Medicine as Enlightenment cure: Benedetto Frizzi, physician to eighteenth-century Italian Jewish society

This article examines modern Jewish doctors and the Enlightenment in action through its analysis of Dr. Benedetto Frizzi (1756–1844) as an Enlightenment Jewish physician and public intellectual in Habsburg northern Italy. Frizzi sought to spread the new Enlightenment gospel of polizia medica—public health policy or social medicine—that he learned from its pioneering exponent, Dr. Johann Peter Frank, his teacher at the University of Pavia. Frizzi dispensed Enlightenment medicine for the benefit of the state and society in general, as well as Jewish society and culture in particular, for he saw himself as both public health crusader and doctor-priest ministering to his own people. His commitments to Enlightenment science and rationalism led him to criticize Jewish social practices harshly even as he creatively reinterpreted classic Jewish texts; accordingly, Frizzi was regarded in some quarters as subversive, while in others as an apologetic defender of Jews and Judaism. Situating Frizzi within the traditions of Jewish as well as European Enlightenment physicians, this article raises broader questions about religion and secularism in the modern discourse of medicalized Judaism.     

BOOK REVIEWS

About 25% of the Jewish population in Israel consists of “secular believers.” They self-identify as secular but also believe in God or some kind of higher/deeper power(s). Their identity conflicts with the conventional identification of secularism with atheism, as do post-secular theologies, whose theological ideas reject traditional religion while adopting concepts of faith. Western feminism proved especially conducive to the development of post-secular theology. This study addresses both Israeli Judaism and feminist theology from a post-secular perspective. It analyses two academic fields of discourse—feminist Jewish theology and feminism in Israel—to determine whether, how and why they are developing a Jewish post-secular feminist theology. The study reveals that such theologies are rare and suggests that discursive field structure limits their development.     

The Transference is Indeed a Cross: Commentary on Paper by Sue Grand

Sue Grand presents a case of “a near-death clinical impasse,” conjuring “God at an impasse.” She questions the philosophical premises and culture biases that inform the foundations of psychoanalytic theory. She asks how we rewrite “the psychoanalytic subject.” This commentary explores the themes of clinical impasse, psychoanalysis and religion, martyrdom and self-sacrifice, the negative Oedipus or “Jacob complex,” multiplicity of selves, and psychoanalytic witnessing. Most important, it challenges the tendency to polarize the Jewish and Christian narratives such that Judaism is depicted as “this worldly” in contrast to Christianity, which is seen as celebrating martyrdom in identification with Christ. It argues for psychoanalysis to recognize the spiritual value of submission and surrender without splitting them into polar oppositions.     

Judaism and the Dialogue of Religion and Science: A Personal Journey

ABSTRACT

Through a personal narrative about my own entry into the field of science and religion, the essay reflects on the interplay of religion and science in Judaism. In addition to documenting my involvement with the dialogue of religion and science, the essay provides a brief historical overview of the interplay of the relationship between science and religion in the case of Judaism and considers diverse approaches toward technoscience among the main strands of Judaism today. The essay ends by recognizing the importance of science in Jewish intellectual history and the potential contribution of Judaism to the field of religion and science.     

Reflections on Israel Scheffler's Philosophy of Religion

The burden of this piece is to draw together into a coherent whole the somewhat diverse strands of Israel Scheffler's thought on the philosophy of religion. Extrapolating from personal discussions with Professor Scheffler, various of his books, articles, and other unpublished materials authored and kindly provided by him, I contend that he adumbrates a post-empiricist rendering of religious belief which masterfully avoids some philosophical problems, while unwittingly giving rise to others. Committed to the view that the methodology of science – in one or other of its more acceptable guises – provides the most reliable measure of the content and structure of reality. Scheffler is bound conceptually to redefine Jewish belief in such a way that the traditional conflict between religion and science never emerges. Consistent with this end, he is concerned to divest traditional Judaism of its metaphysical garb, so that what remains are simply the matters of living to which religion ought properly on his view address itself. The Bible is thus reconceptualized as a piece of rich literature, of no real difference in logical kind to any other piece of rich literature, except that it defines uniquely, along with the Torah and other relevant Jewish literature, the history of the particular community whose perception of human values and meaningfulness forms the core of what it is to be Jewish.While I have no quibble whatsoever with Scheffler that the Bible and other religious teachings provides a profound reservoir for cognitive insight into the matters of quality living and appropriate social interaction, I argue that the divorce of religious values from the metaphysics of religion is in the end misguided. My problem with Scheffler's philosophy of religion is not so much with what he has found to be central to religion, as what he has failed to find in religion. By jettisoning its metaphysical basis, he has jettisoned what is inevitably fundamental to Judaism – namely, a resolute belief in God. This being so, an atheist could more readily adopt Scheffler's version of Judaism than could the theist – an outocme which should be problematic for both the theist and the atheist.     

