Esotericism in the Classroom

 

As someone who works in the American educational system, I find that I need to avoid openly stating my beliefs. Students ask me what I think of Donald Trump and I tell them that I do not discuss politics on school grounds. It may very well be that my students have as low an opinion of Trump as I do. If I agree to talk about the issues where I agree with them then I will be trapped in those situations where I disagree with them. Not talking about politics in school is a matter of principle. I honestly believe that it is not appropriate for adults to use the platform they have been given as teachers to advocate for their own political preferences. Kids deserve the space to be ignorant and not know how to solve the big issues of the day without someone trying to recruit them to some cause. 

The fact is, though, that I have another incentive to keep my politics to myself. Unlike the many teachers who can afford to openly plaster their leftwing politics on their classroom walls, I know that I risk my job if I were to ever openly talk about my politics in front of students. This reality has helped me appreciate the esotericism of Leo Strauss. Central to Strauss' narrative of intellectual history is the idea that pre-modern philosophers hid their views from the masses. One did not want to end up like Socrates, executed for challenging the gods of Athens. Of particular interest to Strauss was Maimonides, who openly admits, in The Guide to the Perplexed, that he contradicts himself in order to conceal things from certain readers.    

Having to be careful about saying my opinions has taught me something else about esotericism, it helps you become a better teacher and thinker. Part of the danger of having strongly held beliefs is that they become a form of identity. You believe less in the idea and more in the community of people who hold them. The idea becomes a password to show that you are a good person. For those who have started reading my dissertation posts, this is an essential feature of the military model with its social ideology. If you cannot simply pontificate your beliefs wherever you want but have to limit yourself to a personal blog, it gives you a space to examine your own ideas. Clearly, your ideas are not obviously true otherwise there would not be people who want to silence you. Are your opponents bad people; maybe, even if you are right, there really is something dangerous about what you believe?

In truth, arguing with students will not win them over to my side. As Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay argue, if your goal is to convince people that they are wrong, perhaps the most counterproductive thing you can do is argue with them. Whatever arguments you make are almost certain to simply demonstrate that you are on a different team and cause your interlocuter to become defensive. They will then respond with their own tribalistic reasoning and all meaningful discussion will break down. 

Recognizing that you are not going to be able to convince people that they are wrong, it is far more productive to let other people simply talk. This has the advantage of developing a relationship with the person as they do not perceive you as a threat. Furthermore, while you may not be able to convince them that they are wrong, there is still one person who can. However resistant people might be to outsiders telling them that they are wrong, they are perfectly capable of converting themselves if given the chance. Most people do not get much opportunity to really listen to themselves talk about what they believe so give them the chance. 

The proper setting for someone to change their own minds is while sitting by themselves reading a book. This was something that Protestants understood very well. It is the Bible that has the power to convince people that they are totally depraved sinners who can rely on Jesus and not anything else, including their own good deeds. After listening to people's arguments, rather than arguing, it is more productive to suggest a book (or a blog) for them to read. 

Being by yourself with a book has the advantage of not having to worry that the author is right. The author very well might live on the other side of the world or even be dead. Furthermore, disagreeing with the author does not break the connection. You can continue to read the book and the arguments might stick around in your head for years until you wake up and realize that you do not have the same opinions as you once did. The more this process is simply going on in your head the better as there will be less social pressure to conform to whatever your group tells you that good people believe. 

As a teacher working in a system in which just about everyone is to the left of me, I have had no choice but to follow the advice of Aaron Burr in the Hamilton musical: "Talk less. Smile more. Don't let them know what you're against or what you're for." 

It turns out that this is good advice and if I did not fear for my job, I would not have the discipline to keep to it. Students should feel free to talk about their beliefs and not worry about whether I think that they are right. As kids, they are most certainly wrong about nearly everything and that is fine. They do not need to hear my slightly less ignorant views. Instead, I can then serve as a librarian to suggest books for them to read. Who knows how they might be affected years down the road by an idea that has been bouncing around in their heads.   

What I wish to give over to my students, above all, is the spirit of skeptical inquiry. This is not a system of belief that I can ever argue them into. To be a skeptic means to be willing to attack your own ideas as vigorously as your opponent's. You become a skeptic by experiencing having your own mind being changed in subtle ways over many years of thinking and reading. Skepticism also has the virtue of helping people become more tolerant. Maybe that person I disagree with is actually right? Let me listen to them. If nothing else, I am honestly curious as to what they actually believe and how they came to their conclusions.

 

Introducing the Military Model of Religion

In the previous post, I started blogging my dissertation on the politics of Jewish messianism. In this post, I wish to begin outlining the military model of religion. A fair criticism of the dissertation is that, arguably my dissertation was never really about Jewish messianism. What I am really writing about is the military model of religion, with the missionary and esoteric models as foils. Furthermore, not only do I go for long stretches without talking about messianism, but I am often not even talking about Judaism at all. As readers of this blog can appreciate, this is the product of my rather eclectic manner of thinking. It certainly did not help matters that I was forced by my advisor to attempt to write large-scale history, including Christianity and Islam. In essence, instead of making sure I stayed focused on something narrow, he pushed me to follow my tendencies that were most likely to cause me to fail.  

In the military model, your religion is obviously right because the armies of your religion are crossing borders and defeating other religions. Imagine that you are an early medieval Muslim. It is obvious to you that Islam is true. How could a band of tribesmen from Arabia have defeated both the Byzantine and the Sasanian Empire, conquered the Near East, and marched all the way to Spain unless this was the will of Allah? Obviously, Allah wanted to spread pure monotheism so he used his beloved Arab people, who were the first to embrace the divine teachings of the prophet Mohammed, to accomplish this. The promise of a heavenly reward for Muslims can already be glimpsed by the fact that Arab Muslims, in this world, have achieved such political power. If you want to be rewarded in this world and in the next, you need to become a Muslim. On the flip side, much of the story of modern Islamic thought comes down to the question of how is it that Islam stopped being successful. This only serves to underscore how important Islam's early military success was to its self-understanding.  

Behind the armies leading the military model to victory, lies a political entity such as a state. The religion’s political sponsor will come to dominate other religions and their respective political sponsors, presumably through military means, causing competing religions and politics to fall away. In the ancient world, this was understood in very literal terms with the god (or gods) of one people defeating a rival god.  Underlying this worldview is a sense of being on the right side of history. Even if the hoped for final victory has yet to come, the political victories scored by the religion, even small ones, indicate the inevitability of that victory. Military model religions have little need to engage in apologetics or even develop a complex theology. The argument for the religion is the observable fact of the existence of the community of the faithful and its political success. Such a religion contains little in the way of universalizing ethics. On the contrary, its only concern is the advancement of the community so that it dominates all others, regardless of how unjust such a state of affairs may be. 

It is important not to overemphasize the role of physical violence in the military model. The military model of religion might also be labeled the community model in that it starts from the perspective of a community and not, as we shall see with the missionary and esoteric models, individuals. It should be understood that the military model does not have to use a literal threat of force to achieve its aims. On the contrary, it is most powerful in the form of a warm surrounding community, full of friends and family. There is a close connection between the coercive power of overwhelming armed might and that of a community in that overwhelming armed might in its most extreme forms (like in the relationship between a state and an individual) can paradoxically appear as if no force is being used.  Such force is so obvious that it can pass unmentioned and become part of the unchallengeable reality surrounding a person. Thus, the person being subject to such force may come to “willingly” comply out of the sense that this is the only “reasonable” option. It is hard to distinguish it, particularly for those subject to it, from the soft pressure of the social expectations on the part of a surrounding community. Thus, community pressure and the threat of physical force merge together. The most powerful sorts of communities will be established states with the ability to exert social pressure that is not so incidentally backed by physical force.    

Considering that the military model works best when it can use a perceived sense of reality rather than physical force, its chief weapon is ritual. This creates a perceived sense of communal reality in which a body of individuals performs the same action.  The ritual act allows the community to conquer physical space. By integrating ritual into the calendar, the community can also conquer time and extend itself to both past and future generations.  In this sense, the ritual community consists not only of those living in the present but also of past generations, who performed these same rituals and passed on their traditions to the present. Of particular importance here are rituals performed for the sake of the dead. Beyond possibly aiding those who have passed to the next world and gaining their aid in return, rituals for the dead strengthen the sense of the community existing through time. Similarly, rites of passage use ritual to extend the community into the future as a new generation embraces the identity of the community. 

