In contemporary social and political discourse, the concept of “the West” plays a role that is both centrally important and difficult to define. It is most frequently used to designate an entire civilization, in a way that does not quite map onto what is suggested by its first dictionary meaning as a cardinal direction. Deciding what exactly is and is not included under the umbrella of the West, or whether the term usefully describes anything at all, is a daunting normative task involving a series of discrete historical and definitional judgments. For example, is the West defined more by medieval Christendom, or by the subsequent intellectual and spiritual movements that attacked it, such as the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment? Is it possible or coherent to include all these conflicting movements under the same designation? Geographically, how important is the ancient split between the Latin and Orthodox churches, and does the Cold War-era exclusion of Russia from the West still hold today? Champions of the concept see defending it and the values it stands for as the foremost ideological task of our time, while critics suspect it of being little more than a portentous tribal designation for societies whose heritage happens to be both majority-Christian and majority-white.

The position of Israel—both the people and the state—within such a construction is manifestly problematic. Turning first to the State, it is clear that much of the rhetoric of Zionism, dating back as far as Theodor Herzl's Altneuland (1902), commits to establishing an outpost of the West in the midst of the East. The lack of overt Jewish religious content in Herzl's political Zionism made it easier to adopt and adapt the political, cultural, and economic arrangements of fin-de-siècle Europe for the Zionist ideal. Of course, Herzl's vision was not dispositive for the whole movement. Younger Zionists, especially after World War I, frequently tended to see European civilization as decadent and in its death throes (although it should be noted that in this, they did not differ from cultural pessimists like Oswald Spengler, whose perceptions of Western decline were compatible with an intellectualized chauvinism). For this young generation, it was easier to imagine the Jews as Orientals and the Zionist movement as the vehicle returning them to their home in the East. This tendency was reinforced by the fact that the persecution of Jews continued unabated even after the transition from medieval Christendom to its secularized successor, “Europe.” Subsequent generations of Zionists, and later of Israelis, continued to exhibit this tension, with some taking a strong stand for the European-ness and Western-ness of the State of Israel, and others denying both the desirability and the factuality of such a status.

The strange term “Judeo-Christian” points to the anxiety attending the effort to position both the people and the State of Israel within the West while recalling the historical status of the Jews as excluded from the West. “Judeo-Christian” is, in effect, an awkward effort to disavow the past enmity between Christians and Jews by forging Judaism into a bona fide link in the chain of heritage and influence that defines the West. From the standpoint of this idea, shared scripture and theological resonance allow Judaism and Jews to be recognized as contributors to a common project with Christians. Christian Hebraisms ancient and modern, the role of the Old Testament in seventeenth-century political theory, and other moments are extracted from their respective historical contexts and adduced in order to demonstrate the authenticity of this partnership and its rootedness, even in the centuries prior to Vatican II and the emergence of non-supersessionist Protestant theologies. Even if the gloomy past is raised in objection, at least the trajectory (the Heilsgeschichte, perhaps) can be regarded as progressive and hopeful. But the hyphen linking Jews to Christians, a coinage of the twentieth century, also highlights a fraught polemical field. For some, “Judeo-Christian” is intended to define the West against secularism, a threat to fundamental ethics and values; for others, it is Islam that remains outside. The wide variety of polemical uses, as we will see, is nothing new.

Into this fraught discourse comes Robert Erlewine's Judaism and the West. Its author has done an important service for the fields of Jewish studies and religious studies by linking the thought of five great modern Jewish philosophers directly to the problem of the West and of Judaism's place in it. The book could be placed on the shelf next to other recent reflections considering (arguably) the same relationship from other angles and possessed of a similar, survey-like structure: Leora Batnitzky's How Judaism Became a Religion: An Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought (Princeton University Press, 2011) and Willi Goetschel's The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought (Fordham University Press, 2013). Sharing the concerns of those works with the significance of fundamental terms such as “religion” and “philosophy” for modern Jewish thought, the book operates on three levels at once: it is a sustained, coherent argument on a pressing contemporary topic; it is a series of essays on major figures of modern Jewish philosophy, and thus a kind of unconventional introduction to that field; and it is a sequel to Erlewine's Monotheism and Tolerance: Recovering a Religion of Reason (Indiana University Press, 2010), another building block in his larger project of rehabilitating the modes and methods of Hermann Cohen and neo-Kantianism. Each of these levels deserves separate comment.

