Emil L. Fackenheim: A Jewish Philosopher’s Response to the Holocaust (review)

This is the first single-author book to offer a sustained and much needed treatment of the work of the post-Holocaust philosopher Emil Fackenheim. Since Fackenheim’s death in 2003, the majority of his many books have gone out of print, including the key God’s Presence in History (1970). His important voice is thus fading with the passage of time, and it falls to a new generation of scholars to bring that voice to a new generation of students. Patterson’s, alas, is not the book to accomplish this.

Patterson’s volume is not, by most definitions, a scholarly work, though nonscholarly works about the Holocaust can have a power and effectiveness scholarly books often don’t. But Patterson has also written, I believe, a book premised on serious misunderstandings of Fackenheim. Patterson should have clarified his own authorial voice, for most of the time he seems to be writing as if he were reporting Fackenheim’s own thought, or extending it in a manner wholly continuous with it. In fact, Patterson is presenting a “right-Fackenheimian” view in which Jewish religious observance is the necessary mode of resisting attempts at genocide of the Jews.

The support that Patterson invokes for this view is also part and parcel of the book’s other than scholarly nature. For Patterson relies heavily on his personal proximity to Fackenheim during the last decade or so of the latter’s life. In his preface, Patterson claims that “after my first conversation with [Fackenheim], he said to me, ‘I can see that you and I are on the same wavelength.’” Nevertheless, Patterson seems to invoke this personal imprimatur not as a preface for reporting or analyzing Fackenheim’s arguments, but as a means of cutting off those interpretations of Fackenheim’s work (many by others close to Fackenheim, e.g., those collected in Greenspan and Nicholson’s 1992 anthology Fackenheim: German Philosophy and Jewish Thought) that Patterson suggests are overly dependent on “philosophy,” or that may insufficiently acknowledge the importance of Fackenheim-as-Jew. Despite Patterson’s frequent description of Fackenheim as a “Jewish philosopher,” his aim seems to me to be to extirpate the philosophy from Fackenheim’s thought.

Patterson’s general argument against modern philosophy runs approximately as follows: Philosophy since the Enlightenment is an attack on Jewish claims to find the personal presence of God in revelation; “just as Christianity is theologically anti-Semitic, so is modern thought philosophically anti-Semitic.” Patterson takes his reader through whirlwind tours of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger to support the claim that philosophy bears responsibility for the Holocaust. “Jewish philosophy,” insofar as it adheres to the ideal of universalism, denies Jewish difference, and is therefore an impossible and ridiculous enterprise. Its epitome is the work of the neo-Kantian Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen. In Patterson’s presentation, it is “philosophy” that prevents Cohen from being able to offer an account of Judaism in which God can be understood as commander and the religious self can be understood as the commanded, acting in accordance with God’s law as opposed to the law of reason.

It is only in holding fast simultaneously to the Jewish world and its practices—a stance Patterson derives from Fackenheim’s notion of “midrashic madness”—that the uniqueness of Judaism and the uniqueness of the Holocaust can be acknowledged. This madness is midrashic; like midrash—the rabbis’ commentaries on Scripture in the early centuries ce—Fackenheim’s work departs from the surface sense of Scripture to address the concerns of his own post-Holocaust age. But it is madness because, like rabbinic midrash, it acknowledges and accepts the paradoxes of Jewish faith (particularly that paradox of a God who is both involved in history and also transcends it); instead of a coherent system of religion, we are left with fragments that go together only jaggedly, if at all. Thus for...