20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays in Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs ed. by Arthur A. Cohen, Paul Mendes-Flohr (review)

Arthur A. Cohen (1928–1986) argued in four scholarly books, scores of essays, and his best work of fiction, In the Days of Simon Stern (1972), that Jewish theology is not only a productive pursuit but one indigenous and integral to the Jewish tradition. This splendid anthology, first published in hardcover in 1987 as Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought, was the last and grandest attestation of Cohen’s conviction. As the introduction explains, the idea for the book occurred to Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr during the Lebanon War, as they wandered in the gardens of the American Colony Hotel in East Jerusalem and discussed “the alleged Jewish disinclination to engage in theology” (xiii). The product of that discussion proves the magnitude of Cohen and Mendes-Flohr’s inclination, and the great inclination of the other 103 contributors to the collection. All of the essays, except Gershom Scholem’s on “Judaism,” were specifically commissioned for this book, from writers “of proven competence and thoughtfulness with regard to the respective topic” (xiv). Each of the 140 essays, which range alphabetically from “Aesthetics” to “Zionism,” bears its title in English and Hebrew and concludes with a selective bibliography on the given topic. A glossary, list of abbreviations, list of contributors, and index help to orient the reader. This paperback edition, a near-exact reprinting of the original, will clarify Jewish religious concepts to the nonspecialist and young scholar, and offer to the more seasoned scholar a rich classroom resource. In all readers the book is likely to encourage theological reflection.

What is Jewish religious thought? In their introduction, Cohen and Mendes-Flohr equate the term thought with theology, which Cohen defines in his essay on the topic as “a scrutiny of the language and interpretation of the ultimate reality that is God” (972). Cohen argues that although halakha, the body and practice of Jewish law, undergirds the Jewish enterprise, rather than theology (which in Christianity precedes practice), halakha has always prompted reflection on God’s nature and will. Cohen suggests that this reflection has lingered for millennia, though implicitly, in rabbinical interpretation of the law. In the Middle Ages, Jewish theology gained an explicit, though often apologetic, role, under the challenges of Christians, and yielded both a mystical and nonmystical branch. After the European Enlightenment and Emancipation, theology found occasional pursuers among a community increasingly concerned with the historicization and secularization of the religion. Cohen counts among these “new Jewish thinkers” Salomon Ludwig Steinheim, Nachman Krochmal, Solomon Formstecher, Hermann Cohen, Leo Baeck, Martin Buber, and Franz Rosenzweig (976). The work of these thinkers divorces Judaism and history, contends Cohen, and as such cannot account for the Holocaust, which called into question, to an unprecedented extent, God’s role in history, the “bond of practice and obedience and the assumed persuasiveness of divine justification” (973). Given our battered premises, says Cohen, “the task of theology is not optional and secondary to Jewish tradition but unavoidably primary” (977).

The essays in this book answer Cohen’s call to varying degrees. Many of the essays do not offer original theological arguments but rather engaging historical surveys, replete with citations from Jewish scriptures and philosophy. Some are indeed theologically provocative, as well as beautiful. I was particularly moved by Yeshayahu Leibowitz’s essay, “Commandments,” which describes how, through miztvot, “Judaism renders religion the prose of life” (68) and suggests that an antithesis between mundane routine and ecstatic moments of “poetry” does not, in fact, exist: Judaism blends the prosaic with the poetic to sanctify all of time. Other essays I found affecting include David Biale’s “Eros: Sex and Body,” Richard Rubenstein’s “Evil,” and Emil Fackenheim’s “Holocaust.” Some essays constellate with others to outline broader issues. For instance, the four essays on the four main branches of contemporary Judaism in America collectively narrate the two-hundred...