The specific prism through which Erlewine considers the titular relationship between Judaism and the West is what he calls the “world religions discourse.” Although he admits in a footnote that the phrase is “largely synonymous” with the more familiar “comparative religion” (209), Erlewine is interested less in the substantive findings of this field than in the ways in which the academic study of religion serves as a mechanism of social self-definition for scholars, readers, and universities alike. The focus on the world religions discourse serves to connect Erlewine to other scholars, currently active in the field of religious studies, who are exploring the second-order meaning of the field along these lines, and Erlewine devotes significant attention to the work of such scholars as Russell McCutcheon and Tomoko Masuzawa. The choice may seem arbitrary at first. Why explore the connection between Judaism and the West as a matter of the academic study of religion, of all things? Granted that Erlewine is a scholar and practitioner of Jewish philosophy (he refers to the figures he studies as “our predecessors” [158]), and granted that he wants to present his data in a new light that will appeal to a religious studies readership broader than his subfield, still, why choose this light?

The answer seems to be twofold. First, Erlewine has a reason internal to his subfield: highlighting the “critical, even bellicose, relationship with Europe and European Christianity” of modern Jewish thought will force us to acknowledge that “different problems and concerns animate our reflections” (157-158), that we are not simply in continuity with the canon, sharing a framework, a context, and a set of methods. In other words, “our understanding of the task of Jewish philosophy must change” (161). Second, he is intrigued by the possibility of including Judaism (here exemplified by its twentieth-century Germanophone philosophical tradition) in the contemporary comparative project of studying the generation and deployment of the category of “religion” itself, by and for the West—a project that necessarily also means examining how this category was absorbed and re-deployed by the West's “others,” including colonized Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims. While Erlewine does not extensively engage with colonialism or postcolonialism, he acknowledges their close relationship to the world religions discourse, and he strongly implies that he imagines the Jewish thinkers he studies, although living within Europe, to be comparable to non-European thinkers who also appropriated and repurposed European academic religious studies for their own. If this is so, one could wish that he had developed this point in more detail, as it has significant implications for his broader interests in recovering a religion of reason (a point we return to below). As it is, Erlewine's treatment provides a glimpse into a world, both distant and near to us, in which the West was made to stand for ideas both familiar and strange.

Although the central chapters of Judaism and the West deal with five different philosophers, they also develop the main argument in such a way that they are not merely six separate statements supporting the thesis, but a continuous thread that the reader must follow closely. That thread runs as follows: Hermann Cohen (the subject of chapters 1 and 2) sets the stage for the work of the thinkers that follow, pursuing two distinct but related strategies to combat the exclusion of Jews and Judaism from European identity within the world religions discourse. First, Cohen confronts the furor orientalis of German philological and historical scholarship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a mood that threatened “the unraveling of the once shared understanding of Europe's foundations as resting on the legacy of a synthesis of ancient Greece and ancient Israel” (14) with its stress on the “Indo-European” heritage. In response, Cohen strongly reasserts the Greco-Israelite heritage, and then privileges the Israelite.Footnote ¹ Thus, Germany, which Cohen sees as standing at the forefront of the West intellectually and spiritually, owes its greatest debts not to Persia or India, and not even to Greece or Rome, but to Israel. Erlewine writes sensitively about the polemical context that makes sense of Cohen's idealized German nationalism and Jewish chauvinism; Cohen accurately perceived that the world religions discourse, which took the philological distinction between Indo-European (“Aryan”) and “Semitic” languages and inflated it into a fundamental conflict of Weltanschauungen, was operating so as to construct a modern Christianity purified of its Jewish influences. He may well have suspected that even the most abstruse and academic versions of this eliminationist intellectual project could license a fulfillment in physical reality soon enough. Second, Cohen argues a philosophical case against the historicist and philological methodologies of Religionswissenschaft, seeking to foreground a conception of reason that again privileges Judaism in such a way as to prevent its diminution or elimination. The subsequent philosophers Erlewine discusses each take up one or the other of Cohen's two strategies, in their own ways: either the grand metanarrative of the West that counter-intuitively centers Judaism (Franz Rosenzweig), or the critique of Religionswissenschaft (Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel). Only Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the subject of the final chapter, renews the Cohenian project of attempting both strategies at once. This makes Soloveitchik, perhaps paradoxically given his Orthodoxy and Cohen's liberalism, a truer heir to Cohen than even Rosenzweig, who claimed that status for himself.