Ritual also serves a practical purpose of gaining the aid of supernatural beings. Thus, military model religions tend have strong magic components, offering the direct physical aid of a god, as opposed to ethical religions, in which a god offers moral teachings that allow one to live a better life. There is something distinctly amoral about magic in that its sole purpose is to subvert normal cause and effect. Thus, it allows the practitioner to gain things they did not work to earn and have no just claim to. As we shall see with the missionary and esoteric models, one of the primary criticisms of the military model, in addition to the fact that it lacks theological depth, is that it does not encourage ethical behavior. As such, military model believers can be attacked for caring little about god or man. 

A classic book that I recently read that does a fantastic job of encapsulating what is essentially the military model is Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580. The first part of the book gets us into the lived experience of late medieval Catholics in England before this world was destroyed by the English Reformation. Catholicism was built into people's daily lives. For example, the calendar was dominated by saints' days and the cycle of Jesus' birth and passion. While I am skeptical about Duffy's claims as to how well lay Englishmen actually understood the particulars of the Catholic theology that lay behind such holy days, Duffy is a valuable voice in that he is sympathetic to popular religion. It is easy even for scholars who are personally religious to look down on such religion as superstition. (I am often guilty of this myself.) As intellectuals, we are going to be naturally inclined toward the missionary and esoteric models. These are intellectual models of religion. Their criticisms of the military model, essentially any popular religion, are going to be our criticisms. As such, instead of simply pointing out the obvious problems with the military model, our job becomes to understand why the military model has not simply been conquered by its critics. On the contrary, as we shall see, it is the military model that generally manages to convert its critics.       

Blogging My Dissertation

Having written about my ill-fated attempt to write a doctoral dissertation, a deeply painful topic even after all these years, I find myself returning to that dissertation on the politics of Jewish messianism. I am going to attempt to edit selections from the dissertation, stripped of their footnotes, to be used as blog posts. I readily acknowledge that this was not a suitable topic for a dissertation. That being said, I still strongly believe in the ideas presented in the dissertation. As such, I wish to present them to my readers. Hopefully, you will find what I have to say useful for understanding the underlying logic of messianism in its political and spiritual forms. Perhaps one of my readers will turn out to be a university administrator, who is so impressed with me as to wish to offer me a doctorate. This is a dissertation about messianism, the willingness to hope against all evidence that history will suddenly and miraculously turn out in one's favor so a failed doctoral student has the right to dream. 

The problem that drew me to this topic of political messianism is that there are two basic kinds of messianism, the political and the spiritual and they are fundamentally at odds with each other. What is the Messiah supposed to accomplish when he comes? Perhaps he is supposed to bring back the not so golden biblical age of David and Solomon on the assumption that this time we are going to get things right. In this political messianism, the natural order of things, particularly the existence of politics remains intact. This is essential as this will finally allow us Jews to rule over the gentiles as we were always "meant" to. Alternatively, we can imagine the Messiah ushering in a spiritual era that will transcend the physical world, leaving no room for politics. When Jews, for thousands of years have prayed for the Messiah, it seems that they were simultaneously asking for political power and for the end of politics. Keep in mind that political power is something deeply materialistic, the sort of thing that pious people should abhor. How could such contradictory impulses have survived in one religion without tearing it into factions?  

My essential argument is that both political and spiritual messianisms should be understood as the product of a discourse between three different models for a religion to relate to the political. The military model relies on community and ritual. Opposing the military model are two anti-community models, which rely on doctrine instead of ritual. The missionary model outright rejects the community and seeks to create a new religion by seeking outside converts to create a new purer community. The esoteric model remains more closely tied to the community and either seeks to take it over from within or form its own competing sect. One thinks of Leo Strauss style philosophers, but this can apply to conventional believers as well. Understand that most people, operating within the military model with its focus on lived experience, do not even think in terms of trying to put together a coherent theology. 

Judaism is primarily military in its orientation. That being said, it has taken on the esoteric and missionary models, despite the theological difficulties, as a response to certain political realities. This mixture created a certain level of tension as the different models contain contradictory principles. Messianic doctrines serve both as a reflection of this tension within Judaism and as an attempted solution. Messianism has thus served an important role in Judaism in that it is precisely its contradictory political and spiritual poles that have allowed Judaism to mediate the conflict between the three ideological factions. 

Forgiving My Advisor (Part III)

(Part I, II)

With my messianism dissertation no longer being useable, my advisor offered to work with me on a new project. I assume that he did this in order to keep me quiet and not go public with my side of the story. As strange as it sounds, I took him up on the offer. I was desperate to get a doctorate, which had been my goal in life. Furthermore, like anyone in an abusive relationship, I needed to believe the best about my advisor. If he really was as bad as the evidence suggested then what did it say about me that I was taken in by him. Better to continue to live in the fantasy that he really was my friend, even if he made a few mistakes. He would make it up to me and help me finish my doctorate. Surely, he realized that what he did was wrong and would make it up to me by getting me funding. How else could he expect me to write the dissertation?

This state of affairs lasted for a few months. I eventually realized that he had no intention of getting me funding. That would have required him to go to the department, admit that he was the one who had messed up and that, as such, I was a worthwhile investment. Furthermore, I found dealing with him to be utterly humiliating. He took a Vernon Dursley attitude toward me. Implicit in his communication with me was that I needed to acknowledge the falsehood that I was the one at fault for being in this predicament. As such, he expected me to be grateful to him for not casting me out as I "deserved."

Making my peace with stepping away from the second dissertation did not mean that I forgave my advisor. On the contrary, making peace with myself meant accepting that it was not my fault and there was nothing I could have been expected to do differently. As I saw it, I deserved the doctorate and my advisor had stolen it from me. He made a conscious decision to ruin my life simply to make himself look good in front of his colleagues. As the victim of such malice, I could be absolved of any blame for the failure of the first dissertation and for giving up on the second. What happened to me would have happened to anyone else with the misfortune to end up with my advisor. This defense mechanism parallels that of the fantasy anti-hero Thomas Covenant. He is someone whose life is ruined because of leprosy. He mentally survives by insisting that what happened to him was not his fault and that he is powerless to change anything.   

While this attitude allowed me to survive the loss of what I wanted most in life, it still left me with an incredible amount of anger toward my advisor. This anger was a Hell for me, but one that I refused to release myself from. I needed to hold on to this anger toward my advisor because some part of me was also angry at myself. To not be angry with my advisor would mean that he had not wronged me in a truly unforgivable way. This would mean that I was responsible for my failure as an academic. Since, my advisor really had wronged me, it was only right that I should be angry. The problem was that my anger did nothing to harm him and only served to make me miserable.    

To my mind, the solution was for my advisor to ask me for forgiveness. To be fair to him, it should be acknowledged that several years later he sent me a $900 check of his own money to cover what the department was supposed to have paid me for some expenses and an award but never did. What he did not do was admit that it was his fault I never got the doctorate. Most importantly, he refused to go to the department or to any of his colleagues and ask them to help me as a personal favor to him to right a wrong. Instead, he limited himself to some vague generalities about how it was unfortunate that things did not work out. 

I tried to reach out to him in 2020 and we had several e-mail exchanges about the possibility of him helping me out without any success. With my advisor not getting me a job or even offering me the emotional solace of an honest apology, I was left to stew in my anger. This made me feel helpless and angry with myself for being helpless. This anger, in turn, was redirected against my advisor. All of this anger did nothing to bring me "justice," but only harmed me. Recognizing this, I have desired to forgive me advisor, understanding that my failure to forgive was a failure on my part. I kept on getting stuck on what it would mean to forgive him in light of the fact he had not acknowledged his wrongdoing.   

