Chapter 5
Jewish Studies as Counterhistory
Susannah Heschel
The recent rise of multiculturalism has become an important moment for the academic field of Jewish studies to reconceive itself. During its early years in nineteenth-century Europe, Jewish studies was stimulated by a radical impulse to question or even overthrow the standard portrayal of Western history. The study of Judaism was not simply to be added to history books; rather, assumptions about the course of the Christian West were deliberately undermined by looking at its development from the perspective of Jewish experience. Today's muticulturalism is attempting something similar: not only adding a multitude of different peoples' experiences to the presentation of history but changing the configurations that mark the nature of that history—the values that govern it, the powers that shape it, the judgment of its significance.
The initial radical impulse of Jewish history began to diminish by the turn of the century and was lost with the transfer of Jewish studies to the American university. Taking another look at the origins of Jewish studies and its own effort to challenge European historiography brings to light the alliance that can be achieved between the study of Jewish experience and the theoretical frameworks offered by multicultural theory. The question is how multicultural theory, particularly postcolonialism, can be useful in illuminating aspects of Jewish experience. Postcolonial literary interpretations examine the political role of European colonization in the creation of literature as well as the resistances to political domination that are expressed literarily. Although the Jews did not constitute a territorial colony of Europe, they formed an internal colony within Europe, under
the domination of Christian powers. How does Judaism, the subaltern voice of Europe, speak back, so as to resist and disrupt the hegemony of the Christian West? Judaism's voice, I will argue, began its resistance and disruption with the rise of Jewish studies in the nineteenth century, as it not only presented its own history but reconfigured the history and significance of Christianity by undermining its central claims.
The most widespread depiction of nineteenth-century German Jews portrays them as struggling to assimilate fully into German society, even at the cost of abandoning their sense of identity as Jews. Their synagogues were transformed into Jewish versions of Christian churches, and in their personal identity they have been described as inverted Marranos, Jewish on the outside, Christian on the inside.[1]
Abraham J. Heschel, "The Meaning of Repentance," in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996), 68-70.
In the early generations of the nineteenth century Jewish men, who began to flock to German universities during the 1830s (sixty years before Jewish women were admitted), were forced to confront the Christianity-centered studies that prevailed.[2]Monika Richarz, Der Eintritt der Juden in die akademischen Berufe: Jüdische Studenten und Akademiker in Deutschland 1678-1848 (Tübingen: JCB Mohr, 1974).
The history of the West was the history of Christians, just as the philosophy and theology that were taught were exclusively Christian. As the discipline of Jewish studies began to emerge, its scholarship was not simply a presentation of Jewish history but a counterhistory of the prevailing Christian scholarship. Judaism, they argued, was not a degenerate religion that had outlived its significance with the dawn of Christianity, nor were Jews a fossil of history, as the Christian construction of "Judaism" claimed. Rather, the Wissenschaft des Judentums presented Judaism as standing at the center of Western civilization, having given birth to both Christianity and Islam. Neither of those religions was original or unique because both derived their central ideas and religious practices from Jewish texts and traditions. Islam was Jewish monotheism for the Arabs, Christianity a paganized version of Judaism which betrayed the message of its Jewish founder. Several prominent nineteenth-century German Jewish historians, including Heinrich Graetz and Abraham Geiger, argued that the intellectual narrow-mindedness and intolerance of the Middle Ages were the genuine products of Christianity, whereas modernity's open-mindedness stemmed from Judaism's teachings concerning tolerance and acceptance of others. They criticized Christian interpretations, particularly of Jewish texts, as biased or distorted, seeking to deliberately misrepresent the religious insights of Judaism.Through such criticisms the first practitioners of Jewish studies saw the study of Judaism as not simply an addition to the general curriculum but as a revision of that curriculum, an effort to resist and even overthrow the standard portrayal of Western history. In this version, at the heart of
the West would stand the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature, not classical Greek civilization or the New Testament, and the history of Christian thought would be presented as a derivatory offshoot of Jewish ideas. Even modernity, with its claims to secularized scientific forms of knowing and its insistence on tolerance and diversity, was to be understood as the product of Judaism, not of Christianity.
The privilege granted the Christian West also prevailed at American universities through the middle of the twentieth century, where knowledge was viewed as a means to protect Christianity's privileges, as scholars of the humanities saw themselves as preservers of Christian moral values and aesthetics.[3]
Susanne Klingenstein, Jews in the American Academy, 1900-1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).
