record of their ongoing reformulation by generation after generation of Jews. Far from being a monolithic enterprise, it reflected innumerable, half-buried historical conflicts. It “is and was for all time an eternal living word, and not a dead book” (47). Once the text had finally solidified, “more creative hermeneutical efforts were enlisted” by postbiblical translators and exegetes “to produce a sacred text infused with religious authority.”
Geiger's greatest contribution, according to Koltun-Fromm, was to stress the never-ending character of this process of reinterpretation, one in which modern Jews could themselves participate as individuals “through creatively rereading texts and their translations” (62). While he clearly regarded this process as an inherently progressive one, he did not envision it as culminating in a universally authoritative reconstruction of the Jewish tradition but in something much more multifaceted. As an exponent of pluralism, he often found himself at odds not only with the Orthodox but also with other contemporary reformers. At the rabbinical conferences of the 1840s, for instance, he stood opposed to the general tendency to enact broad resolutions for the entire German Jewish community and defended the role of “the rabbinic scholar who passionately addresses local concerns through a committed engagement with the Jewish past” (88). The proper training and the activities of such people were matters of the utmost importance to Geiger. Only if they were the recipients of an education that united Wissenschaft with the rabbinic calling could they guide local communities in ways that would challenge and improve them and bring about a creative revitalization of their religious practice.
The preparation of the men who would perform these tasks would ideally take place through training and studying with Jewish studies faculties at German universities. Rabbis would emerge from this environment with “inner sensibilities and personal meanings” grounded “upon the bedrock of Jewish Wissenschaft” (118). In turning to the communities they were destined to serve, they would not provide stale and lifeless reiterations of theological dogmas but would serve as inspiring exemplars of their individual commitments. Like Geiger himself, they would not teach through catechisms but with what his own son called his “living freshness.” In Koltun-Fromm's words, the “authority of personal meaning determines the nature and scope of Geiger's educational philosophy and practice” (126).
Apart from his patient but unyielding criticism of Geiger's retrograde gender politics, Koltun-Fromm portrays Geiger in an almost entirely positive light. He does not, however, make any grand claims on his behalf or present him as a thinker from whom we can derive indispensable, otherwise unavailable insights. But he does indicate an important way in which Geiger's Jewish philosophy can serve as a corrective to one current trend. Citing Steven Cohen and Arnold Eisen's The Jew Within, Koltun-Fromm notes the tendency of modern Jews, particularly in America, to “abandon organizational life within the public sphere” and “to turn instead to more intimate concerns of family, synagogue, and the ‘sovereign self’” (134). Koltun-Fromm does not explicitly deplore this tendency. He does not reiterate the concerns about the debilitating effects of narrow individualism found in some of the works that he cites, such as the important and influential volume edited by Robert Bellah in 1985, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Nevertheless, it seems safe to assume that he shares some of Bellah's and other like-minded social critics' apprehensions and appreciates Geiger's thought largely for the way in which it provides a potential response to them.
Geiger can speak to our contemporaries, Koltun-Fromm believes, because he both shared and endorsed their taste for individualism and outlined a path that leads beyond it. His “liberal Judaism appeals to the authority of personal meaning in order to recenter those meanings within communal practices.” He showed “how religious authority should be lived—in historical memories and reading practices, in the embodied rituals and local communities that provoke and obligate in their own right, and in the education of social actors who flourish within strong communal attachments” (134).
It may indeed be the case that Geiger's outlook is just as much in tune with contemporary sensibilities and as capable of elevating them as Koltun-Fromm claims. But it is nevertheless hard to believe that a better acquaintance with Geiger's own thought will do much by itself to bring about the kind of transformation that he apparently wishes to see. What would be needed to accomplish that would be rabbis and teachers capable of playing the role that Geiger had in mind. They would have to be people both immersed in Wissenschaft and blessed with the ability to transmit their knowledge in a spiritually exciting fashion to the general public. They would need to be people in possession of the kind of “living freshness” that Ludwig Geiger ascribed to his father and is today, I am afraid, in rather short supply in the synagogues in which Abraham Geiger is still regarded as a respected forbear or could possibly be seen as such.
