Contents
- Introduction
- What's been written about Atheism and Jews?
- The article 'Discourses of Doubt'
- The Case of Reform Jews in the Nineteenth-century United States
- Further reading
1. Introduction
Some subjects, such as 'atheism', have been explored by scholars for a long time, and we think we know pretty much all we need to know about it. But these scholars bring with them their own biases and have been mostly interested in atheism in the contexts of the classical world of the ancient Greeks and Romans or in the context of Christian Europe. In my research I've suggested that while there has been some interest in Jews and atheism, more needs to be done. Why? Because sometimes looking at less familiar approaches to a topic (i.e. Jewish, rather than Graeco-Roman or Christian, engagement with atheism) can generate new ways of thinking about the subject. For me, the phenomenon of panentheism (i.e. the idea that the universe is a part of the divine) as a kind of 'almost-atheism' has proven to be important precisely because it features so strongly in Jewish approaches, rather than other approaches.
In what follows, we'll look at modern Jewish scepticism and atheism among Reform Jews in the nineteenth-century United States. But first: what do we know already about the subject of Jews and Atheism?
2. What's been written about Atheism and Jews?
The current historical consensus suggests that atheism has not been important for Jewish history and that Jews have not been important for the history of atheism. Let’s consider first the claim that Jews have been unimportant for the history of atheism. In the Oxford Handbook of Atheism (2013), Jacques Berlinerblau argues that Jews have not really featured in any important way in the wider story. He says,
Interestingly, while Jews are popularly assumed to have a proclivity, talent and genius for atheism, the findings… suggest that European Christians played a much more significant role in the genesis and development of modern non-belief.
Almost all general histories of atheism bear out Berlinerblau’s observation. Historical accounts of the emergence and development of atheism tend to work in the contexts of either Classical or Enlightenment thought. Thus scholars have traced the origins of atheism back either to ancient Greece (e.g. Thrower’s Western Atheism, 1971) or to late eighteenth-century Europe (e.g. Berman’s A History of Atheism in Britain, 1987). Regardless, these histories of Classical atheism and Christian atheism neglect to include the Jewish elements of the story – the exalted place usually given to Spinoza being the exception that proves the rule – and only recently has some attempt to correct this gap in the history of atheism been made. Strictly speaking, there is only Berlinerblau’s entry on ‘Jewish Atheism’ in the Oxford Handbook of Atheism (2013), but if we broaden our interest a little to include other forms of doubt, such as scepticism, then one might point to works such as Jennifer Hecht’s Doubt: A History (2003), which attempts to trace the story of scepticism in the contexts of pagan, Jewish, Christian and Muslim engagement from the classical to modern times. But, generally speaking, I think it’s fair to say that scholars of atheism have not been terribly interested in the Jewish side of the story.
On the other hand, just as Jews are neglected for the history of atheism, so atheism appears to be regarded as largely irrelevant for Jewish history. For example, the historian of Anglo-Jewry, Todd Endelman, has argued that the narrative of Jewish engagement with modernity and the attendant loss of religious practice in Europe has been unduly influenced by the German model, which was highly ideological in nature. Rather than view the ideas of the Haskalah and Moses Mendelssohn’s participation in the world of German scholarship as the key factors that brought about the momentous crisis of the traditional Jewish world, Endelman has argued that in England and in most communities of central and western Europe, the process of modernization was rather one of acculturation, gradual social integration and the attendant gradual abandonment of any commitment to religious norms. In other words, Endelman prefers to explain the arrival of Jewish modernity and the abandonment of Jewish religion in terms of social processes that do not relate directly to ideology or ideas. But while this approach is persuasive and works well for the process of Jewish secularization, that is, ‘the process by which sectors of society and culture are removed from the domination of religious institutions and symbols’, resulting in ‘an increasing number of individuals who look upon the world and their own lives without the benefit of religious interpretations’, it rather misses the point when it comes to the engagement of Jews with atheism and unbelief. Atheism, surely, must by definition be all about what one is thinking and believing. This distinction between secularization and atheism is an important one for us today. The Israeli historian, Shmuel Feiner, author of The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe (2010), is, like Endelman, much less interested in intellectual atheism than in secularization, which could be regarded as kind of practical atheism and which he describes as ‘religious laxity’. He complains that
The ‘sect of the epicureans’, [i.e. ‘fashionable’ Jews, sinners, free thinkers and Deists, who cast off the burden of religion] left behind hardly any texts depicting their worldview; nor did they justify their way of life in writing.
