Jewish Heteronomy

THE HETERONOMY OF MODERN JEWISH PHILOSOPHY
Michael Zank
Boston University
Abstract
Proceeding from Jewish philosophys origins in the convergence and divergence of
Greek and Jewish thought and the resulting possibilities of construing Judaism and
philosophy as heterogeneous or homogeneous, and ranging across the three major
ages or linguistic matrices of Jewish philosophizing (Hellenistic, Judeo-Arabic,
and Germanic), the essay describes Jewish philosophy as an unresolvable entanglement in a dialectic of heteronomy and autonomy.
Keywords
Judaism and philosophy; homogeneity and heterogeneity of; Modern Jewish
philosophy; heteronomy of; Jewish philosophy; academic study of; Torah and nomos
I. Philosophy, Jewish: A Preliminary Consideration

Jewish philosophy, an ancient pursuit and a modern academic
field, is difficult to define.1 Let me begin with a preliminary exploration of the character of the modern academic field. I proceed from
something simple and straightforward, namely, the fact that Jewish
philosophy is a bibliographic term of classification. Certain books
are classified as philosophy, Jewish, and the term appears in many
book titles. A Worldcat search for items classified as Jewish philosophy yields more than eleven thousand items. Curiously, when
searching the same database for Judaism, philosophy, the yield is
only about half that number.2 The difference between the search
1
I thank the anonymous reviewers for the Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy
and my assistant, Ms. Theresa Cooney, for their incisive comments and questions
on earlier drafts of this essay. I also thank the editors of this issue of the journal
for their patience and encouragement.
2
On May 25, 2011, 9:14am EST, an OCLC/Worldcat (http://www.worldcat
.org) search for philosophy, Jewish yielded 11,383 results in 0.21 seconds. A search
for Judaism, philosophy only yielded 5,720 results in 0.19 seconds.
Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012

Also available online brill.nl/jjtp
JJTP 20.1
DOI: 10.1163/147728512X629835
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parameters is that, in the first case, philosophy is the genus and

Judaism the species, whereas in the second case the relation is
reversed. The differences in genre classification and hence in the
kind and number of books yielded by each search are not just the
result of the switch in the major and minor terms but also of an
ambiguity in the term philosophy. Philosophy may refer to
anything resembling a worldview, but it can also refer to the more
specific academic discipline or intellectual pursuit rooted in, or related
to, classical Greek thought. The first use is generalizing and culturally unspecific; the latter derives from a confined and named intellectual tradition (e.g., Socratic philosophy) that we are able to trace
in a more or less complete genealogy of filiations.
Though specific in its Greek cultural origin, philosophy in this
latter sense is supposedly universal in its character and scope, similar to mathematics, geography, or psychology, disciplines still known
by their Greek terms without assuming any cultural specificity or
limitation. The assumption of this usage of the term is that philosophy (like mathematics, geography, psychology, etc.) may have
found its classical expression in the Athens of Socrates and Plato,
but that what rendered it classical as well as universally applicable
was the potential of the reasoning it represented to transcend its
original linguistic boundaries. Paradoxically speaking, the particular
idea of a transcending of all cultural limitations is exactly what
makes Greek philosophy and science universal.
Let us remain a moment longer with the transcending aspiration
of philosophy. As the queen among the sciences and from its very
inception, Greek philosophy aimed at a theory of everything, a
contemplation of one and all, in other words, of viewing all as
one. But the formation of any such theory is troubled by the realization, sometimes represented in an opposition between Plato and
Aristotle, that we cannot be certain whether unaided reason is
capable of resolving the duality of mind and matter into a common
first principle or a unified whole. Reason reaches for, but has no
absolute recourse to, a principle in which the many are one,
and the classical philosophers differ as to whether or not the aspiration of articulating the one even ought to be considered part of
philosophy. To many, especially in the Aristotelian tradition, the
desire to impose one logos or reason on everything inevitably leads
to a metabasis eis allo genos, a leaving of the firm ground of philosophical knowledge, and a transition to, and borrowing from, the
the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy
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likes of poetry or politics. It is the point at which the dialectic of

reason almost inevitably turns to mysticism and revelation.
The desire of the Platonic academy to articulate a coherent
theory of everything, a theory tantalizingly located in an unwritten
doctrine of Plato, entered into a peculiar competition with the
revealed traditions whose Hellenizing savants, in turn, drew inspiration from the vocabulary and imagery of the Greek philosophers.
The symbols of the Abrahamic-Mosaic tradition could be perceived
as having anticipated, in symbolic terms, the intuitions of Greek
philosophy. Moses could be seen as superior to Plato in that he not
only intuited the One but also founded a society based on a perfect
law and a demotic system of representation of the truth in symbolic
form, as a means of education for the many. This was Philos way.
The Greeks themselves, or rather the Macedonian colonists of the
East, had been disposed toward syncretic cultural formations in
the interest of forging an ecumenical system of governance. The
Christian movement, finally, produced a myth that assured Greeks
and Jews of the power and benevolence of the divine logos incarnate.
The product of two very specific cultural formations, the reasoning
of Athens and the symbolism of Jerusalem, thus became the mutually supporting pillars of several major civilizations that have lasted
until today.
There are at least two ways of thinking about the origins of philosophy, Jewish, namely, in terms of historical genesis and in terms
of constitutive principles. One may look at the cultural particulars
of the circumstances under which Jewish philosophy came about
and flourished in the Hellenistic world of late antiquity; or one may
think about origin more in categorical terms, namely, by asking
whether something as historically specific as Judaism, the laws and
customs of an ancient Near Eastern society, can be entirely compatible with the goals of philosophy in the Socratic, Platonic, Aristotelian,
or other major Greco-Roman traditions, such as Stoicism and
Epicureanism.
The idea of a classical philosophical tradition is itself perhaps an
illusion produced by modern, historically informed, and somewhat
purist perspectives that dismiss the more syncretic Hellenistic formations of Greek-language philosophizing in the East as derivative
and bastardized forms of a more classical Athenian tradition. But
in fact, Greek philosophy is philosophy precisely to the degree that it
can be conducted by non-Greeks (the same is true of mathematics,
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geography, historiography, etc.), even though what philosophy means

in these new contexts may change in the processes of adaptation
and transformation and make us long, in hindsight, for the purer or
classical formation of philosophical ideas.
Something similar may be said of Judaism. Judaisms perennial
appeal and perhaps a reason for its entanglements with Greek philosophy arises from the fact that Judaism, too, produced certain
conceptions of transcendence, including the Jewish idea of a single,
true deity and the concept of time implicit in messianic eschatology.
The Jewish doctrines of creation, revelation, and redemption may
be mythic, symbolic, and metaphoric in character, they may be
rooted in ordinary Canaanite summodeism, but the same is true,
mutatis mutandis, of the stories Plato uses to speak of fundamental
matters such as the origin of the natural order or the human ability
to intuit eternal truths, such as the laws of mathematics. The ancients
always communicated wisdom in the form of stories. While biblical
law and prophecy and Platonic philosophy proceed toward transcendence from different problems (though not exclusively or completely
so) and arrive at different terms in which they articulate their respective doctrines about truth and the One, both are equally preoccupied with problems of transcendence. This complicates any
simplistic and neat separation between the Greek and the Jewish
elements that became synthesized in the prophetic-philosophical
hybrids of our Abrahamic theological-political formations.
Given the millennia of meetings between various eastern Mediterranean cultures that preceded the formation of our Abrahamic
scriptures, it may even be more accurate to speak of Christian,
Jewish, and Muslim philosophy as more of a second-order attempt
to reconcile the merely apparent incongruities in the mythic forms
of an always already more or less congruent set of traditions shaped
by cultures far more involved in exchange with one another than
existing in autochthonous solitude.
In purely historical terms, setting aside all possible or actual elective affinities that may be invoked as a kind of predisposition for
Jewish and Greek culture to enter into a deeper relationship, the
existence of philosophy, Jewish hinges on a historical accident,
namely, on the cultivation of a Jewish Hellenism in Ptolemaic and
Roman Alexandria. This culture remains present today in two of
its major productions, namely, the first Greek translation of the
Pentateuch (the Septuagint) and the commentaries on this translation
and other writings by Philo, the Jew.
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The vicissitudes of late ancient Jewish historyi.e., the reorientation of institutions charged with the perpetuation of Jewish identity
at a time following the destruction of the long-standing insignia of
Jewishness, namely, the temple and its sacrificial cult, coupled with
resistance to Christian and Gnostic readings of the Judaic heritage
were not conducive to a sustained engagement with the disciplines
and traditions of Greek or Hellenistic schools of thought. In fact,
given the transformation of Greek philosophy into quasi-religious
formations, including a veritable cult of the leaders of neo-Platonic
schools of thought such as Iamblichus and Plotinus, who, very much
like the Jesus of the Christian gospels, acted as itinerant preachers
and healers and won disciples, it is perhaps quite understandable
why there was little appeal for the rabbis of late antiquity in this kind
of pursuit. If anything, for these rabbis, both pagan and Christian
formations of religious thought appeared as nothing but pale imitations and faux appropriations of the great Mosaic tradition.
Philosophy in the classical sense was lost to the degree that it was
religionized. This makes the first recovery of classical philosophy in
the Abassid period, especially the revival of Aristotelian science, all
the more remarkable. With Muslim rule over a multiethnic and
multireligious realm firmly established, philosophy was able to
reemerge, though it played a much altered role and occupied a
precarious place in an environment where Greek thought could be
drawn upon to mediate between competing Judaic-type or biblicate
civilizations,3 while revelation as such ruled supreme.4
3
By biblicate civilization I refer to a communal or political formation that
relies on biblical revelation (Mosaic law, Israelite/Judahite prophetic literature)
directly or (as in the case of the Quran) indirectly as a source of legitimate government or ordering of society.
4
In a lecture manuscript from December 1930, Leo Strauss points out that
Maimonides was the first to have realized that revelation posed an additional challenge to philosophizing that was unknown to the ancients who were aware only of
natural difficulties of philosophizing. See Religise Lage der Gegenwart (the
quotation marks are part of the original title), in Leo Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften,
vol. 2, Philosophie und GesetzFrhe Schriften, ed. Heinrich Meier (Stuttgart and
Weimar: Metzler, 1997), 37791. The passage on the natural difficulties of philosophizing is on p. 386. A partial English translation of this essay is included in
the introduction to Leo Strauss, The Early Writings (19211932), trans. and ed.
Michael Zank (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 2733.
Like Spinoza, Strausss Maimonides was interested in the freedom of thought,
and medieval philosophy was the first to struggle not just with opinions, as Socrates
did, but with prejudice, i.e., religious belief in supernatural revelation. In contrast
to Spinoza, Strausss Maimonides attempted to keep revelation intact as a politically
expedient augmentation of philosophy, necessitated by the natural differences
among men. As Shlomo Pines showed in a famous essay on Maimonides, Spinoza,
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Jewish philosophical work is never merely the result of an inner

