Judaism As a Culture

 

When dealing with Judaism, it is very difficult to untangle what is culture and what is religion. Judaism is both an ethnic culture and a religion in which the two are inseparably linked. Part of the problem is that we have the same word "Jew" for both religion and culture. It is obvious that there is something called Irish culture as well as an Irish religion. This religion is called Catholicism. Even though the two are closely intertwined and Irish culture has been heavily influenced by Irish Catholicism, clearly these are distinct things. In differentiating Irish Catholicism from Irish culture, it helps that there are over a billion Catholics in the world who do not identify with Irish culture. In the case of Judaism, one is hard-pressed to find someone who practices the Jewish religion who does not also identify with Jewish culture. Even though Judaism does accept converts, in practice, the process of conversion also tends to involve taking on Jewish culture.

The main reason, I suspect, for this, is that the Jewish argument relies on a deep emotional connection to the Jewish nation as something that goes back to antiquity and has survived despite persecution. The Christian parallel to this would be whether you identify with the man Jesus of Nazareth. Without that identification, the theological argument of Jesus' godhood will not connect with the listener. Similarly with Judaism, if someone connects to the Jewish story then they are likely to be open to the argument that God has been using the Jewish people as part of a plan to enlighten the rest of the world with ethical monotheism. To be clear, one does not have to be Jewish to serve God and play a productive role in sanctifying the world.

As a Jew, I do not believe that I am spiritually better than anybody else. Here it is useful to apply Amy Chua's three rules for successful cultures. Judaism is something fantastic and it is a great privilege to be a Jew. That being said, I feel incredibly inadequate, as an individual, to live up to Judaism's lofty standards. While I am far from perfect, I do try to practice the discipline of Jewish ritual in an attempt to be worthy of Judaism.

Amy Chua: Possibly a Better Mother than Historian

Yale Law professor Amy Chua has recently been making headlines with her book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a misleading excerpt of which was published in the Wall Street Journal, about the "superiority" of Asian mothers, who do not let their children attend sleepovers, insult their children for failing to achieve academic excellence and make them practice music for hours on end. I found the whole thing amusing as this was not the first time Amy Chua has crossed my radar. Several years ago I had a lot of fun posting on her book Day of Empire and her utter incompetency as a historian. I think it is worthwhile to note that, from what I can tell, Chua does not appear to force her daughters to spend hours on end attempting to critically analyze primary and secondary sources, something that Chua is clearly unable to do and has written a book proving it.

Unlike her many critics, I will not question Chua's abilities as a mother and keep my knocking of her to the realm of history. Actually, I think there is a lot to be said for Chua's style of parenting. While not nearly as intense as what Chua describes, my parents were much stricter with me than most of my peer's parents were with them and I benefited from that. The point that Chua makes that struck the strongest chord with me was:

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist; things are always hardest at the beginning, which is where Western parents tend to give up. But if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun. This in turn makes it easier for the parent to get the child to work even more.

This is a key argument used by educational theorist Daniel Willingham in his book Why Don't Students Like School. Willingham argues for the value of homework and repetitive drilling, particularly in the early grades. The idea is that learning in any given field requires a certain baseline of knowledge and a set of skills. You either have it or you do not and there is no fun easy way to get it. The only option is to just drill it in. Once a child has gained the necessary skills then the real education can begin and yes it can be fun.

I am good with history and enjoy it because I made myself memorize loads of historical facts as a kid and therefore have a baseline knowledge and skills now to read even really difficult works of history. In contrast, I never really developed the necessary skills in reading Talmud. My high school yeshiva education was therefore hell as I floated along accomplishing nothing. Today I have a mental block when it comes to the topic and avoid it. Perhaps I needed a Tiger Mother to drill me into a Talmudic scholar.

Secular Theodicy: A Review of Day of Empire (Part III)

(Part I) (Part II) 

Something should be said about Amy Chua’s scholarship or lack of which. The book offers a veritable shooting gallery of poor historical scholarship. I do not think that it is a coincidence that, of the four blurbs written on the back cover of the book, only one is written by an actual historian, Naill Ferguson and even he does not actually praise the book. For a trained historian to publically take a positive view of this book it would require serious brain damage or serious bribery. I would like to offer some examples that deal with issues close to my heart. 

When reading her account of the Roman Empire and its downfall, it immediately struck me how Edward Gibbon like it sounded. I quickly turned to the endnotes and lo and behold, her sources were, by and large, taken from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I have spoken in the past about Whigs being dependent upon Gibbon. In Chua’s case, this is quite literal. This is the equivalent of a creationist quoting eighteenth-century naturalists as scientific evidence. The field of history has advanced since the time of Gibbon; to pretend otherwise is a slap in the face to two centuries' worth of historians. Chua’s dependence on Gibbon explains a number of things that might otherwise have proved perplexing. For example, Chua seems obsessed with establishing when Rome’s “golden age” occurred. According to Chua: “… most historians agree that the High Empire, from AD 70-192, represented the apogee of Roman civilization.” (Pg. 31) If Chua actually bothered to read any history written in the later part of the twentieth century she might have realized that historians today are not seriously concerned with defining when a given civilization reached its zenith and when it began to fall. For that matter, historians today do not try to define the essence of a civilization. That was the nineteenth century; we have moved past that. It was Gibbon who wrote about the four “good emperors,” creating a romanticized image of the second century, which Chua has swallowed hook, line and sinker.