My solution is to say that forgiveness here means to give up any claim to compensation. One might imagine that, putting aside the emotional harm, he owed me $100,000 for the financial harm he did to me and not the mere $900 he gave me. While it would be right for me to get that money and not getting it would be highly upsetting, I also have the power to forgive the debt. Giving up on money that I am never going to get, even if I deserve it, is better than living in anger over not getting the money. Furthermore, giving up on the money means that I am forgiving my younger self for putting me in this situation of being owed the money. In essence, I am forgiving my debt to myself.   

To my advisor. If you are reading this, here is what I want you to know. I forgive you. There is nothing you need to say to me or to give me. If you understand what you did, that is punishment enough. If you do not, then you deserve to be pitied. I give up all claims to your money, your body, and even your soul. I even give up all claim to moral superiority. You were not qualified to be an advisor. I was not mature enough to be a doctoral student. You lied to cover up for your mistakes and protect your reputation, leaving me to take the fall. It is quite possible that I would have done no better if our situation had been reversed. It was by God’s grace and not any virtue of mine that I was never placed in a position of influence like you were that I might wrong others merely to protect my place in the social hierarchy. The ordeal that I went through was something that I needed to undergo. You simply had the misfortune to be the instrument by which this came about. If I can forgive you then, perhaps, I can forgive my youthful self for not living up to what he could have been.  

Forgiving My Advisor (Part II)

(Part I)

I do not think it was a coincidence, that it was precisely when I started dating Miriam in 2011 that I made my major breakthrough that messianism, with its contradictory political and spiritual elements, is the product of a dialectic between what I had come to think of as the military, esoteric, and missionary models of religion. Military model messianism is fulfilled through the success of a political state. The esoteric and missionary models of messianism look forward to the elimination of this very political state that the military model clings to. Messianism, as we find it in Judaism, is a marriage between these different sides with the different parties wanting contrary things and simply talking past each other. This has allowed Judaism to function as a united religion. Granted, the topic I was working on was still not something that I was qualified to work on but at least I had a coherent argument to make.

Even though I was now living in California, I remained in regular correspondence with my advisor and sent him drafts of the chapters I was writing. He eventually agreed to allow me to drop the parts about Christianity and Islam to focus on Judaism. Furthermore, recognizing that what I had written was now significantly longer than a conventional dissertation, he allowed me to hand in only the first four chapters of my project. Chapter one laid out my general theoretical framework for the different models of religion and how they relate to messianism. Chapter two dealt with the biblical period and the fact that the messianism of the prophets required the destruction of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. Chapter three dealt with the Second Temple Period and focused heavily on the Dead Sea Sect and its messianic rejection of the political establishment. Chapter four dealt with the post-Temple rabbis and their development of a spiritual messianism that took political activity off the table in the present by placing it in the forever-distant future.

While my advisor had his criticisms, particularly when it came to how my arguments were organized, he strongly praised my work. He was impressed with my research and found my arguments to be brilliant. He made it clear that he was on board with what I was doing and wanted to make sure that everyone else who read my work was as impressed as he was. Judging by his comments, his favorite section was the Second Temple chapter. For the Rabbinic chapter, he expressed some reservations as to whether I was really writing about messianism, but he made it clear that he thought that I was doing fantastic work. 

Spurred on by my advisor's support, I put my heart and soul into improving the dissertation to make my arguments clear to anyone reading them for the first time. By May of 2013, I had a coherent dissertation that came in around three hundred pages. My advisor now felt that what I had produced was good enough to start showing it to other scholars who might wish to serve on my committee. It was here that disaster struck. Readers started to respond that this was not a dissertation.

The right thing for my advisor would have been to go to the department and acknowledge that this was his fault and I deserved the doctorate. I was in this mess precisely because I had listened to him and did my best to do what he told me. Either I should be given an honorary doctorate, or I should be given funding to write a new dissertation, with him agreeing to pay any penalty to make that happen. Instead, my advisor decided to pretend that, for all of these years, I had simply been going off on my own instead of doing my best to follow his specific instructions. When emailing me, he pretended to still be on my side, telling me that he would speak to people who might be able to help me while bad-mouthing me behind my back, giving them every excuse to dismiss my work without giving it serious thought. This included the Second Temple chapter. As far as I can tell, he did not show them what he had written in praise of that chapter. If he had done so, those scholars might have had to rethink their dismissal or acknowledge that my youthful failure to write a successful dissertation paled in the face of my advisor's professional malpractice. Ultimately, my advisor made the decision to sacrifice my hoped-for career as an academic in order to protect his reputation.

His actions clearly involved falsehood. I am uncertain whether he actively lied about me to members of the department or if he simply allowed them to assume that I had gotten into this mess on my own. It is even possible that it was understood that he was the one at fault but, as there was no formal mechanism for penalizing advisors who failed in their duties to their students, the other members of the department protected their own and took the stance that this was my fault as a convenient belief that allowed the whole affair to be tied up in the most convenient fashion for them.

The final nail in my dissertation's coffin came in an email that reached me while I was at the Fuller Theological Seminary Library. By then I knew that the dissertation was likely not going to be accepted but I wanted to keep fighting for it as long as there was any hope. I had put so much of my emotional self into the dissertation that it felt to me almost like my child. One does not give up on a child no matter the odds. I was so focused on my work that I did not see the email for several hours until I stopped for lunch. My advisor forwarded me an email from a professor who dismissed my work while clearly not having read it carefully. From his response, it was clear that my advisor had been speaking ill of me to this professor. 

One would have thought that something like this deserved at least a phone call. My advisor knew that I had a history of depression and that the dissertation situation had put me in a bad place. What sort of person sends information that he knows would negatively affect someone he cares about without following up to find out how they are doing? Clearly, by this point, my well-being was no longer his priority.   

If I were to be charitable to my advisor, I can imagine that, from his perspective, he had been doing me a favor by agreeing to take me on as his student in the first place. As such, any advice that he offered me should have been taken with a buyer-beware attitude, much as if I were to take advice from any other academic I might have spoken to. From this perspective, the fact that my dissertation failed after years spent following his bad advice was really my fault. I should have known better than to listen to him.

Forgiving My Advisor (Part I)

In the previous post, I discussed some of my mistakes in how I approached pursuing a doctorate. Now I would like to turn to what my advisor did to me. Graduate students in their 20s can be expected to not know what they are doing precisely because this is something unlike anything they have done before. This is why graduate students are supposed to have advisors who know what they are doing as they have done this before. Ideally, they should have already guided other doctoral candidates through the process. At the very least, they should have written a dissertation themselves. Advisors are not supposed to make things worse for students than if they had been allowed to proceed on their own. 

I chose to come study with my advisor because he was a specialist in Jewish History. I wanted to work on an Abarbanel dissertation (either on his views on Kabbalah or Messianism) and my advisor initially said he could work with me on that. (He would later lie about this fact even though I had the email in which he said this.) I did not concern myself with the fact that I was going to be his first doctoral student. The university he taught at offered me funding, so he clearly wanted to work with me.

I should add that there were several non-academic factors as well that appealed to me and ended up taking on more weight than they should have. We had a number of friends in common and people I respected told me to go study with him. I honestly liked him and thought we would get along in addition to working on my dissertation. Considering these things, it seemed only reasonable that I should take the path forward and start working with my advisor. I would do the coursework, write the dissertation, and embark on my academic career. It did not occur to me to wait a few years, while doing something else, in the hope that a better option might come around.

It was only after I committed myself to come work with him that my advisor pulled a surprise on me. While he initially had told me that I could do a project on Abarbanel, he now informed me that he would not agree to something that narrowly focused on Abarbanel. For that matter, he was not going to let me write anything that was simply about Jewish thought. He insisted that I write on some sort of grand topic that would appeal to people outside of the field of Jewish History. He also told me to write my dissertation and then he would put together a dissertation committee. Being young and inexperienced, I had no idea that both of his instructions were the exact opposite of what one is supposed to do.

My advisor recommended Norman Cohn’s Pursuit the Millenium to me, which still is one of my favorite works of history. Cohn wrote about medieval Christian peasants using millenarian ideology to rebel against the Feudal order. His goal was to undermine the Whiggish notion of the Middle Ages where peasants meekly accepted the hierarchal order of their day and it was only during the Enlightenment that people developed a political consciousness. What I took from Cohn is the idea that messianism is not just a religious doctrine but also a political ideology. This gave me the idea of writing about Jewish Messianism as something political. This would be going against Gershom Scholem and most Jewish Historians who have seen Judaism from the Destruction of the Second Temple to the rise of Zionism as lacking politics.