Nevertheless, he has no doubt that ‘Secularisation has been one of the most significant historical processes in Jewish history from the 18th century to the present day’, in contrast to atheism, which goes beyond a thoughtless shrugging off the burden of religion.
Despite all this, I think that there are some significant Jewish contributions to the story of atheism over the centuries. And I think that intellectual atheism, and not just practical atheism or secularization, is also important to the story of Jewish modernity. Let's look at just one case study, that of Reform Judaism in the nineteenth-century United States
3. 'Discourses of Doubt'
This presentation is largely based on my article 'Discourses of Doubt: The Place of Atheism, Skepticism, and Infidelity in Nineteenth-century North American Reform Jewish Thought'. In this article I try to make the case that in their concern to counter widespread atheism, some rabbis within American Reform Judaism ended up offering a conception of Judaism that appeared suspiciously atheistic to some observers.
The key argument is that the rabbis appear to move away from the theistic idea of the God of the Bible, who is an all-powerful, all-loving deity with a personality. They appear to shift instead towards a de-personalised conception of the divine that is equated with the universe or with natural laws. They do not quite reach pantheism, that is, the idea that God and the universe are one and same thing, but they do appear to claim that the universe is part of the divine, even if the divine is more than just the universe - and we call this idea panentheism. After the Second World War, some Christians began to think in similar ways, but historically it appears that Jewish thinkers were teaching panentheism much earlier.
4. The Case of Reform Jews in the Nineteenth-century United States
A. Introduction
So what does North American Reform Judaism have to do with atheism? By the late 1880s, by which time it had become the dominant Jewish denomination, US Reform viewed itself as a progressive rejection of the traditions of Jewish Orthodoxy which sought to adopt and adapt Judaism to the best of modern thought and knowledge. As part of its engagement with the wider world, it soon found itself clashing with two famous non-believers. The first was the lawyer and politician, Colonel Robert Ingersoll (1833-99), who was the most high profile sceptic of his day, and whose eloquent rhetoric and mockery of religion in general packed town halls across the US, earning him the nickname ‘the Great Agnostic’. The second was Felix Adler (1851-1933), a former Reform rabbi and professor at Cornell and Columbia universities, who instigated the Jewish Ethical Culture movement in 1876 which taught post-denominational, post-religious, ethics and social justice, and whose highly knowledgeable attacks on Judaism made him a very serious threat for the Reform movement. Their criticisms are based on familiar themes such as the hypocrisy of religious authorities and institutions, on the impact of biblical criticism on undermining belief in the revealed Word of God, on the challenge of the scientific worldview for the supernatural claims of religion, and on the problem of evil and suffering. In hwat follows, we'll focus on the challenges of the scientific worldview, and specifically Darwinian theory, and the responses of some of the leading Reform Jewish leaders in the Classical Reform period, that is, after the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, that is, the public statement of beliefs of the relatively new Jewish denomination. They include Kaufman Kohler, Joseph Krauskopf, and Emil Hirsch.