Can a rabbi marry someone of another religion? Debates of the American Reform movement whether intermarried rabbis can lead Reform congregations

Traditionally, rabbis were expected to marry women who were devoted to Judaism. The convention was a logical one. As a symbolic exemplar of Judaism, everything a rabbi does should reflect his commitment to the Jewish religion. Instead, over the course of the modern period, non-Orthodox denominations have deviated from many traditional positions. This has included the Reform movement’s allowance that rabbis can determine whether they will officiate at interfaith marriage ceremonies. However, while many Reform rabbis have conducted such ceremonies, they were nevertheless expected to have married within the faith themselves. Recently, some rabbis have begun advocating for Reform rabbis to marry gentiles who have not converted to Judaism. The Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, the academic institution serving the Reform movement of North America, which has campuses in the United States and Israel, went through a process of discussion, debate, evaluation, and decision making. At the end of this process, the decision was made to retain the policy of prohibiting intermarried students from matriculating or graduating. This article outlines the development as well as the resolution of the current controversy.     

SELMA THE JEWISH SEER: FEMALE PROPHECY AND BOURGEOIS RELIGION IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY GERMANY

This article discusses the importance of spiritualism and mysticism for nineteenth-century German Jews though the lens of a book about a Jewish female clairvoyant in 1830s Berlin. In 1838, Morris Wiener published Selma, die jüdische Seherin, a widely read story about his sister's miraculous healing and prophetic visions after being treated by a physician specializing in Mesmerism. This article proposes that we consider Selma's unusual story as an expression of nineteenth-century German Jews' experiences of bourgeois religion. In their attempt to prove that their religion was compatible with modern life, many German Jews sought to show not only how rational their religion was, as scholars have long emphasized, they also sought to demonstrate how spiritual Jews could be and to suggest that Judaism, like Protestantism and Catholicism, could engender multiple forms of mystical religiosity.     

“The Religion We Plant in Their Hearts”: A Critical Exploration of the Religiosity of a German Jewish Family at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century

The long-standing historiographical consensus on nineteenth- and twentieth-century German Jews suggests that they were largely “beyond Judaism.” Most historians concur that German Jews abandoned a particularistic faith and the restricted social life of the autonomous community in exchange for cultural tropes of the dominant bourgeois culture as they strove to integrate into the surrounding society. While most German Jews no longer practiced the Judaism of their fathers or their fathers’ fathers, this did not necessarily mean that religion or belief had become irrelevant. In this essay I explore, through a close reading of a set of diaries, the religiosity of one Jewish family—that of William and Clara Stern and their three children, Hilde, Günther, and Eva. In the process, I seek both to address a gap in the research and to contribute to an ongoing discussion in the historiography regarding modern Judaism. While religiosity among German Jews had increasingly become a matter of individual, and not collective, action and choice, I argue that Jews of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still engaged in a quest for meaning for themselves and future generations specifically as Jews. The religious worldview and education that Clara Stern aimed to impart to her children reflect precisely this search for personal religious meaning and exemplify the individual nature of early twentieth-century German Jewish religiosity.     

Emmanuel Levinas and the New Science of Judaism

This article addresses Emmanuel Levinas's re‐conceptualization of Jewish identity by examining his response to a question he himself poses: “In which sense do we need a Jewish science?” First, I attend to Levinas's critique of modern science of Judaism, particularly as it was understood in the critical approaches of the nineteenth‐century school of thought, Wissenschaft des Judentums. Next, I detail Levinas's own constructive proposal that would, in his words, “enlarge the science of Judaism.” He retrieved classical textual sources that modern Judaism had neglected, while at the same time he enlarged Judaism's relevance beyond a historical community by turning to phenomenology as a rigorous science. Finally, I conclude with some reflections on the broader implications of this new science of Judaism for Jewish ethics and identity in a post‐war period.     

Is Attachment to God a Unique Predictor of Mental Health? Test in a Jewish Sample

Research suggests that religion and spirituality generally correlate positively with various aspects of mental health, although mediators remain unclear. We explored whether attachment to God is a unique predictor above and beyond other key religious variables within a Jewish sample. Given the religion-as-culture perspective suggesting that Judaism can be characterized as primarily focused on behavior versus internal mental experiences, we expected that attachment to God would be less relevant to Jewish mental health. Surprisingly, attachment emerged as the strongest predictor of mental health among both more traditional Orthodox Jewish participants and less traditional non-Orthodox Jews. Although additional cross-cultural research is clearly needed, our results suggest that even in more behaviorally focused religious cultures, attachment to God is a key mediator of the protective effects of religion and spirituality.     

