Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow (review)

110 SHOFAR Spring 1993 Vol. 11, No.3 Prawer also believes that Thackeray's treatment ofJewish malefactors should be evaluated in the context of his belief that folly and knavery, rogues and dupes, are found among all religious, ethnic, and national groups, including his own. The narrator of the character sketch "Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon," for example, concludes that "there is no cheat like an English cheat" and that England "produces them in the greatest number as of the greatest excellence" (p. 58). Prawer argues convincingly that in creating dishonest Jews Thackeray never makes them worse than their gentile counterparts. In his world, Jews are not predators corrupting society, but rather it is society itself which is "exhibiting predatory behaviour at every level and forcing such behaviour on anyone who has not inherited wealth and who wants to make his way towards social position and esteem" (p. 413). It is difficult to quarrel with Prawer's contention that Thackeray never intended his unsympathetic Jews to represent the group as a whole. His treatment is exhaustive, his reading attentive to nuance and detail, his analysis balanced and sober. Nonetheless, his desire to defend Thackeray appears to have blinded him to one aspect of this problem: whatever Thackeray's intention, his occasional use of highly charged stereotypes helped to perpetuate anti-Jewish sentiment in Victorian society. These stereotypes, which tend to dehumanize Jews and mark them off as different in essence from other Englishmen, possessed a long history and tapped into well entrenched feelings about the otherness of Jews. What Prawer has failed to consider is that portraits of unpleasant Jews resonate differently than those of unpleasant Protestants. Todd M. Endelman Department of History University of Michigan Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, by Hans Kung, trans. John Bowden. New York: Crossroad, 1992. 753 pp. $34.50. This book is the first of a projected series of three books, each dealing with one of the three great monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, by the well-known Swiss-German Catholic theologian Hans Kung. It is a massive book in every sense, in terms of its content, its research and its goals. It is without doubt one of the most serious and learned encounters with Judaism by a non-Jewish scholar and thinker in our time. It calls for a response from a number of Jewish scholars and Book Reviews 111 thinkers. This review can only be one such short response. Hopefully, others will respond, and under circumstances allowing for lengthier and more detailed answers to the challenge that Kling's important work calls for. "The main thesis of Kling's book is that the world is now involved in a major paradigm shift (a term effectively borrowed from the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn) from modernity to postmodernity. For Kung, a new role for religion is crucial to this paradigm shift and ·its potential for leading to what he calls "peace among the nations," which is the motto of the book. But one has to see the role of religion in terms of the earlier paradigm shift from premodernity to modernity in order to appreciate the second paradigm shift to postmodernity. In this earlier paradigm religious particularism either considered its own closed world sufficient unto itself (as was largely the case with premodern Judaism), or it attempted to force its particularism on all others (as was largely the case with premodern Christianity and Islam). Modernity, which emerged out of the impasse of the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was initially successful in transcending this impasse by positing a secular universalism in which religion-anybody's religion-at best played a supporting role. Man, then, became the measure of all things. Kling's book conducts a battle on two fronts. On the one hand, he is impatient with efforts of some contemporary religious leaders to return tQ the premodern role of what might be called"imperial religion." Although, along these lines, he is quite critical of much of contemporary Jewish orthodoxy and its attempts to force its beliefs and practices on the vastly larger non-orthodox majority of Jews, especially in the Israeli religiopolitical situation (skillfully drawing upon the...