The Fall of Community and the Rise of Secular Modernity

Previously, I criticized C. S. Lewis for his argument that modernity took away people's ability to judge objective truths and make life-changing positions because they believed that something was true. What I believe was missing from that argument is the role of community. Modernity is important in the rise of secularism not because people stopped judging arguments objectively, they never were good at that in the first place, but that modernity broke down traditional community authority. This flipped the incentives when it came to religion. Where once people's lived experiences made it almost impossible not to be at least somewhat religious, now people live in a secular reality that makes it quite difficult for them to be religious. 

The importance of communal authority is most obvious when dealing with Judaism as the Jewish experience with modernity (at least in Europe) involved fairly clear-cut moments where communal authority broke down. Jews went from being members of their local kehilla to being citizens of a country, leading to rapid secularization during the following generation. The Christian experience of modernity provides fewer clean breaks with religious authority, the French and Russian Revolutions being the obvious exceptions. That being said, the practical implications of the modern breakdown of community, once it happened, are relevant to Christians as well.  

It is the combination of community and ideas that forces people to make life-altering decisions. If you grow up within a particular faith community, you might be very smart and be able to come up with all kinds of challenging arguments against your religion. That being said, as long as an alternative community with a superior doctrine does not exist, then it is unlikely for a formal break to happen. One thinks of the tragic life of Uriel da Costa, who fled Catholic Portugal only to find that the rabbinic Judaism of Amsterdam did not suit him either. He found himself caught in a cycle of being excommunicated for heresy and humiliating himself in order to get the community to take him back. Eventually, he committed suicide. Most people are going to avoid such a fate by accepting the parts of their religion they can accept while quietly placing anything else as beyond their understanding. 

Take away the sense of a religious community and two things happen. One, our person likely will have encountered an anti-religious ideology with which to argue against any argument for religion we might wish to make. Two, even if you get past his arguments, as long as our person has no religious community, your arguments for religion will never get past the level of an interesting theory that does not need to be put into practice. Before modernity, it was unbelief that had to get past people's lived experiences and, as such, even the best arguments against religion could be dismissed as interesting theories with no relevance to "reality." Now it is religion that has to scale that wall of people's lived experience in a secular world where the a priori assumptions of the game are fixed against religion.  

The problem of community helps us understand the challenge of science and other academic disciplines. For many people, science offers a kind of objective truth. Even if particular claims of science can be refuted, the scientific method carries authority as something against which other truths are going to be judged. It is very easy to make a convincing case for Genesis if there are no ready alternatives competing for the person's attention. Introduce evolution and the mere fact that it exists as an alternative explanation makes it harder to accept Genesis as an absolute. This becomes all the more so once we accept evolution as part of science and come to see science as fundamental to how we understand the world.

From this perspective, it does not matter if I reconcile Genesis with evolution. The moment dinosaurs living millions of years ago become something to take more seriously than a literal Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, my religion is going to be critically hobbled. As my brain becomes filled with all sorts of things from science, math, and history that I honestly believe in at the bottom of my heart, the religious truths I hold are going to become pushed aside to the point when, even if they are not rejected, they become relativized to the point that it will not be able to make absolute claims over my actions. The only way to escape this trap is to undermine the very authority of the academic disciplines as a means of making any claims regarding even physical reality.   

Keep in mind that most people, myself included, are not professional scientists. Even among professional scientists, the number of people who are in a position to directly evaluate the case for evolution is going to be small. It is likely that there are only a few thousand such people on the planet. Everyone else is forced to accept what such people say as a matter of faith. This is going to come down to a question of whose authority you going to accept. If you are part of a religious thought structure then it is easy to reject evolution. Scientists are just a bunch of power-hungry fools trying to convince people to reject the obvious truth of creation. This is in contrast to our wise and virtuous gedolim (or whatever your religious leaders like to call themselves). Once this is your a priori, it is easy to find evidence to justify this belief. The moment that science becomes the basis of your lived reality then the script flips and it becomes easy to dismiss any objections to evolution as religious backwardness.   

