Guest Article: A Broken Frame

Analysing from a Sephardic religious perspective, David Shasha wrote the following article to investigate the decay at the core of modern Judaism and to make suggestions for repair.

I am uncomfortable with David's use of the phrase religious humanism, which usually refers to a modern non-theistic religion that includes an anthropocentric ethical philosphy.

While David has identified a fundamental difference that came to divide Sephardic and Ashkenazic Judaism, it required several centuries of development before attitudes toward Maimonides crystallized into a demarcation point between two distinct versions of Rabbinic Judaism.

Maimonides' harshest initial critics were the non-Ashkenazi scholars Hasdai Crescas and the Provençal rabbi known as Rabbeinu Abraham ben David of Posquières (RAVAD).

While Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (RASHI) of Troyes, Champagne in northern France belongs to the early Ashkenazi tradition, the early Ashkenazic tradition was not quite as insular as it later came to be in the Polish environment, and the research of Menahem Banitt indicates in Rashi, Interpreter of the Biblical Letter, that members of RASHI's community may have retained knowledge of the Hellenistic Biblical philosophic tradition.

Judaism in the Arab Islamic environment eventually developed a pluralistic approach toward attaining intellectual-spiritual perfection under the influence of Arab-Islamic social-religious pluralism, which unlike Christianity accepted the existence of valid non-Abrahamic traditions of revelation.^*

Ethnic Ashkenazi Judaism in the Polish Catholic environment tended toward an exclusionist intellectual-spiritual perfectionism that drew from the models of Catholic intolerance for non-Christian religion and from the historic Polish caste system that integrated ethnic Ashkenazi Jews into a society with generally strict and for the most part almost impermeable barriers among various ethnic, religious, and economic-functional groups.

David discusses the fracturing of ethnic Ashkenazi Judaism that effectively began in the 17th century with Sabbatianism and that in many ways paralled the collapse of Poland into Europe's first failed state.

By the 19th century thanks to the misguided "reforms" of Czar Nicholas I, ethnic Ashkenazi Judaism could be described as shattered, and Russian ethnic Ashkenazi Jews developed their own intelligentsia comparable to those of the Russians and the Poles.

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries ethnic Ashkenazi Jewry and in particular Russian ethnic Ashkenazim can be characterized as violent, extremist, fanatic, racist and very dangerous both to European countries with large ethnic Ashkenazi populations and to Palestinians among whom ethnic Ashkenazim had established colonies for the purpose of stealing the country.

Yet even in the late 19th century, there are countervailing tendencies to the main and distinct trends of Ashkenazic and Sephardic Judaism. In Frankfurt at the fringes of the territory of modern ethnic Ashkenazi Judaism, Shimshon Rafael Hirsch established a much more intellectually inclusive form of modern German Orthodoxy while the beginnings of the confrontation of the Arab-Islamic with European modernism may have occasioned the beginnings of non-Ashkenazic factionalism in the form of movements like Dar Da` (Dor De`a) in Yemen.

David is hopeful and states:

Once we look to restore the model of Sephardic Religious Humanism to the Jewish community, we will see the formation of exciting new possibilities for the promulgation of a healthy and robust Jewish identity. Rather than breaking Jews off into separate groups, the Sephardic model of Religious Humanism would enable Jews of all ethnic origins to unite under the rubric of an inclusive and tolerant culture that seeks entente and rapprochement with the world at large and the primacy of Jewish shalom bayit as its ultimate aim.

I am more pessimistic because I see mostly incoherence resulting from removing various forms of Judaism from their native German, Polish, and Arab-Islamic environments that no longer exist any more.^**

While there are a few remaining Jews with sincere faith in God, for the vast majority Judaism has become a combination of ethnic narcissism, Holocaust-obsession and worship of the State of Israel. It is hard to imagine that any but a few Jews will develop a more inclusive mentality when so many are enthralled to a barbaric Zionist ideology that is driving most Jews either to commit or to justify ever more heinous atrocities against the native population of Palestine.

A Broken Frame: Sephardi Occlusion and the Repairing of Jewish Dysfunction

by David Shasha, Director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, NY

The way in which we name and identify a thing determines the conceptual categories that enable us to resolve problems that we face.