Understanding religious behavior

The attached (to mother) fetus-infant finds his religious expression in Buddhism. The attached (to group) juvenile finds his religious expression in Judaism and other tribalisms. The attached (to spouse) adult finds his religious expression in agnosticism and secularism. Attached phases are placid and of progressively decreasing emotional intensity. The three detaching phases are hurtful and hence soteriological, and are also of progressively decreasing emotional intensity. The toddler-young child finds his religious expression in Christianity, the adolescent in atheism and/or Marxism, and the aged, sick or dying plucks at any religious or secular aid.He has written numerous papers on aspects of child care, medical history, interrelations between medicine and religion, and between Judaism and Christianity.     

Freud's Jewish identity,circumcision, and the theory of castration anxiety: problem or pride?

In this work the author reflects on the Jewish identity of Sigmund Freud. It is acknowledged that Freud, even though he seemed ambivalent towards Jewishness and even though anti-Semitism was omnipresent, not necessarily perceived his Jewish identity as problematic. Rather, it seems as if Freud had a positive Jewish identity, which was connected to profound knowledge in Jewish religion and tradition, even though he declared himself as a Godless Jew. Both his Jewish identity and his knowledge in Judaism seemed to have contributed to some of his insights into the human psyche. The impact of the traditional Jewish circumcision and the insights connected to the theory of castration anxiety are specifically discussed. The author suggests that Freud's positive Jewish identity, and the significance of circumcision, contributed to his insights into the prerequisites of human development and how we as individuals are shaped both by our interpersonal relationships and by the cultural context.     

Reply to Barbara Pfeffer Billauer's "On Judaism and genes

The response of Barbara Pfeffer Billauer to my article "If I Am Only My Genes, What Am I? Genetic Essentialism and a Jewish Response" highlights the conflict between a sociological understanding of religion and the resistance to such analysis from within a faith tradition. Ms. Billauer makes three main points; the first strangely credits to me, and then attacks, an argument the article takes great pains to refute, but does so to emphasize the faith's prescient guidance in matters scientific. The second attempts to rebut my critical analysis of the tensions inhernet in Jewish views of the body with an insistence that Judaism so perfectly balances the relation between the sacred and profane that there is not now, and never was, the slightest tension between corporeality and divinity in the Jewish corpus. The third uses my article as vehicle for her to expound on an interesting but tangential formulation of three Jewish terms. In all, the need to defend her interpretation of Judaism's solutions to the problems the article raises results in un-self-critical and ahistorical theorizing, making the utility of her arguments in a discussion of the sociology of religion unsatisfactory.     

The Katz-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Judaism: Internal Consistency Reliability and Construct Validity among Female Undergraduate Students in Israel

The Katz-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Judaism was developed to extend to the Jewish community a growing body of international research concerned to map the correlates, antecedents, and consequences of individual differences in attitude toward religion as assessed by the Francis Scale of Attitude toward Christianity. The internal consistency reliability and construct validity of the Katz-Francis Scale of Attitude toward Judaism were supported by data provided by 284 Hebrew-speaking female undergraduate students attending Bar-Ilan University. This instrument is commended for application in further research.     

TECHNO‐SECULARISM AND “REVEALED RELIGION”: SOME PROBLEMS WITH CAIAZZA'S ANALYSIS

Abstract. Instead of focusing my remarks on John Caiazza's interesting and important thesis about the way in which modern technology is drastically secularizing our culture today, I examine the frame within which he sets out his thesis, a frame I regard as seriously flawed. Caiazza's argument is concerned with the broad range of religion/science/technology issues in today's world, but the only religion that he seems to take seriously is what he calls “revealed religion” (Christianity). His consideration of religion is thus narrow and cramped, and this makes it difficult to assess properly the significance of what he calls techno‐secularism. I suggest that employing a broader conception of religion would enable us to see more clearly what is really at stake in the rise of techno‐secularism. Instead of defining the issues in the polarizing terms of revealed religion versus secularity, I argue for a more integrative approach in which concepts are developed that can bring together and hold together major religious insights and themes with modern scientific thinking. If, for example, we give up the anthropomorphism of the traditional idea of God as creator and think of God as simply creativity, it becomes possible to integrate theological insights with current scientific thinking and to formulate the issues posed by the rise of techno‐secularism in a more illuminating way. This in turn should facilitate effective address of those issues.     