A Jew could hardly be permitted to teach English literature, and that discipline did not open to Jews until mid-century. As much as the academy was a male domain, the pen a metaphor for the penis, it was also a Christian domain, and the hegemony of the Christian West over academic knowledge suggested that the very act of acquiring knowledge, interpreting, and transmitting it was a Christian act, on behalf of Christian society. Even the architecture of many American colleges, with a Christian chapel as its focal point, lent physical confirmation to the intellectual message.Unfortunately, the original radical political thrust of Jewish studies was lost when the field was transferred to the United States. Although the United States has always been a multiethnic country, built on the federalism of multiple groups, it is here that Jewish studies became transformed into a conservative field whose goal was the incorporation of Jewish history into the larger framework of Western civilization. The study of Judaism was presented as an effort not to undermine Christianity but to contribute to its understanding and reinforce its hegemony. American Jewish scholars trying to overcome the exclusion of Jewish studies generally presented Judaism as part of the established curriculum, an ally of the canon of Western Christian civilization, not a challenge to it. Jewish studies, its proponents argued, deserved a seat at the banquet because of its contributions to the West, not because it unsettled any established understandings of the West. Maimonides, for example, was to be studied in order to better understand Aquinas, without implying any challenge to the preeminence of medieval Christian scholasticism. Consequently, current attempts to establish multiculturalism within the academy have been eyed warily by Jewish studies scholars. The multicultural agenda, with its assault on the canon of Western civilization, seems to many to be antithetical to the interests of Jewish studies by identifying Jews and Judaism with the curriculum of dead white European males. As
a result, Jewish studies and multiculturalism frequently have come to view each other as enemies.
The question today is whether Jewish studies as a field can revitalize the radicalism that inspired its early development in the nineteenth century. The recovery of its radicalism would enable Jewish studies to enter the multicultural academy, disrupt antagonistic claims about Jews and Judaism, and eventually develop a multiculturalism within the study of Judaism. Through multiculturalism, Jewish studies might be restored to its more interesting position as challenger of the established definitions of the Western canon. The study of Judaism might itself be transformed, from the religion of white Western European Jewish males into a multivocal Jewish history that includes the geographic, gender, and class distribution of Jewish experience. Simultaneously, the example of Jewish experience contradicts multiculturalism's tendency to view Jews as white European oppressors. Finally, theoretical developments within multiculturalism, such as gender theory and postcolonialism, could be applied to illuminate the situation of Jews as a marginal minority group within a broader Christian or Muslim society.
Recognizing the intimate relation between knowledge and power stands at the heart of multicultural assertions.[4]
See, for example, the highly influential work by Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Tavistock Publications, 1972).
As Simon During has noted, since the 1970s culture has been analyzed through the spectrum of Antonio Gramsci's understanding of hegemony as relations of domination which are not visible as such.[5]Simon During, "Introduction," Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1993).
Illuminating those relations has become a contemporary preoccupation within the academy. The intimacy shared by knowledge and power has been most influentially illustrated by Edward Said's 1978 study, Orientalism , which describes the modern European academy's construction of "Orientalism" as a field of study put to use by European colonizers.[6]Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
While the book abounds in problematic assertions and has been subjected to widespread attack for misunderstanding the field of Islam and the course of modern European history as well as for over-looking "the potential contradiction between [Foucauldian] discourse theory and Gramscian hegemony,"[7]Dennis Porter, "Orientalism and Its Problems," in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 150-161, 160.
it has nonetheless become a banner for multicultural studies concerned with the politics of scholarship.From the perspective of the history of Jewish studies, the enormous acclaim given to Said's book seems odd; comparable criticisms of the academy's construction of "Judaism" and the political uses to which it was put is nothing new. Jewish scholars have investigated and criticized that construction and its politics for over a century. Indeed, the intimacy between knowledge and power may be better known to Jewish historians than anyone else. Surely the control of the university throughout most
of its history by Christians, the censorship of anti-Christian statements from Jewish texts, and the powerfully influential denigrating definitions of Judaism by Christian scholars are just some examples of the subordination and distortion of Jewish knowledge at the hands of Christian powers.[8]
See Frank E. Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism through Christian Eyes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Indeed, the New Testament's negative depiction of Pharisaic Judaism stands as a model of how distorted knowledge can become a regime of "truth" via the strength of the politically powerful. Going further, we can see that definitions of early Christianity in opposition to early Judaism incorporate the latter of necessity into the Christian hegemonic framework; the control and delimitation of the Jewish becomes necessary to define the Christian. Almost every study of Christian origins includes a contrasting description of a degenerate first-century Judaism, as if an affirmation of Christian teachings by itself were insufficient to establish its legitimacy. Yet by defining Christianity as the "not-Jewish," Judaism is made the signifier of Christianity. "Can the subaltern speak?" Gayatri Spivak, one of the leading postcolonial theorists, asks;[9]Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 66-111.
