بسم الله الرحمن الرحيم
و به نستعين
Article Information
Volume: 15 issue: 3, page(s): 369-390
Article first published online: June 16, 2017; Issue published: June 1, 2017
Dov Weiss
University of Illinois, USA
Corresponding Author: Dov Weiss, Department of Religion, University of Illinois, 3021 Foreign Language Building, 707 South Mathews, Urbana, IL 61801, USA
The Rabbinic God and Mediaeval Judaism
Anti-Anthropomorphism:
The Maimonidean Stranglehold
Unlike mediaeval Jewish philosophy or mediaeval Kabbalah, the rabbis do not present their ideas in a logical or systematic fashion (Schechter 1961 [1909]: 1-20). Rather, the rabbis showcase their ideas through an anthology of terse and fragmentary rabbinic teachings connected to Scripture that evince little order. Moreover, many of these teachings are ‘transitory’ (p. 9) and unstable as they were adopted by ‘contradictory’ and ‘incoherent’ rabbinic ‘impulses’ (p. 12) that should be regarded not as fixed theologies but as reflecting a spectrum of rabbinic responses to specific historical concerns.Notwithstanding these hesitations, scholars have tried to highlight the distinctive rabbinic approach to God. For example, Alon Goshen-Gottstein (1994: 172) has posited that ‘in all of rabbinic literature there is not a single statement that categorically denies that God has body or form’. In other words, despite rabbinic debates over specific theological claims such as the extent of God’s power and knowledge, we seem to have full acceptance—at least on a straightforward reading—that the rabbinic God, much like the biblical God, should be viewed as embodying a human-like personality. As further evidence, early Christian thinkers such as Origen (182–154), Justin Martyr (100–165), and Basil the Great (329–379) criticized the Jewish belief in the corporeality of God (Stroumsa 1983).Posing a problem for later Jewish philosophers, some rabbis anthropomorphize God in ways that outdo anything we encounter in the Hebrew Bible (Stern 1992; Green 1975; Wolfson 1994). Although in Scripture, God is conceived as having humanlike limbs and organs such as arms, eyes, and legs, and humanlike emotions such as love, anger, regret, and jealousy, rabbinic literature expands the anthropomorphic and anthropopathic field by having God assume humanlike roles and features never entertained by biblical authors. A few examples suffice to illustrate this anthropomorphic intensification. In the Hebrew Bible, God saves or punishes Israel. Rabbi Akiva and other sages, by contrast, also imagine God, the Shekhinah, to be ‘in exile’ with His people and, until the redemptive moment, in physical bondage with them. As the Israelites experience suffering, so does the rabbinic God. Moreover, many Midrashim depict God as Israel’s ‘brother’ or ‘friend’—a relational model that virtually never appears in the Hebrew Bible. In these relational analogies, the vertical hierarchy between God and humanity is downplayed, and the horizontal relationship between God and humanity is accentuated. And, more radically, as Moshe Halbertal has demonstrated, the Rabbinic God at times assumes a weaker position in the human-divine metaphor (Halbertal 2009).Other examples of rabbinic anthropomorphic intensification include God laughing, dancing with sages, studying and teaching Torah in the house of study, engaging in matchmaking, and spending His free time playing with mythic sea-monsters. We also have dozens of midrashic texts detailing God’s physical features, such as His clothing and crown. God even rides a horse and kisses the walls of the Temple and His most beloved human followers. Many of these images do not have analogues in the various biblical traditions (see Weiss 2017: 150).Mediaeval philosophers, and their German enlightenment heirs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, could not accept at face value these anthropomorphic and anthropopathic depictions of God. That is because, based largely on the Maimonidean view, God was understood as a concept rather than character; as an ‘it’ rather than a ‘He’. Like the Aristotelian unmoved mover, God in the Maimonidean view is incorporeal, unchanging, and perfect. Therefore, there can be no essential analogy between God and humanity. God is transcendent and has no direct relationship with the world or humanity. This posed an obvious problem to rational interpreters of the rabbinic tradition.Rather than defend these odd divine depictions as genuine expressions of the rabbinic imagination, the standard Jewish response, beginning in the mediaeval period, was to neutralize the problem by adopting various