The individual readings in each chapter deal with central, well-known works by each thinker (Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, Buber's I and Thou) as well as lesser-known ones (Heschel's Die Prophetie, Soloveitchik's dissertation on Cohen and Halakhic Mind). Occasionally, the discussions get very deeply into the philosophical weeds, so that the reader may forget exactly what ties the subject matter at hand to the overarching question of Judaism and the West, e.g. when Erlewine discusses Soloveitchik's critique of Cohen's concept of the infinitesimal: “Cohen denudes perception of access to any sort of givenness or quality. Perceptions are an ‘otherness’ awaiting ‘objectivization.’ As a result, the contents of sensation are actually already contents of consciousness and are generated by thinking” (137). In these moments, Erlewine's book covers some familiar ground, rehearsing the conflict in twentieth-century philosophy between neo-Kantianism and other rationalisms, on the one hand, and existentialism and phenomenology, on the other. Typically, however, Erlewine manages to bring the discussion back around to the main thesis without obvious strain. After all, the phenomenological approach in the history of religions depends for its salience on phenomenology itself, and one of Erlewine's preoccupations is to demonstrate to contemporary critics of that methodology, especially as an approach to religious studies, why they might still find Jewish philosophers and theologians who indulge in it worthy of interest.Footnote ² Overall, the facility with which Erlewine is able to connect his readings of even the most “philosophical” passages in each thinker back to the world religions discourse speaks to the plausibility of his thesis.

In at least one case, that of Rosenzweig, Erlewine's treatment effectively moves the whole conversation about the field forward, explaining clearly and helpfully what, exactly, those ostensibly ridiculous passages about the religions of China, India, and Islam are doing in The Star of Redemption. Other scholars have noted that these sections are serving systematic functions for Rosenzweig, filling in positions in a schema that simply had to be filled by something in order for his presentation to work; Erlewine shows why Rosenzweig filled them with these examples, a demonstration that makes it harder to argue that we should pass over them in silence while somehow maintaining the overall relevance of Rosenzweig's argument. Not all of Erlewine's individual readings are as fruitful as this one—the discussion of Buber, perhaps, comes closest to being a presentation that could have served well in any introduction to modern Jewish philosophy, rather than needing to appear in this particular book—but perhaps my judgment here is attributable to my familiarity with the strand of scholarship, found in Michael Zank and Guy Stroumsa, that already stressed the centrality of Religionswissenschaft to Buber, including his understanding of the threat posed by neo-Gnosticism and the role of “metaphysical antisemitism” in structuring research in the history of religions. Much of this may still be news to non-Buber scholars, and all of it is concisely and accurately presented.

The inclusion of Heschel and Soloveitchik, albeit with a focus on their German-language works that ties them more closely to the German-Jewish philosophical scene than to the American one in which they later became well known, is another factor that sets Judaism and the West apart. In the introduction, Erlewine explains that it was their relationship to the world religions discourse that led him to select these two, rather than Leo Strauss, Emmanuel Levinas, or Emil Fackenheim, as representatives of mid-century Jewish philosophy. The chapter on Heschel, in particular, is a crash course in the nuances and perils of drawing Athens-Jerusalem distinctions, even in a context in which the polemical force and meaning of “Greece” has shifted in its relationship to Europe and the West (i.e., the context of the recovery of Persian and Indian “roots” by the world religions discourse). Heschel, as Erlewine presents him in his reading of his early work Die Prophetie (1936), is extremely invested in a particular version of the Athens-Jerusalem distinction, according to which the former is defined by its positing of an indifferent universe and its lack of ultimate concern for human life, and the latter by its assumption of a God who cares for the human being. Defining Athens in this way allows Heschel to align Greek philosophy with the mythology that it ostensibly opposes, and determines Heschel's attitude towards contemporary German science of religion, which he perceives to be in thrall to this “Greek” way of thinking and as such incapable of properly understanding the biblically-inherited Jewish categories. From Heschel's point of view, Cohen himself, with his attachment to neo-Kantian categorical modes of thought, ends up on the Greek side, together with nearly all of Christianity. This fact leads Erlewine to observe that the ideas of Greekness and biblical-ness are fluid throughout these works, shifting in signification from one thinker to another according to each thinker's perception of his polemical requirements. Thus “Cohen critiques Christianity for being too Greek in the sense that human beings and the world are too similar to God . . . Heschel, however, criticizes Christianity for the exact opposite reason” (114).