how does Judaism speak to the master narrative of Western history, which is rooted in traditions of Christian religious supremacy?Spivak concludes that the very construction of the subaltern carries the seeds of its undoing. In the particular case of the Christian repression of Judaism through its construction of "Judaism," the subaltern Jewish voice begins by insinuating itself as necessary to Christian, even while claiming that the Christian is not necessary to the Jewish. It is not the Jew who desires Christianity, but the Christian who requires a myth of Jewish desire in order to legitimate Christianity. Had the Jews not been in a desperate religious state in the first century, there would have been no reason for Jesus to initiate the reform of Judaism that turned itself into Christianity.
Modern European scholars' construction of "Orientalism" took place in the absence of Arabs or Muslims, but "Judaism" was constructed by Christian scholars in the presence of Jews, who were able to talk back. The German Jewish scholars who shaped the first generation of the Wissenschaft des Judentums condemned the exclusive control of Jewish knowledge by Christians. Judaism was being portrayed in a "hateful light" by Christian theologians, asserted Immanuel Wolf, who published the first manifesto of Jewish studies in 1823.[10]
Immanuel Wolf, "Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judenthums," Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums 1 (1823): 1-24.
Leopold Zunz, one of the towering figures of Jewish scholarship in nineteenth-century Germany, complained of the tendentious view of Jews in academic writings. Jews, according to Zunz, were depicted either as witnesses or opponents of a victorious Christianity, but always as representatives of disputed principles, never as subjects of their own self-defined historical narratives.[11]Leopold Zunz, Zur Geschichte und Literatur, 2d ed. (Berlin: Louis Lamm, 1919).
Whatever thecase, Zunz suggested that Christian scholars took on a "demonic nature" when studying Judaism.[12]
Cited by Altmann, "Jewish Studies," 84.
The alternative was the emergence of a coterie of Jewish scholars of rabbinics who became gatekeepers, guarding a scholarly treasure of rabbinic literature that, they insisted, would transform historical arguments. Even though they called for training scholars in Hebrew and rabbinics within faculties of Protestant and Catholic theology, the goal was to establish faculties of Jewish theology at German universities, just as feminist scholars called for the establishment of women's studies programs at universities even as the study of women was integrated into the general curriculum.Multiculturalism, however, is concerned not only with giving voice to neglected groups within history; it is also concerned to develop new analytic tools to better understand the position of the socially marginal and to expose the exercise of power within the mainstream academy. Stephen Greenblatt's analyses of the roles of racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism in Shakespeare's writings have provoked outrage among opponents of multicuturalism, who view the approach as an intrusion of the political into literature.[13]
Stephen Jay Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Opponents of multiculturalism term his exposure of the political agenda at work in Shakespeare an irresponsible exercise of left-wing politics, a politicization of the academy. Underlying such polemics is the myth of apolitical knowledge, as if multiculturalists do not represent one among many competing political viewpoints but are the only ones with a political agenda.The myth is not new, nor is the challenge to it. Rather, the contemporary debate over multiculturalism recapitulates much of the debate that took place between Christians and Jews during the nineteenth century, as each group created conflicting scholarly approaches to its canonical texts and histories. Whereas the multicultural debate in contemporary America focuses on a range of topics, in the last century the debates were between Jews and Christians and they were most often carried out over the question of the historical figure of Jesus and his relationship to Judaism.
Like Jewish studies of the nineteenth century, contemporary multiculturalism is concerned with destabilizing the hegemonic claims of the academy. African American studies and women's studies are two examples of efforts to include a multiplicity of voices in the presentation of history and literature. Whose history and whose literature should be studied? When the story of male, white, Christian Western civilization is related, should not its cultural glories be tempered with the evidence of its racism and misogyny? That kind of question headed the agenda of the Wissenschaft des Judentums as well; Heinrich Graetz opened nearly every section
of his eleven-volume History of the Jews with a description of the cruel persecutions perpetrated by Christians against Jews.[14]
Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten his auf die Gegenwart, volumes 3-11 (Breslau, 1853-1870).
