This Power Which Is Not One: Queer Temporality, Jewish Difference, and the Concept of Religion in Mendelssohn's Jerusalem

Of all the various ways to describe Jewish difference in Western modernity—cultural, ethnic, national, racial, and so on—the designation "religious" is particularly vexed. In the context of the rise of the nation-state in Europe, religion was, we are often told, a way for Jews to become just like their Protestant neighbors. In the context of Jewish immigration to the United States, framing Judaism in terms of religion, rather than race or ethnicity, was a way for Jews to benefit from white privilege by distancing themselves from black Americans and other racially and ethnically stigmatized groups.¹ In both the European and the U.S. case, parsing Jewish difference in terms of "religion" proved to be the least threatening to the status quo. Therefore, many popular and scholarly assessments regard the translation of Judaism and Jewishness into the idiom of "religion" as the decidedly modern wound of assimilation. These assessments are also aided by the widely circulating master narrative in the academic study of religion, which holds that "religion" is itself a modern, Protestant concept that, via colonialism, exported its categories globally and collected back its own products in the form of "world religions." Knowledge production about the colonized other, attendant to missionary activity and colonial governance, entailed extracting from previously undifferentiated spheres of life some sui generis essence called "religion," deciding what rituals, gods, "sacred" texts, affective dispositions, social arrangements, and forms of authority will belong to it and be prohibited by it and, in this way, shaping disparate forms of life around the globe in the image of Christian Europe. Aaron Hughes, for instance, drawing on a body of literature in religious studies, concludes that "religion" is "predicated on a set of largely Western and Christocentric categories that are subsequently retrofitted onto other cultures and earlier times."² For this reason, the word "invention" often appears in book and article titles aimed at explaining how particular practices in specific regions at certain historical junctures came to be discussed in terms of "religion." If book and article titles in religious studies alone are any indication, accounting for the "invention" of religion is the gift that keeps on giving.³

In her recent book, How Judaism Became a Religion, Leora Batnitzky offers one plausible genealogy of modern Jewish thought, articulated around the question of whether "religion" is an appropriate idiom for Judaism. Batnitzky argues that Moses Mendelssohn essentially "invents" Judaism as a "religion," thereby setting in motion a series of variations on and oppositions to the project of Judaism becoming a religion.⁴ Batnitzky posits Mendelssohn's presentation of Judaism as a point of rupture—a conceptual fault line—that simultaneously works as a periodizing gesture. Framed as the inauguration of the "modern," Mendelssohn's now classic eighteenth-century text, Jerusalem: Or on Religious Power and Judaism, becomes a site for exploring questions and anxieties about the continuities and discontinuities between the "modern," what came before, and a range of contested possibilities for what is yet to come.

Like many scholars engaged in theorizing this distinctly modern and Western concept, Batnitzky sees "religion" as an artifact of the rise of the nation-state. Removed from the domain of political power, "religion" now describes private, disembodied, apolitical, and individual belief.⁵ At times, Batnitzky suggests that this decidedly modern concept was not organic to any tradition's self-understanding and had to be "invented" as much for various forms of Christianity as for its others. She acknowledges that the question of what belongs to religion was contested even among Protestants, thereby potentially complicating even religion's monolithically "Protestant" credentials.⁶ Batnitzky also notes that Judaism is not unique in its incongruity with the conceptual category "religion." According to her, when we look at headscarf controversies in France or U.S. evangelical Christian opposition to gay marriage, we are confronted with a bad fit between our decidedly modern expectations of "religion" and the various communities that have not separated "religion" from domains of power such as law, science, and politics.⁷ While Batnitzky grants that...