Jewish tradition is filtered through its Biblical and rabbinic antecedents. The historical evolution of Jewish life has taken a number of different turns that must be precisely measured. Quite often, these developments have been ignored.

At present, Jewish life is marked by a serious difficulty in dealing with the outside, non-Jewish world and by an equally difficult internal series of intractable conflicts waged within the Jewish community. These conflicts, internal and external, bespeak a particular vision of Judaism that remains wedded to an insular modality that judges the external as problematic.

In the centuries following the production of the Babylonian Talmud an acculturation took place in the Middle Eastern and Mediterranean Jewish world, a world that was linked by a dynamic and creative rabbinical culture with its roots in the old Levant, which led to what scholars have called “Arabization.” With the adoption of the Arabic language by the rabbis and Jewish laypeople of the Mediterranean basin and Near East in the wake of the Islamic conquests, tumultuous changes took place that culminated in the crowning achievements of Moses Maimonides (1138-1204); a figure whose own personal itinerary led him from Spain in the West across North Africa to Egypt.

Maimonides is a figure whose historical influence has been distorted in a desperate attempt to misread the immediate developments in the European Jewish world relating to his teachings and value-system.

Today the supremacy of Maimonides is often taken for granted, whereas his actual teaching has been occluded. Maimonides developed a Judaism that was typified by the Religious Humanism which had been articulated by Middle Eastern thinkers in a polyglot form of Arabic culture that infused the various sacred texts and traditions of the region’s monotheistic religions with Greco-Roman science and rationalism.

Religious Humanism is a critically important category that is rarely articulated in its precise sense and is even less understood as a basis for Jewish self-understanding. The idea provides the integration of the parochial values of religion with the universal aspects of human civilization.

A fairly representative example of what this concept signifies can be found in the following two passages: the first (1) from Maimonides himself and the second (2) from Moses Angel:

1. It was not the object of the Prophets and our Sages in these utterances to close the gate of investigation entirely, and to prevent the mind from comprehending what is within its reach, as is imagined by simple and idle people, whom it suits better to put forth their ignorance and incapacity as wisdom and perfection, and to regard the distinction and wisdom of others as irreligion and imperfection, thus taking darkness for light and light for darkness. The whole object of the Prophets and the Sages was to declare that a limit is set to human reason where it must halt. (Guide of the Perplexed 1:32)

2. Then, charity, which in the doctrine of abstract faith, means love for universal mankind, shall cease to be what concrete religion made it, love only for self and self’s imitators. Then, man shall acknowledge that true God-worship consists not in observance of any particular customs, but in the humble, zealous cultivation of those qualities by which the Eternal has made himself known to the world. The members of one creed shall not arrogate to themselves peculiar morality and peculiar salvation, denying both to the members of other creeds; but they shall learn that morality and salvation are the cause and effect of all earnest endeavors to rise to the knowledge of revelation. Men shall cease to attempt the substitution of one set of forms for another set of forms; they shall satisfy themselves with being honest and dignified exponents of their own mode of belief, and shall not seek to coerce what heaven has left unfettered – the rights of conscience. They shall strive to remove all obstacles to the spread of God-worship, by showing how superior the happiness, the intellectuality, the virtue of its professors; but they shall stop there, not even for the sake of securing their object preferring their own faith for that of another. This was the original combination under which Christianity was called into existence; this was the power which enabled it to survive the shock which had destroyed all else, and to this must it return before its mission can be perfectly accomplished. What the teachings of Sinai were to the children of Abraham, the teachings of the other mount were to be to the rest of the world; one was not to supersede the other, but to render it accessible. (The Law of Sinai and its Appointed Times, pp. 288-289)

Religious Humanism is the place where our traditional religious tenets meet with the universal aspects of science and rational culture. The teachings of Maimonides represent for Judaism a significant efflorescence of Religious Humanism and the struggle against Maimonides the most important attempt to suppress it.

The reasons for this are complicated and intertwined with the inner workings of Jewish history. At the outset of any discussion of the matter we have what has become known as “The Maimonidean Controversy,” which, though accepted as axiomatic, is also mired in a murkiness that makes the issue less clear to us today than it was when it first emerged.

