Jewish Materialism: The Intellectual Revolution of the 1870s by Eliyahu Stern (review)

Stern’s Jewish Materialism is a brilliant and deeply learned book that calls into question widely held historiographical views regarding the modernization of European Jewry. At first glance, the rabbinic subject of Stern’s first book, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (New Haven, 2013), and the materialist thinkers of this one, his second, would appear to have little in common. Yet, in different ways, they represent alternatives to the common equation of Jewish modernization with secularization and the influence of the Haskalah or Jewish Enlightenment. Whereas in The Genius, Stern sought to demonstrate what was modern about Elijah ben Solomon Zalman, the Vilna Gaon (1720– 1797), one of the founding figures of what would eventually become Haredi (Ultra-Orthodox) Judaism, in Jewish Materialism, Stern argues that a cohort of Russian Jewish intellectuals embraced different forms of materialism in the 1870s without rejecting Judaism. On the contrary, Stern illuminates how these thinkers discovered affinities between contemporary materialist conceptions of the world, such as Marxism and Darwinism, and traditional Jewish sources, including the biblical prophets, the Talmud, and, even the reconditely mystical Kabbalah. Thus, for example, Stern notes, “The Jewish materialists viewed [Karl] Marx in conjunction with, not in opposition to, the Hebrew Bible and the Kabbalah” (81).

In another historiographical revision, Stern complicates the view that the modernization of Judaism inevitably reflected a movement toward Protestantism, a model that has also been applied to other religious traditions, sometimes in a teleological fashion. While Protestantism did, in fact, serve as the chief model for Reform Judaism’s modernizing project in Western Europe, Stern reveals how some Russian Jewish materialists turned instead to Catholicism, with its emphasis on “tradition” that paralleled the Jewish “Oral Law,” as a source of inspiration and a means by which Judaism might be translated for contemporary non-Jewish audiences. Indeed, Stern demonstrates that the Jewish materialism of the 1870s had important resonances not only with developments among geographically proximate Polish Catholic intellectuals but also with the parallel efforts of the Young Turks to articulate an “Islamic materialism,” as well as those of Hindu thinkers on both the “civilizational” and “spiritual” ends of the spectrum (for example, V.D. Savarkar and Swami Vivekananda).

Even within this varied religious landscape, however, the turn to materialism had special significance for Jews and Judaism. For centuries, Stern notes, Christian accusations of Jewish materialism were second only to the charge that Jews had killed Jesus in stoking antisemitism. Against this backdrop, the Jewish materialism of the 1870s turned this critique on its head. Rather than being a sign of Jewish inferiority or backwardness, the “Jews’ relationship to the physical world,” as evinced in “the non-theological and this-worldly orientation of Talmudic Judaism,” was now understood positively as an intellectual advantage that would enable Jews to modernize without having to give up Judaism (81).

In Jewish Materialism, Stern not only makes major contributions to theories of Jewish modernization that, in turn, shed light on parallel developments around the globe; he also treats the emergence of Jewish materialism from the ground up, identifying the particular place, socioeconomic conditions, and cultural and religious milieu that gave rise to the phenomenon. Rather than Western Europe, the starting point for many historical narratives of Jewish modernization, the intellectually fertile soil in which Jewish materialism took root was the northwest corner of the Russian Empire known to Jews in Yiddish as Lita,a term that literally means Lithuania, but which, from a Jewish cultural perspective, also included territory in present-day Belarus, Poland, Latvia, and Ukraine. Rather than secularized university students, most of the young Jews who embraced materialism in the 1870s came from traditional Jewish homes, received conservative religious educations, and were inspired, in part, by the declining economic conditions that characterized Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement following the 1860s—conditions that did not exist for the Jews of Germany or France. Indeed, as part of their...