strategies of containment (Fishbane 2005: 3-13; Saperstein 1980: 1-20). These apologetic maneuvers included decanonizing or devaluing the non-legal sections of the Talmud and Midrash (Lorberbaum 2007:); seeing these strange divine images as ‘poetic conceits’ for the uneducated masses (Heinemann 1986); or embarking on various forms of metaphorical or allegorical reinterpretation that expose the deeper spiritual kernel of the rabbinic depiction (Guttmann 1966: 33-35). As Yair Lorberbaum astutely documented (2009), the mediaeval philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138–1203) adopted all these techniques and thereby created a virtual stranglehold on Jewish theology—even for later academic scholars. From Maimonides onward, rabbinic texts concerning God were typically read through a mediaeval philosophical lens: They were ignored, not taken as serious theology (Schechter 1961 [1909]: 12, 13, 42; Kadushin 1932: 29; Ginzberg et al. 1967: 1.29-32), or reinterpreted as expressing lofty ideas in concrete form (Kadushin 1965: 273-303). To buttress their view, these scholars typically argued that the rabbis used the phrase ‘as it were’ [כביכול] as a method to signal their lack of seriousness or literalness in what was being said. Alternatively, drawing on the writings of Sa’adia Gaon, some mediaeval rationalists understood the anthropomorphic descriptions of the Shekhinah or Kavod (Divine Glory) in rabbinic passages as referring not to God himself, but rather to lofty creations of God (Wolfson 1994: 126-27; Altmann 1969: 140-60). In short, rabbinic theology was not read on its own terms.A few examples will illustrate this phenomenon in early twentieth-century scholarship. Rejecting a literalist reading of rabbinic thought, Julius Guttmann (1966: 34-35) argued that the ‘most daring [rabbinic] anthropomorphisms…express the consciousness of the presence of God’. In order words, rabbinic descriptions of God should be read metaphorically. Guttmann further writes (p. 35) that the Midrashic claim that God shared in the suffering of the Jewish people after the destruction of the Temple was merely a rabbinic way to highlight the ‘intimate bond between God and his people’. Perhaps the most remarkable expression of this mediaeval retrojection can be found in Louis Ginzberg’s assertion (1901: 1.624) that ‘Sa’adia [tenth century] is in full harmony with Rabbinical Judaism when he maintains that the corporeality of God is contrary both to reason and Scripture’.The problematic effects of this Maimonidean hijacking of classical rabbinic thought is most starkly evident in Ephraim Urbach’s encyclopedic The Sages (1975 [1969]), which, while systematizing the unsystematic thinking of the rabbis, imposes abstract mediaeval categories and conceptions retroactively onto rabbinic material. According to Urbach, although the sages express their conceptions in highly concrete and vivid terms, they, like their mediaeval philosophical descendants, understood God as an incorporeal, omniscient, and omnipotent being. Thus, any rabbinic statement to the contrary must reflect a rhetorical concession to the masses or, in other instances, must be perceived as mere metaphor (p. 226). From this vantage point, Urbach could maintain (p. 37) that ‘the sages acquired a supra-mythological and supernatural conception of the deity. He is spirit and not flesh’. And he further argues (p. 37) that midrashim describing God with human attributes were merely meant to ‘counter the deistic outlook which removed God from the world’. The most telling sign of Urbach’s failure to distinguish between rabbinic and mediaeval modes of thinking is his decision to name his book חזל: אמונות ודעות. The subtitle of Urbach’s book harkens back to Judah Ibn Tibbon’s twelfth-century translation of Sa’adia Gaon’s Kitāb ul-ʾamānāt wal-iʿtiqādāt, which attempted to systematize and organize Jewish theology, much like Urbach’s work, in abstract terms.
Shattering the Maimonidean Stranglehold
The first scholar to partially break from a philosophical or Maimonidean approach to midrashic thought was Arthur Marmorstein (1969 [1927]). He posits a theological debate between the school of Rabbi Akiva, which, reading Scripture literally, affirms a corporeal God, and the school of Rabbi Ishmael, which, reading Scripture nonliterally, rejects divine corporeality. By positing that the question of anthropomorphism in Jewish late antiquity was a matter of debate within rabbinic circles, Marmorstein rejects the Maimonidean tradition, which would never claim that a rabbi, let alone a school, would affirm a corporeal God.