Chua also drags out the old canard that Christianity, with its “intolerant” beliefs, brought about the downfall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon did not invent this idea; he simply represents one of the premiere examples of it. Chua’s Gibbon-like history carries into the Middle Ages. According to Chua: “Christian Europe was fragmented and fanatic, consumed with the Crusades, sectarian rivalry, anti-Semitism, and the persecution of infidels.” (Pg. 109) This is Chua’s version of thirteenth-century Europe. Besides for ignoring the rise of Scholasticism (This was the age of Thomas Aquinas.), she also fails to consider the rise of the French, Castilian and Aragonese states. These states gained power through such acts of “intolerance” as the Albigensian Crusade and the Reconquista. This goes against what Chua is trying to argue so she simply ignores the problem. 

Chua’s negative portrayal of Christian Europe is contrasted oddly enough with the Mongols. This is quite strange since Genghis Khan killed far more people than any “fanatical” Christian cleric. Genghis Khan manages to get into Chua’s good graces, despite slaughtering tens of thousands of people, because he was willing to put up with people regardless of their religion. In addition to followers of the native Mongol beliefs, his army included Confucians, Muslims, and Christians. Of course, Genghis Khan also took an equal opportunity approach when it came to killing people as well. Calling Genghis Khan tolerate misses the point. He was someone who did not care what god someone worshipped as long as that person served him; those who did not he killed. 

Chua’s footnotes on Spain repeatedly refer to David Nirenberg’s Communities of Violence and the work of Henry Kamen, both excellent present-day scholars. Unfortunately, she appears not to have actually read these books. If she had she might have been alerted to certain nuances that her beloved Whig narrative ignores. The whole premise behind Communities of Violence is that the paradigm of intolerance leading to violence, so basic to Chua’s book, does not work; the acts of violence against Jews and Muslims are extensions of a popular common culture, one in which Jews and Muslims were part of. Kamen has often been labeled as an apologist for the Inquisition. This may be just a bit unfair to Kamen, but Kamen does serve as a counterweight to the traditional “black legend” of the Inquisition and the portrayal of Spain as a country that sunk under the weight of barbarism and superstition. Chua seems to be blissfully unaware of this. One can only conclude gross levels of ignorance or dishonesty on her part. Chua comments: 

Why sixteenth-century Spain declined has been a favorite topic of historians. Technological backwardness, entrenched feudal traditions, crushing foreign debt, the lack of a significant industrial and entrepreneurial sector, demographic decline, a weak state apparatus, and chronic budgetary crises are some of the contributing factors most often cited. (Pg. 156) 

This statement is an utter lie. It might be true to say this about seventeenth or eighteenth-century Spain, but to say this about sixteenth-century Spain is ludicrous. What sixteenth-century Spain is she talking about? Is she referring to the Spain of Charles V, which encompassed Spain, its empire in the New World, and the Holy Roman Empire? Maybe she is referring to the Spain of Philip II, which spearheaded the Catholic assault against Protestantism. The seeds may have already been there for its eventual downfall, but sixteenth-century Spain has a good a claim to hyperpower status as just about any of Chua’s other contenders. She cannot bring herself to call Spain a tolerant society so she has to deny that they were a hyperpower. Since the facts of history do not fit she simply goes for made-up facts, recycling the made-up history of centuries past. 

Chua’s dishonesty in regard to Spain becomes truly unforgivable when it is placed side by side with how she treats the Dutch Republic during the seventeenth century. She holds up the Dutch Republic as a contrast to Spain to show how the more tolerant Dutch Republic became a hyperpower. The Dutch Republic did not conquer for itself any empires it was not, militarily, that successful. All it was a small country that proved to be a remarkable economic success. I would give the modern example of the State of Israel. Israel is a remarkable success, particularly economically. That being said, no matter what the Arabs might say, Israel is not a hyperpower or even a superpower; Israel does not dominate the world. Reading this, one can only conclude that Chua has absolutely no regard for historical facts and is simply making stuff up as she goes along. 