What was at the root of this controversy, and what transpired in its wake?

Central to the problem are the clashing Jewish visions of the two different rabbinical traditions that emerge fully in the wake of the various bans and counter-bans that rise up in the aftermath of the publication of the Maimonidean oeuvre.

A century preceding Maimonides’ ministry brought the development of an Ashkenazi rabbinical school which was founded by Rashi (1040-1145) and built up by Rabbi Jacob Tam (c. 1100-1171) and the members of his Tosafist group. A number of basic principles can be noted that were central to the teachings of the school: A fierce sense of Talmudic essentialism emerged that sought to replicate behaviors, concepts and beliefs of the ancient Talmudic society; an interpretive methodology known as pilpul would adapt this Talmudism to the socio-cultural needs of the community; a hermetic system would emerge that closed off rabbinical study from outside influences and mark Talmudic interpretation as an exclusive system that eschewed the modalities of non-Jewish concepts or philosophies.

The emergence and acceptance of the new Maimonidean system in the Sephardic world reverberated in the Ashkenazi communities and led to dramatic responses. A cross-cultural penetration of Ashkenazi thinking into Christian Spain in the 13^th century led to fierce battles being waged on the front lines of the new Maimonidean culture. While rabbis in the Rhineland and Northern France were by and large immersed in their own religious world, the Jewish communities of Spain were deeply impacted by the new learning of Maimonides and his school; a school whose illustrious progenitors included figures as august as Se’adya Ga’on (882-942), Bahye ibn Paquda (c. 11^th century), Samuel ibn Naghrela (993-1056) and Solomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1021-c. 1057).

Within the new learning was a proclivity to seek wisdom from many different sources. Sephardic learning was not insular as its Ashkenazi counterpart, but took what it needed from any source which could contribute to a better understanding of God’s creation.

We must not, as is currently the case, minimize the impact of the Maimonidean Controversy on subsequent Jewish life. The Maimonidean Controversy led to developments in Jewish law and Jewish thought that we continue to struggle with.

The binary template that is struck in the early Middle Ages sets out two variant forms of rabbinical Judaism, one based on an open-ended form of Religious Humanism, the other which lay the seeds for a fundamentalist Judaism.

This binarism lay dormant in Jewish history for many centuries. With Ashkenazi Talmudism remaining relatively static as it was exclusively tied to ritual matters and legal theory in the form of Talmudic novellae and works of Responsa that often acted as intellectual exercises rather than practical case studies and court rulings, Sephardic literary production remained consistently pluralistic and dynamic. Sephardic writers produced works of literature – religious as well as secular, philosophy, science, ethics, Biblical interpretation, history, Hebrew grammar and many other diverse intellectual studies that spoke to the fundamental centrality of Religious Humanism in the culture.

Religious Humanism sought to link the parochial concerns of the Jewish ritual and liturgical tradition, the element that made Judaism unique among other cultures and faiths, with a concern for what could best be described as the old Greek paidea; that form of Humanistic learning that was characteristic of an educated person in the ancient world.

This form of paidea, in Arabic called adab, became a central part of Jewish learning in the early Medieval period, reaching its high water mark in Maimonides’ seminal achievements. The various bans and attacks on Maimonides had to do with his Religious Humanism. In the most famous – and egregious – case of this we see a rabbinical ban on the first book of the Mishneh Torah – Sefer ha-Madda’ – which incorporates Humanistic concepts and learning into a discussion of ethical and intellectual principles in Jewish thought and practice. The anti-Maimonidean reaction to this Religious Humanism was swift and decisive. It would forever stigmatize the “Humanist” side of “Religious Humanism” and try to beat back what its detractors saw as “alien” influences in Jewish life.

The point that is so important to understand here in the subsequent development of Jewish life in the Modern era was that European Judaism struggled with the problems that such rejectionism placed on its ability to develop and adapt to the ways of the world. So long as European Judaism remained locked into ghettoes, the matter of acculturation was not seen as a decisive issue. But once Europe began to change and provide to Jews the ability to integrate into their societies, deep conflicts arose in the Jewish world.