At this point, a comparative reference to twentieth-century Christian theology might have served Erlewine well, since radical Protestants, from Barth to American fundamentalists, are no strangers to the polemical deployment of Bible-vs.-philosophy binaries. Ultimately, the chapter concludes with a citation of Heschel's view that “our [Jewish] intellectual position situated as it is between Athens and Jerusalem is not an ultimate one” (128), since it is the result of historically contingent cultural proximity to the Mediterranean Sea, and could just as well have involved the Himalayas instead – a congenial view, tending to work against the notion that Occidental identity is in any way integral to Jewishness.

This position of Heschel's, that we should not place undue emphasis on the historical accident that the culture that received the Torah came under the sway of Hellenistic empires rather than East Asian ones, provides an interesting vantage point from which to consider Erlewine's overarching scholarly goals. If, indeed, it is fair to consider Judaism and the West as part of a project initiated by Monotheism and Tolerance (despite Erlewine's own reference to it as “a methodological departure for me” [ix]), then Erlewine is concerned first and foremost with the problems posed to the twentieth century by religious pluralism and its counterpart, religious violence. He rejects solutions to these problems that involve either the imposition of a demand for tolerance and equality by a self-proclaimed rationalist, universal philosophy (in the previous book), or that essentialize the players involved, reifying the religious traditions into “closed-off monads” (163). The latter point, however, made together with the claim that “modern Jewish philosophy can continue to inspire us today,” requires some fancy argumentative footwork, since it is clear that all the thinkers discussed by Erlewine do in fact maintain some sort of essentialist vision of Judaism. He acknowledges this, arguing for a recontextualization of their work as “a form of critical pluralism” that “actively worked to deconstruct and subvert the hegemony of the world religions discourse, as well as the Germanic, Aryanized Christianity that went hand in hand with it.” But how to address the challenge posed by “the radical plurality of religious and nonreligious traditions without,” while simultaneously acknowledging “the proliferation of voices within”? Surely Cohen, Rosenzweig, Buber, et al. derived strength from their conviction that they spoke in the name of Judaism; depriving oneself of the right to make such a claim (in McCutcheon's terms, disavowing the role of “caretaker”) means entering an entirely different argumentative territory, even if we agree that one can “offer creative reconstructions of ‘Judaism’ that prioritize one particular strand or thread of the tradition” (162).Footnote ³

This same difficulty would seem to hold for that central floating signifier of the title, the one with which we began: the West. Like other contested terms, the meaning of the West fluctuates from one use to another, according to the polemical needs and context of the user. A challenge presented by Erlewine's book, in this context, is that the author occasionally gives the impression that he is not only contextualizing modern Jewish philosophers in relation to the West in order to underscore the distance between their twentieth-century concerns and our twenty-first century ones, but that he actually agrees that the polemical context necessitated their particular responses, or ones like them. For example, as mentioned earlier, he writes:

Thus the response of Cohen, in re-centralizing the Jews in the West, seems to make sense. However, by restricting himself to critical commentary on these thinkers and largely refraining from his own constructive theorizing, Erlewine stops short, in this book, of asking: “previously understood” by whom? Which Christians and Jews shared basic categories for imagining “Europe” in this way, and when did they do so, and to what end, and for whose benefit, and why did they stop?

