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6 From the Historical Jesus to a new Jewish Christology: rethinking Jesus in Contemporary American Judaism It is monstrous to talk of Jesus Christ and to practice Judaism. —Ignatius of Antioch, Magnesians 10:3 Jesus, ils entendent de tirer chex eux, ils ne veulent pas venire chez lui. Jews mean to draw Jesus to themselves, they do not want to come to him. —Joseph Bonsirven, Les Juifs et Jesus Contemporary Jews in America do not seem very interested in Jesus. Few rabbis today sermonize about Jesus from the pulpit and there are few courses about Jesus (or Christianity) in formal or informal Jewish education. Contemporary scholar of the new testament Amy-Jill Levine correctly notes in passing, “If on the popular level we Jews are willing not only to acknowledge but also to take pride in the Jewishness of such generally non-observant Jews as Sigmund Freud, Albert einstein, the Marxes (Karl and Groucho although Karl was baptized as a child), and Jerry Seinfeld, why not acknowledge the quite observant Jesus? . . . I have heard rabbis in reform and Conservative synagogues cite Homer (both the Greek poet and Bart’s father), Plato, the Buddha, Muhammad, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., the dalai Llama, and even Madonna (the Kabbalah-besotted singer, not the mother of Jesus). At least Jesus is Jewish with regard to family, practice, and belief.”1 Why should Jews living in postethnic America be interested in Jesus? The reason is that, as Stephen Prothero has argued, Jesus in America is more than the central figure of Christianity—he is also a cultural icon, a figure central to America as a civilization.2 Jews always knew this, and in the nineteenth century rabbis took Jesus very seriously and viewed a “Jewish position” on Jesus as a crucial part of the process of Americanization. I think it is safe to say that most major rabbis in nineteenth-century America (almost all of whom were 134 American Post-Judaism reform) at some point sermonized about Jesus. Major figures such as rabbis Isaac Mayer Wise, Kaufmann Kohler, emil Hirsch, and later Stephen Wise wrote and spoke extensively about Jesus and his place in American Judaism.3 Jews today seem less interested in Jesus even as they are more American than their nineteenth-century ancestors. While there are many popular books written today by American Jews about Jesus most of them are polemical, countering the evangelism of “Jews for Jesus” or “Messianic Judaism,” two movements that have captured the attention of American Jews. Counter-missionizing has become a small cottage industry in contemporary Jewish America, trafficking (as polemics often do) in skewered and superficial depictions of the opposition (in this case Jesus and Christianity) largely based on sources that are themselves polemical and ahistorical in nature. Organizations such as “Jews for Judaism” and popular titles such as You Take Jesus, I’ll Take God: How to Refute Christian Missionaries and the more recent Why the Jews Rejected Christ fill the shelves of American Judaica bookstores.4 This popular polemical literature unfortunately veils what is a long and complex history of the figure of Jesus in American Jewry.5 Of course, the history of Jesus in modern Judaism does not begin in America but in Western europe where newly emancipated rabbis and intellectuals were inspired by the Historical Jesus School championed by new testament scholars and some liberal Protestant theologians who began to investigate Jesus as a historical figure, requiring them to examine his “Jewish” roots.6 In this period, Jews such as Henrich Graetz, Samuel Hirsch, and Abraham Geiger led the way by writing scholarly works on Jesus in his “Jewish” context, leaning on, and moving beyond, the Protestant scholarship, making claims about Jesus’ Jewishness and using those claims to question whether Christianity, or Judaism, was the true religion of Jesus as opposed to the religion about Jesus.7 Jewish writing about Jesus in America, with a few exceptions, ended after the “Jesus Controversy” in 1925. This controversy erupted in light of a sermon delivered by rabbi Stephen Wise at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan on the occasion of the 1925 english publication of Joseph Klausner’s Hebrew volume Jesus of Nazareth: His Life, Times, and Teaching. Although the discovery of the nag Hammadi texts and other dead Sea scrolls in 1947–48 reinvigorated interest in the historical Jesus among many Protestants, American Jews did not begin writing about Jesus again until the 1960s, around the same time post-Holocaust theology began to emerge. Samuel...

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