Secular Judaism and Secular Jews: Lives and Choices 1789 to 2005

The University of Pennsylvania is offering a course not funded by the Posen Foundation but consistent with the project. The course, Secular Judaism and Secular Jews: Lives and Choices is also offered as a continuing adult education course.

Can Judaism exist without the religion? Are there secular Jews? Is it possible for people to consider themselves to be Jewish without any formal affiliation with either a religious or other specifically Jewish institution? If so, what sort of Jews are they? These questions trouble all those interested in the history, present position and future prospect of the Jews as a people. There have been many answers: Zionist, non-Zionist, cultural, ethnic, sociological, theological (both Christian and Jewish) and others less respectable. We have no answers but we have a different way to put the question, a biographical way, which may help to define the parameters of a possible answer. We ask how have individual Jews defined themselves and how have they chosen to live their lives. Such choices only became possible in the Western world after the Enlightenment, the American and the French Revolutions had created the category of "citizen," a new, free, universal, abstract person, who had the right to be what he or she chose. This course will try to address these questions in a strictly historical way, following a selection of lives of important Jews who at different times and places attempted their own answers to these questions. These lives will be drawn mainly from Western Europe, where until the Second World War, the majority of Jews lived. We shall also consider some American lives since during the Twentieth Century the American Jewish community became the place where choice of identity became an unusually important issue. We shall also look at the lives of some who chose Israel as the "national" answer to the question of Jewish identity.


Secular Judaism and Secular Jews: Lives and Choices 1789 to 2005
Adut Education Course

Course Arrangements:

This course approaches an old problem in what we think may be a new way. It is an experiment in substance but also in teaching. It is a course designed exclusively for Senior Associates and others from the wider adult community. It will run in parallel with the undergraduate course on the same topic and will benefit from the experience both instructors have had in discussion with the students. Both of us have learned a great deal and been forced to think in new ways and find new combinations of problems.

Reading Material:

Paul Mendes-Flohr, and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.): The Jew in the Modern World. A Documentary History, Second Edition, New York and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Method of approach:

Jewish history has often been studied from within the Jewish world. Our approach adopts a broader perspective: the interaction of the Jews, always a minority everywhere until the foundation of the State of Israel, with the wider, surrounding society. Jewish experience and practice, social structures and religious inheritance, show a remarkable uniformity. Thus to compare the lives of Émile Durkheim and Captain Alfred Dreyfus, two Alsatian Jews with identical backgrounds, exactly the same age and educational trajectories but diametrically different fates – the one a hero and an icon of French republicanism, the other stripped of his rank in the army and imprisoned for a treason he did not commit - cannot be explained without understanding the structures, divisions and politics of the French Third Republic in the period 1870-1914. The Jews tell us as much about the history of the host societies as they reveal about themselves. What does that history tell us about the character of modern historical development and about the nature of historical thought itself? These are not easy questions, and we have no easy answers; indeed in a few cases no answers at all, but, if history as a discipline has any moral claims to understand the way we live in society, it must validate those claims in the hardest of all tests, and the history of the Jews in the modern era constitutes just such a test.

Course Outline:

1. Introduction / Enlightenment: Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant
French Revolution and the Critique of the Revolution

Readings
Jacob Katz, Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation, Syracuse University Press, 1998, pp 1-41

Mendelssohn, Moses. On the question: what does “to enlighten” mean? in: Philosophical Writings. Ed. by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. CUP Cambridge 1997. pp.313-317.

Immanuel Kant. What is Enlightenment? in: Modern History source Book online: www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/kant-whatis.html

Moses Mendelssohn. The right to be different. In: Mendes-Flohr, Paul and Reinharz, Jehuda (eds.): The Jew in the Modern World, Oxford University Press Oxford and New York 1995. pp.68-69.

Dohm, Christian Wilhelm von. Concerning the Amelioration of the Civil Status of the Jews, in: Mendes-Flohr, Paul and Reinharz, Jehuda (eds.): The Jew in the Modern World. pp.28-36.