The history of the Christian West, for Graetz, is coterminus with the history of anti-Semitism. Indeed, when Graetz turns to explaining the rise of Christianity, his formulation comes as a kind of Jewish theodicy, trying to account for the origins of Jewish suffering by analyzing Jesus and Paul. So too with contemporary feminist analyses of the history of philosophy; for instance, the study of Aristotle concerns not simply the origins of Western philosophy but also reveals the origins of the profound gender biases that have infiltrated Western thought.[15]Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (London: Virago, 1980); Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: The Problem of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).
In its day the Jewish perspective on Western history was perceived by Christian scholars as radical, even a potential threat. The Christian West had been used to looking at Judaism, dissecting its flaws and defining its nature. Now, for the first time, Jews were looking at Christianity and that shift in gaze was not accepted easily; on the contrary, as Jewish scholars began their exploration of Christianity, they aroused an intense acrimony among Christian theologians which far exceeded the conventional bounds of scholarly discourse. For example, Graetz's claims about Christianity led Heinrich von Treitschke to accuse him of holding an anti-Christian bias that was shared by all German Jews and that served, for Treischke, as grounds for denying Jews German citizenship.[16]
Heinrich von Treitschke, A Word about Our Jewry, trans. Helen Lederer (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, 1958); Walter Böhlich, Der Berliner Antisemitismusstreit (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1965).
Thus, Jewish studies emerged not as a politically neutral field concerned with describing the history of the Jews but as a politically charged effort to reconceive Christian history as well. The central focus of discussion was the first century, the era that saw the rise of both rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity as well as the destruction of Jewish political autonomy. The historical description of that era, which concerned both Jewish and Christian scholars, was crucial for determining the nature of the two religions and quickly became a debate over the merits of each. That debate centered, for Jewish and Christian historians, on the figure of Jesus and his relation to first-century Judaism.
One of the most influential figures among nineteenth-century Jewish historians was Abraham Geiger, who wrote extensively on the historical background of Jesus in early Judaism and whose arguments can be taken as an early example of multicultural challenge.[17]
Abraham Geiger, Das Judentum und seine Geschichte, 3 vols. (Breslau, 1865-1871); English translation, Judaism and Its History, trans. Charles Newburgh (New York, 1911).
In his survey of Jewish history, published during the 1860s, Geiger argued that Jesus was not only a Jewish religious leader but specifically a Pharisee whose goal was nothing more than that of the Pharisees: the democratization and liberalization of Judaism. Nothing in Jesus' teachings was new or unexpected: he interpreted the commandments, encouraged greater piety, and engagedin the sort of rabbinic disputes that were typical of Pharisaism. The later dogma of Christian theology concerning Jesus—the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the Resurrection—were later theological inventions that resulted from pagan philosophical influences. Geiger's arguments not only sought to counter the widespread image of Judaism as a degenerate religion, which was current in the Christian scholarship of his day, but went further, insisting that Judaism was the original, true religion from which Christianity—and Islam, according to his book on the Koran—was a deviant derivative.[18]
Abraham Geiger, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? Eine von der Königl. Preussischen Rheinuniversität gekrönte Preisschrift (Bonn, 1833; 2d ed., Leipzig: M. W. Kaufmann, 1902). Translated as Judaism and Islam by F. M. Young (Madras, 1898; 2d ed., New York: Ktav, 1970).
The implications of Geiger's argument for Christians were highly problematic, and Protestant theologians responded to him with anger.[19]
For a review of the reception of Geiger's work, see my Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (forthcoming), chapter 7.
According to them, Jesus was the first Christian, not just one among the rabbis of his day. Indeed, Jesus was presented by nearly all Christian theologians as standing in sharp contrast to the Judaism of his day, which they depicted as a degenerate, immoral legalism, hardly a religion at all.[20]Emil Schürer, Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Zeitgeschichte (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1874); second edition published as Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1886-1887; 3d ed., 1898); Joseph Langen, Das Judenthum in Palaestina zur Zeit Christi (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder Verlag, 1866); Julius Wellhausen, Die Pharisäer und die Sadducäer: Eine Untersuchung zu inneren jüdischen Geschichte (Greifswald: Bamberg, 1874; Hannover: Orient-Buchhandlung H. Lafaire, 1924; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967).