disposition; it also depends on or responds to external social, cultural,
economic, and political circumstances. A few individuals or schools
must perceive philosophy as a plausible, useful, and even necessary
pursuit, or else it will remain marginal (academic in the weak sense
of the word). In fact, where it is vigorously pursued by some, it is
often perceived as objectionable and even shunned by others. The
rabbis went as far as condemning the father who taught his son
Greek. The development of philosophy, Jewish as a discipline or
a pursuit commanding the respect of (some of ) the Jews did not
proceed directly from Philo. Greek and Judeo-Hellenistic thought
reentered the Jewish community only after centuries of a flourishing
of Christian and Muslim philosophical theologies, leading to a second peak of philosophical thought, specifically among the Jews of
Baghdad, who were living in a sphere where philosophical theology
was embraced and cherished by a plurality of cultures and fostered
by the imperial court.
Similarly, philosophy was revived among the Jews of early modern
Central and Western Europe in concert with the processes of
Renaissance, the European Enlightenment, the scientific revolution,
and the emancipation of religious minorities. This third age of Jewish
philosophical writing confirms that favorable circumstances are
required for any inner predisposition toward philosophical thought
to take hold among the Jews and to be perceived as a significantly
Jewish pursuit. Why should it be otherwise? Jewish participation in
the intellectual culture of their environment, the absorption of cultural influences, and the exploitation of opportunities for expansion
and integrationhowever much it may be resisted by communal
organizationsalways depend on external circumstances. Jewish
philosophy thus remains an option, chosen under specific conditions
and Kant that he dedicated to Strauss (Spinozas Tractatus Theologico-Politicus,
Maimonides, and Kant, Scripta Hierosolymitana 20 [1968]: 354; also in Pines,
Collected Works [5 vols.; Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Leiden: Brill, 19791997],
5:660711), Spinoza was no less of an elitist who invented an expedient religious
creed for his own time, one that became more or less the dominant creed of liberal
Protestantism. It must be questioned whether religions can indeed be manufactured
in this Machiavellian fashion. In my view, Strausss awareness of this role of the
politically expedient manufacture of religion derives from his experience with the
manufacture of Zionist propaganda or, rather, from his awareness of the new
science of propaganda that was widely debated in Europe following the Great
War of 19141918.
105
and as part of the economy of a diasporic society perpetually struggling with the centrifugal and centripetal forces of minority existence.
It would be surprising, therefore, if Jewish philosophy were not to
develop differently in the national center of the modern state of
Israel and in the current Diaspora, especially in the English-speaking
world. Forces of centrifugal embrace of, and centripetal resistance
to, philosophical universality obtain in the culture wars of the modern Jewish state and its educational and political institutions. In Israel,
the embrace or rejection of philosophy, Jewish may well indicate
ones vision of the Jewishness of state and society, whereas in the
gentile world of the Anglo-Saxon academy, philosophy, Jewish
seems to have few if any social or political implications for, or repercussions on, Jewish identity. One might say that the absence of
assimilatory pressure has rendered philosophy, Jewish in the
Diaspora a purely historical, academic, and hence largely irrelevant
pursuit. But such a broad claim about the fate of Jewish philosophy
in the twenty-first-century Diaspora, in contrast to its Land of Israel
counterpart, requires further study and consideration.
Philosophy proper also has its ups and downs. To breathe new life
into philosophy at a point when science seemed to have rendered it
redundant (philosophy arrived at this point several times in the
modern era), philosophers turned to life, politics, or other excrescences of the will. In contrast to science in the modern sense,
which (following Weber) may be characterized as essentially disinterested, philosophyespecially philosophy in the Socratic traditionwas characterized (inter alia by Leo Strauss) as always and
necessarily at odds with the interests of the city. It was thus rendered
eminently political. This perspective, if embraced, necessarily
pushes philosophy, Jewish into the realm of political philosophy,
calling for an interrogation of Jewish philosophy as to its specifically
political dimensions and rendering the tension between philosophy
and Judaism a particular case of a broader political-theological
problem.5
Though Plato is clearly a political philosopher, the orientation of
his school, especially of middle- and neo-Platonic philosophy, to the
5
Though the political dimension of modern Jewish philosophy is now widely
taken into consideration, which explains the emergence of Leo Strauss as one of
the most important modern Jewish thinkers, it was still a relatively obscure topic
when I organized the first conference on this topic at Boston University in 1997
(see http://www.bu.edu/mzank/Michael_Zank/mjthconf.html ).
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political realm is not obvious at all. Philo of Alexandria may be the

exception, though his philosophy as such appears at first glance
rather apolitical and hence more in keeping with the general drift
of middle Platonism, whichunder the influence of Stoicismwas
more interested in the place of the individual in the cosmic order
than in the well-ordered city, unless the latter could be perceived as
a mirror of the former, which is how Philo understands the laws of
Moses. Philo himself was highly involved in the communal affairs
of the Jews of the great city of Alexandria, at the time one of the
most teeming capitals of the Roman Empire. The situation of the
Jews of Roman Alexandria was unprecedented in Jewish history but
became a common experience to the point of being repeated and,
in some cases, ritualized in other centers of Jewish life down to the
modern period. What began in Alexandria culminated in the
Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion: Jewish otherness evoked
suspicion and served as an easy target for the ethnic or political selfdefinition of others. Philos philosophical defense of the compatibility of Plato and Moses and hence of theory and law served the
political purpose of persuading young Jews, like his nephew Tiberius
Alexander, that it was possible to embrace the truth of Plato without
dismissing the laws of Moses.
If Jewish philosophy is a remedy, what is the illness, and what are
the remedys side effects? At what point does it turn into a poison?
In the Hellenistic age, the illness might have been the temptation of
apostasy, of an abandoning of the signs of difference. The remedy
was to represent Jewish history and tradition in a manner that was
appealing to a society steeped in Greek culture. A philosophical
interpretation of the law was achieved through allegorical exegesis,
a method honed in the interpretation of dreams and applied by the
Alexandrian grammarians to the interpretation of sacred texts, such
as the epics of Homer. Applied to the Torah, this method yielded
evidence of the high age and the superior wisdom of the Mosaic
legislation. The unanticipated side effect was the creation of a new
tradition, independent of Jewish institutions and beyond their control.
The absorption of the Septuagint and of the works of Philo into
the library of Christian theological works speaks for itself. In the
Middle Ages, philosophical argumentation was used to support the
rationality of theological beliefs but also the value of particular
traditions against their competitors. Here the side effect is that the
study of philosophy tended to overpower the study of the law, and
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exegetical sophistication was used in order to defend the pursuit of

philosophy against the suspicion of the lawyers that the study of
philosophy would lead to an attenuation of commitment to legal
practice.
In the modern age, philosophy, history, and exegesis were employed
to defend the humanity of Judaism. The post-Catholic atheism of
the radical Enlightenment as well as the moderate rationalism of
the Protestant Enlightenment conspired to expose the Jews and
Judaism to the contradictory charges of supporting religious tyranny
and sustaining a lack of true religion. It is specifically in the liberal
Protestant context that Judaism is cast as a heresy not just against
divine revelation but against fundamental human values. Philosophy
alone could not answer these charges, as is evident from Mendelssohns
failure to satisfy either the enlightened detractors of the Jews or the
disenfranchised Jews themselves. It required a thorough historicization of Judaismand of religion more generallyaided by Herderian
romanticism, Hegelian dialectic, and the rigorization of philologicalhistorical methods, for the Jewish question to be posed anew and in
philosophical terms that were sophisticated enough to recognize
Judaisms particular qualities as well as to guide the articulation of
principles of Judaism in terms that could persuade Jews as well as
sympathetic non-Jews that Judaism did not, in fact, deserve the
renewed odium humani generis. The resulting historico-philosophical
notions of Judaism as ethical monotheism, or as a mother religion of Christianity and Islam, no longer command wide acceptance, even though they may still echo in a few sermons of an older
generation of Reform theologians. But it was not the decline of the
neo-humanistic paradigm in general education that caused the demise
of the typically modern conception of Judaism. Rather, once again,
it was the unanticipated and unprecedented major changes in the
Jewish situation that eroded the plausibility of humanistic Jewish
thought: mass migration, genocide, and the establishment of a Jewish
state in Palestine. Large-scale historical upheaval effectively rendered
obsolete the modern philosophical conceptions of Judaism that had
been conceived under radically different historical circumstances.6
6
The three major ages of Jewish philosophy are also characterized by the different major non-Jewish languages in which Jewish philosophy was conducted in
each case (Greek, Arabic, German) as well as the geographical centers where the
pursuit took root (Hellenistic Alexandria, Spain/Baghdad/Cairo, and Central and
Western Europe). In all three cases, Jewish contributions to philosophy spilled over
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In the following, I explore construals of Judaism and philosophy