Although Marmorstein provides us with a theologically bold assessment of rabbinic theology, he is still quite Maimonidean. First, Marmorstein’s work is highly apologetic. He proudly supports the anti-anthropomorphic view of the Ishmaelian school and seeks to justify how the legendary Rabbi Akiva could maintain such a ‘low’ and ‘unspiritual’ conception of the deity. More crucially, as David Stern (1996: 76) and Max Kadushin (1965: 277-78) have noted, Marmorstein appropriates Maimonidean language when describing the Ishmaelian School as ‘allegorical’, ‘rational’, and ‘anti-anthropomorphic’. Dismissing this description as anachronistic, Stern and Kadushin correctly note that Rabbi Ishmael’s rejection of the Akivan view is not driven by a conscious concern to defend divine incorporeality, as with Philo, but by a need to defend a lofty and exalted sense of the deity.
In his classical work, Heavenly Torah, Abraham Joshua Heschel (2005 [1962]) inaugurated a more comprehensive revisionist reading of classical rabbinic thought. Lamenting the scholarly tendency—in the tradition of Maimonides—to impose philosophical interpretations onto rabbinic aggadah, Heschel stressed the necessity to take aggadic texts seriously and to read them on their own terms (p. 8). In this regard, Heschel refused to reinterpret, downplay or minimize rabbinic anthropomorphic or anthropopathic material. For him, when the Akivan school describes God as suffering with His people, for example, it means just that. Accordingly, divine pathos should not be understood as a metaphorical expression highlighting God’s love of Israel (as Urbach and others argued). Rather, God—in actuality—suffers when the Jewish people suffer. Unlike Marmorstein, Heschel does not read Rabbi Ishmael (and his school) as rejecting divine anthropomorphism on philosophical grounds, but theological ones: certain biblical texts describing God do not comport with the honor and dignity due to God.
Despite Heschel’s interpretive revisionism, academics generally dismissed Heschel’s Heavenly Torahfor two reasons. First, Heschel’s book pigeonholes the entirety of rabbinic thought into the two schools of Akiva and Ishmael. This binary division of rabbinic literature goes well beyond earlier scholars of Judaism who had posited an Akivan-Ishmaelian divide regarding rabbinic law only (see Yadin 2004: x-xii) or—as we saw in Marmorstein (1969 [1927])—a divide on the issue of anthropomorphism only (but not rabbinic thought more generally). Alluding to Heschel’s problematic binary presupposition that all aggadic texts fit into either the Akiva or Ishmael viewpoint, Azzan Yadin correctly argues (2004: x), ‘Heschel makes sweeping claims about the two schools, often at the expense of more nuanced readings and a fuller consideration of the historical setting of the various corpora that make up rabbinic literature’. Moreover, scholars adopted a lukewarm attitude towards Heschel’s academic bona fides as they regarded him as a tendentious constructive theologian rather than a disinterested historian of theology. This posture is understandable given the fact that most of Heschel’s writings (excluding Heavenly Torah) made theological claims.
Notwithstanding these reservations, Heschel’s work should be applauded. He was the first great Jewish scholar to thoroughly reject a philosophical reading of rabbinic thought. Interestingly, but not unexpectedly, Heschel’s Heavenly Torah faced strong opposition from the ‘anti-anthropomorphic’ Jewish studies elites. Urbach (1975 [1969]: 695) lambasted Heschel for imposing his own theological presuppositions back onto rabbinic texts. The irony, of course, is that it was Urbach—not Heschel—who retrojected his own assumptions back onto rabbinic literature. Also noteworthy is the fact that Urbach ignores Marmorstein’s revisionist reading of rabbinic theology even though we have evidence that Urbach knew (see p. 705) of Marmorstein’s writings. On the other hand, some scholars, such as Guy Stroumsa (1983: 269), accepted the Marmorstein position.
