How Judaism refused philosophical modernity, with the consequences we see

The Jews mostly decided that they can and will be powerful, not weak. They succeeded. In America, because of this success (and sentiments related to the war and the rise of America as a world power after it), they became the model European-American minority. Many of them, like most Americans, are now like Calvinist Protestants who believe in power and success, mainly their own. This is not Jewish. Jews who think like that are non-Jewish Jews. Judaism persists in this context mainly as a relic. It has long been out of touch with contemporary developments at least in European culture.

Indeed, that has been true since roughly the French revolution. It liberated the Jews in France, and the model spread throughout Europe and the West, including America. Reform Judaism created an ideology of assimilation and a Judaism that effectively was a Protestant denomination (and that was the explicit model). In America as well, it articulated the idea that Jews could be part of the bourgeois and professional class, and should be accepted as such, since they only differ in variant religious practices, like worshipping on Saturday. Reform later became more traditional, but did not also become more modern.

And what happened in Europe after the French revolution? Particularly in Germany, and at the same time that Reform Judaism was growing, a philosophical culture developed that, with Hegel and afterwards, was based not on ways of thinking of Being or knowledge, and on an ethics and politics that were advice to princes (and now the professional class), but on social criticism, with the address now not to a privileged class necessarily but to all citizens. Philosophy and thought generally became republican. The new science of sociology arose at the same time that philosophy began to take this turn, one it still follows on the "Continent" (at variance with England and America). Outside Reform, the Jewish world was long split between traditionalists, who were religious (and Orthodox) and secular minds, the most important groupings of which were radicals. The mass wave of Jewish immigrants to American from Russia and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th consisted of Jews who were either Orthodox or socialists. It was widely understood that the religion was conservative, and in some sense it never modernized. Could it have? That is an interesting question; I don't have the answer, though I know the way it would have to have were it to succeed in doing so. Historian Norman Cantor suggests this in The Sacred Chain: Judaism could have tried to engage with modern secular thought, Jewish and otherwise. It did not. After Kant and the French Revolution, two separate lines can be traced of thought in the Jewish world. In philosophy, one line is the (religious) "Jewish philosophers": Cohen, Baeck, Buber, Rosenzweig, Soloveitchik, Heschel. The other line is "secular," mostly political, and typically concerned with art. These two lines of philosophy and thought never much interacted with each other. The first line is philosophically very weak, and one must recognize this whether they like it or not. That is partly because it is written almost exclusively by rabbis, with little professional training in philosophy, which certainly shows. (The exceptions are professional philosophers like Levinas; Cohen was that, and Rosenzweig had been, and they are partial exceptions, partly because Cohen's philosophy of Judaism is rather rabbinical in part, and partly just because, while a leading neo-Kantian philosopher, he is a minor figure in the philosophical canon, and rightly so.). Part of the problem, well-recognized today, is that the modern world results in a reconfiguring of the relationship between the sacred and the secular, and of how religious thought is secular, its concerns not really distinguishable from those animating discussions in ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics as well as metaphysics. In fact, Judaism still does not well enough understand its possible relationship to philosophy. Maimonides insisted on its importance, and interestingly claimed that philosophy is universal, while the legal and ethical code of Judaism is alone particular to Judaism. But he insisted that philosophy was central. It does not have that position in the Jewish world today. There are various reasons for that, one of which is the continued popularity of mystical thinking since the 16th century, well-received in America because of the popularity of notions of spiritual irrationalism. Judaism as a possibility in the modern world seems to me a massive failure. It offers some things, but it's not very robust. It does not offer a comprehensive world view that could make sense to a modern person, and does not ask the questions pertinent to the construction of such a world view. That that would mean people disagreeing and engaging in arguments is not an obstacle in a religious tradition that never tried to develop and impose a dogma, a set of mandated beliefs. What has happened is that in the Jewish world religion remains separated from secular thought and life, and this separation appears also in intellectual formations. In secular terms, the greatest privilege of the Jews was the value of universal and lifelong learning. I can certainly read, to learn what can be learned, from 'religious' writers, and as I study philosophy, and am a writer, I can make whatever connections I like. There is almost no one I could productively discuss this with, and everyone who is religious, more or less, is committed to something I find conservative.

This closure of the religious that excludes philosophy and creative secular thought has a political effect that I find unacceptable, as do many Jews. It directly and clearly supports the idea of a Jewish state as an entity that must be separate. This is the modern problem that Germany failed to solve, because assimilation did not mean integration, except in the worlds of art and ideas. The problem is not that the Jews were different, but that they were separated, because this difference was thought of as a separation. This is why it is said that "It was (only) at Auschwitz that they separated the Germans and the Jews." Israel as a state is based on a similar separation. The solution is to decide, or recognize, that just as the sacred and secular are no longer separated as they were, so distinct peoples in modern states cannot be separated. The Jews and the Palestinians are different, but that does not mean that they cannot have strangers as neighbors. To welcome the stranger is one of the most central commands in Judaism. The contemporary problem starts with the refusal to welcome the stranger. In place of this, we have identitarian communitarianism and its collective narcissism. And this in the context where the fact or idea of being-Jewish is referred not to related secular ideas, but to a falling back upon a more primitive, earlier, essentially medieval and pre-Copernican, closed notion of the self and its world. It would not directly solve this problem if Judaism became modern, but it could help.