as homogeneous or heterogeneous before turning to the question of
a heteronomy of Jewish philosophy. I argue that modern Jewish
philosophy is particularly characterized by a heteronomy that arises
from its historicity, a historicity no longer grounded in revelation as
such (i.e., not as an ephapax) but in a particularly modern wrestling
with the opposition between revelation and reason.7
II. Homogeneity or Heterogeneity of Plato and Moses
If one begins the inquiry into the character of Jewish philosophy by
looking at the components of this concept, one quickly realizes that
neither Jewish nor philosophy has a stable or certain content.
Raising the question What is Jewish philosophy? therefore means
to begin with something diffuse and indeterminate.8
Since the individual components of this hybrid concept are diffuse
and indeterminate, philosophy and Judaism can be associated with
into the non-Jewish realm. Philos writings became the foundation of Christian
theology. The Jewish origin of Salomon ibn Gabirols work Fons Vitae was entirely
forgotten until it was rediscovered in the nineteenth century. And contributions by
modern Jewish philosophers from Spinoza to Levinas are an indelible part of the
Western canon.
7
My approach is informed by Leo Strauss who, in several lectures from around
1930, posed the question whether it was possible for a philosopher to extricate him/
herself from wrestling with history and thereby attain what to Strauss and others
may have appeared as a natural (rather than historical ) starting point for philosophy
itself. To Strauss and other members of what Dieter Henrich has called the Marburg
constellation (in an interview with Matthias Bormuth and Ulrich von Blow, Was
ist verlsslich im Leben? Gesprch mit Dieter Henrich, Marburger Hermeneutik
zwischen Tradition und Krise, ed. Bormuth and von Blow [Gttingen: Wallstein Verlag,
2008], 1364), a group of young philosophers centered on Rudolf Bultmann,
including Karl Lwith, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Gerhard Krger, and Strauss, philosophy itself had become entangled in the history of revelation, an entanglement
that was rendered more rather than less inextricable by the modern critique of
religion. This seems to suggest, however, that far from achieving a clear and radical
break between Judaism and philosophy, Strauss inadvertently remains beholden to
their modern synthesis even as he tries to think his way out of it. For the Jewish
philosopher that he was, perhaps despite himself, the conditio Iudaica thus remained
coeval with the conditio philosophica.
8
The original version of this paper also claimed that terms such as Jewish or
philosophy were empty concepts. But I must agree with Paul Franks who kindly
pointed out to me that this usage would be misleading since, in Kants First Critique,
empty concepts have a clearly and distinctly different meaning from what I am
describing here. Since I have not found a better alternative, I decided to drop the
phrase altogether. The description works just as well without it.
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meanings that are either completely or partially heterogeneous or

completely or partially homogeneous. Judaism and philosophy can
therefore be perceived as anywhere between essentially the same or
at least commensurate, and radically opposed to one another or
incommensurate.
Diffuse though the concept may be, as a literary genre Jewish
philosophy has a distinctive origin in the works of Philo of
Alexandria.9 Philo marks the beginning for us even though other Jews
before him surely wrote and thought about the Jewish scriptures in
Greek. Philos prerogative consists in the fact that it is through his
works that we have received the possibility of reconciling Greek and
Jewish traditionsspecifically, on the Greek or Hellenistic side,
Platonism and Stoic philosophy, and, on the Jewish side, the
Septuagint version of the Pentateuch and various other literary and
oral traditions.10
If Jewish philosophy commences with Philo of Alexandria, our
field arises from a perception of an affinity between Moses and
Plato.11 Mediated by the Greek translation of the Torah and infused
with a heavy dose of Stoic philosophy (popularized among Hellenistic
Jews; to wit: 4 Maccabees), Philos homogenization of Platonism and
Mosaism served as the basis for much of Western philosophical
theology which found its way back into the Jewish context, after a
9
According to H. A. Wolfson, Philo was not just the beginning of Jewish philosophy as a literary genre but the beginning of a distinctive mode of philosophy
of religion that pervaded Western civilization until Spinoza, who effectively brought
it to an end. Others have argued that the meeting of philosophical reasoning and
Judaic tradition antecedes Philo. This interesting question is beyond the argument
of this paper, insofar as we are dealing with Jewish philosophy as a distinct literary
genre and a tradition and discipline of thought in its own right that presupposes
Jewish and Greek writings as distinct traditions in need of reconciliation.
10
The retrieval of the long and complex prehistory and the conditions for the
plausibility of Philos workincluding the important question of a philosophical
dimension of Scripture acquired before, as well as through, its translation into
Greekare beyond the scope of this writing. Strictly speaking, Philos allegorizing
of Scripture is contingent on the Greek translation of Scripture, which is already
an allegory in the sense of saying something otherwise. When all is said and done
we will have to conclude that the Septuagint marks the beginning of Jewish philosophy, namely, of the okhmah of Shem in the tents of Japheth.
11
In the discussion of this paper, someone suggested that one might rather begin
the history of Jewish philosophy with Ecclesiastes rather than with Philo. This
question deserves a thorough investigation in its own right that cannot be offered
here. It should be noted, however, that the sentence in question is formulated as a
mere hypothesis.
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detour of nearly a millennium, via the Christian and Muslim theological traditions.
If one then fast-forwards to the twentieth century, one is struck
by two radically opposite assertions about the relation between Plato
and Moses. According to Hermann Cohen (18421918), philosophy
and Judaism are heterogeneous, but reconcilable. They are heterogeneous because prophetismwhich for Cohen is the primary source
of Judaismhas no conception of nature, whereas Plato lacks the
pathos of prophetic messianism. To Cohen, this does not mean that
the two pursuits are incommensurate or irreconcilable, and the task of
reconciling philosophical reason and the sources of Judaism is in fact
exactly what drives him as a Jew and a philosopher. The overarching
goal of Cohens philosophy was therefore to reconcile Judaism and
cultural consciousness.12 To Leo Strauss (18991973), on the other
hand, Judaism and philosophy are not just heterogeneous but irreconcilable, at least on the theoretical level.13 Judaism requires belief
and submission to revelation whereas philosophy requires withholding
belief. One can therefore only be a Jew or a philosopher.14
Both Cohen and Strauss draw on Maimonides to attest to the
pedigree of their respective positions on the possibility or impossibility
of a Jewish philosophy. Maimonides argues against philosophy when
he refers to the pursuit of the falasifa, but he also argues that the
Law of Moses our master demands the pursuit of truth. In Philosophy
and Law (1935), Strauss begins to work out a political approach to
the resolution of what at first seems like a paradox, namely, the fact
that Maimonides offers a believing justification of an unbelieving
pursuit. Strauss was to argue that the impression of a fideist paradox
is generated by the art of writing that philosophers developed to
12
Dieter Adelmann (zl ) was the first to see the unity of the cultural consciousness as the focus of Cohens philosophical attention. See Adelmann, Einheit des
Bewusstseins als Grundproblem der Philosophie Hermann Cohens (PhD diss.,
Heidelberg, 1968). My PhD thesis on Cohen, Reconciling Judaism and Cultural
Consciousness (Brandeis, 1994), elaborated on Adelmanns intuition. Cf. more
recently Michael Zank, The Idea of Atonement in the Philosophy of Hermann Cohen
(Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2000).
13
On Strauss, see my Politische Theologie als Genealogie. Anmerkungen zu
Schmitt, Strauss, Peterson und Assmann, in Fragen nach dem einen Gott: Die
Monotheismusdebatte im Kontext, ed. Gesine Palmer (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007),
22950.
14
See Leo Strauss, How to Begin to Study The Guide of the Perplexed, in Moses
Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Shlomo Pines, 2 vols. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1963), 1:xilvi.
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hide the fact that their believing justification was grounded in an

unstated decision in favor of unbelief.15
To be sure, Strausss construal of historically and culturally remote
philosophical projects in terms of absolute opposites comes at the
peril of willful distortions and reductions. Strausss approach is dialectical. In contrast to Strauss, Cohen describes Plato and Maimonides
as, very much like himself, devoted to the idea of the good, in other
words, to the idea of God. This vantage point beyond being allows
Cohen to work out an affinity between Platonic and Maimonidean
philosophizing that prevails in spite of their differences and attests
to the possibility of reconciling the deepest impulses of Judaism and
philosophy. To be sure, the construal of such affinities across time,
language, and culture comes at the peril of obscuring profound differences. Cohens approach is synthetic.
It is instructive that Philo, Maimonides, Cohen, and Strauss neither
agree on what they mean by philosophyall four are Platonists,
but this means something different in each casenor on what they
refer to as Jewish or as divinely revealed. Philo was a Middle Platonist
whose conception of Mosaism preceded or paralleled the formation
of rabbinic law and exegesis; Maimonides attempted to reconcile
rabbinic law and medieval neo-Aristotelianism; Cohen was a neoKantian in an age of Jewish reform; Strauss was a post-liberal Zionist,
a professed atheist, and a participant in a concerted deconstruction
of any synthesis of Plato and Moses. Yet despite these striking contrasts, the impulse to relate Plato and Moses prevailed in the work
15
As a caveat: every simple assertion of what Strauss taught or believed is problematic because he may have changed his mind on such issues as the relation
between reason and revelation at important junctures. He asserts, for example, that
a change of orientation occurred in the late 1920s, i.e., after completing his
Spinoza book and before writing Philosophy and Law. But Strauss later dismisses the
position he presented in Philosophy and Law as a Thomistic detour. (See his letter
to Gershom Scholem of June 22, 1952, quoted by Meier, Vorwort, in Strauss,
Gesammelte Schriften, 2:xxv, n. 29.) Interpreters of Strauss differ widely as to Strausss
true or ultimate position, not least because Strauss never offered a systematic account
of his thought (very much in imitation of his master, Plato) but merely offered his
views in the guise of comments on the work of others. Strauss, I submit, not only
aspired to retrieve the classical philosophical teaching but to instantiate or represent
it in his own writing, namely, in the manner of his writing. More recently, Daniel
Weiss has argued (in his 2009 University of Virginia dissertation, Paradox and the
Prophets: Hermann Cohen and the Indirect Communication of Religion) that
Cohen similarly represents the heterogeneity of philosophy and Judaism in a peculiar writing style Weiss shows to be embedded in Religion of Reason. (Weisss book is
forthcoming in 2012, published by Oxford University Press).
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of all four of these thinkers, even ifas in the case of Strausssuch