My advisor liked my idea for a dissertation but insisted that even this was too narrow and that I needed to also write about parallel examples within Christianity and Islam. Fairly quickly, I found myself trapped in a project that I was not qualified to handle. Furthermore, I was socially isolated where I was living with few dating opportunities. This led me to depression, which in turn, made it difficult to work on the dissertation, which only furthered my depression. My main relief from depression was writing this blog, which most certainly did not mean making progress with the dissertation.  

To be fair to my advisor, he is an excellent teacher and I learned a lot from him. In addition to introducing me to the work of Norman Cohn, he gave me a copy of Keith Thomas' Religion and the Decline of Magic. I still cherish the memories of sitting in his office doing a private study session on Christian mysticism, reading people like St. Teresa de Avila, St. John of the Cross, and Jacob Bohme. I think it was because I held my advisor in such high esteem, that I did not initially blame him for my difficulties, even though I realized after a year or so that I should not have been given a dissertation project like the one he gave me. I simply accepted that he had made an honest mistake and it was my job to plow through and make the best of it.   

 

Advice to My Younger Self

From 2006 to 2013, I worked on a doctorate. In the end, things did not work out for reasons that are deeply painful to me. After many years, I have finally decided to directly discuss what happened. This will take multiple posts. Let me start by acknowledging that, at that point in time, I was not ready to work on a doctorate. Here is what I wish my younger self would have known. There may be a doctoral student out there who would benefit from my experience.  

If I could go back in time to when I was about to start work on my Ph.D., I would give my younger self the following advice. In college, you got by simply by being smart. When you get to a doctoral program, everyone is smart. The question then becomes, what else do you bring to the table. Writing a dissertation is not simply a really long research paper that you spend several years on. You are not simply being asked to produce a coherent bit of writing but to make an original argument about a highly specific topic that will be presented to scholars who are experts in this field. With a term paper, you need to convince a professor that you are a decent student who paid attention to lectures and followed that up by reading some of the relevant literature. With a dissertation, you need to convince a committee of scholars that you are someone close to being their equal. With a research paper, your task is to follow the teacher’s instructions and as long as you have made a good-faith effort to do so, the worst they can do is give you a B. If they did a bad job explaining the assignment, that is on them. With a dissertation, no one owes you anything. If the committee does not want to accept what you have written, you are out of luck and all your work will have been for nothing.

Considering the fact that a dissertation requires a different mindset from a research paper, it is important to not jump straight from college to graduate school. Instead, you should take time off to do something else. Spend a few years teaching high school, get married, and start a family. Stay in the Washington Heights neighborhood near Yeshiva University where you have a solid group of friends and one of the few places on the planet where you do not need to justify being an observant Jew who likes secular studies.

One should not think of this as putting your academic career on hold. On the contrary, start developing contacts within academia so that there will be professors who think of you as an adult and a colleague instead of as an eager student. When you are thirty or so and find an attractive offer in a good program that has plenty of funding with an advisor who knows what they are doing and honestly wants to work with you, then you can start your doctorate. By then, you will understand what you need to do and have the personal maturity and support network to succeed.  

The fact that I did not understand this, at the time, left me vulnerable to being given bad advice from none other than my advisor. He told me that I needed to write on a big topic and that I should only bother putting together a committee when I was nearly finished writing. I was not prepared to take what he said in the proper spirit of skepticism because I assumed that my job was simply to do what he told me. The possibility that I could be made to pay for his mistakes never occurred to me. That is not how school is supposed to work. School is supposed to be a safe place where the adults are in charge but also carry responsibility.      

My Dissertation's Journey (Part II)

I spent most of the next two years adrift with my dissertation. It did not help matters that I spent the 2009-10 school year away from any real academic oversight while teaching high school over in Maryland. The Hebrew Academy experience itself was a positive one for me, but most of that time randomly reading. It also did not help matters that I was fairly depressed over being in my late 20s and still single. Perhaps someone with better guidance, more emotional stability and less stubbornness would have recognized the need to reign in one's thinking instead of allowing it to range over a wide variety of topics related to messianism, much of it with no particular connection to Judaism, producing little in the way of actually useful writing.

It was only in 2011, after spending months wadding through the issue of Sabbatianism, that I really found my big idea. This idea was that messianism, with its conflicts between its spiritual and political variants, was rooted in the conflict between, what I came to refer to as, military model, missionary and esoteric model religions. The military model, based around community and ritual, seeks the support of a politically successful state. The missionary and esoteric models, based around believing individuals, oppose the community and eschews worldly success such as that provided by a state. This manifests itself in messianism, which combines the military model dreams of political success with the anti-community hopes of spiritual redemption. In a sense, messianism requires the belief that a political state is so unimportant that God would destroy it, merely for the sake of creating a more faithful nation, and so important that God would organize history around the return of his people to one.

I was still trapped by the idea that this dissertation needed to be comparative and discuss Christianity and Islam. This cost me several more months until I finally forced myself to set aside what had already ballooned to over 100 pages of material and set it aside for a future book. This still left me attempting to conceive of a grand narrative of Jewish messianism placed within the context of an elaborate theory of religion. Last fall, after I crossed the 500-page mark, my advisor told me to cut my early modern material. This included the Sabbatian chapter that I had spent so much time on. A few months ago, he told me to cut the medieval material and only hand in the beginning part, which was then well over 200 pages. One problem with this was that it meant abandoning all the material that I had originally set out to write. A more serious problem was that I was now writing a dissertation on ancient history, an area that neither I nor my advisor possessed any official expertise on. Nevertheless, I continued away at this part of the dissertation, clarifying ideas and adding in more examples to serve as evidence, until it passed the 300-page mark. I knew that what I was writing was not the sort of thing that one should normally do for a dissertation, but I assumed that as long as I was coherent and my advisor supported me I was safe.

Disaster struck a few weeks ago when a professor my advisor wanted to serve on my committee objected to the fact that I was writing a work of general theory. Other professors were soon called in and they raised the same objection. None of them bothered to argue against anything I had written. They did not need to. I had, without realizing it and with my adviser's cooperation, broken an unwritten code and that was enough. This morning I received what appears to be the final verdict. My advisor has acknowledged that my project had been a mistake from the beginning. He now apologizes for his mistake and offers his aid in writing a new dissertation. After nearly five years and more than 800 pages, I seem to be back at square one.         

My Dissertation's Journey (Part I)

As readers know, I am still in the process of writing my doctoral dissertation in history. It has taken me a few years and I am not yet done. As it stands now, while I possess a flesh and blood dissertation and more, that only needs to be edited, there is a strong possibility that I will have to make major changes, which can set me back months or even longer. Thus, I thought to take the opportunity to fill readers in on the situation and how I got there.

When I started my doctoral work at Ohio State, back in the fall of 2006, I wanted to write a dissertation on Isaac Abarbanel, focusing on either his messianic thought or his relationship to Maimonides. My advisor Dr. Goldish turned this idea down. He did not feel qualified to supervise something on Abarbanel. More importantly, he felt that my job prospects would fare better if I did not simply write something narrowly on Jewish thought, but instead addressed a larger narrative issue that would be of interest to people outside of Jewish Studies.

My next major idea was to write on the theme of vengeance against Christians in Jewish messianic thought. This was inspired by comments by Abarbanel, expressing his very un-politically correct hopes for the destruction of Christendom in the wake of the expulsion of 1492. I figured that writing about Jews thinking in ways that Christians often accused them of doing would be fun and controversial. This line of thinking led me to write an essay on the sixteenth-century adventurer David Reubeni, who claimed to come from the Ten Lost Tribes, and his interest in guns.