Whereas Heschel attributed inconsistent rabbinic descriptions of God to conflicting tannaitic circles (Akivan and Ishmael), Jacob Neusner (1988) attributed it to different historical stages. According to Neusner, the earliest rabbinic work, the Mishnah (ca. 200 ce), understood God ‘philosophically’, and thus the Mishnah denied that God had ‘personality’. In Neusner’s view, the Mishnaic God does not intervene in human affairs; God is passive and merely present (1988: 49-81). Subsequent rabbinic works, in Neusner’s opinion, evince an increasingly anthropomorphic or human God who acquires a robust personality. Boldly, Neusner claims (pp. 165-97) that the humanization of God reaches its apex in the Babylonian Talmud where God becomes ‘incarnate’. In these writings, we have, in Neusner’s terms, the ‘gospel of God incarnate’ (p. 19) as God becomes an ‘equal conversation partner’ (p. 17) with human beings. In the Babylonian Talmud, God is presented as a sage who wears tallit and tefillin, laughs, studies, and teaches Torah in the house of study, and spends His free time playing with mythic sea-monsters. Neusner’s striking use of Christological terms to describe the rabbinic God is purposeful. By doing so, he explains why God’s humanity appears most radically in the Babylonian Talmud but not in other rabbinic documents. Neusner suggests (pp. 194-97) that the Babylonian sages living in the Persian Empire were not concerned about sounding too Christian and, thus, blurring theological boundaries. Unlike their Palestinian counterparts, the Babylonian rabbis were not living in Christendom and thus felt uninhibited in formulating their daring religious convictions.
Neusner’s reading of (late) rabbinic theological texts continues the hermeneutic tradition initiated by Marmorstein and Heschel. Anthropomorphic midrashic texts were no longer to be reinterpreted through a metaphorical filter. Neusner aptly avers that ‘this [rabbinic] picture’ is not ‘poetry’ (p. 170). Aggadotare to be read seriously and literally. That said, some of Neusner’s claims remain problematic. His very premise of a Babylonian-Palestinian divide seems to be unfounded as God is radically humanized in both Babylonian and Palestinian sources—early and late (see Weiss 2017: 149-60). Moreover, notwithstanding Neusner’s rejection of a Maimonidean-like reading of late rabbinic literature, he nevertheless continues to operate with a questionable hermeneutic when describing rabbinic theology. First, he problematically labels the Mishnaic God as a ‘philosophical’ deity even as scholars for centuries have highlighted the immense gulf between rabbinic thinking and Greco-Roman philosophical thinking. Second, as Elliot Wolfson (1990) has noted, Neusner’s appropriation of Christological language, such as ‘incarnation’, downplays important contrasts between the Talmudic God and the early Christian God. Neusner himself seems to cede this point as he admits that his book challenges the notion that ‘Christian belief in humanity and divinity united…[and in a] God incarnate…[is] absolutely unique’ (p. 6).
In the same year that Neusner wrote Incarnation of God (1988), Jewish mysticism scholar Moshe Idel composed Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988) which, like Neusner, rejected a Maimonidean-like reading of rabbinic thought. The book’s larger project was to revise many of the conclusions reached by the founding scholar of Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem (1897–1982). In chapter seven of that work, entitled ‘Ancient Jewish Theurgy’, Idel disputes Scholem’s claim (1965: 120-21) that Kabbalistic myth represented an alien invasion to Judaism. Unlike Scholem who argued that Kabbalistic myth drew primarily from the ancient theories of Gnosticism mixed with Neo-Platonism, Idel showed how Jewish ‘theurgy’—a belief that Jewish observance or violation of mitzvoth strengthened or diminished God’s power—already occupied a central place in rabbinic thought. In the Midrash and Talmud, God not only affects humans via His decisions but, as in later Kabbalah, divine power is conditioned by human fulfillment of divine laws. In short, for Idel, mitzvoth already have cosmic significance in late antiquity (see also Idel 1991). Maintaining that ‘there is no major difference between midrashic and Kabbalistic theurgy’ (1988: 166), Idel could thus claim that Kabbalah should ‘be regarded as an endeavor to explicate midrashic theurgy’ (p. 163). Parallel to Neusner (1988), Idel reads anthropomorphic rabbinic texts literally, thereby refusing to adopt a metaphoric reading as Scholem had done. As Idel would stress, rabbinic texts of theurgy could not be more alien for a Maimonidean-like position which strips Halakha of its metaphysical and mythic force. That is because mediaeval Jewish philosophers understood God to be a (mostly) unchanging, transcendent, and omnipotent being.