The story of the world religions discourse speaks only, and only partially, to the last of these questions, when it tells of the rise of an Aryan ideology and a scholarly philology that looked for German national origins in India and Iran, rather than in Greece and Israel. But if we ask about the supposed consensus that preceded it, we might soon have to admit that it did not exist, since Jews were rarely if ever asked for their opinion about what constituted Europe, and since they largely did not recognize the “Hebraic” or “ancient Israel” in the admixture known as “Europe” as anything other than the age-old Christian appropriation and distortion of the Torah. In one sense, this fact tends to reinforce, rather than undermine, Erlewine's thesis, insofar as it is only with the modern Jewish philosophers that we find this investment in the value of the Israelite element in the European heritage. But it also has another implication, which he does not fully address: even taking on board the “critical pluralism” he says that these thinkers embody, there may well be no version of Europe into which Jews fit as a comfortable component of a synthesis. To paraphrase Rosenzweig's comment on Hermann Cohen's “Deutschtum und Judentum,” cited by Erlewine (168): Judaism and the West are not on the same level. One can compare the East and the West, the South and the West, but not Judaism and the West.

So, then, were the Zionists right all along? Was Gershom Scholem's withering critique of Cohen, even stronger than Rosenzweig's, the last word? The vexed nature of the relationship of the contemporary State of Israel to cultural and political Western-ness would suggest a more complex picture. If the people of Israel have an unsettled relationship to the West, emerging out of their unsettled relationship to Christianity, then the State of Israel does as well, simultaneously claiming and rejecting Western status according to the needs of the moment. Moreover, there is no denying the embeddedness of the very thinkers Erlewine discusses, the modern German-Jewish philosophers, in European culture and thought, even if this fact does not immediately or automatically yield a workable, coherent concept of a “Judeo-Christian West.” Finally, one would not wish to provide aid or comfort to those who, today, in the name of the West and its defense, carry on the tradition of proclaiming that, indeed, the Jews have no place in it.

In answer to these quandaries, then, I agree with Erlewine that the modern Jewish philosophers have something to offer, without necessarily admitting that a fuller appreciation and understanding of their polemical situation also intellectually warrants their particular responses. As Bertolt Brecht wrote in An die Nachgeborenen (1939), to “you who will emerge from the flood in which we have sunk,” we may think of them forgivingly, but we may no longer pursue the first of Cohen's strategies, the one taken up by Rosenzweig, and seek to establish Judaism at the center of a metanarrative of the West. The second strategy, the critique of Religionswissenschaft, stands on entirely different ground, but it is not immediately clear how this will work to address many of the concerns that Erlewine characterizes as ours: “challenging forms of Judaism that prioritize ‘Jewish interests’ in the Middle East to the point of failing to recognize the suffering, indeed the humanity, of the Palestinians . . . [challenging] militant orthodoxies that not only perpetuate homophobic and sexist behavior but also refuse to respect other religious modes of existence . . . critiquing and resisting rising economic and political inequality . . . recognizing and resisting newly emergent forms of antisemitism” (163). Perhaps this will be the subject of Erlewine's next book.

As Erlewine demonstrates, efforts to establish the Jews and Judaism intellectually as central to metanarratives of Western cultural, intellectual, and spiritual development often share, to some extent, in the assumption that to be central to such a narrative would be a noble, worthy thing, while to be distant would be less worthy. At the extreme, such a view approaches cultural chauvinism. Many who feel that they cannot justify the political establishment of religion through recourse to straightforward arguments of religious supremacy, or cannot intellectually commit to biological racism, find cultural chauvinism a palatable alternative. It justifies the same inequalities, but without the taint of being associated directly with discredited scientific theories. It feels closer to patriotism, kin to traditional virtues. It requires some knowledge of the past, of literature and philosophy, and thus cannot be fully and truly embraced by the vulgar and uneducated. There is nothing new or surprising about this. What is new is the attempt to include Jews in the orbit of this chauvinism, rather than exclude them as its suffering object. It is a devil's bargain that some Jews, including some great Jewish philosophers, have found difficult to fully refuse. If Erlewine is right, however, the study of modern Jewish thought can offer us a foundation for illuminating and encouraging such refusal in the future.