Some very basic trends began to emerge in the late 18^th and early 19^th century European Jewish world: Stirrings of a movement for Reform clashed with the old Talmudic schools in Eastern Europe. A seminal figure such as Moses Mendelssohn (1727-1786), himself an observant Jew, was initially seen, as was Azariah de Rossi (c. 1513-1578) in an earlier generation, as a possible danger to the pristine hermetic faith. Mendelssohn provided his own take on Religious Humanism by reading some of the new European learning into the Jewish sources.

The confusion created by Mendelssohn’s teaching led to a renewed effort in rabbinical circles to refuse any connection with the outside culture. In the long run, Mendelssohn became an icon to the reformers and rejected by what would become known as Orthodoxy. Orthodoxy, a movement created in reaction to the establishment of Reform Judaism, soon closed ranks against the attempt by rabbis to incorporate Humanist culture into Judaism.

Such was a repetition of the Maimonidean Controversy which led to new fissures and conflicts in Ashkenazi Jewish culture.

The continuation of Maimonidean thinking among the Sephardic elite in the early Modern age found brilliant rabbinical figures such as Saul Morteira (c. 1596-1660), Menassseh ben Israel (1604-1657), Isaac Abendana (c. 1640-1710), David Nieto (1654-1728), and others articulating a Judaism that was comfortable engaging with the new European learning and was consistent with the old Maimonidean school and its adherence to the pluralistic values of Religious Humanism.

In spite of the massive upheavals in this same early Modern Jewish world wrought by the mystical frenzy of Sabbatianism, leading many in the Sephardic world to embrace its anti-rational mystic tendencies, it is clear that there remained many Sephardic sages who continued to study and promote the old curriculum in places like Amsterdam, London, Venice, Salonica, and Fez.

It was in the early Modern age that a demographic imbalance began to develop between the Sephardi and Ashkenazi worlds. Socio-cultural changes were afoot that weakened the old Sephardic world and empowered the Ashkenazim. This is a deeply complex process with many different aspects that we cannot do adequate justice to in such a confined space.

These changes were ushered in with the emergence of Europe as a major global force and the subsequent eclipse of the Ottoman and Arab worlds in the wake of Colonialism and international power politics that crested in the First World War. The process culminated with the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the occupation of the Levant and North Africa by the European powers. Thus would the Jews of Europe rise in the context of Jewish life the world over.

To take but a single example of this phenomenon, we have the figure of Adolphe Cremieux (1796-1880) in France who reaches out to his “less fortunate” brethren in North Africa and draws up a decree that would provide Algerian Jews with special protections afforded by the French government. This example shows us the complicated ways in which Europe’s Jews now took the lead in world Jewish affairs. And with this change came the emergence of new and often perplexing developments in Judaism and Jewish life.

At the very dawn of the 20^th century new developments were taking place in the Jewish world that would have a decisive impact on future events.

A massive wave of immigration brought Eastern European Jews to the United States where they would overwhelm the previous immigrants, many of whom were Sephardim. A gradual transition soon took place in American Jewry from a cosmopolitan Atlantic Judaism stretching from London to Livorno to Gibraltar to Jamaica to Charleston, Newport, Manhattan and Philadelphia, led by seminal figures such as Isaac Leeser (1806-1868), Sabato Morais (1823-1897) and Henry Pereira-Mendes (1852-1937), to a more complex amalgamation of the diffuse and often warring Ashkenazi Jewish groups that brought to America the conflicts that had been waged in the old country.

It should be remembered that a crucial American figure like Isaac Leeser, himself an Ashkenazi, acculturated to the Sephardi model in order to work as a rabbi in this country. Like the Jewish society Rabbi Saul Morteira, an Ashkenazi by birth as well, faced in 17^th century Amsterdam, so too did the 19^th century Jewish Americans adopt the old Sephardic model.

In America, the European immigrant Reformers and the Orthodox were joined by those who sought to remove themselves from the Jewish fold and start a new life in a new world. Jewish unity was not the watchword of the Eastern European immigrants. Replicating the models of the old world, the immigrants broke off into separate factions that reproduced the acrimony of the Shtetl world and its tense relationship to the Modern age.