relating of Plato and Moses was rendered problematic in the
extreme.
Homogeneous means arising from the same origin, heterogeneous means arising from a different origin. When looking at reason and revelation, for example, one may either think of them as
both originating in Gods mind, which would predispose one to think
of them as homogeneous; or one may think of them as originating
in different human faculties, such as reason and imagination, that
are perceived as potentially at odds. Thus the striving of the rational
mind for order seems frequently opposed to the irrational appetites
of our animal souls that conjure the narcissistic figments of our
imagination. Accordingly, the question of origin may be considered
as falling either in the domain of metaphysics or epistemology, or
as falling into anthropological domains such as sociology, psychology,
or politics. As an example of the latter, the classical theory of religion
formulated by Varro (theologia tripartita), transmitted by Augustine of
Hippo, distinguishes between the religion of the poets (myth), the
religion of the rulers (public ritual ), and the religion of the philosophers (doctrines derived from, grafted onto, or associated with myths
and rituals).16
The question of origins is related to the question of truth, including the true nature and origin of the many that is hidden behind
the veil of appearances. The gesture of philosophy is always toward
the one behind the many. This is evident in the underlying meaning
of philosophical terms such as concept and idea. The traditional
etymology of the word theoria (often derived from a seeing of the
divine, suggesting a cultic festive or oracular setting) further attests
to a possible affinity between the goals of philosophy and religion.
The way we divide the pie between religion and philosophy is usually that we think of religion as myth and ritual, while philosophers
are usually perceived as interpreters rather than as inventors of myths
and ritual. But it may also be otherwise. Religious myths may be
veiled allusions to abstract ideas; stories about the gods may be
allegories to begin with (as Maimonides points out in the introduction to the Guide); and rituals may be guides to contemplation, as
Note that Varro, who introduced the schema of a theologia tripartita, has no
conception of a religion of the jurists. This alone has seriously derailed the Western
discussion of Judaism as a religion. The discussion of Islam in Western categories
has also been problematic but for different reasons.
16
113
Philo, and later Mendelssohn, argued. In the realm of philosophical

writing, Plato stands out as an inventor of myths; and the panegyrics
offered to great thinkers, such as Lucretiuss hymn to Epicurus, show
that there is a religious veneration of the philosopher as the liberator of mankind.
The most common means of harmonization and hence homogenization of religious myth and philosophical meaning is allegory.17
Allegory in fact instantiates the overall goal common to so much of
the Western philosophical and religious tradition, which is to transcend the world of appearances, a world of falsehood, illusion, and
transience, and to intuit the world of truth, reality, and permanence
that lurks, so to speak, between the lines. The medievals frequently
allowed for the temporal realm to enjoy a certain amount of freedom
that made it less pressing to reconcile or homogenize the temporal
with the eternal. Revelation pertained to the true, real, and permanent realm, but reason was allowed to frolic in the sublunar sphere,
without too many worries. This peaceful distinction between two
realms or two truths is no longer available to modern philosophy.
Instead, the moderns aspired to reveal what revelation really is,
namelyin case of a destructive unveiling of the essence of religionillusion, pious fraud, opiate for the masses, orin case of a
constructive unveiling of religions essencea metaphoric representation of ethics, a feeling and taste for ones dependence on the
universe, a symbolic anticipation of the rationality of the real that
is fully comprehended only when translated into philosophical terms,
or a projection of human love for one another onto the screen of
heaven. If this sketch is more or less correct, we might say that
the ancients overcame the temporal for the sake of the eternal while
the moderns attempted to overcome the eternal for the sake of the
temporal. To be sure, moderns like Kant and Cohen felt that the
illusion of eternity could be dispensed with because it was part of
the fragmentation of reality inherited from the scholastics, a fragmentation now perceived as dishonest. It was this illusion that needed
overcoming, not the true idealism of the ancients, which the moderns
felt they were retrieving in a nonmythological form.
Against the modern critique of (medieval ) religion and the modern gesture of understanding-religion-better-than-it-understands-itself
17
Cf. Northrop Frye, The Great Code: The Bible and Literature (New York: Mariner
Books, 2002).
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arose a powerful counter-critique that was in equal parts philosophical and religious in its motivation.18 It was also in equal parts
a progression beyond the philosophical reduction of religion to
anthropology and a return to ancient mythological and poetic forms
of language. The counter-critics no longer found it fully persuasive
when philosophical reason (or science) was claimed to be sufficient
to determine the tenability of the doctrines of a religion, such as
the claim to prophetic knowledge and belief in miracles. Meanwhile,
in broader cultural terms, the emphasis has shifted away from philosophy and back to religion.
Responding to the overall crisis of tradition, critics and countercritics engaged in an intense debate on the true intention of the
ancients. The key question in all of this was whether what Philo
did was adequate and justifiable, in other words, whether Plato
and Moses can be reconciled or whether they must be separated
once again in order to begin to even understand what it really is
we claim to be doing when we speak of a reconciliation of Greek
philosophy and Judaic religion. Philo resolved the problem of the
apparent heterogeneity of Plato and Moses in epistemological terms
that were rooted in ancient anthropology. In antiquity, the human
being, like society and religion, is conceived as a whole made up
of the sum of its distinct parts. Here, too, the structure is tripartite
(body, soul, mind), corresponding to the three types of religion (body:
ritual; soul: poetry/myth; mind: philosophy), whose unification in a
single system was, to Philo at least, the great achievement of Moses.
The success of Moses, according to Philo, consisted in his ability to
imitate the principles of cosmic harmony and to embody them in a
system of rules of behavior and representation attuned to the forms
he beheld with his mind. Medieval philosophy followed suit in that
it considered the human being as endowed with a plurality of faculties, of which the intuition or receptivity for divine revelation was
the highest. (Even Spinoza reserves room for the intuitive faculty of
the mind!) For Philo, philosophy and Mosaic revelation arise from the
same source, namely, the mind and its ability to intuit the rational
cause of things. Here as elsewhere, the knowledge value of revelation
18
Frye, without reference to Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, has Vico predict the
historical mechanism that leads to a recurrence of the mythic after the allegorical
and the demotic phases of religion. See The Great Code, 530.
115
is closely connected with insights into the different kinds of human

knowledge and into the range and limitations of human language.
The modern critique of the epistemological homogeneity of reason and revelation begins with Spinoza, who denies that prophetic
and scientific intuitions arise from the same source or are somehow
reconciled and integrated in the Mosaic Law. Spinoza thus reduced
prophetic intuition to political inventiveness, a faculty thatwhen
wielded by a lawgivermay yield path-breaking constitutions, but
when wielded by prophets or punditsmay cause stasis and, ultimately, a failure of the state.19
Looking at the question of homogeneity or heterogeneity of philosophy and Judaism, then, we discern two very different positions.
One position, here represented by Philo and Cohen, construes
Judaism and philosophy as essentially harmonic and epistemologically reconciled. The other position construes them as essentially
distinct and unrelated, or as contraries that can be united only
apparently, not essentially, and merely for pragmatic or political
reasons. Let us call the former position philosophical theology and
the latter position political theology. Ancient philosophical theology
derives its intuition of a harmony between reason and revelation
from a correspondence theory between human and divine mind, an
idea that became popular again in early modernity, with the notion
of the human being as a microcosm corresponding to a universal
macrocosm. Modern philosophical theologians no longer approach
human knowledge from a cosmological and quasi-mystical point of
view but rather from a critical epistemological one. The ancient
intuition of a unity emanating from the divine mind is here transposed into the mode of a critical or methodological unity emanating
from the human mind. (To be sure, Hegels philosophy of religion
attempts to reconcile these two approaches.) Medieval philosophical
theology sometimes maintains and sometimes only appears to maintain a system of two realms that, while reconciled in the mind of
God, are nevertheless divided in their appearance to us. It was this
19
For Strauss the difference between Spinoza and Maimonides is this: Spinoza
merely spells out openly what Maimonides asserted covertly, namely, that prophecy
is limited to the imagination and hence of no truth value. More precisely, Strausss
Maimonides hides the irreconcilable opposition between philosophy and prophecy
under the guise of the conception of a Torah that speaks to both philosophers and
nonphilosophers. Spinoza, unconcerned with the perpetuation of the Mosaic religion, tears philosophical reason and prophetic revelation apart, at least on the
surface.
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promontory of an epistemic dualism that allowed modern critics of

the unitive approach, among them Leo Strauss, to argue that the
modern reconciliation of revelation and reason was merely based
on a misreading of the medieval as nave. Medieval philosophy,
especially in the Judeo-Arabic context, wasaccording to Strauss
political philosophy of the finest, namely Platonic, kind. At first
glance, this is a rather dazzling analysis of what went wrong in the
history of metaphysics and religion. But political theology of this
sort may have its own blind spots. The gesture of cultural pessimism
(emanating from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) may be appealing to
realists, but it is nonetheless open to the charge of being dogmatism in the guise of skepticism. In any case, it appears to me that
the claim of political theologians that reason and religion are irreconcilable amounts to a dogmatic position.
III. Autonomy vs. Heteronomy
We turn to the question of a heteronomy of Jewish philosophy. What
I mean is the sense in which Jewish philosophy is unfree to choose
either its subject or the manner of pursuing its business, and hence
potentially limited, from the outset, in its outcomes. The challenge
to Jewish philosophy associated with the problem of heteronomy is
this: If a pursuit is driven by the extra-philosophical concerns of
Judaism and the Jews, can one still call it philosophy?
To be sure, all philosophy arises from compulsions and givens
beyond our control or making, but it arises in the attempt of rising
above these compulsions and givens. The idea of philosophy is that
we are capable of overcoming these compulsions and free to choose
what we think, even though we may not always be at liberty to state
our opinions openly. Let us consider the question of Judaism and
heteronomy first.
Since the success of Kantian philosophy, Judaism has often been
tarred as a heteronomous religion, cast in opposition to the
autonomy or self-determination championed by liberal thinkers,
including the liberal Protestant theologians. No doubt, Judaism entails
heteronomy to the degree that the fiction of a commanding other
must be maintained in order to havein Jacob Neusners parlance
a Judaism. This does not rule out the possibility of assent, as David
117
Novak has shown in his book on the election of Israel.20 But, as

