Between Jerusalem and Benares: Comparative Studies in Judaism and Hinduism

2 The Love and Hate of Hinduism in the Work of Jewish Scholars

2 The Love and Hate of Hinduism in the Work of Jewish Scholars Wendy Doniger Many great Jewish scholars of religion have been motivated not by love of religion but by hatred of religion, or at least by anger directed against religion, or fear or loathing of religion. Freud and Marx are the most outstanding examples of brilliant Jewish haters of religion but there are others. The strange Hass-Lieb relationship that has bound many important Jewish Indologists to their subject matter has long been apparent to scholars working in the field. Yet Jews have also been numbered among the great scholars who are sympathetic to religion: Emil Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Levy-Bruhl, Boaz, Sapir, Radin, and Claude Levi-Strauss. Within the narrower field of Indology, one would think of Sylvain Levi,1 Moriz Winternitz, and, in our generation, Milton Singer, Charles Malamoud, and David Shulman. I would locate myself within this latter tradition, of Jews who love rather than those who hate religion in general and Hinduism in particular, and I would trace my lineage through the paternal line: my mother was a brilliant and passionate atheist and Marxist and my father a publisher of journals for the protestant clergy. There are so many things that could account for both the hate and the love of Jews toward Hinduism. Both might be connected in some way to the same phenomenon: the law of physics that like repels like. 15 16 Wendy Doniger For Judaism and Hinduism are alike in all sorts of striking ways, in their depiction of the cunning malevolence of God (be it the god of Job or Shiva), in their tendency toward orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy (the emphasis on correct praxis allowing for greater doctrinal freedom)-every Jewish Indologist would doubtless have his or her own list. But another phenomenon would account better, I think, for the predominance of love over hate in the annals of Jewish Indology, and that is the traditional Jewish relationship with other religions. There are two basic sets of question that one could ask about these Jewish Indologists. First, one could ask what it is that Jewish scholars have brought to the study of India, what Jewish "baggage" they have dragged through their Sanskrit texts, or what Jewish ways of thinking have proved fertile (or, indeed, barren) in foreign soil. But one could also look at the other side of the transaction, and ask what it is that Jewish scholars have gotten from India, what they have sought, and what they have found, in Hinduism. In this article I have chosen to set aside the first set of questions and to concentrate instead on the second, and, indeed, on one small aspect of that second question. I want to ask why Jews have taken Hinduism seriously as a source of personal meaning.2 Jews have always lived among Others-have always been the Others wherever they lived. The tendency to make use of other people's myths has long been a habit of the Jews, wandering or dispersed as they are. But this talent (or weakness, if you will) of a particular sort of Jew must be understood in the context of Judaism as a whole. The overwhelming majority of Jews are of a very different sort. They live and die in the religion of their birth and find it entirely sufficient unto their religious needs. I am not talking about religious conversion, let alone the anti-Semitic proselytizing of such groups as the Jews for Jesus. (It is indeed interesting to note the fascination that Indian gurus seem to have for American Jews, but this is another story.3) I have in mind, rather, the ways in which Jews have been forced, for their very survival, to learn other peoples' religions, and some cases to learn from them as well. This is all the more true of Jewish scholars. On some deep level, I think, all truly creative scholarship in the humanities is autobiographical , but it is particularly true that people who traffic in foreign myths are caught up in them, volens nolens. The great Indologist Heinrich Zimmer retold a welll-known Hasidic tale told by Martin Buber, a version pf the story of the Jew among Others. The Love and Hate ofHinduism It is a brief story, told of the Rabbi Eisik, son of Rabbi Jekel, who lived in the ghetto of Cracow, the capital of Poland...