Jewish Chosenness Repudiated Scult

The Radical American Judaism of Mordecai M. Kaplan, by Mel Scult. 2013

Jews Transform Societies. Jewish Chosenness (Including Its “Benevolent” Form) Repudiated. Polonophobia. Judaism Nondogmatic Myth

In order to form my own opinion of Mordecai Menahem Kaplan without being influenced by that of anyone else, I first read Kaplan myself. See my review of The future of the American Jew.

This book includes biographical information on Kaplan. One learns that Kaplan was born in Vilna (Wilno, Vilnius), in 1881. (p. 9). (This makes Kaplan a Litvak/Litwak). Most of this work focuses on Kaplan’s ideas and especially their often-tumultuous encounter with the thinking of other Jews. The reader may be struck by the ways that Kaplan tried to defend himself against charges of atheism by means of his creative re-definitions of God.

The purview of this book goes beyond the immediate ideas of Mordecai Kaplan, and includes interesting information pertinent to many different issues and events. I focus on a few of them.

TRANSFORMING JEWISH RELIGION INTO POLITICS

Some of the theological encounters were particularly revealing. Rabbi Kaplan was asked by the author’s son Joshua, a boy at the time, what it was that forced the Pharoah to release the captive Israelites if, as Kaplan taught, the plagues were not factual. Kaplan responded that Pharoah’s release-the-Jews order was not factual either. So what had happened? The Israelites had risen up against the Egyptians, and had departed of their own accord. (p. 117). To Kaplan, the events celebrated every Passover were nothing more than a successful slave revolt. It is easy to see that Kaplan was imaginatively rewriting the Exodus, and bending the facts to conform to his liberal theological and liberal political ideologies.

JEWS, LIKE CHRISTIANS, SOMETIMES PUNISHED HERESY

It is commonly supposed that Judaism, unlike Christianity, was free of dogma, and generally welcomed independent thinking and religious dissent. Author Mel Scult implicitly challenges this notion. He starts with Kaplan’s experience, (quote) The fact that Kaplan was excommunicated in 1945 because of his ‘heretical’ prayer book reveals the extent of the anger that he generated among traditional Jews, even among his ‘friends’ and colleagues at the Jewish Theological Seminary. (unquote) (p. 2).

Scult puts this in broader historical context, (Quote) Excommunication is usually associated with the Catholic Church and not with the Jews, but, alas, this painful act has been part of Jewish life for centuries. Indeed, the enemies of Maimonides–Jews, of course–burned his books after he died in 1204 and excommunicated anyone who read them. The most famous excommunication in Jewish history took place in Amsterdam in 1656. Its recipient was Baruch Spinoza, one of Kaplan’s intellectual inspirations. (unquote). (p. 7). In addition, Scult quips (quote) Though excommunication was one of the most powerful weapons the Jewish community employed during the Middle ages, the authors, explain, it is completely inappropriate in the twentieth century. (unquote). (p. 197).

The reader who would like to go further, and examine the ways that Jews even made use of the Catholic Inquisition to punish heresy within Judaism, should read the detailed Peczkis review, of Militant Messiah: Or, the Flight from the Ghetto: The Story of Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement.

JEWS AS THE CHOSEN PEOPLE REPUDIATED, EVEN IF IT IS “BENEVOLENT”

Mel Scult deftly summarizes Kaplan’s position on this subject, alluding to what nowadays is called benevolent prejudice (e. g, the “white man’s burden”), and the fact that Kaplan rejected the usual exculpatory reasoning behind Jewish Chosenness. Thus, Scult comments, (quote) He [Kaplan] was among the very few who dismissed the notion of the chosen people. American Jews, in his time as in ours, attempt to rationalize their beliefs, insisting that being the chosen people does not mean that Jews are superior. It just means that we have more obligations. But feeling we have more obligations certainly reflects a sense of superiority. (unquote). (p. 208).

Indeed it does.

TAKING A RUN AT THE POLES

Interestingly, a form of Jewish condescension towards non-Jews, along with Polonophobia, was part of prominent Rabbi Leo Jung’s criticism of Kaplan’s “heresy”. Kaplan had contended that MITZVOT constituted a custom and not law. Scult comments, (quote) Kaplan did not think that this proposal regarding KASHRUT particularly extreme, since he did not “give outright license to violate KASHRUT,” but only wanted to illustrate what it meant to treat rituals as folkways instead of legal certainties. Rabbi Jung believed that Kaplanism reduced the Jews to the level of “Eskimos, Poles, and Magyars.” He maintained that nationalism plus reform was the essence of Kaplanism and a most dangerous threat to Orthodoxy. (unquote). (pp. 12-13).

JEWS TRANSFORM SOCIETIES

When Jews decide to abandon what may be called their self-imposed apartheid, and to integrate themselves into gentile society, they engage in a multifaceted process. They do not merely strive to JOIN the gentile society: They want to RE-MAKE it. Author Scult cites the philosophy of Ahad Ha-Am (Asher Hirsch Ginsberg), (quote) Ahad Ha-Am believed that there were two ways for Jews (or any minority) to relate to the host culture. The first he termed “slavish imitation,” by which modern Jews assimilated to the point of self-effacement, abandoning their connection to Judaism. The other way of relating to the host culture entailed a much healthier attitude, an attitude of pride that he called “competitive imitation”: Jews would appropriate modalities of the host culture but, at the same time, transform them and make them their own. They would, in other words, “Judaize” aspects of the dominant culture…Ahad Ha-Am’s recipe for liberation made a deep impression on the Jewish intelligentsia of both Europe and America. (unquote). (p. 50).

LIKE ENDEKS LIKE JEWS

The informed reader may recognize the unmentioned, but striking, implications on Polish-Jewish relations in pre-WWII Poland. Some of the Endeks (National Democrats) had contended that, were Poland’s massive Jewish population to assimilate and to convert to Catholicism on a large scale, this would cause a zazydzenie (Judaization) of Poland and of Polish Catholicism. Polish-ness and Polish Catholicism could become transformed beyond recognition, with dilution or even loss of their essences. Asher Hirsch Ginsberg and his thinking provides a Jewish mirror-image to these much-condemned Endek concerns.