B. Rabbi Kaufman Kohler
For Kaufman Kohler (1843-1926), the second president of Reform’s rabbinical training college, Hebrew Union College, and the denomination’s leading intellectual, the moral implications of a widespread loss of faith in the United States were as clear as the reasons for the loss of faith in the first place. As he observed in 1887,
People have broken away from the old landmarks of belief, because they found them to be in conflict with the reason and science, and the old hell-fire to have lost its terror. The dread prevails today among believers that the decay of religion may lead to a decline, if not collapse, of morals. ('Evolution and Morality (1887), p.3)
There were various ways to address these related problems, and Kohler discussed most of them during his long career. The key one was to attempt to demonstrate that science was not an exclusively materialist endeavour and that the teachings of Reform Judaism were perfectly compatible with its findings. For Kohler, as for others, it was evolutionary science that offered the greatest challenge, but one that a liberal religion could readily meet. In ‘Science and Religion’ (1874) he maintained that such a progressive worldview eschewed the supernatural claims of much of the Bible and at the same time readily admitted the natural laws of causation that science had discovered, so that atheism was by no means the only viable modern, reasonable mode of thought. He asked,
And does this [Darwinism], accepted and constantly confirmed by almost all investigators of nature – astronomers, geologists, botanists, and zoologists – lead to atheism and a denial of God? All which Darwinism declares is, that creation is not to be explained through a miracle, but through the natural law of progressive development of life under favourable circumstances.... Do I deny God when I deny every immediate interference of God with the eternal order of the world, and question every miracle? Quite the opposite. ('Science and Religion' (1874), p.821)
In particular, Kohler was concerned to convince the reader that the apparent threat to religion posed by science was much exaggerated and that, in fact, science, and especially evolutionary theory, could be regarded as complementary to Judaism. As he saw it, ‘Religion and science must illumine one another, and must harmonize with one another.’ He asserted that ‘Science and religion need not antagonize one another’ since they are two complementary sides of the same coin of revelation, one working through the emotions ‘which feel The One in All’ and one through the reason ‘which, investigating, recognizes the unit in the whole’. Yet, he went on, science could not do without religion since there was still much that it could not explain. In particular, he questioned whether the nineteenth-century scientist could ‘unriddle’ how inanimate matter became living matter. But just as the ‘Judaism of old united and harmonized its new knowledge with its old faith’, so Kohler could not see any danger to Judaism from modern science, the findings of which amounted to the declaration that
the world was not made in one moment, but has developed itself, and that man was not created complete, but has developed himself: for this is essentially the new Darwinian doctrine, the foundation and capstone of the modern science of nature… ('Science and Religion' (1874), p.821)
And just as one did not deny God when one no longer claimed that He sent rain directly down through the gates of heaven, or that He daily led the sun out from its tabernacle, so one did not deny God when one was obliged, as instructed by science, to ‘deny every immediate interference of God with the eternal order of the world and question every miracle.’ Kohler’s conception of God was of a profoundly immanent divinity. In language that hinted at an equivalence between natural laws and divine will, he confessed that
My idea of the wisdom of the Eternal is too great to allow me to believe that He is from time to time patching up and improving His own works. The eternal laws of nature are His eternal wisdom, His unchangeable will. Were He ever to change His will, He would not to me be the Eternal. ('Science and Religion' (1874), p.821)
The common refrain, in which others would follow Kohler, was that harmonious order of the world testified to its divine foundations. As he wrote in 1879, ‘Natural science, by the unshaken faith in [natural] law, testifies to a divine law-giver.’ In time he would go even further by suggesting that the divine life was made manifest in matter and mind through evolutionary processes. In so doing, Kohler came as near as he ever would to articulating a panentheistic conception of God.
Instead of alienating us from God, it [evolutionary science] brings us right face to face with God; for we see Him steadily at work fashioning worlds and lives without number here and ever carving out new destinies for all beings there. In fact, evolution, as I conceive it, is the unfolding of the divine life, the unbroken revelation of God first in endless varieties of matter, then in marvellous productions of conscious mind. And since both matter and mind emanate from the same God, why should the lines not merge?... The entire creation, from crystal and protoplasm to ape and horse, in their gradual rise towards beauty and emotion, foreshadows the coming of upward-striving man. ('Evolution and morality' (1887), p.4)
The evolution of the universe and of life was, it seemed, the unfolding or evolution of God in His material and psychical emanations.
C. Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf
Joseph Krauskopf (1858-1923), who led the largest Jewish congregation in the U.S. in Philadelphia and who co-founded the Jewish Publication Society, shared with Kohler a belief that the great threat of materialism lay in the implications for social morality – ‘Ethics without a God must in the long run mean humanity without morality’ – and was as concerned to counter the triumphant claims made by some materialists. He complained in his book-length study Evolution and Judaism (1887) that ‘the great mass of believers insisted upon bringing certain primitive speculations of a purely scientific nature within the horizons of religion’ necessitating a defence against ‘that skepticism which is engendered by poorly understood science’ so as to ensure a modern ‘rational faith’. He readily admitted that religious knowledge could not ignore ‘the icy breath of skepticism which touches it’ and which undermined tradition, and he fully accepted that its observed flaws had brought about the inevitable result that its authority was regularly questioned, that its claims and doctrines were subjected to ever increasing scrutiny, and that it had been weighed and found wanting. But Krauskopf was primarily concerned to reject the assertion of many materialists that science, and especially Darwinism, led to atheism, as if it should by necessity ‘drive God out of nature, and lead to infidelity’. A liberal religion could give proper weight to the findings of science without abandoning the key theological truths that generated an ethical foundation for modern social life. The solution lay, in large part, in Krauskopf’s de-anthropomorphised conception of God. Just as Kohler had done, he identified natural law with God.
[N]ature is under the power of government under the control of supreme order and uninterrupted harmony, under the reign of ever-present, ever active, never-changing law which shapes all matter, organic and inorganic, according to design, and directs all force, physical and vital, according to purpose, and compels both to be eternally the same in their manifestations. This universally acknowledged supreme governing power, this universally acknowledged eternally invariable law,… this universally admitted ever present design and purpose and order and harmony,… is named by evolutionists ‘Natural Law;’ by theologians it is called ‘God.’ … With this conception of the nature of God every difference between science and religion disappears. (Evolution and Judaism (1887), pp.102-104)
D. Rabbi Emil Hirsch
Much later, Emil Hirsch (1851-1923), who was professor of rabbinics at Chicago as well as editor of the movement’s main journal, The Reform Advocate, took a direct swipe at Felix Adler when he wrote in a discussion of atheism that ‘In modern Judaism, as is evinced by printed sermons and other publications, Atheism of every kind has found voice and adherents’. He went on to complain that ‘The influence of the natural sciences, and the unwarranted conclusions now recognized as such by none more readily than by the thinkers devoted to the exploration of nature’s domain, have also left their mark on Jewry.’ The ‘unwarranted conclusions’ included the views of those, like Robert Ingersoll, who maintained that there was a conflict between religion and science. As he had sought to show in his Evolution and Judaism, such views were old fashioned and out of date, and he insisted in his sermon ‘The Doctrine of Evolution’ (1903), that ‘Atheism may extract no comfort from the recent expositions of the theory of evolution’, not only because so many theists could reconcile their theology with modern science, but because the common view of materialists that religion was ‘a benevolent or malevolent invention of crafty priests or well-meaning lovers of their kind’ had been discredited by the modern appreciation of religion itself as an evolved phenomenon, which could continue to adapt to the changing environment. Like Kohler, Hirsch also disagreed that science could be regarded as a support for atheism. He condemned philosophical materialists (or ‘beer and cheese materialists’ as he called them) for, among other things, their failure to explain the beginnings of existence or the nature of matter and energy, or to account for the transformations of the inorganic to the organic and of the unconscious to the conscious. It seemed self-evident to him that ‘mystery still calls for faith’ and that ‘there is a need and room for the introduction of an energy which religious faith and reasoning philosophy have always posited.’ In attempting to articulate a theory that would address adequately such challenges, Hirsch offered a panentheistic conception of God’s immanent relation to the world, as had the others before him. He enthused:
In notes clearer than were ever intoned by human tongue does the philosophy of evolution confirm the essential verity of Judaism’s insistent protest and proclamation that God is one. This theory reads unity in all that is and has being. Stars and stones, planets and pebbles, sun and sod, rock and river, leaf and lichen, are spun of the same thread. Thus the universe is one soul, One spelled large. If throughout all visible forms one energy is manifest and in all material shapes one substance is apparent, the conclusion is all the better assured which holds this essentially one world of life to be the thought of one all-embracing and all-underlying creative directive mind… I, for my part, believe to be justified in my assurance that Judaism rightly apprehended posits God not, as often it is said to do, as an absolutely transcendental One. Our God is the soul of the Universe… Spinozism and Judaism are by no means at opposite poles. ('The Doctrine of Judaism and Evolution' (1903), pp.10-11)
Such ideas went beyond philosophical Idealism, or, at least, were justified in a very different manner, that is, by reference to biological science. And Hirsch’s position was panentheistic, rather than pantheistic, in that God was explicitly identified with the universe while, at the same time, the natural world, in which energy and matter were unified, was regarded as the product of the divine mind and distinct from it.