The next turn was influenced by a Koran class I took with the remarkable scholar Dr. Georges Tamer. On wrote a paper on Islamic Mahdism focusing particularly on the case of the Shi'i Fatimid dynasty, which seized power in North Africa in the early tenth century. What caught my attention was the fact that we are dealing with an apocalyptic movement that managed to evolve into a political one, once it seized power. I wondered if Maimonides', who took the apocalyptic element out of his messianism, was influenced by this line of thinking. Combined with my reading of Norman Cohn's Pursuit of the Millennium, which discusses medieval Christian apocalyptic movements in political terms, I became interested in messianism as a form of Jewish politics. This was to be in contrast to Gershom Scholem's categorizing of messianism as a retreat from politics.

I started to seriously work on the dissertation at the beginning of 2009 after completing my general exams. Using the essays on Reubeni and the Fatimids as well as a more extensive piece placing Abarbanel's messianism within the context of the Christian apocalyptic tradition as exemplified by Joachim of Fiore, I was planning on making my case that Jewish messianism was political largely by placing it within the context of various non-Jewish movements. The chapters would go as follows: Abu Isa's and David Alroy's use of armed force under charismatic leadership as influenced by early Shi'ism, Maimonides' rejection of apocalypticism as influenced by the Fatimids, Abarbanel's use of contemporary history as influenced by Joachim of Fiore, David Reubeni's use of guns as a symbol of state power, Sabbatai Sevi's use of early modern communication networks and Jacob Frank's use of brute force. This idea was grand, bold and completely impractical.

Summary of My Dissertation

My advisor asked me to write him a prospectus summarizing what my dissertation is about. This project has been taking up my writing time these past few years and I have been meaning to write about it on my blog. So here is what I sent him:

This dissertation seeks to elucidate the origins of Jewish messianism as it evolved out of the biblical and Second Temple era apocalyptic traditions and came into the inheritance of the rabbis. Following in the footsteps of Gershom Scholem and Norman Cohn, I divide messianism into the conflicting restorative political and spiritual apocalyptic versions. Most importantly, I see messianism as a means by which those on the margins of a religious community can attack and even conquer the establishment. To further develop an understanding of these conflicts at the heart of messianism, I place this discourse within the context of a particular theory, I propose, of how religions relate to community. This involves three models, military, missionary and esoteric. The military model relies on community and ritual to create a socially constructed reality in which the religion is so obviously true it never needs defending. The community is backed by a formal bureaucracy and sometimes even a state. Its rituals are backed by texts and traditions. Opposing the military model are the two anti-community models, esoteric and missionary. They rely on doctrine instead of ritual. The missionary model outright rejects the community and seeks to create a new religion by seeking even outside converts. It arms its followers with an all-encompassing faith that is strengthened by persecution and even martyrdom. The esoteric model remains more closely tied to the community and either seeks to take it over from within or form its own competing sect. The teachings of its charismatic leader counter the community’s texts and traditions. The esoteric model also uses doctrine to undermine ritual, and by extension the community, by means of antinomianism, the ritualized violation of the law. This allows the esoteric model to either give new, if subversive, meanings to already existing practices or to create new ones. Messianism is important to understanding how these models function because it provides the chief means by which a military model religion can bring its opposition into the fold. Messianism is a tool used by the anti-community models to take over a community, but it is also the means by which the community can absorb their opposition and render them relatively harmless.    

The struggle between the different models follows a cyclical narrative. You have a religious establishment sitting at the top of a military model community. Their focus is on the use of ritual as a means to create a social ideology. This makes the religion quite shallow and parochial, but also the sort of religion that can attract a mass following. This establishment will be under attack by various kinds of intellectual elites, who form the anti-community models. These intellectuals oppose the establishment because it fails to live up to their set of universalizing doctrines. Followers of the esoteric model will maintain themselves, at least outwardly, as members of the community and either attempt to subtly influence it as part of a symbiotic relationship, or reject the community by forming a secret sect. The missionary model will openly break with the community and attempt to form a new community of believers, either by taking over the existing community as reformers or by converting non-members.

Those believers who make up the anti-community models are usually simply the disenchanted and marginalized members of the religious establishment. Thus, they benefit from the success of the community. Success gives this opposition both material support and, by encouraging all the worst habits of military model thinking, intellectual ammunition. The big moment for the opposition, though, comes when the community undergoes a major setback, such as the defeat of an established religion’s state, causing the community’s masses to question whether or not they are on the right side of history and to seek alternatives. Either openly or secretly, our intellectual opposition, having existed on the margins all this time, but never truly distant from power, comes to the rescue with a reformist agenda. They become the new establishment and may even be able to carry out certain surface reforms. In the end, though, the former anti-community model reformers will be taken over by the same community and transformed into just another version of the establishment they claimed to oppose. Their doctrines will turn into rituals without any larger meaning. Even when doctrines are outwardly maintained they will be nothing more than a ritualized catechism.    

The messianic doctrine encapsulates that moment in the cycle when the anti-community opposition achieves its takeover and is, in turn, conquered. During the time of the military model community’s success, its members have no need to develop a messianic doctrine, because, as far as they are concerned, they are already living in a “messianic” age in which history moves as it is supposed to with them on top. The anti-community opposition, existing on the margins, by contrast, develops a form of spiritual messianism. It explains both why the world is in such a fallen state that all the “wrong” people are in power and why it does not matter, considering that God offers them a far greater salvation than mere earthly power. When the moment of disaster strikes the community, the masses will turn to these same marginalized anti-community intellectuals. This spiritual messianic doctrine of a fallen people keeping their faith and being redeemed in the end sounds like the perfect ideology to explain the community’s weakened position and offers hope that, if they just persevere in their belief in themselves and the community, they will be redeemed. The community accepts messianism and its anti-community advocates despite the fact that this messianism really means the hope for the community’s destruction. By extension, the community is agreeing to hand over control not to pious defenders of the community, but people that seek to replace it with a different one of their own design. The last joke, though, is on the anti-community opposition. Their doctrine of spiritual messianism, which was meant to deny the relevance of the military model’s politics, is transformed into a spiritualized version of the old military model hope for political power. This leaves messianism trapped by paradoxes, defending military model politics and supporting its anti-community denial of the relevance of politics. Ultimately, messianism allows for the marriage of two different and contradictory religious visions. These visions are brought together by the language of messianism, which means opposite things to each party. This allows both sides to speak past each other and never have to confront the essential conflict.

Over the main body of the dissertation, I explain how this narrative of the conflict between models and the cycle of community takeovers has played out in ancient Israel, the Second Temple period and with rabbinic Judaism. Ancient Israel saw a priestly and monarchial establishment in conflict with the prophets, who attacked the ritual based sacrificial cult and monarchial authority in the name of a monotheistic theology. The prophets turned the establishment’s concern with enemy invaders against them by transposing it into a populist polemic against the wealthy. What tied these nationalist and populist positions together was the prophetic belief in a supreme deity with a universalizing ethic that condemned the Israelite elite both for their lust for foreign gods and their greed for extorted wealth. The prophets won due to Israel’s political defeats, which culminated in the destruction of the First Temple. This led to the rise of the Deuteronomist theology and the birth of Judaism. The Deuteronomists combined prophetic monotheism with a ritual based covenant that promised both a spiritual redemption and a political return from exile. The prophetic tradition was captured by a Judaism that agreed to believe in one God in exchange for that belief being manifested in a set of rituals that would allow Jews to survive their lack of a political state as well as allow Jews to regain precisely the sort of political state and temple that the prophets had originally denounced.

The Deuteronomist compromise created a Jewish religion that, during the Second Temple period, was capable of surviving despite the fact that most Jews lived in the diaspora and, even in Israel, were relatively weak politically. Second Temple era Judaism combined a more limited state and temple with a monotheist theology that allowed it to intellectually go on the offensive and compete with Hellenism for not only the souls of Jews, but for the entire Mediterranean world. The possession of an ideology opened Judaism up to anti-community thinking. This made establishment Judaism particularly vulnerable to sectarian groups like the Dead Sea Sect and early Christianity. These groups simply took the belief-based attack on ritual and community developed by the prophets to the next level, openly challenging the covenantal status of the vast majority of Jews. One of the main manifestations of this attack on community was a radical apocalyptic vision that saw not just a new order to the world, but the complete overthrow of nature and politics. This implicitly also rendered Jewish community and ritual irrelevant. What meaning could they have in a world where such concepts ceased to exist?