I have placed Day of Empire on my shelf next to Rabbi Yosef Eisen’s Miraculous Journey. I think these two authors deserve each other as they are a match in terms of their sloppy thinking and lack of scholarly standards. They are both intellectual frauds, who in pursuit of their own personal theologies actively distort historical facts. Unfortunately, for some strange reason, Chua seems to have been allowed to gain a position of public trust as a professor at Yale. The fact that the Yale law school would employ such a person forces one to question the legitimacy of the school and the value of any degree that it might confer. I would say no differently if a university employed a creationist or a holocaust denier even if they were not working as scientists or historians.

Secular Theodicy: A Review of Day of Empire (Part II)

(Part I)

I hope my readers will forgive my long discourse, but I felt it served a useful purpose; I wished to make it very clear how this theodical history game is played, who benefits from it, and to make sure that I am not accused of being a defender of religious fundamentalism (Haredi or any other brand) or of intolerance. On the flip side, I do not want anyone to think that I was simply going after Haredi Jews as my target here is not Haredim but Amy Chua, a Chinese-American Law Professor who teaches at Yale. Chua may not be Haredi but, in terms of playing the theodical history game for all of its intellectual dishonesty, she is every bit their equal. Not that she is interested in defending divine providence; rather, walking in the Whig tradition, she has adapted the game for the cause of tolerance.

Her book, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance and Why They Fall, analyses what Chua likes to refer to as “hyperpowers” and argues that their rise was due to their tolerance, or at least their relative tolerance, and their subsequent downfall was due to the fact that, when faced a crisis, they chose to turn away from tolerance. This is comforting in that the people who do the decent, pious and moral thing come out ahead in this sort of narrative. It must overcome the hurdle of all such narratives namely that, as political thinkers such as Glaucon and Machiavelli recognized, misbehavior often does pay off in the political realm. Kicking the Jews out of your country and seizing their property or claiming Church land for yourself is a good way to raise money; money that can be used pay for an army, fight wars, oppress people living in other countries and gain even more power and renown. In effect Chua has set for herself the task of correcting the “misimpression” that one may have gotten from the casual study of history that great powers are created by being “intolerant” and being better at it than anyone else.

To play her game she has, at her disposal, two moveable pieces, tolerance and hyperpowerhood. Which societies count as being tolerant and which ones count as being hyperpowers? These concepts are so wide open that Chua can have them mean whatever she wants them to mean. She goes through the pretense of defining these things. In her introduction, she defines three conditions to be a hyperpower:

Its power clearly surpasses that of all its known contemporaneous rivals; it is not clearly inferior in economic or military strength to any other power on the planet, known to it or not; and it projects its power over so immense an area of the globe and over so immense a population that it breaks the bounds of mere local or even regional preeminence. (xxii)

She defines tolerance as: “letting very different kinds of people live, work, and prosper in your society – even if only for instrumental or strategic reasons.” (xxiii) Not that Chua is actually serious about trying to stick to these parameters. When you can say that the seventeenth-century Dutch counts as a hyperpower, but sixteenth-century Spain does not then the concept of a hyperpower has no meaning. (more on this later) If we were serious about using her definition of tolerance we would have to admit that Nazi Germany was a tolerant society. They did let many different people live, work and prosper in their society. The Nazi army contained people from dozens of different countries. The Nazis worked with Frenchmen, Poles, Hungarians, and Russians, and many non-Germans prospered under Nazi rule. The Nazis were even willing, on occasion, to work with Jews. What becomes clear very quickly about Chua is that what matters for any given society is not if you were really “tolerant” or a “hyperpower” but if Chua wants to make you out as one of the good guys, if she can use you as part of her morality tale that tolerance is a good thing.

If Chua was a real historian and not writing Whig propaganda for modern liberals she could have easily written a book about the paradox of tolerance and intolerance faced by great powers. Almost all great powers have found themselves ruling over multiple societies and cultures, often even hostile ones. This presents a problem. On the one hand, people are not likely to meekly submit to a power that tries to suppress their culture, ban their religion and physically wipe them out. On the other hand, in order to maintain oneself as a great power, one is going to need to create a common society with a common cause. This requires that the various societies and cultures under one's dominion must, in some sense, yield and agree to merge into the general culture. The solution is to try to balance these two requirements. One makes the overt gesture of tolerance while at the same time, usually less overtly, one tries to bring pressure in order to force dissenting groups to knuckle under. One can easily show how different powers such as the Roman Empire, the Catholic Church, Spain, and the United States have faced this problem of dealing with multiple cultures and have followed this line of reasoning, while practicing different models of tolerance/intolerance. In essence, such a book would be an expanded version of Michael Walzer’s On Toleration. This line of argument avoids a number of problems. It makes no absolute claims so it does not have to deny exceptions. This allows for one to be somewhat open-ended about what counts as a great power or as a tolerant society. This argument merely tries to describe a given phenomenon; it does not judge whether tolerance is good or bad, it does not try to create some sort of historical law, it makes no predictions as to the future nor does it proscribe any given course of action or ideology. As with all good history, it offers a method of analysis but affirms no dogmas.

(To be continued …)