E. Conclusion
In the context of championing religion against atheism on the battlefield of scientific knowledge, then, the Reformers surveyed here presented several lines of defence and counter-attack. It was, after all, axiomatic to Reform that it was entirely compatible with science. Perhaps the most remarkable defence against the materialistic or atheistic presentation of science was the emergence of a panentheistic tendency, expressing the image of a divine element woven into the fabric of the cosmos, while maintaining the distinctiveness of the deity. This complimented the de-anthropomorphizing tendency that had dominated their discussions about biblical inaccuracies and failings. Taking also into account two other Reform rabbis, Isaac Mayer Wise and Aaron Hahn, whom I’ve not had space to consider here, one can say that Reform Judaism’s depersonalized deity was explicitly identified with, among other things, the natural law that bestowed order to the world, the vital force that animated it, the soul of the universe, and the universe itself. While it is not possible to claim that such conceptions were argued for consistently, they were certainly a feature of the discussions. The suggestion made here is that the context, that is, the engagement with natural science to counter the atheists’ contempt for religion, accounts in large part for the Reform rabbis’ most panentheistic moments. And such theological formulations sounded to many critics of Reform Judaism as inauthentically Jewish and, ironically, even atheistic.
5. Further Reading
On Jews and Atheism
Langton, Daniel. 'Atheism' in Encyclopedia of Jewish-Christian Relations. ed. / AJ Levine; P Schäfer. de Gruyter, Walter GmbH & Co, 2021.
Langton, Daniel. 'Discourses of Doubt: The Place of Atheism, Scepticism and Infidelity in Nineteenth-Century North American Reform Jewish Thought' in Hebrew Union College Annual (2017) Vol. 88. pp. 203-253.
Berlinerblau, Jacques. "Jewish Atheism." In Oxford Handbook of Atheism, edited by Stephen Bullivant and Michael Ruse, 320-36. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Feiner, Shmuel. The Origins of Jewish Secularization in Eighteenth-Century Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
On Jews and evolutionary science (with implications for atheism and scepticism)
Langton, Daniel. Reform Judaism and Darwin: How Engaging with Evolutionary Theory shaped American Jewish Religion 2019, Berlin: de Gruyter, Walter GmbH & Co.
Langton, Daniel. 'Naphtali Levy’s Divine World: Jewish Tradition, Panentheism and Darwinism’ in Jewish Culture and the Natural World. Shyovitz, D. (ed.). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Forthcoming.
Langton, Daniel. "Elijah Benamozegh and Evolutionary Theory: A Nineteenth Century Italian Kabbalist's Panentheistic Response to Darwin." European Journal of Jewish Studies 10, no. 2(2016).
Langton, Daniel. "Isaac Mayer Wise, Cosmic Evolution, and the Problem of Evil." In Chance or Providence: Religious Perspectives on Divine Action, ed. Louise Hickman, 79-94. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014.
Langton, Daniel. "Jewish Religious Thought, The Holocaust, and Darwinism: A Comparison of Hans Jonas and Mordecai Kaplan." Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 13, no. 2(2013) : 311-348.
Langton, Daniel. Online reader: Darwin’s Jews (2016)
Langton, Daniel. 'Naftali Levy: An Interesting Species (or min) of Jewish Evolutionist' Katz Center blog, 27 Nov 2017. https://katz.sas.upenn.edu/resources/blog/naftali-levy-interesting-species-or-min-jewish-evolutionist
These pages were created by me, Prof Daniel Langton, Professor of Jewish History at the University of Manchester. My primary research interest is the history of the way in which Jews and Christians have influenced each other, and in recent years I've explored this in relation to evolutionary science, and to atheism and scepticism.