To be clear, when I talk about secularism, I do not necessarily mean that people become outright atheists. Religion can still survive as a social hobby that people attend to on a weekly basis. This does not change the fact that such people still live in a secular reality. Religion, no longer the full-time lived experience, is pushed to the margins with little hope of reaching the next generation let alone the wider society. 

AJS Conference Day Two Session Two (Early Modern Messianism(s): Context, Confluence, and Discourse

Rebekka Voss (Harvard University)
"Topsy-Turvy World's End: The Lost Tribes in Apocalyptic Scenarios from Sixteenth-Century Germany"

Jews saw the Ten Lost Tribes as redeemers who would save them from the Christians. This is in keeping with the theme of revenge which so permeates Ashkenazic thought. Christians saw the Ten Lost Tribes as serving the Anti Christ. (See Andrew Gow's the Red Jews) In the early modern period the Ten Lost Tribes were a major political and military force, to be reckoned with, in the minds of both Jews and Christians in Europe. In 1523 we have pamphlets in Germany talking about the tribes being on the march with 600,000 soldiers. It was at this moment in time that Reubeni appeared and offered Christians a solution to their problem. The Ten Lost Tribes would help them take the Holy Land. What is interesting to note is that, despite the differences between Jews and Christians, the Ten Lost Tribes plays a role in their common culture. Jews and Christians exchange information between each other relating to sightings of the tribes and are used as sources by the other. Jews took on the legend of the Red Jews, that there was this vast army of Jews from the Ten Lost Tribes ready to descend upon Europe, as a counter counter story. Each side claimed the Jacob side in the Jacob/Esau narrative. For Christians red refers to Edom (in reference to Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of lentiles) For Jews red referred to King David who had red hair. The Yiddish version of the legend talks about the Ten Lost Tribes as David taking on the Christian Goliath.


Anne Oravetz Albert (University of Pennsylvania)
"The Religio-Political Jew: Post-Sabbatian Political Thought in Daniel Levi de Barrios and Abraham Pereyra"

The Sabbatean movement meant a lot of different things to different people. We see an example of two Amsterdam Jews who engage in a shift towards a Jewish politics, to see Jews as political beings. Both of these Jews were ex conversos familiar with Catholic political thought. Abraham Pereyra talks about the need to govern with more piety. His Mirror of the World talks about the value of prudence in classical and Jewish sources. He attacks secularizers who follow Machiavelli and try to take religion out of politics. (For a discussion of the role of Machiavelli in early modern Catholic political thought see Robert Bireley's the Counter-Reformation Prince.) Daniel Levi Barrios, a converso poet, talks about how Jewish exile lead to better Jewish forms of government with the ultimate example being the Jewish community of Amsterdam. (Ruth Wisse's Jews and Power is an interesting example of a modern scholar who seems to follow a very similar line of thinking. Wisse talks about Jewish exilic political thought as being centered on creating and maintaining a community without recourse to physical force.) Barrios wavers back and forth on the merits of a monarchy versus that of a democracy. (A line of political discourse founded in Aristotle's Politics.) The mamad is the ideal type of government. Barrios uses various symbols to put the mamad within the context of creation.

(This presentation, as with the first, are closely related to the research I am doing now. I wrote a paper on Reubeni and his use of his status as an ambassador from the Ten Lost Tribes to create a mobile state around himself. This going to be part of my larger dissertation on the politics of Jewish Messianism, an issue this second paper so nicely confronted.)

Pawel Maciejko (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

(The original title of Maciejko's presenation was going to be "Messinaism and Exile in the Works of Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschutz." Maciejko, though, decided to speak on Eibeschutz's Sabbatean son, Wolf Eibeschutz.)