The destruction of the Second Temple left Judaism in need of another reformist movement. Such a movement would offer Judaism an ideology that would allow them to survive the complete end of Jewish sovereignty in Israel and the loss of the Temple. This time, the rabbis, who likely emerged from an esoteric model sect, came to the rescue by offering the emerging body of oral and written traditions that eventually came to form the Talmud as a mobile community to which Jews could attach themselves. The Talmudic corpus offered an intellectual framework, but little in the way of hard doctrine. Similarly, it kept the ritual and sense of community so important to the military model, while avoiding actual politics. This kept Judaism as a military model ritual keeping community, while giving it a transcendental vision beyond ethnic chauvinism that allowed Judaism to survive the lack of a political state. This compromise did not grant rabbinic Judaism the Deuteronomist’s sense of world mission nor the polemical firepower to attempt to pursue the mass conversion of gentiles. What this compromise did do was give rabbinic Judaism both the internal stability to avoid breaking apart into sectarianism and a sense of identity to be able to withstand the outside pressure of Christianity and Islam, competing monotheistic religions that were, in many respects, far more dangerous than anything the Hellenistic world produced. The rabbinic attempt to maintain Judaism as a religion of ritual and community without the need for a formal political system explains a peculiarity of rabbinic messianism. The rabbis maintained the doctrine in theory but avoided putting it into practice. They inherited the radical apocalypticism of Second Temple era sectarianism but avoided the anti-community implications of this apocalypticism by pushing it off forever into the future and the realm of theory. While kept out of the realm of daily life, apocalypticism served to keep political messianism in check. If the Jews were to regain their state and temple in an eschatological age then there was no reason for any Jew to attempt to rebuild a physical state and temple through political means in the present. As esoteric model intellectuals, the rabbis may have developed a symbiotic relationship with the Jewish community, but, in the end, they still needed to reject both state and temple along with their competing forms of leadership. Like any esoteric model group, the rabbis saw what the military model might consider exile to be the messianic age as it allowed the rabbis the freedom to mold Judaism in its own image without the internal competition of kings or priests. In order to avoid ever having to either face up to these inconvenient elements within Judaism or openly attempt to get rid of them, the rabbis simply pushed messianism into the realm of the forever imminent but never to be arrived at future.            

The Best Collection of Liberty Loving Short Stories about Government that Money Can Buy

Oren Litwin is a friend of mine from back in my days in the Yeshiva College Dramatics Society. I have since fallen out of touch with him. While I have been pursuing my doctorate in history from Ohio State, he has been pursuing one in political science at George Mason. I moved out to California and he moved out to California. While I have not finished my dissertation and have therefore put my musket and magic fantasy novel on hold, Oren has produced a delightful collection of short stories titled The Best Government Money Can Buy.

Each of these short stories is premised on a wild government reform and what it might mean if such policies ever were put into practice. Such reforms include direct elections for cabinet positions, private prisons that inmates pay to be sent to and lawsuits against corrupt politicians. Most of the stories seem to be of policies that Oren would like to see in practice. There is one story, though, about mandatory firearm ownership. Here the main point of the story is to imagine the commerce clause being turned against liberals. Instead of liberals being able to use the commerce clause to demand that citizens buy healthcare, conservatives get to demand that even liberal pacifists buy some sort of firearm, even a Taser. Liberals then wake up and discover the value of a limited government.

The stories, in general, have a libertarian bent, with running references to Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard, without being explicitly so. There are stories about legalizing marijuana and privatizing social services, but if I were to put my finger on what precisely about these stories is libertarian I would say that the approach to reform that runs through these stories is not of specific laws, but of institutions and the incentives that motivate the people behind them. This is in keeping with one of the main contributions of thinkers like Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek that the noblest best-intentioned plan in the world is worthless in the face of the flesh and blood humans, who will put that plan into practice and what their incentives might be. Also while these stories do not actually support anarchism as the government is left standing, there is something anarchistic in its spirit in that it approaches government as something that can be radically restructured at will. A government that can be refashioned at will is also a government that can be made to disappear. Even if government exists, it is placed on the dock as something that must justify itself in the face of the demand for personal liberty.

The story that intrigued me the most was the last one, which deals with a plan to crowdsource the paying of city taxes. If citizens in a town can raise a certain amount of money in a given year than they do not have to pay taxes. Instead, citizens would be able to decide which public works projects they would want their donations to go to. I am still mulling over whether such a plan would work. My concern would be special interests taking an expansive view of what counts as public works. For example, what if wealthy elites put together the necessary money to get out of taxes and then used their donations to fund the building of golf courses instead of schools. I will certainly have to reread the story to come to an opinion.      

Conference Presentations and Why I Now Hate Megabus

The past two weeks have been very exciting for me. I flew out to Grand Rapids, MI for a symposium on religion and politics at Calvin College. I spoke at this symposium two years ago on the topic of apocalypticism in Joachim of Fiore and Isaac Abarbanel. Back when I was more productive on this blog and less so on my actual dissertation, this was going to be a chapter for the dissertation. Since my dissertation writing has become more productive, it has changed its emphasis and so Fiore and Abarbanel will need to wait for a future book. This time I spoke about Max Weber and his influence on my understanding of religion. As a Jew and as a medieval historian I was certainly the odd man out at the symposium. I must say that the people there were once again very kind to me and did there best to try to make me feel right at home.

After the symposium, I took a Megabus to Pittsburgh (which unfortunately went through that den of iniquity known as Ann Arbor) to visit my Nadoff relatives. From Pittsburgh, I took another Megabus to Washington D.C. I got to spend several days with my parents, siblings and my very cute new nephew Boaz. (He was very sneaky managing to get himself born hours after my wife and I needed to fly back to Los Angeles this past January.) This past Thursday, I was supposed to take a Megabus from D.C. to Pittsburgh before transferring to Greyhound for the last leg of my trip to Columbus, OH. After having purchased my ticket weeks in advance, I showed up at the stop only to be informed that the bus had been canceled. I had to quickly run over to Greyhound and buy a ticket to keep all of my plans in line. Now the nerve of Megabus. It is one thing for there to be delays. It is something completely different to point blank decide not to run a scheduled bus line, not tell paying costumers and leave them stranded. Megabus refunded the $1.50 I paid for the fare. This is beside the point and an insult. The $1 fares are door busters meant to serve as a means of advertising and are covered by the majority of times one ends up paying a higher fare. I won a raffle for agreeing to trust Megabus enough to set my plans around them weeks in advance. They violated that trust and broke their contract. At the very least they should cover the $50 for the Greyhound ticket and maybe even throw in some vouchers for future tickets.  

When all is said and done, I got into Columbus on Friday morning. I spoke to the middle school and high school at the Haugland Learning Center, a school for children on the autism spectrum, about college and dating. In terms of college, I emphasized the great reward in store in being able to focus on a particular interest, but that this reward must be earned through the personal discipline of being responsible for one's own work and, by extension, one's own life. In terms of dating, I used a little Nassim Nicholas Taleb to argue that dating is a form of high-risk investment in which most attempts fail. This means that, on the one hand, they should expect most relationships to fail and recognize that there is nothing they can do about it. The positive side of this is the knowledge that failure in these circumstances is not really failure, because they are not the cause of their failure. At the end of the day, a long string of failures with one success at the end means that the entire endeavor, including the failures, was a success.

The Sabbath was spent walking many miles and socializing with old friends (both of which are marks of my wife's corrupting influence on me). Sunday was The Ohio State Graduation and President Obama spoke. While the president encouraged young impressionable college students to forsake the peaceful social cooperation of working in the private sector to join him in a life of crime in government, I was a few blocks away at Hillel speaking about Maimonides for a graduate Jewish Studies colloquium. Even while he attempted to sneak in philosophical ideas, I like to think that Maimonides' attitude toward community was more honest than Obama's. As with Abarbanel, the Maimonides material is also not going into my dissertation, but will hopefully make its way into a future book.

I am flying back to California today. I miss the weather, my kitty and my wife.          