Hermann Cohen argued against Moritz Lazarus,21 assent and whatever else we can marshal in the attempt of mitigating the harsh
impression of a revealed legislation is a far cry from moral autonomy.
And yet, in what we may call classical Judaism, the goodness of
the Law rests on belief in the unity and identity of the Creator of
the universe and the Revealer of the Law. Since the Law is given
by the Creator, it must be an embodiment of truth and, despite all
appearances to the contrary, the expression of divine providence
and benevolence.22 The subordinate clause inserted in the preceding
sentence (despite all appearances to the contrary) makes all the
difference. It implies that the unity of Creator and Lawgiver also
entails the one who has always already reconciled the world of what
appears to us with how things truly are. The God of Judaism is also
the Redeemer. Depending on where we come from and depending
on our frame of reference and interpretation, we can either read
these dogmatic statements as expressions of a faith in our complete
dependence on divine intervention or we can read them as statements encouraging us to think through the implications of the Judaic
worldview and translate them into a mandate for human agency and
action. Both views can be found in rabbinic midrash, and both have
their champions today. In other words, for reasons beyond the present consideration, the language of revelation can be interpreted in
either fashion, which means it is open to both literal and figurative
interpretations.
The skeptical or political theological point of view dismisses
the literal interpretation of divine redemption as nave or exoteric
(i.e., intended only for the masses and for the sake of maintaining
public order), and it dismisses the liberal interpretation of divine
20
See David Novak, The Election of Israel: The Idea of the Chosen People (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
21
Hermann Cohen, Das Problem der jdischen Sittenlehre. Eine Kritik von
Lazarus Ethik des Judentums, Monatsschrift fr Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums
43 (1899): 385400 and 43349 (also in Jdische Schriften, 3 vols., ed. Bruno Strauss
[Berlin: Schwetschke, 1924], 3:135).
22
Kalman Bland raised the concern, in the concluding discussion of the conference where this paper was first given, that none of us had paid sufficient attention
to the Law as a source of Jewish philosophy. I hope that the printed version of my
contribution, which in this respect is identical with the one I read, will persuade
my esteemed colleague that I share his concern. See especially below, on nomos.
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redemption as a prompt for human action as ignorant or forgetful

of human nature and its abysses. Proceeding from the observation
that the major biblical prophetic text is a body of legislation (i.e.,
the Torah or Mosaic Law) and affirming that this Law is good in
the Aristotelian sense, namely suitable to its purpose, the question
is, what is the purpose of the Law? The medieval answer is that
this Law is suitable to the purposes of governing different kinds of
people and leading them to individual perfection, to the degree that
they are capable of attaining it. The perfect Law (and it is indeed
an ideal that, in hindsight, is shown to have been realized by ones
own respective revealed tradition) addresses different kinds of intelligences at once without giving offense to any one of them. Modern
readers, beginning with Spinoza, rejected the notion that the Law
intentionally contains a plurality of meanings (because it wishes to
address a plurality of audiences) or provides for a plurality of readings. The medieval interpretation is dismissed as a fraudulent imposition of alien principles on the ancient biblical corpus. Sensitized by
Nietzsches critique of the Enlightenment, Strausss counter-critique
of the critique of religion and its concomitant Bible science raises
the question of what gave rise to this modern critique. For Strauss,
it was essential to render doubtful the generally shared assumption
that the modern critique of religion was simply rooted in a scientific turn of mind and a concomitant attitude of intellectual probity
and to demonstrate that it was, instead, a neo-Epicurean impulse
that employed science in the service of the promotion of a quest
for freedom from the disturbing qualities of a heteronomous divine
Law.23 In other words, the scientific aspects of the scientific study of
the Bible were not what drove modern critics of revelation to subject
the Bible to scientific or critical study. What drove modern Bible
science was the hedonistic interest in happiness, disguised as a quest
for political freedom from ecclesiastical tutelage, as a scientific quest
for truth, or as an argument for the political harmlessness of the
philosophical freedom of thought. Strauss went on to recognize the
superiority of the medievals not because of their faith in or conviction about the insufficiency of reason (this Strauss later dismissed
as a Thomistic detour of his own) but because they were able
23
This, in a nutshell, is the program of Strausss first book, Die Religionskritik
Spinozas als Voraussetzung seiner Bibelwissenschaft (1930) [English: Spinozas Critique of
Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (New York: Schocken, 1965)].
119
to maintain the external force of the Law while emasculating its

hold on the philosophical mind itself. According to this reading, the
medieval solution to the heteronomy imposed by the Law was to
distinguish the external sense of the Law that imposes conformity
on our actions from the internal sense that imposes on us the duty
to philosophize and hence requires us to challenge the petrification
of cognitive aspects of the Law.24
The opposite of heteronomy is autonomy or self-legislation. The
Cartesian turn in philosophy involves the displacement of the authority of received knowledge by the certainty of self-knowledge. The
self as the source of certainty establishes itself as the source not just
of the knowledge of nature but also as the source of the laws of the
state. In other words, just as the mind discovers the laws of nature
by which the body is recognized as a determinate object, the mind
recognizes itself (i.e., self-determination) as the source of the law by
which its own happiness as a political being is determined. This
entanglement of theoretical discovery and practical legislation is
characteristic for the course of modern philosophy. The mindin
somewhat Kantian terms: the transcendental unity of its own productions in the form of a system coordinating theoretical and practical knowledgeis henceforth the most important subject matter
of philosophy, just as God was the most important subject matter
of medieval philosophy, and World or cosmos was the most important subject matter of ancient philosophy. If modern philosophy
isto a large extenta philosophy of mind, its postmodern critique
arises from the unraveling of the unity and authority of mind.
If the above statement about the similarity between medieval
interpreters of the Law and modern critics of religion is correct,
one may further sayagain, with Straussthat the difference
between premodern and modern philosophy is not freedom of
thought but the genuine or feigned philosophical belief that all
humans are on principle susceptible to freedom of thought and
freedom of speech. This entails a shift in values: from theory as a
form of happiness attainable only by few to a democratization of
thought and speech, and from a society based on the natural differences among men to a society based on human rights, social
24
Moses Mendelssohn came to the same conclusion, but he made it public,
which led to an inevitable erosion of the authority of halakhah.
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justice, and universal equality as realistic goals we are obliged to

pursue.
Modern philosophy is propelled by the confidence that the discovery of laws of nature entails liberation from preconceived notions
such as that the sun rises in the east and other assumptions stipulated
by perception and imagination and reinforced by linguistic convention. The liberation of science from assumptions arising from perception and imagination is directly related to the liberation of
society from prejudice.25 The beginning of political modernity is
thus coeval with the beginning of philosophical modernity or modern scientific empiricism. The age of political revolution is tied to
the scientific revolution by virtue of the problem of human nature.
In the question of human nature, necessity (in the form of eternal
laws of nature) meets and unites with contingency (the freedom of
self-determination within the limits of nature). The token of freedom or autonomy is scientific or philosophical reason itself, which
is capable of discovering the laws of nature and hence of knowing
itself. From its very beginning, modern philosophy is therefore not
just natural philosophy but political philosophy.
In the act of founding philosophy anew on the basis of the critical
self-knowledge of reason, philosophy becomes historical in that it
progresses from prejudice to true knowledge, from dogmatic assertions
to critique, and from a nave experience guided by our imagination to critical self-awareness of the epistemological ground of valid
judgment. This progress is purchased at the expense of the loss of
certainty with respect to the highest objects of knowledge, namely,
the existence of God (indicating the unity of thought and will, necessity and freedom, natural and historical teleology), the immortality
of the soul, and freedom itself, which are now classified as ideas,
i.e., according to Kant, mere intelligibles or, in Cohens term, fictions rather than empirical facts. Yet the move that limits scientific
knowledge and philosophical certainty to the objects of possible
experience also allows practical reason to extend the power evident
in the spontaneity of the intellect in the direction of moral selfdetermination. As a result, modern philosophical thought construes
25
Strauss distinguishes between prejudice, by which he means the modern synthesis of reason and revelation that gave rise to the assumption that the equality of
all people was a rational ideal, and the Socratic fight against opinion. See, e.g.,
Religise Lage der Gegenwart (1930), as in n. 4, above, and cf. Strauss, The
Early Writings, pp. 2933.
121
itself as the intelligible source or origin of the good, requiring no