At the close of the decade and into the 1990s and beyond, Bible scholar Michael Fishbane adopted a similar approach to Idel (1989: 19-32; 1998; 2005). By elucidating the exegetical grounding of dozens of rabbinic narratives about God—and by refusing to qualify or filter them in any way—Fishbane, like Idel, regards rabbinic theology as inhabiting the world of mythos rather than logos. Reading aggadotwithout the guiding hand of Maimonides, Fishbane demonstrates the ways in which the rabbis of old conceived of God as an evolving, vulnerable and, at times, limited deity. Like Idel, Fishbane explicates rabbinic texts that have human actions determine the level of divine power (theurgy). And he also presents midrashic texts that have not only the Jewish people needing deliverance, but God as well. Put differently, whereas the biblical God saves the Israelites from exile and destruction, the rabbinic God experiences exile and destruction. In this regard, rabbinic literature provides greater details about God’s feelings and personality than anything we encounter in the Hebrew Bible (Fishbane 2005: 308, 309). In short, in Fishbane’s view, a central rabbinic project is to show how beneath the surface of biblical narrative of Israelite history lies a second hidden and untold divine history (2005: 134). Finally, and most importantly, Fishbane argued that the rabbinic use of the qualifying phrase kaviyahol (‘if it was possible [to say]’), which often accompanied these anthropomorphic texts, did not signal rabbinic retreat or denial, as prior rabbinic scholars averred, but rather signaled the rabbinic self-awareness that their theological claims had a tenuous link to Scripture (1989: 27; 2005: 325-401).
Both Fishbane and Idel designated the rabbis as mythmakers rather than philosophers. As such, they rejected Scholem’s famous assertion that mediaeval mystical ‘Kabbalism’ represents a sharp break from the anti-mythic stance of ‘Rabbinism’ (Idel 1991; Fishbane 1989: 24). In the early 1990s, Kabbalah scholar Yehuda Liebes (1993: 1-64) joined Fishbane and Idel’s revisionist project. He unearthed additional mythic material and bemoaned the tendency of prior Jewish ‘enlightenment’ scholars such as Hermann Cohen, Yehezkel Kaufman, and Julius Guttmann to de-mythicize the Jewish tradition. Rejecting the philosophical hijacking of classical Jewish texts, Liebes regarded Kabbalah as an internal Jewish development. Support for the revisionist position was also adopted by leading rabbinics scholars of the day, such as Daniel Boyarin (1990), Meir Bar-Ilan (1993), and Alon Goshen-Gottstein (1994). These conclusions were also buttressed by Warren Zev Harvey (1992), a leading scholar of mediaeval philosophy, who underscored the extent to which the rabbis rejected Greek philosophical thought, both in content and method.
Nevertheless, the revisionist school of Heschel, Idel, Fishbane, and Liebes did not convince every scholar. After criticizing Marmorstein’s and Neusner’s works, David Stern (1992) posits that the question as to whether rabbinic texts describing divine activity should be read literally or figuratively remains an open—and unanswerable—question. Thus, Stern beckons scholars to turn from researching the theological implications of these aggadot to unravelling their literary and rhetorical dimensions. The strongest critique of the revisionist school, however, came from the Jewish philosopher Shalom Rosenberg (1998). In a highly polemical article in Hebrew, he championed the anti-mythic readings of rabbinic literature found in the writings of Herman Cohen, Yehezkel Kaufman, and Ephraim Urbach. For Rosenberg, anthropomorphic rabbinic texts must be read as parables or metaphors. And theurgic texts that describe how human rituals effect divine power should be re-read as merely describing the effect ritual has on God’s will to actuate His power. In Rosenberg’s view, the rabbis believed that God’s power is constant and is not truly affected by human action. Thus, according to Rosenberg, the existence of rabbinic myth is itself a myth. In response, Liebes (1998) accuses Rosenberg of ignoring the plain sense of aggadot because it does not square with Rosenberg’s ‘orthodoxy’. Liebes maintains that if a Midrash states that human sin decreases divine power, it means just that; scholars ought not to read it otherwise (as human sin decreases God’s desire to actualize His power). Scholarship, Liebes stresses, does not mean searching for ‘truth’ (Rosenberg’s view) but rather ‘textual truth’. In Liebes’s opinion, scholars must encounter the newness of the historical text in front of them rather than superimposing onto the text what we already know to be true, as Rosenberg and other philosophers do.