On Christmas eve in 1758 Wolf Eibeschutz told the people in the synagogue that he was in that instead of following the traditional Jewish Christmas eve practice of playing cards. (There is a custom amongst certain Jews not to study Torah on Christmas eve because on this night the klipot, the dark powers, reign supreme and anything good done would just go to serve the forces of evil.) Instead Eibeschutz declared that he would destroy the power of the klipot by playing his harp. The people saw a flame in the sky, which Eibeschutz declared was the sechina descending. Like Eibeschutz, Jacob Frank, in Poland, was trying to unite the Sabbatean community behind him. The Frankists had just lost their protector. Frank was pushing for conversion to Christianity which he would do in 1759. Like Eibeschutz, Frank also used this "flame" in the sky, which was in fact Halley's comet.

The eighteenth century was a golden age of charlatanism, which Eibeschutz and Frank are examples of. The eighteenth century was a time in which there developed a major knowledge gap; those who were on the more knowledgeable side could easily use their knowledge to dupe those who were not. Both Eibeschutz and Frank knew about the expected appearance of Halley's comet from reading European newspapers.

The concept of a false messiah is a contradiction in terms. Frank should not be viewed as a messiah at all. He was simply part of a wide circle of charlatans active in Europe at the time and formed an actual community. There is little messianism in Frank. He does not offer redemption. Instead there is this world and eternal life.

(Even if you are involved in Jewish studies you have probably not yet heard of Pawel Maciejko. I first met him last May when he came to Ohio state for a conference. Just remember that you heard about him here first. This guy is brilliant and a talented speaker and he will be a dominant figure in the field in the decades to come.

One could challenge Maciejko over the eighteenth century being the age of charlatanism. The sixteenth century had David Reubeni and Natalie Zemon Davis' Martin Guerre case. Maciejko responded to this that the eighteenth century was different in that you have an actual community of charlatans who are in contact with each other.

Elisheva Carlebach was chairing the session and challenged him over his refusal to use the terms false and failed messiahs. So they got into an interesting back and forth on this matter. I asked him point blank if in creating the narrative of Jewish Messianism, such as Harris Lenowitz's Jewish Messiahs: From the Galilee to Crown Heights, if he would take Frank out. He said yes. Since I am planning on including a chapter on Frank in my dissertation on political messianism, I am going to have to be responding to Maciejko; this should be interesting.)

Discrimination Against Blacks Practiced by Jews in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam

Here is an interesting example of what one might see as Jewish “racism” within the Amsterdam Sephardic Jewish community in the seventeenth-century. According to Adam Sutcliffe:

The exclusion of non-whites from participation in the life of the Sefardic community took many forms. An ordinance of 1644 asserted, in protection of the “reputation and good government” of the community, that circumcised Black Jews could not be called to the Torah. In 1647, the Mahamad marked apart a separate, less prestigious area of the cemetery for the burial of Blacks and mulattos. In 1658, mulatto boys, as well as all other non-Sefardim, were excluded from study at the Amsterdam yeshivah, Ets Haim. An unmistakable strain of color-conscious racial prejudice is evident in these ordinances. (Adam Sutcliffe, “Regulating Sociability: Rabbinical Authority and Jewish-Christian Interaction in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam.” Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics Ed. Daniel Frank and Matt Goldish pg. 306.)

Sutcliffe goes on to put this into context. It was not just Blacks that the Sephardic Jewish community looked down upon. They also had absolute contempt for Ashkenazic Jews (Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe). One wonders as to what extent this attitude toward Blacks and mulattos was a reflection of the Spanish and Portuguese cultures that these Jews had fled from. The Spanish created the most elaborate race code of any pre-nineteenth European culture and are the premier example of pre-modern racism. The Sephardic community in the Netherlands was made up conversos, people raised as Christians, and their descendents. We see many examples where, while they may have rejected Catholicism as a religion, they remained good Spanish Catholics to the core. This might be one of them.

I must say, this whole attempt to keep Blacks as lesser members of the Jewish community actually reminds me a lot of the Mormons. The Mormon Church, until the 1970s, did not allow Blacks into the priesthood. In theory they could be baptized but would always remain as outsiders to the group.