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Throughout Rome and Jerusalem, as well as in his later essays, Hess argues that modern Reform Jews abandon their attachments to the Jewish national tradition and pursue the illusory goal of civic and political emancipation in Germany. They sacri¤ce their national heritage without replacing it with a tangible and sustainable community. According to Avineri, Hess treated Reform Judaism as a Jewish assimilationist strategy modeled on Protestant Christianity that “ignores the fact that the Jews are a nation and saw Judaism in religious terms only.”1 This critique was made before by Hess’s contemporaries and later German historians. If this were all Hess could offer, we would do well to look elsewhere. But Hess’s critique is a signi¤cant and unique study of how conceptions of tradition inform notions of identity. The problem is not only which political tradition the Reformers adopt as their own. The more troubling issue is how they recognize and explore Jewish attachments within that community. Hess argues that the German community, premised on the ideal of Bildung, renders the Jew incapable of acknowledging features of Jewish identity. Although Hess directs his polemic at the Reformers, he faults Orthodox Jews as well for restrictive adherence to a rabbinic tradition that renounces legitimate modern commitments. They too are blinded to constitutive features of modern Jewish identity. Hess seeks to ¤nd a middle way, between what he calls “the nihilism of the Reformers, who never learned anything,” and “the desperate reactionaries, who never forgot anything.”2 In Hess’s account, Jewish identity is fashioned by modern national and humanitarian movements, yet is rooted in Jewish culture, religion, character, and race; Hess seeks to learn from the present without forgetting the past. Yet Hess offers two divergent accounts of Jewish tradition in his critique of Reform and Orthodox Judaism. In his discussion of Jewish Orthodoxy, Hess appeals to hermeneutical creativity that overturns Orthodox rigidity and claims to religious authority. But in his analysis of Jewish Reform, Hess returns to the rhetoric of Kultus discussed in the second chapter. Jewish tradition exposes the enduring differences that ¤rmly root Jews in a distinctive racial history. But Hess criticizes the Reform tradition for much that we have come to associate with his racial theory—abstract continuity and undifferentiated unity. It is as if Hess transfers the assumptions underlying his racial theory onto Reform Judaism, ¤nds those claims wanting, yet still relies upon his racial theory to upend the Reform movement. He will not abandon his racial account even though it relies upon the very ideals of simple unity and integrity that he rejects in Reform Judaism. So two versions of tradition co-exist in unresolved tension in Rome and Jerusalem: the one attune to Traditions and Scars: Hess’s Critique of Reform and Orthodox Judaism 5 90 creativity and historical contingency, the other grounded in the ideals of unity and continuity. Hess pragmatically selects from the one or the other to reinforce his critique of Orthodoxy and Reform. Appealing to both accounts, Hess renounces Reform Judaism in favor of a more contextual and embodied tradition and the strong distinctions that inform it. He insists that Reform Jews cannot adequately evaluate the Jewish tradition because they cannot recognize difference. The Reformers search for a new identity and community in the secular, liberal German state that promises civic and legal equality. This is the promise of German Bildung: the universal moral community of the liberal, self-educated, unique individual. But the Bildung community requires the denial of difference and particularity. Reform Jews cannot uncover features of the Jewish tradition because particular differences are suppressed within the Bildung community. The Orthodox, by contrast, characteristically reject the rhetoric of German Bildung. But their wholesale denial leads to an unhealthy retreat into a more stable and insular Jewish community. The Orthodox too easily deny modern social and intellectual movements that inevitably complicate attachments to the Jewish tradition. They, too, suppress difference in order to maintain a¤rm continuity with the authoritative rabbinic past. For both the Orthodox and Reform, an understanding of tradition is limited by a failure to assess different and historically contingent values and goods. Hess, too, is deeply ambivalent about how to justify the different values that shape traditions, and the identities informed by them. Taylor’s account of strong and weak evaluation can help us see why this is the case. A strong evaluator thinks in terms of better and worse, noble and base, such that certain goods acquire a higher...

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