Studying the biography of Sabato Morais in this light we can quite clearly see the difficulty in the conferral of names, identities, categories and concepts on American Jewry. Morais was a major presence in American Jewish life in the second half of the 19^th century. But today his name is barely known, and when he is discussed attempts are often made to identify him in these denominational terms. Vain efforts have been made by both Orthodox and Conservative writers to identify Morais as one of their own.

And yet Morais himself, as was consistently the case among the Sephardic rabbis, refused the Eastern European nomenclature. Preferring instead to mark Judaism as a single construct that was inclusive of many ideas and values, a true Religious Humanism, Morais and Pereira-Mendes founded their Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City as a repository of traditional Sephardic values that were grounded in the ancient paidea. After Morais’ death, his seminary would sadly fall victim to the denominational maladies of the Ashkenazi world.

As the 20^th century dawned, fewer and fewer Sephardic rabbis and leaders could count themselves as part of the American Jewish elite. Indeed, Morais’ own Philadelphia community was populated by many individuals of Ashkenazi origin who supplanted the old Sephardic leadership.

Nevertheless, those Ashkenazi students, peers and colleagues of Morais, people like Marcus Jastrow (1829-1903), Cyrus Adler (1863-1940), Isaac Husik (1876-1939) and many others who would become great Jewish scholars and teachers, continued to set American Jewish scholarship on a resolutely Sephardic course. At the Dropsie College, founded by the Philadelphia Sephardi Moses Aaron Dropsie (1821-1905), we could see this Sephardi-centrism well into the 1950s. In a volume of his collected addresses and essays published in 1953 entitled Landmarks and Goals, Dropsie president Abraham Neuman (1890-1970) concentrated on the Spanish Jewish experience as determinative in Jewish history. Such a philo-Sephardi attitude would lamentably become rarer as the years passed.

Indeed, the very elementary Jewish categories, the way in which we are currently able to process Judaism, are exclusively Ashkenazi.

Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Hasidic and the rest are all products of the schisms inherent to the Ashkenazi Jewish experience and are most definitely alien to the Sephardic tradition.

Going back to the Maimonidean tradition, we can see that the Ashkenazi schismatic groups all focus on disparate elements of Sephardic Religious Humanism that are picked apart and separated in a way that marks each group as distinctive.

What this categorization has done is to balkanize Judaism and, rather than strengthening

Jewish life today, has served to tear it apart.

It is thus critical for us to mark Jewish trends and developments in precise terms so that we can better appreciate the problems that we now face.

The adoption of the term “Orthodoxy” and the attempt to make use of it in a “Modern” context is just one of many hazards that we now face. As we have seen in religious movements all over the world, the trend toward exclusion and fundamentalism is quite pronounced and gaining strength.

The Orthodox trend in Judaism was a reaction to 19^th century Jewish Reform and Enlightenment. A prior internal Eastern European battle waged between Orthodox Misnagdim and the Hasidim was dropped in order to better combat the new ideas and groups. Today, a resurgent Hasidic messianism that looked like it might once again separate Orthodox and Hasidic groups is being suppressed in an Israeli context where elements of the Religious Orthodox community seem to have made common cause with Lubavitch messianists in order to support an extremist form of Zionist identification.

For a long time Sephardic Judaism remained outside the frame of this internecine Ashkenazi battle. It continued well into the 20^th century to articulate its own traditional Religious Humanism in spite of the pressures being inflicted by demography and socio-cultural exclusion. From the headmaster of the Jews’ Free School in London Moses Angel (1819-1898), a brilliant educator and author of the Religious Humanist classic The Law of Sinai and its Appointed Times (1858) from which we quoted earlier, to the Italians Sabato Morais and Elijah Benamozegh (1822-1900), to the last Hakham Bashi of the Ottoman Empire Haim Nahum Effendi (1872-1960), to the Alexandrian Chief Rabbi Bekhor Eliyyahu Hazzan (c. 1845-1908), to Palestinian Chief Rabbi Ben-Zion Uzziel (1880-1953) and on to more contemporary figures like Hayyim David Halevi (1924-1998), Yitzhak Dayyan (1878-1964), Matloub Abadi (1889-1970), and the contemporary academic Jose Faur, we find the leading lights of the most recent epoch of Sephardic Rabbinical Humanism, now almost completely lost to us.