By insisting that Jesus was a Pharisee, Geiger implied that those Christians who sought to follow the faith of Jesus, rather than the dogma about Christ, would have to convert to Judaism. If Jesus was simply a Jew, what defined the originality and uniqueness of his message, and what was the difference between Christianity and Judaism?The nature of Geiger's arguments about Jesus or Graetz's claims about Christian persecution of Jews is best understood as a form of counterhistory, a genre that has been operative since antiquity but that was identified in its relation to Jewish studies by David Biale in his study of Gershom Scholem.[21]
The motif of counterhistory is developed by David Biale, Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979); see also Amos Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 36 f.
Counterhistory is a genre of interpretation which characterizes the methods frequently employed by today's multiculturalism, in which the sources of one's adversary are exploited and turned "against the grain," in Walter Benjamin's phrase.[22]Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 257; cited by Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 36.
Counterhistory also characterizes traditional Christian theological histories of the Jews, which (mis)read the Hebrew Bible as anticipating the coming of Christ (theological promises) or as explanations for the rise of Christianity (the degenerate state of postexilic Judaism). As counterhistory, these Christian revisions of Judaism, whether intentional or not, "deprive the adversary of his positive identity, of his self-image, and substitute it with a pejorative counter-image."[23]Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 48.
At the same time, Geiger's arguments also have to be acknowledged as betraying a large degree of Jewish triumphalism. Amos Funkenstein is correct in observing that the "forger of a counteridentity of the other renders his own identity to depend on it."[24]
Funkenstein, Perceptions of Jewish History, 48.
That was Hegel's argument, presented as the master-slave dialectic, that the master's identity as a masterdepended on its recognition by the slave. The master narrative of Christianity may not realize its dependence on a subjugated Judaism, but once the subaltern Jewish voice began to speak, its potential to undermine Christian claims began to be clear. Yet the subaltern voice of Geiger's counterhistory of Christianity also poses a threat to Jewish identity. Making Judaism's significance to Western civilization so intimately linked to the figure of the Jewish Jesus forges a dependence that relies on the Christian theological realm rather than resting independently on Jewish identity.
Now it is well worth asking why Jewish historians, including Geiger, gave so much attention to the history of Christian origins and the figure of Jesus, especially given their concern with anti-Semitism and Christian anti-Judaism. After all, the Jesus story has been responsible for inordinate Christian violence and Jewish suffering. Why not dismiss or refute or ignore Jesus and the Gospels? Multicultural theory, which concerns itself with understanding the efforts of socially marginal groups to overcome prejudice against them, can illuminate underlying motivations of Jewish historiography and demonstrate the politics at work in their allegedly objective scholarship and that of their opponents.
Telling the story of Christian origins from a Jewish perspective was an act of Jewish self-empowerment. The position of Jews entering the world of Christian theology is not unlike the position of women novelists entering the nineteenth-century literary world. In their landmark study of women novelists in Britain, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argued that women were required to "kill the angel in the house," the aesthetic ideal of the female promoted in male literature, before they could generate their own literature.[25]
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979).
Similarly, Jewish theologians initiated an effort to destroy the image of Judaism in Christian theology as part of their project of self-definition. Nina Auerbach has observed in connection with women writers in Victorian England who appropriated male-authored misogynous myths that the power of mythologies lies both in their ability to oppress and in their ability to endow strength.[26]Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 12.
To deny a myth or try to sidestep it will neither destroy its power nor subvert its meaning. The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of women's efforts to cope with the misogynist myths of literature by retelling the conventional narrative but subverting its plot. In a similar pattern, modern Jewish thought has been formed not simply by creating a Jewish historical narrative but by attempting a rebirth of the Christian mythic potential under Jewish auspices. What is particularly interesting in Geiger's work is not so much his denial of individual Christian anti-Jewish myths but the second look he takes at those myths and the power he reclaims from them. Like women charactersin the English novel, the Jewish victim of Christian persecutions—slain, dismembered, powerless—is revived, made whole, and empowered through a Jewish retelling of the Christian story. In this theological construction, Jews are thereby enabled to become the self-restoring hero who tries, in Auerbach's words, to merge "imperceptibly with the lives of those who believe in [the myth] and thereby into the history they make."[27]
Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, 15.