100,000 Words

According to Microsoft Word, I have just crossed the 100,000 word mark for my dissertation. Now granted some of that is from the bibliography and footnotes and large sections are little more than gibberish. That being said I still think it is a milestone worth celebrating (most probably with more work).

Tzabi the Israeli "Duck and Cover" Turtle

My friend Frank Blazich Jr., a fellow graduate student at Ohio State, is a specialist in American Cold War era civil defense. Right now he is working on a dissertation North Carolina's civil defense program. (Why someone would be working on North Carolina history from Ohio is a separate story that you are free to ask him.) A few months ago, he came over to me and asked me if I could translate something in Hebrew for him. Why would Hebrew be relevant to American civil defense? He had an Israeli version of the American cartoon Bert the Turtle.







I allowed the project to languish on my back burner for several months. (Frank is a much better friend than I am in reverse.) One of the reasons was that there were some terms I was not sure of and my translation is very stilted. So please go over to Frank's blog to see Tzabi the Israeli duck and cover turtle. Those of my readers with a background in Hebrew should feel free to suggest alternative translations.

It is interesting to note that the Tzabi comic was produced in 1967, presumably during the lead up to the Six Day war. Unlike Bert, there is no mention of Atomic bombs. The concern is merely that Egyptian planes might bomb Israeli cities. As a good Israeli turtle, Tzabi does not follow in the ways of the waspy Bert and wear bow-ties.

At the Calvin College Symposium on Religion and Politics

I am writing to all my readers from Grand Rapids MI (my first overnight stay in the "State up North") where I am attending a symposium on religion and politics hosted by Calvin College's Paul B. Henry Institute. So to get some random thoughts in before Shabbos:

I got a ride up to the conference with another Ohio State student. I can't think of many other times where I talked to someone for nearly five hours straight, the entire car trip. He played Carl Reiner to my libertarian historian Mel Brooks. This was the perfect sort of conversation for me. I got to talk about the things that interest me such as the historical method and libertarianism and challenged by an intelligent person who disagrees with me and asks good questions leading to a conversation that I had not previously worked through every move for both sides in my head. Not that I mind questioning other people. The only problem is that I tend to turn more inquisitorial than most people would like. Not that it is personal; on the contrary, I do not care about people's lives, but only their views of life and whether they are coherent and consistent. Though failure to do so is something I take personally.

I gave a presentation this morning of a draft of my dissertation chapter on Joachim of Fiore and Isaac Abarbanel. Where else but a Protestant institution should a Jew go to talk about Catholics (as well as Jews)? I was the odd man out in my discussion panel in that I was not talking about Thomas Hobbes. (Who could resist at an institution named Calvin?) In general, this has been a very political science conference so it was probably the perfect place to announce to political science people that the study of political history is a political act in that it makes politics relevant and so historians like me are needed to make their academic lives meaningful. Then again perhaps my work will convince some of these political science people to not despair that even though the apocalypse might come, ushering in the end of earthly politics, their studies might still yet not have been in vain. 

At one of the sessions, there were two presentations that were open Christian apologetics. The first argued against non-theistic understandings of the moral imperative to obey authority figures. The second was a defense of Jonathan Edwards' understanding of Original Sin. Edwards argued that if every being was born independently and untainted by Original Sin then every person would be the equivalent of the prelapsarian Adam. Adam as an innocent being in total communion with God was incapable of having any knowledge of sin and evil. Because of this he could not identify evil and resist it. This leads to a cosmology of consistent decay where every person falls from grace when confronted with sin just like Adam. In the Edwardian cosmology, everyone is corrupt from the beginning, but we can then take a more upwards view of things as people at least try to improve themselves. 

This was my first conference hosted by a religious institution so maybe it should have been expected. As a historian, though, I take for granted the fact that my job is to describe "who," "what," "when," "where" and "why," but not "should." I write about messianism, but there is nothing in what I do that can suggest one way or another whether a messiah might be coming or when. My Carl Reiner friend pointed out that coming from a political science perspective there may not be such a simple bifurcation. That is an interesting point; does political science force one out of the neutrality of mere description and into actual advocacy?   

Have a good Shabbos everyone.   

A Helpful Message to Finish My Dissertation

Today I was reading up on John of Rupescissa. He was a fourteenth-century Franciscan apocalyptic visionary. He believed that the Jews would convert and be saved in the end. He also, like seemingly every self-respecting Franciscan of the period, got into trouble with the Church and spent the last years of his life in prison, (something to do with having very "un-Christian" ideas about Church poverty) from where he did most of his writings, ranging from the end of the world to alchemy. Tommaso Campanella, another Christian apocalyptic visionary I am studying, also spent over twenty years in prison for his part in a failed political revolution in Naples. (This was after he managed to convince the Inquisition he was insane by being tortured for two days straight.) He also used his time in prison to write productively and was released to spend the last few years of his life as a European court celebrity. Then there is the example of St. John of the Cross; my spiritual guide through depression. His inspiring poetry on life in a spiritual abyss, The Dark Night of the Soul, benefited from a year spent locked away against his will. (I could, of course, also mention Adolf Hitler, who managed to produce Mein Kempf during a year spent in prison, but he does not fit under medieval and early modern Christian thinkers.)  

I cannot help but feel that I am being sent a message, one that I would rather not hear. That the best place to write is not the office, the library, or even on a couch with the TV on, but in prison doing hard time for treason and heresy. So I need to go to federal prison as a violent religious apocalyptic revolutionary. To do that I am going to need to start a violent religious apocalyptic movement. (All violent religious apocalyptic actions will of course be carried out by erring disciples who have distorted my teachings.) In order to learn how to start such a movement, I will need to finish writing my dissertation. But of course, I cannot hope to finish my dissertation unless I go to prison.       

The Politics of Jewish Messianism (My Proposed Dissertation Thesis)

Gershom Scholem famously distinguished between two types of Messianism, a restorative Messianism that sought to reestablish the biblical Jewish State and a utopian apocalyptic Messianism that sought the end of the physical political world as we know it. (See David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History pg. 72.) Scholem and most students of Jewish Messianism have tended to focus on the latter type of Messianism. I would like to deal with the former kind.

On the surface, Jewish Messianism has very little to do with politics. In fact, it can be seen as a counter politics. Politics deals with earthly power as it relates to a State of this world. Messianism is usually seen as a rejection of politics and the earthly political State. Instead, it looks for an end to earthly politics through the imposition of a supernatural divine State. From this perspective, there is a vast gulf between political thinkers, such as Machiavelli and John Locke, and political revolutionaries, such as George Washington and Maximilien Robespierre, on the one hand, and messianic thinkers, such as Joachim of Fiore, and messianic claimants, such as John of Leiden, on the other. In my work, I seek to argue that, in fact, that the apocalyptic world of Messianism may not be so far removed from the realm of earthly politics. Whatever various messianic movements may have thought of the politics of their day, it cannot be denied that messianic movements by definition interact with worldly political authorities, make political claims and are thus themselves political movements of this world. 

For anyone not wedded to the Whig narrative of bifurcating the “superstitious” Middle Ages and “rational” Enlightenment and ignorant of the past few decades of scholarship, this should not be surprising or controversial. There is a well-established literature linking in various ways the “religious” messianic and apocalyptic movements of the Medieval and early modern periods with the supposedly “secular” revolutionary political movements of the modern period. To give some examples, Norman Cohn, back in the 1950s, in his Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, sought to portray movements as the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Taborites and the Anabaptist Munster revolt as the forerunners of modern absolutist movements such as Communism and Fascism. Similarly, though working in the opposite direction, Jacob Talmon, in his Origins of Totalitarian Democracy and Political Messianism: the Romantic Phase, sought to connect modern totalitarian movements, particularly those of the Rousseauan tradition, with earlier religious apocalyptic movements. David S. Katz and the late Richard H. Popkin, in Messianic Revolution: Radical Religious Politics to the End of the Second Millennium, set forth the evolution of medieval Joachimite apocalyptic tradition into the modern apocalyptic movements of today.