Given the occlusion of the Sephardim and their Religious Humanism within the majority Ashkenazi culture, these names are now more or less unknown – not just to Ashkenazi Jews, but to Sephardim themselves. A critical part of the Sephardi acculturation to the new Jewish world has been a process of de-Sephardification and the adoption of the new insular models and frames of reference.

In my own Brooklyn Sephardic community we can clearly see – after some 50 years of profound cultural erosion – the complete absence of the old ways and the adoption of the new ways.

We now have Modern Orthodox Ashkenazi rabbis in the community who have sadly expressed a profound antipathy to the Sephardic tradition, while at the same time we have seen an explosion of Lithuanian-style Yeshivas that have paradoxically claimed the mantle of the old Sephardi traditions.

It is equally clear in Israel, given the emergence of the SHAS party and a full-fledged Haredization of important sectors of the community there, that the post-Sabbatian rejection of Religious Humanism in the name of a more pronounced mystical bend has done a great deal of damage to the organic values of Sephardic Religious Humanism whose roots, as we have seen, extend back many centuries.

Given that the Sephardic option has been made unavailable even in the Sephardic communities, the Ashkenazi schisms that affect the wider Jewish world have continued apace. Attempts to integrate non-Jewish learning into an Orthodox context have been met with hostility and outright rejection by an ever-expanding Ultra-Orthodox world with massive global tentacles

Pronouncements by less extreme Orthodox rabbis are met with derision by what has become known as “Da’as Torah” that stems from a robust and all-powerful rabbinical leadership connecting Borough Park, Monsey, Bnei Brak, Gateshead and various other places. It now seems clear that this rabbinic power base has consumed Orthodoxy.

But in the Sephardic terms that I have examined in this essay, it is the very nomenclature that is the problem here. Any attempt at moderating Orthodoxy is profoundly antithetical to the original construct and vision of the movement.

Orthodoxy itself, as its Greek roots indicate, is primed to express a single, unwavering truth that is to be determined by its rabbinical leadership. All previous attempts at having Orthodox leadership take into account the non-Jewish world have been met by rejection and failure.

There is no reason to think that as Orthodoxy continues to garner more power and influence in the Jewish world – that part of the Jewish world that continues to use the Talmudic law as its foundation – that it will compromise its rigid stance and its almost-complete rejection of the outside world. Orthodoxy builds its rejection into the very linguistic foundation of the nomenclature. As its name indicates, what we are dealing with is a form of Jewish monolingualism that eerily reminds us of an exclusionary Hellenism that did not tolerate aliens.

To cite a relevant example of the inherent complexities of this problem, we can point to the intricacies of the thinking of the acknowledged leader of Modern Orthodoxy, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (1903-1993), and the continued difficulty he had with the matter of defining the movement in pluralistic terms.

In his seminal 1965 essay “Confrontation,” Rabbi Soloveitchik made it quite clear that the outside world – here represented by Christianity – is off-limits in terms of religious discussion and dialogue. Such a stance is consistent with Orthodox belief that the outside world has nothing to offer us in terms of Jewish self-understanding and in asserting ourselves as a community in the world.

Indeed, since the death of Rabbi Soloveitchik there has been an ongoing tug-of-war between moderate Orthodox forces and the more extreme elements to claim his legacy as their own. His very biography has been combed for definitive proof of his ideological predilections and leanings. But in the end, it is all of little matter as the struggle exemplifies the larger battle for the soul of Orthodoxy; a battle which will inevitably be won by the extremists. I say inevitably because it is in Ultra-Orthodoxy that we have the most perfect manifestation of Orthodox thinking and its proclivity for exclusion and intolerance. Again, exclusion and intolerance is built into its very nomenclature.

So it is now more than worthwhile for those who continue to do battle with Ultra-Orthodox forces, as well as the schisms of the reformers and assimilationists, to take seriously the nomenclature of Sephardic Religious Humanism and the manner in which it has been passed over in contemporary Jewish life.

