A Sacred Tradition Within Mundane History: Rabbi Unna and the Orthodox Return to History in Interwar Germany

“Remember the days of old, consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will tell you, your elders, and they will explain to you.”

(Deuteronomy, 32:7)

“In the case of the smallest or of the greatest happiness, however, it is always the same thing that makes happiness happiness: the ability to forget or, expressed in more scholarly fashion, the capacity to feel unhistorically during its duration. He who cannot sink down on the threshold of the moment and forget all the past, who cannot stand balanced like a goddess of victory without growing dizzy and afraid, will never know what happiness is. Worse, he will never do anything to make others happy.”¹

(Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, 1874)

INTRODUCTION

Friedrich Nietzsche penned these words in 1874, criticizing his age for neglecting the authentic happy life in the present moment by focusing excessively on the past.² Modern man, Nietzsche felt, was so focused on the grander trajectory of human history that too often he forgot to live a truly authentic existence. For Nietzsche, the rapid ascent of history during the nineteenth century placed an incalculable burden upon his generation, saddling his contemporaries with a paralyzing and all-consuming awareness of the past. Life in the modern world was thus condemned to a deep-seated “antithesis unknown to people of earlier times,” where man’s outer existence no longer expressed his true inner self.³ Nietzsche challenged his contemporaries, and indeed all living in the modern world, to query the apposite relationship between history and life, to question whether history ought indeed to be sacrificed to allow for a happier more authentic existence.⁴ The present article deals with a group of German-Jewish Orthodox thinkers at the cusp of the twentieth century, centered around the Berlin Rabbinerseminar, who were plagued with the very same concerns. They questioned the precise role history, the past, ought to play in contemporary Jewish life. These Orthodox rabbis avoided the extremes, challenging both those who advocated an ahistorical Judaism ignorant of its concrete past and those who reduced Judaism to the mundane realm of pure history. These thinkers paved a novel direction in modern Jewish Orthodox thought which brought the past into modern life in ever more fruitful and creative ways. This Orthodox dialogue with Jewish history promised a more profound understanding of the present that would also ground a generation of Jews dislocated from their tradition amidst the maelstrom of modernity.

Nietzsche was perhaps the most eloquent nineteenth-century onlooker to perceive the ascent of history as a threat to meaningful life. Yet, it was the Protestant theologians during the early nineteenth century who sensed the rise of the historical school as an existential threat to the fundamental pillars of their religious faith. Ever since David Friedrich Strauss published his Life of Jesus in 1834, Protestant theology has maintained a rather uneasy relationship with historical scholarship, an affair from which it has never fully recovered.⁵ Strauss subjected the New Testament to the critical gaze of a thorough scientific historical methodology and refused to presuppose its historical accuracy.⁶ In the words of Strauss: “it was time to substitute a new model of considering the life of Jesus, in the place of the antiquated systems of supernaturalism and naturalism … every part of the history of Jesus is subjected to critical examination to ascertain whether it have not some admixture of the mythical.”⁷ Strauss concluded that significant portions of the New Testament reflected the mythical outlook of its authors and did not accurately echo historical reality. No realm, not even the pure world of faith could ignore the results of historical investigation.⁸ For many faithful Christian believers, the notion that religiously significant events had to pass the test of historical scholarship betrayed heresy and heterodoxy. Thus was born a series of debates which has plagued religious thinkers from a wide array of faith backgrounds ever since.

As nineteenth-century Protestant theologians grappled with this challenge of historical scholarship, a group of German-Jewish Orthodox thinkers...