Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh's Jewish Universalism by Clémence Boulouque (review)

The primary normative claim of Boulouque's Another Modernity, about the nineteenth-century Livornese Jewish philosopher-theologian Elia Benamozegh (1823–1900), is to be found in her last sentence: "It was from this in-between space, in which Jewish tradition was assertively kabbalistic and universalist, that he proposed a different modernity—and such an in-between space is worth returning to" (195). The in-between space that Boulouque invokes is a space cued by Benamozegh's own self-description at the conclusion of his 1871–72 self-defense Ẓori Gil'ad, which appeared in a series of articles in the Orthodox newspaper Ha-Levanon in response to the controversy occasioned by the 1865 ban of his Pentateuch commentary by the rabbinate of Aleppo. There, Benamozegh claims—ironically, according to Boulouque—that he is "neither heretic nor believer, neither infidel nor kabbalist, neither philosopher nor rabbi … neither Hillel nor Shammai, neither day nor night." Such an indeterminate space may indeed be worthwhile. Especially at a time when ideology seems to straitjacket so much of Jewish and non-Jewish religious self-expression, it may seem like a space of utterly desirable freedom. However, Boulouque leaves the nature of that space frustratingly vague, and she therefore inadvertently casts doubt on her own claim about its worth.

In sixteen chapters averaging a mere ten pages each (not including a substantial introduction and a brief epilogue), Boulouque introduces Benamozegh and his works to readers who may not know anything about him, and articulates Benamozegh's commitments to universalism, Kabbalah, and the integrity of other religious traditions. Benamozegh is best known in Jewish thought for his account, in his posthumously published Israel and Humanity, of the possibility of a religious identity of "Noahism" for gentiles. This possibility, which for Benamozegh is maintained in the Noahide laws of Judaism, is superior to that of the revealed monotheisms Christianity and Islam because of its cosmopolitanism. Yet, as Boulouque rightly points out, interpreting Noahism—much less endorsing it—is not easy. Perhaps Benamozegh promoted Noahism due to the constraints placed upon Jews by emancipation, as a way of showing Judaism's universalism. But if that is the case, then Noahism is a bizarre kind of inclusion of non-Jews in the Jewish tradition, because non-Jews are only included as Noahides, and not as Jews. As a result, far from signaling universalism, the Noahide laws "could be seen as reinforcing its [Judaism's] ethnocentric nature" (90). In addition, given the appropriation of the Noahide laws by Léon Askénazi and Meir Kahane in the twentieth century as a tool for discrimination, Benamozegh's claim for universalism seems more appropriate for a twee nostalgia than anything else.

Benamozegh's Kabbalah was not a source of esoteric knowledge, but a kind of scientific theosophy that contains imperatives for a collectively pursued evolution. Benamozegh reads the Lurianic concept of berur (purification), for example, as a kind of program for human unification. Benamozegh's modernist-scientific Kabbalah appears to be genuinely novel in the history of Jewish thought, and Boulouque fascinatingly interprets Benamozegh's location of progress in Judaism, and not in Christianity, as "a discreet jab" at Ernest Renan's antisemitism. Yet the tension between universalism and a sort of Jewish supersessionism that appeared in Boulouque's earlier pages appears here too. In a discussion of Benamozegh's appropriation of the Kabbalah's account of Adam, she shows that one cannot be certain whether Benamozegh is offering a "difference-based universalism" (142) in which Adam represents a transnational human community, or a scenario in which Israel just is the universal and will absorb the nations of the world in the messianic era.

Finally, Boulouque highlights that Benamozegh's Jewish theology has a place for other traditions, and thus suggests the "interdependence" (174) of Judaism and other religions in a way that is common in understandings of twentieth-century Jewish philosophers such as Franz Rosenzweig (in The Star of Redemption) and Abraham Joshua Heschel (in "No...