Seen in this light, the modern Jewish retelling of Christian origins is not merely a matter of Jews wishing to "set the record straight." Rather, it demonstrates a Jewish desire to enter the Christian myth, become its hero, and claim the power inherent in it. Reform Jews in particular concentrated so much attention on early Christianity in part to uncover a model for their own acts of revisioning Judaism, since they saw Christianity itself as beginning in a strong misreading of Judaism.From the Christian perspective, the widespread research on the Jewish background to the New Testament became so prevalent during the nineteenth century not simply to gain information about Jewish history. Rather, it was a necessary element in constructing the hegemony of Christian scholarship. Studies of first-century Judaism provided information about the historical background of the New Testament, but, more important, they established the preferred Christian interpretation under the pretense of an objective, scholarly gaze. The creation of a devalued Judaism as "Other" to Christianity made the Christian theological gaze seem to be a transcendent, rational subject able to undertake analysis without being affected by subjective factors or personal biases.[28]
The effort was similar to the establishment of the transcendental rational subject outside of time and space as a necessary part of the nineteenth-century colonialist enterprise. See Nancy Hartsock, "Foucault on Power," in Feminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda J. Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990), 160.
Christian scholarly investigation of Jewish history established a radical dichotomy between Christianity and Judaism which was required to maintain Christian theological order. Presenting the historical relationships between the two religions was simultaneously a construction of contemporary social relations and of relations of power within the realm of scholarship. The Christian made himself the transcendent subject of theological Wissenschaft, necessitating a radical dichotomy with an Other in order to maintain order. The gaze of historical theology was Christian; the ordering of history, the questions raised, the evidence examined, all revolved around the central issue, explaining the rise of Christianity. Other religions, other peoples' histories, other texts, were viewed from the Christian perspective, weighed and evaluated with reference to the Christian standard of measurement. Edward Said has noted the function of the Orient in the imagination of Christian Europe: "European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self."[29]
Edward Said, Orientalism (new York: Vintage Books, 1979), 3-8.
The role of the "Jewish" in theEuropean Christian imagination is very similar, even in the parallel metaphors that establish both the Jewish and the Oriental as feminine.
Geiger's reinterpretation of Christian origins is more complex than simply the story of the powerless demanding that the powerful relinquish their power. Rather, his engagement with Christian history remakes both Jewish and Christian theology; he is like Paul, whose work is "a struggle over interpretations of power, conflicts over authority and truth."[30]
Elizabeth Castelli, Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991), 44.
The impact of Geiger's view of Christianity is comparable to the impact achieved by the gaze of the nude woman in Edouard Manet's famous painting Olympia , first displayed in Paris in 1863, the same year Geiger delivered his lectures on Jesus in Frankfurt. By reversing the position of the observer, from Christians writing about Judaism to a Jew writing about Christianity, Geiger reversed the power relations of the viewer and the viewed. Until now, the gaze of scholarship had been a Christian gaze and Judaism appeared occasionally as the object viewed. In Geiger's writings, the gaze is Jewish, and Christianity is transformed into a semiotic representation within Judaism. The first Jew to be so thoroughly versed in New Testament scholarship and to be armed with an array of rabbinic textual evidence unknown to his Christian counterparts, Geiger did not simply refute Christian claims but entered the Christian story. Telling the story of the life of Jesus became Geiger's appropriation of the Jesus myth. Through his retelling, Geiger the Jew became the hero, claiming the power that inheres in the story for himself and his community. Yet as much as Geiger railed against Christian anti-Judaism, his own anti-Christian attitudes remained equally tenacious. The theological gaze was indeed reversed, but its ferocity was not diminished. Geiger defied the scholarly gaze as Christian theology had defined it; in his work Judaism is no longer merely the object of representation but the subject gazing at Christianity, which is transformed into an object of Jewish representation. Geiger's gaze is defiant, disruptive, and subversive. Christian reactions to his writings frequently intensified the negative depiction of Judaism, particularly of the Pharisees, and insisted on the opposition between Jesus and Judaism. Perhaps the rage Geiger's interpretation evoked among Christian historians demonstrates just how powerful his gaze was.By presenting an example of the ideology underlying Jewish studies as it developed during the nineteenth century I do not intend to suggest a continuation of the particular arguments developed by Geiger, nor do I urge a focus on Jewish-Christian relations or a return to the figure of Jesus as the site of multicultural debate. Rather, I intend to describe the methodology of counterhistory and its usefulness in formulating a radical
challenge to hegemonic forms of knowledge. Both the examples of the Jews and of Jewish studies as a field can make a theoretical contribution to the development of the multicultural academy.