further recourse to supernatural revelation or heteronomy.26
Though Kantianism and idealism more generally have long since
been eclipsed by other paradigms of academic philosophical
discourse,27 the classical works of modern Jewish philosophy were
shaped in its orbit. For this reason alone, Jewish philosophy has
remained entangled in the opposition between heteronomy and
autonomy, an opposition that carries with it some of the connotations of the more traditional oppositions of works and grace, slavery
and freedom. One could say that modern Jewish philosophys major
concern was how to address this opposition successfully without
abandoning ones Jewish obligations. In other words, the question
was how to reconcile Jewish obligation with the notions of freedom
and self-determination. In Strausss terms, everything came back to
the question of philosophy and law.28
26
The most striking post-modern alternative to this system is offered by the
philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, for whom moral obligation arises from an absolute heteronomy that is present to us in the face of the other. To be sure, the
revelation of the other is not super-natural revelation other than in the sense of
a radical difference, similar to Martin Bubers distinction of the I-Thou relation
from the humdrum I-it relations.
27
The undoing of this brand of philosophy arose from the emancipation of the
sciences from philosophical reason in two directions, namely, in the direction of
establishing science on a separate foundation from any concern with ethics and
politics (an emancipation of science from any unity or system of philosophy),
and in the direction of establishing autonomous sciences of man, independent
of the spiritual tutelage of systematic philosophy (an emancipation from the authority of philosophy). Philosophy yielded its pride of place in theoretical matters to
the natural sciences and it yielded its pride of place in practical matters to the
human and social sciences, i.e., to specialized empirical disciplines, such as experimental psychology, social and economic theory, and political science. Furthermore,
critical reason turned its analytical gaze on the philosophical tradition itself and
subjected it to examination guided by assumptions derived either from the empirical or from the social sciences. This move became inevitable after philosophy had
reached its apogee as self-determination in a system that merged theoretical and
practical knowledge in a comprehensive philosophy of right, unraveling, as it did
in Hegels wake, in a radical opposition between seemingly equally legitimate absolutes, namely, in the totalizing utopias of the political left and of the political right.
In this contradiction or aporia of political philosophy, the original impulse of reconciling freedom and necessity unmasked itself as a form of tyranny.
28
The classical way out of the contradiction between freedom (philosophy) and
necessity ( Judaism) was recourse to choice as the source of self-legislation and hence
the self (or a spontaneity of the intellect) as the common origin of moral and
natural law, ethics and science. Rosenzweig extended or converted this to mean the
actual selves and their historical collectives rather than the abstract or universalized
Fichtean/Cartesian I. Rosenzweigs solution has not been popular but it remains
relevant to the question of the future of a Jewish state, i.e., one that is equally
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IV. Concept and Functions of nomos
The concept of nomos has a long and eminent history in its original
Greek context, in Judaism, and in the history of philosophy. Its
meanings range from custom to law to the comprehensive determinate order of being as cosmos or physis.
Judaism is a religion or a practice founded on a body of texts and
a set of customs and laws that are conventionally referred to as the
Mosaic Law or the Torah of Moses. The term torah can refer to, or
is shaped by, various shades of meaning of nomos, including custom,
law, and determinate order. However, though Torah translates as
nomos, nomos does not translate as Torah.29
What we call normative Judaism is to a large extent determined
by the rabbinic tradition, the Judaism of the dual Torah, as Jacob
Neusner has called it, though given its complexity, rabbinic tradition
is surely not to be reduced to any catchphrase. But there may be
certain nonnegotiable foundations that apply to all rabbinic
Judaisms. Thus, for example, while from any rabbinic perspective
the authority of Torah is absolute as revelation, the actual contents
or meanings of this revelation are quite fluid; that is, they are determined by interpretation and decision.30 This means that the authority of Torah is a formal or abstract principle of the Law in its
constitutive function for rabbinic Judaism. But this may be saying
too much already. Rabbinic Judaism is not simply determined by
the authority of Torah as such, but rather by what Jews believe, by
what communities do, and by what certain rabbis and courts of law
decide in light of circumstance, need, and tradition. It is a legal
principle that, in some areas of Torah, local custom overrules rabbinic halakhah, though, this being a principle of Torah, it does not
suspend the Law as such. Judaism is not ultimately determined by
Torah, but by the Jews who read or interpret or neglect it and draw
democratic and Jewish. The general erosion of Jewish liberalism, the turn of Jewish
political thinkers to neoconservative skepticism on questions of equality, is directly
related to the realization that the rule of law and genuine democracy undermine
the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state.
29
In rabbinic parlance nimus (= nomos) refers to custom and it is never used as
a substitute of or equivalent to Torah. In modern Hebrew, nimus refers to conventional rules of conduct or good manners.
30
This openness of the process of rabbinic law has been aptly described by
Menachem Fisch in Rational Rabbis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
See Noam Zohars review in Textual Reasoning 10 (2001), online at http://etext.virginia
.edu/journals/tr/archive/volume10/RationalRabbis.html (accessed June 16, 2009).
123
on other, nonlegal sources of orientation, including, on occasion,

philosophy; though again, this does not necessarily contravene Torah,
which commands the love and knowledge of God, a commandment
that, as has been argued, may be taken to be coeval with the pursuit
of philosophy.
By philosophy we either mean a discipline communicated orally
or in writing, similar to the study of Torah, or a practice of thought
exercised by particular individuals, whether communicated to others
or not, a pursuit that is perhaps more akin to mystical contemplation. To the degree that Torah study and philosophical thought
involve reflection on communication and rules of logic, interpretation, and so forth, Torah study and philosophy may be subject to
identical or similar hermeneutical rules.31 More recently, hermeneutics (rooted in Renaissance symbolism and Enlightenment aesthetics)
has emerged as a kind of Leitwissenschaft, namely, as methodical
attention to the symbolic forms of reality as representation in need
of decoding. Far from substituting for the pious command to take
and read, the early modern scientific turn was initially more of an
application of this command to the book of nature, at least in its
initial self-understanding.
It is precisely this gentle humanistic rhetoric of receptivity that is
displaced by homo faber who can because he ought and whose
intellect is the author of categorical imperatives. To think for oneself
(sapere aude) displaces (at least ideally speaking) any proceeding from
opinions stated in texts, dismissing all tradition as heteronomous and
aiming to replace sensory perception (Hear!) with thought, an
activity that produces law rather than intuiting it.
The point of the Cartesian Enlightenment was certainty and how
to attain it. The path to certainty required calling into question any
and all tradition. Everything had to be subjected to doubt and nothing could be accepted on faith. In this light, the Torah could no
longer claim submission since anything recognized as binding
required not just common assent but certain knowledge. Spinoza
hints at the difference as well as at the possibility of a law to be
grounded in more than mere assent, namely, in a moment of truth.
Thus he sees the Mosaic constitution as initially the expression of
On the theoretical and quasi-philosophical underpinnings of rabbinic hermeneutics, see the by now classic work of Max Kadushin, e.g., The Rabbinic Mind (New
York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1952), and more recently Alexander
Samely, Forms of Rabbinic Thought and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2007).
31
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the idea of a radical equality and immediacy of every Israelite (i.e.,

every person then present) before God. This lasted only for a moment
before it gave way to a more conventional form of government based
on fear and mediation, namely, when the Israelites shied away from
speaking to God directly and on an equal footing with Moses.
Although, from a Jewish perspective, life in accordance with the
commandments may be rather unrelated to the pursuit of scientific
truth, modern idealist philosophers, looking to homogenize theory
and practice, felt that Judaism was a perfect example of what prevented people from achieving a unified sense of self. Philosophy,
conceived as the pursuit of certainty by means of casting doubt on
the truth of received religious nomoi, produced a perception of
Judaism as the other of philosophy, i.e., as a received religious nomos
blindly accepted. This misperception could only be rightedin the
eyes of Jews as well as non-Jewsif it was addressed using the same
philosophical means that first produced it. Modern Jewish philosophy
thus commenced in the face of a critique of Judaism as heteronomy
par excellence, and the subsequent course of Jewish philosophy was
determined by the particular constellation of a modernity that
criticized its own Christian authorities by means of a critique of the
Mosaic Law, using Judaism as a theological-political cipher and a
whipping boy. Jewish students of philosophy and Judaism undertook
their defense of Mosaism in the name of a reconciliation of Judaism
and the new science of philosophy. The pursuit of this defense is
what we know as modern Jewish philosophy.32 Defending Mosaic
Law in the face of philosophical autonomism either took the form
of a historicization of the Law (as expressive of Judaism or the spirit
of the Jewish people), or it took the form of a hermeneutical analysis of the Jewish symbolic forms as essentially open to reinterpretation as required by shifting philosophical paradigms predicated on
a historicization of philosophy, often invoking Maimonides as a
premodern and hence authentically Jewish authority in order to
authenticate this move as homogeneous with what was claimed to
be the Jewish philosophical tradition. The Jewish nomistic tradition
could thus be maintained as an outward nomos that included the
On this conception of Jewish philosophy see my essay Jdische Religionsphilosophie als Apologie des Mosaismus, Archivio di filosofia 71, nos. 13 (2003):
17382; and see my forthcoming monograph (in German), Jdische Philosophie als
Apologie des Mosaismus (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck).
32
125
commandment of the pursuit of knowledge rather than exhausting

itself in the conveyance of dogmatic assertions.33
V. The (Homogenizing) Tyranny of Autonomy
In the modern period, as philosophy shifts from the notion of a
timeless (divine) mind to a historical paradigm of thought, academic
philosophy remains widely engaged with classical texts but authority
shifts to the reader who must determine what it is in those classical
texts that still contributes to the problem and problems of philosophy.
Philosophy became historical when reason stepped away from the
heteronomy of any philosophical or other tradition to the autonomy
of thought. As a doctrine, the narrative of progress, if considered
irreversible and absolute, constituted a new heteronomy. What served
as the evidence of the truth of this new doctrine, just as miracles
had served as evidence of the truth of Scripture, was evident progress in science, mathematics, and technology.
The notion of progress still rings true with respect to theoretical
philosophy, at least to the degree that it is identified or associated
with our knowledge of nature. When it comes to practical philosophy, i.e., our knowledge of values or of the good, modern philosophy is not just divided but also widely considered bankrupt. This
popular impression really means that, when it comes to our knowledge of nature, we are satisfied to hand it over to specialists and
thus relieve philosophy of its task; after all, most of us no longer feel
the need to reconcile a determinist universe with the notion of freedom or belief in the existence of God. But when it comes to the
one thing necessary, the question of the value of human life, we feel
that philosophy has been letting us down.
According to English and French Enlightenment views on natural
right (from Hobbes to Rousseau), rationality and sociality arise as
second-order phenomena, following the primordial order of nature.
The rational decision to enter into a social contract follows upon
the experience of threat that characterizes the state of nature; the
33
Hermeneutical philosophy (e.g., Gadamer, Ricur) could well be enlisted in
this struggle for a new justification of Judaism, not least because hermeneutics
makes us aware of our dependence on tradition and language more generally, a
dependence temporarily obscured by Cartesian philosophy. And yet, even here
tradition remains deprived of its erstwhile nomic quality.
126
michael zank
social contract is based on the wizened decision of individuals to

