I would like to follow up on my previous post and consider the implications of what I wrote for Judaism. Does not Judaism have its own tradition of religious liberty, independent of Protestantism? For an explanation, let me turn to the example of Max Weber and Capitalism.
Much as I argued that Protestantism is a crucial ingredient
for religious liberty, Weber famously argued that Protestantism played a critical
role in the development of Capitalism. For Weber, Protestantism allowed for a “worldly
asceticism.” Traditionally societies had operated on the assumption that labor
was a curse. Most people were fated to be peasants with only a few having the
opportunity to be aristocrats leading lives of leisure. The implication of this
was that one worked only as hard as one needed to with the goal of having as
much leisure as possible. If you managed to get some money, you should stop
working.
In the Protestant model, work became the natural state of
affairs for human beings. As such, even rich people, in no danger of starvation, should work. If you managed to get ahold of some money, you should not take an
extended vacation. You should not even donate the money to support the Church.
Instead, you should invest that money back into your business as capital. Instead
of being saved through good works like charity, you are saved by being one of
the Elect. A possible sign of being one of the Elect is that God causes you to
be successful in business. From this perspective, being a capitalist is not
contrary to the Protestant faith. On the contrary, capitalism is the logical
fulfillment of Protestantism.
To be clear, Weber recognized that people engaged in
capitalist-type behavior long before Protestantism. What Weber was arguing was
that Protestantism created an ethical revolution where trade was seen as a
principled moral good. Think of it this way, the medieval Church accepted prostitution
as a necessary evil. This did not mean that being a prostitute was ok. On the
contrary, being a prostitute was something that someone was ashamed of and only
did for as long as it was absolutely necessary before trying to get out.
Similarly, one was not proud to be a merchant and engage in something as “sterile”
as trade. Instead, one made some money from trade before retiring and trying to
“atone” for having resorted to such base activity.
In regards to Jews, Weber argued that they were “emergency”
capitalists. There is nothing inherently capitalist about Judaism. Ancient Jews
were not particularly involved in trade. It was only circumstances in Christian
Europe, not anything within Judaism, that caused Jews to develop a capitalist
element. Medieval Jews were cut out of most professions, so they turned to
money lending. As such, Weber did not believe that Jews provided a model of
principled capitalism to say that being a capitalist was a positive good.
In response to Weber, I would argue that it is possible for
principles to evolve out of pragmatic necessity. For example, Isaac Abarbanel,
living right before the Protestant Reformation, rejected the Aristotelian claim
that money was sterile and therefore argued that usury was a positive good. Clearly,
Abarbanel did not come to this position from an “objective” reading of the Hebrew
Bible. This may have been self-interest, but that should not matter. Abarbanel,
presumably, honestly believed that money-lending Jews like himself were morally
superior to the Christian nobility responsible for the expulsion of 1492. If claiming
that Jews were morally superior to Christians required one to believe that capitalism
was a positive good, then we can add capitalism as the fourteenth principle of the Jewish faith.
To be clear, Jews never were in a position to bring about a
capitalist ethical revolution by themselves. It is not as if, capitalism ever
became acceptable just because the Jews did it. Furthermore, the Jewish experience
with capitalism remained linked to their place within Christian society.
Much as Protestantism created the grounds not simply to engage
in capitalism as a practical necessity, but as a matter of principle, Protestantism helped lay the groundwork for a principled support for religious
liberty. This should be distinguished from a pragmatic tolerance where you
refrain from murdering members of another faith because you fear they will
murder you back. I would see the Jewish tradition of religious liberty, much
like the Jewish tradition of capitalism, as being rooted in the Jewish
experience as a persecuted minority. It can be argued that the fact that Jews
have needed to support religious tolerance for pragmatic reasons, does not preclude
the development of a principled belief in religious liberty that it is better
for people to persist in their freely believed error rather than be coerced
into the truth. An example of this can be seen in the Jewish disdain for
missionary activity. Jews in the ancient world tried to convert non-Jews.
During the Middle Ages, Muslim and Christian authorities did not allow Jews to
try to convert Muslims and Christians. Today, Jews do not try to convert
non-Jews and have even developed theological reasons to justify not trying to “save
the souls” of non-Jews.
This does not change the fact that Jewish support for
religious liberty came out of a distinct experience with non-Jewish cultures. If
you are going to have Jews who support religious liberty on principle rather
than as a simple matter of deeming non-Jews as beneath even missionary activity, then
it will require someone with positive interactions with non-Jewish religions. An
obvious candidate would be some kind of Philo-Semitic Protestantism that
acknowledges some legitimacy to the Jewish experience.