Anti-Anthropomorphism: The Maimonidean Stranglehold
Unlike mediaeval Jewish philosophy or mediaeval Kabbalah, the rabbis do not present their ideas in a logical or systematic fashion (Schechter 1961 [1909]: 1-20). Rather, the rabbis showcase their ideas through an anthology of terse and fragmentary rabbinic teachings connected to Scripture that evince little order. Moreover, many of these teachings are ‘transitory’ (p. 9) and unstable as they were adopted by ‘contradictory’ and ‘incoherent’ rabbinic ‘impulses’ (p. 12) that should be regarded not as fixed theologies but as reflecting a spectrum of rabbinic responses to specific historical concerns.Notwithstanding these hesitations, scholars have tried to highlight the distinctive rabbinic approach to God. For example, Alon Goshen-Gottstein (1994: 172) has posited that ‘in all of rabbinic literature there is not a single statement that categorically denies that God has body or form’. In other words, despite rabbinic debates over specific theological claims such as the extent of God’s power and knowledge, we seem to have full acceptance—at least on a straightforward reading—that the rabbinic God, much like the biblical God, should be viewed as embodying a human-like personality. As further evidence, early Christian thinkers such as Origen (182–154), Justin Martyr (100–165), and Basil the Great (329–379) criticized the Jewish belief in the corporeality of God (Stroumsa 1983).Posing a problem for later Jewish philosophers, some rabbis anthropomorphize God in ways that outdo anything we encounter in the Hebrew Bible (Stern 1992; Green 1975; Wolfson 1994). Although in Scripture, God is conceived as having humanlike limbs and organs such as arms, eyes, and legs, and humanlike emotions such as love, anger, regret, and jealousy, rabbinic literature expands the anthropomorphic and anthropopathic field by having God assume humanlike roles and features never entertained by biblical authors. A few examples suffice to illustrate this anthropomorphic intensification. In the Hebrew Bible, God saves or punishes Israel. Rabbi Akiva and other sages, by contrast, also imagine God, the Shekhinah, to be ‘in exile’ with His people and, until the redemptive moment, in physical bondage with them. As the Israelites experience suffering, so does the rabbinic God. Moreover, many Midrashim depict God as Israel’s ‘brother’ or ‘friend’—a relational model that virtually never appears in the Hebrew Bible. In these relational analogies, the vertical hierarchy between God and humanity is downplayed, and the horizontal relationship between God and humanity is accentuated. And, more radically, as Moshe Halbertal has demonstrated, the Rabbinic God at times assumes a weaker position in the human-divine metaphor (Halbertal 2009).Other examples of rabbinic anthropomorphic intensification include God laughing, dancing with sages, studying and teaching Torah in the house of study, engaging in matchmaking, and spending His free time playing with mythic sea-monsters. We also have dozens of midrashic texts detailing God’s physical features, such as His clothing and crown. God even rides a horse and kisses the walls of the Temple and His most beloved human followers. Many of these images do not have analogues in the various biblical traditions (see Weiss 2017: 150).Mediaeval philosophers, and their German enlightenment heirs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, could not accept at face value these anthropomorphic and anthropopathic depictions of God. That is because, based largely on the Maimonidean view, God was understood as a concept rather than character; as an ‘it’ rather than a ‘He’. Like the Aristotelian unmoved mover, God in the Maimonidean view is incorporeal, unchanging, and perfect. Therefore, there can be no essential analogy between God and humanity. God is transcendent and has no direct relationship with the world or humanity. This posed an obvious problem to rational interpreters of the rabbinic tradition.Rather than defend these odd divine depictions as genuine expressions of the rabbinic