establish protections against violent death34 rather than on a natural
inclination toward bonding together and mutuality. In contrast, in
the German philosophical tradition (Mendelssohn, Kant, Fichte, but
especially Hegel ), the empirical and the intelligible are conceived
as coeval. As a result, the natural-right tradition tended to have
recourse to an authoritarian imposition of religion (as an expression
of the sovereign will either of God or of the king or, in Rousseau,
by the volont gnrale), whereas if sociality emerges from within an
immanent and dialectic unity of will and intellect, matter and spirit,
the empirical and the intelligible, then the service rendered by revelation in generating individual morality and obedience to the state
appears as immanent and always already anticipated from within.
In this view, religion itself is not really the expression of a heteronomous (political or transcendent) imposition but may count as
evidence of an autonomy that both affirms and perpetually struggles
with human nature as we find it.35
There appears to be no conflict between Torah and natural right,
if by the latter we refer to a Hobbesian construal of the state as the
expression of a shared interest in self-preservation. The individual
enters into a contractual aggregation of human beings in the form of
a society, modeled on the Sinaitic covenant, that requires a superior
power to monitor this contract, be it God or the Leviathan, i.e., the
state. The space of a highest moral order is taken by the commonsense interest in preserving life and liberty for as many as possible
or, where this appears as an insufficient obligation, by a dominant
state-religion. In a Hobbesian society, this religion may be Jewish,
Christian, Hindu, or Muslim, etc., and the only thing curtailing the
power of the dominant religion is the functional limitation the liberal
state imposes on religion within the liberal state, such as limiting it to
I follow Leo Strauss in this interpretation of Hobbes. See Strauss, The Political
Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), a book first published in 1935.
35
What I describe here, somewhat schematically, suggests also that Continental
philosophy was more profoundly affected and guided by Spinozas monistic intuition
than were the French philosophes or the Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment; or if both
were Spinozistic in some respect, the Continental school tended toward resolving
the duality of nature (heteronomy) and spirit (autonomy) in the direction of spirit,
whereas the alternate Enlightenments of France and Britain tended to resolve them
in a materialist direction that did not become prominent in Germany until the
mid-1830s, where it triggered radically diverse responses, ranging from F. A. Langes
neo-Kantianism to Friedrich Nietzsches philosophy of the will to power.
34
127
the private or communal sphere and imposing limits on its political

power. Thus we have modern states with a dominant religion (e.g.,
the Church of England) that espouse the toleration and protection
of religious minorities. This toleration comes with the desire to
assimilate the minority religions to the moderation exerted by the
majority religion within the liberal state. The well-known conflicts
arising from this system need not be rehearsed. (Think of the discussion of the Muslim veil in French, but also in Turkish, society.) The
contemporary debate on religious fundamentalism is very much an
indication of the threat religious commitments pose to this liberal
conception of the state. Radical religion has emerged as the most
effective threat to liberal society.
The major modern attack on Judaism, rather than on religion in
general, arose from within the Spinozist tradition of Continental
philosophy. The merging of the empirical and the intelligible required
a reconciliation of natural self-interest and the state in such a way
that morality and the law no longer remained opposite or adjacent
spheres but appeared identical. The state as the highest form of the
spirit, the manifestation of the intelligible good, represents, or strives
to represent in the form of law, the very attitude that constitutes the
state within the intelligible individual to begin with. This reciprocity
of the individual and the state, one and all, this humanity within, is
not imposed from without but striven for from within. The individual from which all sociality proceeds is not sinful or egotistical
(or not merely or completely sinful or egotistical ) and hence in need
of correction, but produces sociality by striving for its realization in
the form of justice.
This modern semi-Pelagian idea of the statea state of always
already or potentially redeemed individuals, a City of God immanent
in the City of Man, though not yet fully manifest (since it is merely
intelligible rather than empirical ), i.e., an idealist conception of the
statecontrasts with a realism that construes morality as the afterthought of a primordial fear of violent death and as conditioned by
an externally imposed authority. From the idealist position, Judaism
appears to negate the full human potential, projecting a deficient
morality, and thus comes to represent a kind of radical evil (Kant)
where the good (the highest intelligible) is chosen for the seemingly
inferior purpose of preserving the body, i.e., empirical life.
Whatever else one may understand modern Jewish philosophy to
be, its most eminent and philosophically profound representatives
128
michael zank
have been those who struggled with this Spinozistic idealism and
attempted to defend the Mosaic law and the legitimacy of a perpetuation of a Jewish way of life in the face of this particular philosophical challenge. Philosophically mindful Jews found themselves
compelled to defend Judaism against a completely new attack
that consisted in a new theory of the state that became regnant at
the very moment when the Jews were invited to join the modern
state as citizens. Contrary to their reputation among Christians
enmeshed in their own anticlerical polemics, many philosophically
minded Jews may have been attracted by the idealistic moralization
of the political sphere that harbored the promise of a full, complete,
and innerlich or sincere amalgamation of Jew and Christian in the
new humanistic conception of the state. But the deeply anti-Jewish
disposition of modern Continental philosophy that I have tried to
sketch above made modern Jewish philosophy a tragic enterprise.
The compulsion nevertheless to articulate Judaism, Jewish religion,
and Jewish philosophy in reconciliation with the idealist conception
of the Christian state is what I call the heteronomy of modern
Jewish philosophy.
In the nineteenth century, the problem of Jewish citizenship was
debated across Europe. But opposition to the admission of the Jews
to the republic took different forms in different places, and nowhere
did it impact more strongly on Jewish self-definition than in societies
that adopted the new idealism of German philosophy. The muchdebated problem of assimilation is misunderstood if one considers
it merely a matter of dress, speech, and habit. In Germany, integration required evidence on the part of the Jews that they were
capable of producing the Gesinnung that maintained, sustained, and
not only produced the state but constituted the nation. For this reason, it was in Germany that anti-Semitism took root in particular
in and through the agency of a humanistically or romantically
transformed intellectual and academic culture. To the degree that
the assumptions of German idealism penetrated the wider world of
European intellectual culture, the same suspicion of the assimilability of the Jews could be found elsewhere, including the Jewish intellectual elite itself, where this theory penetrated perhaps more deeply
than anywhere else.36
36
From a social-psychological perspective, hostility and suspicion of the Jews as
unassimilable preceded the rise of modern philosophy and merely adopted a new,
129
VI. The Great Escape or Exodus from ( Jewish) Philosophy

The Germanic philosophical tradition, if indeed it was a tyranny in
the disguise of freedom, was a recipe for the rule of the commissariat and the spiritual cause of an anti-Judaism more vicious and
profound than was thinkable under the presupposition of the principled admission of a natural inequality among human beings. After
its demise, Judaism appears free to return to its own sources of certainty and to re-establish itself on the basis of its own nomoi, its
customs and traditions, and within the formal and absolute framework of the Law.
The possibility of a return and reaffirmation of the Law, in the
form of collective or individual teshuvah, mirrors a general return of,
and to, religion that has been sweeping the intellectual and political
world across the globe, a movement that rose to the level of philosophical reflection among the educated classes of the West around
the time of the First World War. A precursor to this intellectual
return to religion was the Romantic critique of the Enlightenment.
It is thus almost as old as the Enlightenment itself and hence a firstorder phenomenon of modern intellectual history, rather than just
an afterthought or merely a current fad. It is greatly enhanced by
the possibility of reading modern political history as the becoming
explicit of the brutality and violence inherent in the presuppositions
of modern philosophy itself.
Concurrently with the demise of the German idealism of the
Jewish philosophers ( Jrgen Habermas), or its receding into the
past, we discern something like an exodus from ( Jewish) philosophy
(Margarete Susmann) and the search for new modes or practices of
reflection. Put differently, in the attempt to extract themselves from
the heteronomy of Jewish philosophy, students of Jewish philosophy
took refuge in a variety of alternatives, a process that is still ongoing
or that keeps repeating itself. This exodus from Jewish philosophy
turned into a rout with the destruction of European Jewry and a
more philosophical, justification where such was on offer. Whether Jews could be
citizens and act in solidarity with non-Jews, as required by the republican idea, was
famously debated in the French National Assembly of 1791, and suspicion against
Jewish (specifically, Ashkenazic) integration was raised again by the emperor
Napoleon in 1806. The difference is that in France, this problem was solved by
means of laws and assurances given by representative elites. Anti-Jewish sentiments
prevailed, of course, among the masses long afterwards.
130
michael zank
traumatic displacement of the survivors and refugees that included