I seek to bring elements of all of these works together and apply them to Jewish history. This serves a number of purposes. Even more important to me than placing messianism within a political framework is the continued effort to place Jewish history within the context of the surrounding society. I seek to place Jewish Messianism within the context of similar movements produced in the Christian and Islamic worlds. Furthermore, I propose that Messianism as a political movement offers us a way to talk about Jewish politics. Jewish history has traditionally suffered from not being able to employ the traditional State narrative, for most of recorded history there has been no such thing as a sovereign Jewish State. More important to modern scholars is the lack of a Jewish political tradition. Messianism allows us a backdoor to bring Jews as actors into the political narrative, beyond being the victims of hateful mobs and capricious rulers. Thus helping us move away from the Heinrich Graetz “Jews suffer and think” lachrymose narrative. Furthermore, by dealing with messianic theorists and their confrontation with worldly politics, we can begin to construct a tradition of Jewish political thought. For this reason, I will be discussing not just actual messianic movements such as the Sabbatians, but messianic theorists such as Maimonides and Abarbanel as well.

As a multi-disciplinary project, my work should be of use in a number of fields. This is a work on Jewish history and particularly Jewish Messianism. The models I propose should be relevant to general students of Messianism and apocalypticism. Finally this is also a work of political theory meant to aid in the understanding of how to integrate Messianism as a political phenomenon.

General Exams IV: Orals

Yesterday I came to the final part of my general exams, the oral section. Orals consists of being put in a room with all four professors on your committee and for two hours they get to ask you whatever they feel like. I would describe the experience of having orals with Dr. Matt Goldish, Dr. Daniel Frank, Dr. Robert Davis and Dr. Daniel Hobbins as being in the center of a free-wheeling conversation with four people who are way smarter than you, but are being very nice about it. Most of it was a blur to me. I passed so I guess I did a good job. Here is my attempt to present my orals based on what I can remember.

I started off with a brief introduction, where I gave a survey of my intellectual development as a historian up to this point. History has been a major part of my life since I was in second grade. The area of history that interested me has changed from time to time. In middle school I was a big Civil War buff. Later, in high school, I moved to World War II and the Russian Revolution. Going into college I was convinced that I wanted to do nineteenth century European political history. Then I came under the influence of Prof. Louis Feldman, the classics professor at Yeshiva University. I guess I turned to the medieval and early modern periods as a compromise between being a modernist and a classicist. This turn nicely dovetailed with another interest of mine from high school, the biblical commentary of Isaac Abarbanel. Abarbanel proved to be the main subject of most of the papers I wrote while I did my MA at Revel. When I came to Ohio State I intended to do a dissertation on Abarbanel, focused on a close textual reading of his work. Either I was going to work on the issue of his relationship to Kabbalah or his relationship to Maimonides. Dr. Goldish nixed both of these options, insisting that whatever I did, it should be more than just textual analysis and involve myself in examining the general context of whatever I wrote. In this regard Dr. Goldish has been a tremendous influence on me. For Dr. Goldish the major thematic in dealing with European Jewry is always how what we see with Jews is part of some larger trend that encompasses Christians as well. (His book, the Sabbatean Prophets, is a good example of this.) My fondest moments with him remain, sitting in his office talking about various Christian mystics and how they compare to what we find in Judaism. That should give you and idea of the sort of thinker he is.

The first to go was Dr. Hobbins. We started by talking about the issue of female mystics, which was one of the papers I wrote in the written exam. He noted that when I first came to him about preparing a reading list we talked about doing something about medieval universities. This topic disappeared and the reading list was taken over by Christian female mystics. He asked me if I thought that any consensus had been reached as to the nature of Christian female mysticism and if so what. I responded that the big issue that everyone seems to come up against is whose voice are we dealing with in the texts, the female visionary or her male priest. We next talked about discretio spirituum, particularly as it involved Dr. Hobbins’ dissertation topic, the early fifteenth century French theologian Jean Gerson. I supported Rosalynn Voaden’s contention that this whole process of discretion spirituum was a discourse that could be used to ones benefit depending on ones ability to play to the politics of the situation, not all that different from knowing how to handle Inquisition censorship in the early modern period. This brought Dr. Davis into the fray and we ended up talking about Richard Kagan, who he once studied with, and his work Lucrecia of Leon. In her case it was her blaming her priest and painting herself an innocent, ignorant girl and her priest saying that she duped him. Dr. Hobbins next went to the issue of the fourteenth century Scientific Revolution. Norman Cantor advocated that position; Hobbins was interested in knowing who else held this. I pointed to Charles Homer Haskins and the classic example of someone who put the Scientific Revolution into the Middle Ages. There is also the example of Amos Funkenstein, Dr. Goldish’s late mentor, who saw there being a direct continuity between the late Middle Ages and the early Enlightenment. Underlying all this was Dr. Hobbins’ interest in the late Middle Ages as not being an era of decline. (An issue that I had wisely taken a supportive stance on in the written part of the exam.) I ended up having to defend the notion that astrology presupposed a mechanized view of the universe in light of the fact that astrology did not all of a sudden enter Europe at the end of the Middle Ages. I explained that this is a latent sort of issue. There is that element to astrology, waiting for someone to bother to use it. The other thing is, and this I should have been more forceful on, is that it is precisely in the early modern period that astrology becomes a major issue.

Dr. Davis, for his turn, opened by asking me about the difference between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. We had some difficulty getting on the same page with this question. I assumed that he talking about periodization, something with little intrinsic meaning. We break times into given periods to suit our own convenience. The point that he was trying to make, which eventually came out, was that, yes, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries many of the things we are used to associating with the Middle Ages and many of the things we are used to associating with the Renaissance are going on at the same time so we have the Middle Ages and the Renaissance going on simultaneously. He then when on to the topic of Jacob Burckhardt and civic ritual, which I discussed in the written exam. Dr. Davis, noting with a smile that Burckhardt was a free gift since he was not on my reading list, wanted to know how, in light of the very structured nature of civic rituals in the Italian city states, one could see this as promoting individualism. This line of questioning put me in a difficult situation since I do not support Burckhardt. Dr. Davis then went to the issue of the introduction of Greek into Italy during the fifteenth century. He managed to trip me up a bit here since my knowledge of the whole process is a bit vague. We next got onto the topic of magic, particularly within the context of the scholarship of Keith Thomas, Francis Yates and Stuart Clark. Here I got jumped by Dr. Frank for blithely remarking that Jews were not all that different from Christians. He managed to really back me into a corner on this since our sources when it comes to Jewish magic are basically all point to rabbinic magicians and not to lay magicians and we do not have an internal Jewish literature on Jews engaging in black magic.

Dr. Frank and Dr. Goldish led the final round of discussions. I was expecting Dr. Frank to bring up Karaites since I spent a good chunk of this past quarter in his office studying about them. He did not bother. Instead he asked me about comparing the Jewish reaction to Islamic culture as opposed to Christian culture. One of the major issues is the fact that Jews in the Islamic world were fluent in Arabic while Jews in the Christian world were, by and large, not using Latin. This got me going on about my memories of Dr. Haym Soloveitchik’s class and him attacking Yitzchak Baer; “he turns himself over backwards to show how Rashi knew a word of Latin.” This led to a general discussion of Christian influences on Jews and I ended up talking about Baer’s argument that the Hasidai Ashkenaz were influenced by the Franciscans. Of course Dr. Soloveitchik hates this essay as well. (There is a funny story that I did not mention; those familiar with Dr. Soloveitchik might appreciate this. I asked Dr. Soloveitchik where Baer got the idea that Hasidai Ashkenaz were interested in animals just like the Franciscans were. He turned on me and said: “there is one person (Baer) who knows and he is upstairs. There is one reference in the entire Sefer Hasidim.”) Dr. Goldish next asked me about the issue of conversos, which I had written about and were there any other major historiographical issues besides for the one that I wrote about, whether they were actually practicing Judaism or not. I brought up Richard Popkin, Dr. Goldish’s other mentor, who argued that conversos played a major role in the rise of skepticism within European thought. I could not come up with anyone who actually disagree with Popkin so that was a dead end.

So that ended my orals. They sent me out of the room for a few minutes before Dr. Goldish invited me back in and congratulated me on becoming an ABD (All But Dissertation.)