Moses Mendelssohn . Response to Dohm/Remarks concerning Michaelis’ response to Dohm. In: Mendes-Flohr, Paul and Reinharz, Jehuda (eds.): The Jew in the Modern World, Oxford University Press Oxford and New York 1995. pp.44-48

Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France And on the Proceeding in Certain Societies in London Relative to That Event in a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to a Gentleman in Paris. 1790 Harvard Classics, Vol. 24, Part 3 (on-line: www.bartleby.com/24/3/) Paras. 75-99

2. Heinrich Heine, Giacomo Meyerbeer and Richard Wagner – Jewish Emancipation and Hatred of the Jew

Readings
Heinrich Heine. A Ticket of Admission to European Culture. In Mendes-Flohr, Paul and Reinharz, Jehuda (eds.): The Jew in the Modern World pp.258-259

Heinrich Heine, The Gods in Exile. in: The Sword and the Flame. Selections from Heinrich Heine’s Prose. Ed. and with an introduction by Alfred Werner. Thomas Yoseloff New York, London 1960. pp. 541-584.

Hannah Arendt. The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age. Ed. With an introduction by Ron H. Feldman. Grove Press New York 1978. pp.67-75

Richard Wagner, Judaism in Music (1850) and other essays. Transl. by William Ashton Ellis. Lincoln Nebraska and London 1995.
users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/prose/wagjuda.htm

3. Karl Marx / Leon Trotsky, Socialism and the Russian Revolution

Readings
Karl Marx, “On the Jewish Question” (1844) (+Lasalle/Bernstein)
www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/jewish-question/

Yuri Sleskine, “The Jewish Century” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004) pp. 105-188

Leon Trotsky. My Life
www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1930-lif/ch01.htm

4. Benjamin Disraeli / Cesare Lombroso – Liberalism and Science

Readings
Isaiah Berlin, Against the current: essays in the history of ideas. “Marx and Disraeli”
edited and with a bibliography by Henry Hardy ; with an introduction by Roger Hausheer.
London: Hogarth Press, 1979.

Cesare Lombroso and William Ferrero, The Female Offender, London 1959 pp 1-26
Cesare Lombroso, Man of Genius. London: W.Scott, 1891 Preface, pp v-xi, Part One, Ch II pp 5-37, Part Two, Ch III pp. 133-150

5. Emile Durkheim / Alfred Dreyfus – Sociology of Secularism

Readings
Émile Durkheim, “Concerning the definition of religious phenomena’ (1899) in Durkheim on Religion, ed. W.S,F. Pickering, London/Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975, pp.74-98

Emile Zola. J’accuse. In: Mendes-Flohr, Paul and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.): The Jew in the Modern World. pp.351-356

6. Wissenschaft des Judentums (Science of Judaism) / Kaplan

Readings
Modern Jewish Studies. Chapter V. Mendes-Flohr, Paul and Jehuda Reinharz (eds.): The Jew in the Modern World. pp.207-248

Abraham Geiger and liberal Judaism; the challenge of the nineteenth century. Compiled with a biographical introd. by Max Wiener. Translation from the German by Ernst J. Schlochauer. Philadelphia, Jewish Publication Society of America, 1962
A Series of 34 Lectures, Breslau 1865. pp.149-157, pp.265-269, pp.283-293

Mordecai M. Kaplan, The Greater Judaism in the Making. A Study of the Modern Evolution of Judaism, New York, The Reconstructionist Press, 1960, pp.450-511

7. Jewish Nationalisms: Theodor Herzl / Haim Zhitlowsky

Readings

Theodor Herzl. The Jewish State. Translated from the German by Sylvie D'Avigdor, This edition published in 1946 by the American Zionist Emergency Council, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Zionism/herzl2.html

Haim Zhitlowsky. Job and Faust. (1919) in: Two Studies in Yiddish culture. Edited and translated by Percy Matenko. Leiden: E.J. Brill 1968. pp.90-99; pp.148-162

8. Sigmund Freud and the Modern Mind

Readings
L.J. Rather, “Disraeli, Freud and Jewish Conspiracy Theories”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. No. 1 (Jan.-Mar., 1986) pp 111-131

Gay, Peter, 1923, A Godless Jew: Freud, atheism, and the making of psychoanalysis. New Haven: Yale University Press; Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1987.

9. Saul Bellow / Primo Levi – After the Holocaust

Readings
“The Bellarosa Connection” in Saul Bellow, Collected Stories, New York: Viking Penguin, 2001, pp. 35-89

Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz. The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Translated by Stuart Woolf ; London : Abacus, 1987 (1997) pp.9-11, 87-150

Amos Funkenstein, “Theological Responses to the Holocaust” in Perceptions of Jewish History. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1993, pp.306-337