ATHENS,JERUSALEM, AND THE ARRIVAL OF TECHNO‐SECULARISM

Abstract. Western civilization historically has tried to balance secular knowledge with revealed religion. Science is the modern world's version of secular knowledge and resists the kind of integration achieved by Augustine and Aquinas. Managing the conflict between religion and evolution by containing them in separate “frames,” as Stephen J. Gould suggested, does not resolve the issue. Science may have displaced religion from the public square, but the traditional science‐religion conflict has become threadbare in intellectual terms. Scientific theories have become increasingly abstract, and science has been attacked from the left as a source of objective knowledge. However, technology, not science, has displaced religious belief, a phenomenon I call techno‐secularism. Robert Coles's suggestion that secularism is a form of doubt inevitably attached to religious belief, and William James's reduction of religious experiences to psychological states, evaluating them according to their “cash value,” are unhelpful. Technology enables us to remake our environment according to our wishes and has become a kind of magic that replaces not just revealed religion but also theoretical science. Techno‐secularism has an ethical vision that focuses on healthful living, self‐fulfillment, and avoiding the struggles of human life and the inevitability of death.     

WHAT IS “SECULAR”? TECHNO‐SECULARISM AND SPIRITUALITY

Abstract. I argue that there is no “roaring reality of rampant secularism” with “technological application as its chief agent,” as claimed by John Caiazza (2005). Two phenomena, techno‐religion and a spirituality of technology, suggest a different picture of reality: Technology may be an alternative spirituality rather than an ally of a secularism that makes “nutcrackers of the soul” out of people who should be “dancers” (Nietzsche). An analysis of secularism and its manifold causes indicates that secularism is a fruit of both science and religion. The secular is a companion of religion rather than its enemy. Hence, I recommend a heuristic instead of an ontological use of the concept of secularism. In a technological age, religion is changing rather than being displaced. These changes are illustrated by the increase of private religiosity, megachurches, and cyber‐spirituality. Energized by the tension between finitude and creativity, technology shares in the marks of spirituality (Philip Hefner) and in the potential for good and evil. In this situation, fundamentalism and dogmatism in religion, science, and technology are a greater threat than secularism.     

The “Jewish Knight” of Slobodka honor culture and the image of the body in an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish context

Scholarship on Ultra-Orthodox Jewish thought has traditionally assumed that the views of these communities derive from a struggle against the Jewish Enlightenment and Zionism, as well as against any values they identify as “modern.” This article challenges that assumption. Beginning with an examination of Ultra-Orthodox sources that present an image of the religious leader as the “ideal Jew,” the author then focuses on sources concerning the founder of the Slobodka Yeshiva in Lithuania. This rabbi intended his students to internalize “modern” norms found in the European honor culture of his time, while translating them into the language of Jewish Ultra-Orthodoxy. The author chooses to present his argument by tracing the image of the body in the Slobodka method, since it is precisely through the nexus of the body that Ultra-Orthodox Judaism was segregated from general European society and culture.     

‘What do these stones mean?’ Inscriptions on stone from an ancient monastery in Ireland that address Jewish–Christian relations

Etched on a stone from a monastery from the Middle Ages at a small village in County Roscommon in Ireland is a combination of Jewish and Christian symbols. The Menorah sits atop a cross. At the base of the cross and at both ends of the crossbar are three small extensions. The image is one of religious integration. Augustine, whose argument for the Trinity and respect for Judaism, comes across on the inscribed stone. His influence on Irish Christianity is evident. The article argues not for the Christian take-over of Jewish symbols to the exclusion of Judaism, but for the recognition of Judaism as the bearer of religious meaning that enriches Christian faith. Here is an object lesson for wholesome relations between Jewish and Christian worshippers.     

The Roles of Religion in National Legitimation: Judaism and Zionism's Elusive Quest for Legitimacy

Why and how do nations turn to religion to justify claims for statehood? This article addresses this question in both theory and practice, showing that religion plays multiple legitimating roles that shift dynamically according to the success they yield for national movements. I posit four legitimating models: (1) nationalism instead of religion (“secular nationalism”), (2) nationalism as a religion (“civil religion”), (3) religion as a resource for nationalism (“auxiliary religion”), and (4) religion as a source of nationalism (“chosen people”). Empirically, I analyze the roles of religion in Zionist efforts to legitimate a Jewish state in Palestine. I argue that Zionism has responded to persistent delegitimation by expanding the role of religion in its political legitimation. The right of self‐determination, which stands at the core of the “secular Zionism” legitimation, has given way to leveraging Judaism, which in turn has been eclipsed by constructing a Zionist civil religion and a “chosen people” justification.