Eschewing the many problems inherent in the Ashkenazi construction of Judaism as different denominations, it is time that we paid respect to the Sephardi tradition of pluralism, tolerance and inclusion. The existence of different denominations is not necessarily a mark of strength and good health, but can just as equally indicate a profoundly troubling dysfunctionalism.

Attempts to appropriate the Sephardi model without naming it will not be an effective tool in transforming Judaism and in addressing the current situation we face. Names have meaning and behind those names are some very complex and difficult histories that we must face if we are to move forward.

In truth, the Maimonidean Controversy continues to be fought and the anathemas against foreign ideas and learning remain a central part of the tension in contemporary Jewish life. Exclusionary visions of Jewish identity have now extended to the state of Israel itself where the rejection of the model of Levantine Religious Humanism, what I have called “The Levantine Option,” has made of Israel a Middle Eastern ghetto which has turned the old Shtetl mentality into a national matter.

A siege mentality now pervades many parts of the Jewish world. In religious, socio-cultural and political terms Jews continue to suffer from an inability to make peace internally and with the outside world. Where you stand on these issues depend on which Jewish group you are affiliated to.

The old model of Sephardic Religious Humanism brings together a seriously committed yet moderate form of Halakhic observance with a liberal attitude towards an outside world which is definitely not deemed treyf and which will not lead to the rejection of Talmudic standards.

Maimonides stood firm in his belief that Judaism must not be an insular culture and for this was anathematized by those rabbis who stand as the model for today’s Ultra-Orthodox. He counseled Jews to live in the world as equal and proud members of the human family. It was this Jewish pride that resonated in the Sephardic world throughout the centuries and which has now been lost to the Jewish community.

Such a broken frame needs both to be repaired and rearticulated.

Repaired means that we need to identify the forces that rejected such Religious Humanism and have suppressed it as a force within Judaism. We cannot bring the Jewish body to proper health unless we can correctly identify the illness from which it suffers. Attempts to sidestep this part of the process will inevitably lead us to failure because of the continued confusion over the conceptual framework and the proper understanding of the categories in which we are functioning.

But the identification of the problem is only one half of the process.

We must restore the vision of Sephardic Religious Humanism and with it the standing of the Sephardim in the larger Jewish world. The grave historical injustices that have been inflicted on the Jews of the Mediterranean and the Middle East in recent times are deeply complex, yet brutally obvious to all who calmly investigate the matter. The Ashkenazi Jewish ethnocentrism that is a critical part of the current problematic must be identified and expunged from our communities. Such an exclusionary racism is not limited to Ashkenazi Jews per se, as many Jews of Sephardic origin have themselves taken on such a viewpoint which has generated a self-loathing that is just as dangerous a problem as that of Ashkenazi prejudice.

Once we look to restore the model of Sephardic Religious Humanism to the Jewish community, we will see the formation of exciting new possibilities for the promulgation of a healthy and robust Jewish identity. Rather than breaking Jews off into separate groups, the Sephardic model of Religious Humanism would enable Jews of all ethnic origins to unite under the rubric of an inclusive and tolerant culture that seeks entente and rapprochement with the world at large and the primacy of Jewish shalom bayit as its ultimate aim.

Notes

^* Note that Maimonides' intellectual inclusiveness may account for the lack of sources in his Mishneh Torah, which is his code of Jewish religious law (Halakhah), which is comparable to Islamic religious law (Sharia). Early Sefardic and Ashkenazic critics of Maimonides' text focused on the ommission of the traditional critical apparatus, but its absence may have in theory facilitated its consultation by Karaite Jews, who have not infrequently argued that Maimonides was a secret Karaite.

^** Note that in the American environment Hirsch is of far less significance than a fanatic bigot like Joseph Soloveitchik. (See Jewish, Zionist War Against Salvation, Feldman and the anguish of the disinherited, and Gary Rosenblatt: Noah Feldman and the Confrontation of American with Jewish or Zionist Values for discussions of Soloveitchik, his followers, and his victims.) Sphere: Related Content