imagination, the standard Jewish response, beginning in the mediaeval period, was to neutralize the problem by adopting various strategies of containment (Fishbane 2005: 3-13; Saperstein 1980: 1-20). These apologetic maneuvers included decanonizing or devaluing the non-legal sections of the Talmud and Midrash (Lorberbaum 2007:); seeing these strange divine images as ‘poetic conceits’ for the uneducated masses (Heinemann 1986); or embarking on various forms of metaphorical or allegorical reinterpretation that expose the deeper spiritual kernel of the rabbinic depiction (Guttmann 1966: 33-35). As Yair Lorberbaum astutely documented (2009), the mediaeval philosopher Moses Maimonides (1138–1203) adopted all these techniques and thereby created a virtual stranglehold on Jewish theology—even for later academic scholars. From Maimonides onward, rabbinic texts concerning God were typically read through a mediaeval philosophical lens: They were ignored, not taken as serious theology (Schechter 1961 [1909]: 12, 13, 42; Kadushin 1932: 29; Ginzberg et al. 1967: 1.29-32), or reinterpreted as expressing lofty ideas in concrete form (Kadushin 1965: 273-303). To buttress their view, these scholars typically argued that the rabbis used the phrase ‘as it were’ [כביכול] as a method to signal their lack of seriousness or literalness in what was being said. Alternatively, drawing on the writings of Sa’adia Gaon, some mediaeval rationalists understood the anthropomorphic descriptions of the Shekhinah or Kavod (Divine Glory) in rabbinic passages as referring not to God himself, but rather to lofty creations of God (Wolfson 1994: 126-27; Altmann 1969: 140-60). In short, rabbinic theology was not read on its own terms.A few examples will illustrate this phenomenon in early twentieth-century scholarship. Rejecting a literalist reading of rabbinic thought, Julius Guttmann (1966: 34-35) argued that the ‘most daring [rabbinic] anthropomorphisms…express the consciousness of the presence of God’. In order words, rabbinic descriptions of God should be read metaphorically. Guttmann further writes (p. 35) that the Midrashic claim that God shared in the suffering of the Jewish people after the destruction of the Temple was merely a rabbinic way to highlight the ‘intimate bond between God and his people’. Perhaps the most remarkable expression of this mediaeval retrojection can be found in Louis Ginzberg’s assertion (1901: 1.624) that ‘Sa’adia [tenth century] is in full harmony with Rabbinical Judaism when he maintains that the corporeality of God is contrary both to reason and Scripture’.The problematic effects of this Maimonidean hijacking of classical rabbinic thought is most starkly evident in Ephraim Urbach’s encyclopedic The Sages (1975 [1969]), which, while systematizing the unsystematic thinking of the rabbis, imposes abstract mediaeval categories and conceptions retroactively onto rabbinic material. According to Urbach, although the sages express their conceptions in highly concrete and vivid terms, they, like their mediaeval philosophical descendants, understood God as an incorporeal, omniscient, and omnipotent being. Thus, any rabbinic statement to the contrary must reflect a rhetorical concession to the masses or, in other instances, must be perceived as mere metaphor (p. 226). From this vantage point, Urbach could maintain (p. 37) that ‘the sages acquired a supra-mythological and supernatural conception of the deity. He is spirit and not flesh’. And he further argues (p. 37) that midrashim describing God with human attributes were merely meant to ‘counter the deistic outlook which removed God from the world’. The most telling sign of Urbach’s failure to distinguish between rabbinic and mediaeval modes of thinking is his decision to name his book חזל: אמונות ודעות. The subtitle of Urbach’s book harkens back to Judah Ibn Tibbon’s twelfth-century translation of Sa’adia Gaon’s Kitāb ul-ʾamānāt wal-iʿtiqādāt, which attempted to systematize and organize Jewish theology,
much like Urbach’s work, in abstract terms.
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