intellectual displacement.37
Though Jewish philosophy was already established in North
American universities before the new wave of European migrs of
the 1930s and 1940s, these migrs themselves frequently shifted
from philosophy to law or political theory, or taught intellectual history; in other words, they chose subjects and approaches favored by
the more pragmatist environment of the New World.38 The complex
variety of moods and intuitions prevailing among the displaced
intellectuals cannot be summarized in a few sentences. There were
existentialists like Walter Kaufmann, who attempted to articulate for
American readers the Nietzschean presaging of the collapse of the
previous international order and who took Buber to task, while making him more widely known, for not providing a satisfactory answer
to Nietzsche. There was Abraham J. Heschel, who left his own
Hasidic and phenomenological roots unexposed while writing a
theology in support of the new social activism of the civil rights
movement. Other exiles expressed their filial piety to the lost world
of modern Jewish philosophy by means of translation. For example, the eminent Assyriologist William Hallo undertook the first
translation of Rosenzweigs Star of Redemption at the behest of an
informal Academy of Jewish Philosophy, a gathering of displaced
Jewish Europeans that used to get together in the Manhattan apartment of Arthur A. Cohen; and Simon Kaplan published a translation of Cohens Religion of Reason, accompanied by an introductory
essay by Leo Strauss, then at Annapolis.
The Jewish philosophy movement of the second half of the twentieth century was in many cases also a movement away from academic
philosophy, or rather it enshrined the exodus from philosophy, diagnosed by Margarete Susmann, as the only remaining legitimate
option for Jewish philosophy. The focus of many contemporary
college-level syllabi on works of the exodus from philosophy (Buber,
37
This account of the recent history of Jewish philosophy should be read in
light of my essay Zwischen den Sthlen? On the Taxonomic Anxieties of Modern
Jewish Philosophy, European Journal of Jewish Studies 1, no. 1 (2007): 10534, which
narrates the fate of Jewish philosophy in the context of the history of the academic
disciplines of Wissenschaft des Judentums.
38
For how this narrative of a migration of Weimar-related ideas applies to the
establishment of a different academic discipline, namely, international relations, see
Nicolas Guilhot, American Katechon: When Political Theology Became International Relations Theory, Constellations 17, no. 2 ( June 2010): 22453.
131
Rosenzweig, Fackenheim, etc.) attests to the fact that this trend has
long since become normative. Similarly, the narratives that accompany the presentation of the above-mentioned works of earlytwentieth-century Jewish philosophy still frequently foreground their
respective post-liberal, post-modern, and post-idealistic character.39
The neo-orthodox or cultural Zionist turn of the early twentieth
century, enhanced by First World War malaise, was thus imported
and renewed in postSecond World War America as a decisive
analytical tool to decode the present, when the survival of Jews and
Judaism remained in question and many intellectuals, theologians,
and political scientists were searching for what was then called a
realistic attitude toward human nature and the international order.
This constitutive moment in American Jewish intellectual life goes
a long way toward explaining why Jewish philosophy has as yet to
recover or to find its mode or place in todays intellectual world.
The malaise of the 1960s, fueled in part by the import of pessimistic theologies and political theories shaped in the aftermath of World
War I, gave way to the optimism associated with the natural sciences
and with a progressivism based on social and behavioral sciences.
To be sure, of late, the mood has been changing as optimism has
given way to a sense of national and global vulnerability. Accordingly,
religion is back and so, to some extent, may be the plausibility of
theologies and theories of malaise.
The economy of Jewish philosophy is tied to other external factors
as well, such as the overall attitude prevailing in departments of
philosophy. Few of this generation of students of Jewish philosophy
were trained in philosophy departments, though some of our teachers were. For the most part, Jewish philosophy is taught in religious
or Jewish studies departments, where students have no or little
philosophical training. There are very few graduate programs in
Cf. Rosenzweig und Cohen. Beobachtungen zu einer Schler-LehrerBeziehung, in Franz Rosenzweigs Neues Denken. Internationaler Kongress Kassel 2004,
vol. 1, Selbstbegrenzendes Denkenin philosophos, ed. Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik
(Freiburg and Munich: Verlag Karl Alber, 2006), pp. 15678, where I analyze
Rosenzweigs imposition of a narrative of exodus from philosophy onto Cohens
Jewish writings. Given this narrative, modern Jewish philosophers who embraced
Enlightenment rationality will inevitably appear as nave or be used merely as
negative foils. Cf. Michael Zank, Inauthentizittsverdacht und Anspruch auf
Authentizitt. Reflexionen ber Hermann Cohens Auseinandersetzung mit dem
Christentum, in Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism: Tradition and the
Concept of Origin in Hermann Cohens Later Work, ed. H. Holzhey, G. Motzkin, and
H. Wiedebach (Hildesheim: Olms, 2000), 30329.
39
132
michael zank
philosophy of religion today (the steady decline of this discipline is

a topic in its own right), and those that remain train their students
in analytic or science-oriented modes of philosophy that are difficult
to reconcile with the Jewish textual or Continental philosophical
traditions. As a result we have a dearth of full professionalism in a
field staffed by aficionados who lack advanced training in either
philology or philosophy.
While some of us have found productive fields of inquiry that can
be informed by the disciplines of Jewish and philosophical textual
traditions, others may yearn for the fleshpots of the philosophical
heteronomy that was the home of Jewish religious thought for the
past two centuriesnamely, ever since Jewish thought was forced to
build bridges between Judaism and Continental, i.e., Christianized
Platonic or post-Christian moral philosophies, all of which were
more or less generated within the academy. But this may be a yearning for something that no longer exists or is no longer relevant, and
no longer commands much attention in the mainstream of academic
philosophy; a mere licking of wounds. To be sure, the lost paradise
of academic philosophy, indicated by the fact that most of us are
not located in philosophy departments and rarely give papers at
meetings of the American Philosophical Association, may not be a
sign of the inferiority of Jewish philosophy; nor would it necessarily
be a sign of the health of the discipline to be admitted to a club
that actually welcomes us as members.
VII. The Heteronomy of Jewish Philosophy
I ended the original version of this essay with a question that arose,
somewhat navely, from my ongoing engagement with the work of
Leo Strauss, whom I elsewhere call the Jewish philosopher of the
hour.40 I wrote that
our academic inquiry may temporarily obscure, but it cannot make
us completely forget, the real threat to all genuine philosophy that
arises from what is not philosophy because of what philosophy is when
40
See Michael Zank, Jewish Philosopher of the Hour?, review of David
Janssens, Between Athens and Jerusalem: Philosophy, Prophecy, and Politics in Leo Strausss
Early Thought (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), and of Daniel Tanguay, Leo Strauss: An
Intellectual Biography, trans. Christopher Nadon (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2007), Review of Politics 71 (2009): 6628.
133
it does not deteriorate into academic navel gazing. Genuine philosophy

may not actually be conducive to the order of the city but constitute
a threat to the order of the city because it questions the certainties or
spiritual foundations of the city.
I believe that even if Strauss is wrongafter all, Strausss measure

of the genuineness of philosophy is merely a dialectic onethere is
still a difference, and frequently a tension, between philosophical
skepticism and the myths by which public and political order maintains its credibility. What does this mean for Jewish philosophy? Is
Jewish philosophy really philosophical if it is not radically committed
to what only philosophy can pursue, namely, the freedom of thought,
no matter the cost to Jews and Judaism as perceived by an organized
Jewry? We might be compelled to think the unthinkable, but whether
to speak the unthinkable and communicate it to others is no longer
an academic question but one that challenges the order and legitimacy of the city and our place in it.
It would take considerable literary ability to spell out what this
might entail, and I am not even sure whether what I stated is fact
or posture. In her recent writing on prophetic messianism, Myriam
Bienenstock has reminded us of a prophetic dimension of history;41 I
am reminded of the lament of Jesus that Jerusalem habitually killed
her prophets.42 Athens, of course, may be said to have indulged in
a similar habit. There is an obvious affinity between prophetism
and philosophy, one that does not bode well for either prophets or
philosophers.
What if Jewish philosophizing collided with what is widely perceived as the fundamental imperative of Jewish studies, namely, a
commitment to the perpetuation of Jews and Judaism? What if it is
impossible to be a Jewish philosopher, namely, someone committed
at once to the freedom of thought and to the perpetuation of Jews
41
Myriam Bienenstock (ed.), Der Geschichtsbegriff: Eine theologische Erfindung?
(Wrzburg: Echter, 2007), reviewed by this author in Religious Studies Review 34,
no. 2 (2008): 115.
42
Cf. Matthew 23:37 and Luke 13:34. In biblical literature, Jerusalem is not
particularly famous for killing its prophets, making the dictum of Jesus appear
cryptic. But see the reference to the martyrdom of Zachariah son of Barachiah
(Matt 23:35), which seems to refer to 2 Chronicles 24:22, the death of Zachariah
son of Jehoiada. A medieval Syriac source, the Book of the Bee, boosted Jewish
notoriety by providing a list of violent prophetic deaths. See Book of the Bee, trans.
Ernest Budge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), chap. xxxii, Of the Death of the
Prophets.
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michael zank
and Judaism? What if our Jewish philosophizing compelled us to

deem the Jewish state problematic? In that case, would philosophy
require us to speak or to be silent? Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses.
Would Jewish tradition or faith require us to speak or be silent? Si
tacuisses, judaeus mansisses. Would Jewish philosophy require us to speak
or be silent? Si tacuisses, philosophus judaeus mansisses.

Jewish Heteronomy

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THE HETERONOMY OF MODERN JEWISH PHILOSOPHY

I. Philosophy, Jewish: A Preliminary Consideration

Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2012

parameters is that, in the first case, philosophy is the genus and

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

likes of poetry or politics. It is the point at which the dialectic of

geography, historiography, etc.), even though what philosophy means

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

Jewish philosophical work is never merely the result of an inner

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

political realm is not obvious at all. Philo of Alexandria may be the

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

exegetical sophistication was used in order to defend the pursuit of

In the following, I explore construals of Judaism and philosophy

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

meanings that are either completely or partially heterogeneous or

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

hide the fact that their believing justification was grounded in an

of all four of these thinkers, even ifas in the case of Strausssuch

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

Philo, and later Mendelssohn, argued. In the realm of philosophical

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

is closely connected with insights into the different kinds of human

promontory of an epistemic dualism that allowed modern critics of

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

Novak has shown in his book on the election of Israel.20 But, as

redemption as a prompt for human action as ignorant or forgetful

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

to maintain the external force of the Law while emasculating its

justice, and universal equality as realistic goals we are obliged to

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

itself as the intelligible source or origin of the good, requiring no

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

on other, nonlegal sources of orientation, including, on occasion,

the idea of a radical equality and immediacy of every Israelite (i.e.,

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

commandment of the pursuit of knowledge rather than exhausting

social contract is based on the wizened decision of individuals to

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

the private or communal sphere and imposing limits on its political

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

VI. The Great Escape or Exodus from ( Jewish) Philosophy

traumatic displacement of the survivors and refugees that included

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

philosophy of religion today (the steady decline of this discipline is

the heteronomy of modern jewish philosophy

it does not deteriorate into academic navel gazing. Genuine philosophy

I believe that even if Strauss is wrongafter all, Strausss measure

and Judaism? What if our Jewish philosophizing compelled us to

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