Contemporary multiculturalism, if it is to be effective, should not concern itself exclusively, or even primarily, with providing a rainbow of data concerning the experiences of diverse cultures. Rather, its goal ought to be the establishment of a variety of gazes that will unsettle and throw into question the complacency of academic categories and analyses. Feminist theory, for example, has been most effective in pointing out the narrow-mindedness of identifying the "human" with the male. One of the most prominent examples is Carol Gilligan's challenge of the stages of children's moral development, which had been established by Lawrence Kohlberg solely on empirical evidence drawn from boys.[31]
Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge: harvard University Press, 1982).
Gilligan argued that the moral development of girls occurs along a wholly different spectrum and that morality, when viewed from a female perspective, would have to be entirely redefined. Although feminist educators have criticized Gilligan's work for not taking into account variations in girls' experiences based on social, economic, and racial background,[32]Critical reviews of Gilligan's work include Judy Auerback, Linda Blum, Vicki Smith, and Christine Williams, "Commentary on Gilligan's In a Different Voice," Feminist Studies 11 (Spring 1985): 149-161.
her fundamental challenge still holds true: that male experience cannot be equated with human experience and that categories of morality based solely on male behavior and judgment are at best partial and at worst immoral. Women's studies, in other words, is not simply about the inclusion of women's experiences but about reconsidering the very categories of definition and analysis used in the academy, a kind of counterhistory illustrated by the example of nineteenth-century Jewish studies.Ultimately, even multiculturalism itself might be subjected to a kind of counterhistorical analysis. The simplistic distinctions between oppressor and victim which too frequently operate in multicultural discourse relegate Jews to the side of white Europeans. Awareness of Jewish history, however, would reveal a more complex identity not only of Jews but also of Europeans. As much as Jews in the modern era began to participate actively in the construction of European society, they became its greatest victims. Jewish identity stands in many ways as a challenge by insisting on the complexity of white European identity. As much as Jews are inside the Christian world, they are also outsiders; they occupy a position of ambivalence and ambiguity that functions as a kind of counterhistory to the multicultural account of the West: not all white Europeans are Christians. The danger lies in the tendency of multiculturalism to construct a counterpart to Europe's "Orientalism" in the form of a distorted myth of European hegemony.
In Jewish studies multiculturalism points out the problematic nature
of retaining a unified construct of "Jew." The multiplicity of Jewish experience begins, most fundamentally, in radical distinctions between the historical experiences of men and women. To speak of the entry of "Jews" into German universities in the early nineteenth century, for example, is to presume an identity between Jews and men, since Jewish women did not gain entry until all women, Jewish or not, were admitted in the late nineteenth century. Aspects of the social emancipation of "Jews," then, take on greater complexity, since Jewish women can be said to have attained societal integration in some respects not as Jews but as women. Yet that assertion in itself presupposes the equation of "Jewish" with "male" experience. Who is the Jew as woman and how is her difference to be taken into account when speaking of the "Jew"? With that question begins the entry of multiculturalism into Jewish historical experience.
However much some Jews may rail against multiculturalism, and multiculturalists themselves may reject Jews from their intellectual community, multicultural theory itself lies at the heart of modern Jewish experience. The struggle over multiculturalism so intensely characterizes the Jewish adventure because it expresses both the relationship between the Jew and non-Jewish society and also the relationship between the Jew (female) and Jewish society. In many ways, women's experience within Judaism reproduces Jewish experience within the larger society: enduring a sense of exile within one's own social and linguistic world; finding oneself an immigrant within one's own society or community; calling for acceptance and equality from hostile or ambivalent compatriots; striving for an identity against the tide of definitions that diminish one's sense of self. Over and over in the encounters with Judaism, the Jew as woman asks: What of the Jewish expressions of politics, morality, or faith applies to me as a woman? What can be created to give voice to the tenuous balance of identity as Jew and woman? These are the questions of multiculturalism, questions about identity and meaning, knowledge and power, experience and definition. They are the central questions asked by Jews and of Jews.