Ontological Judaism: Reframing the Jewish Question
An Ontological Understanding of Judaism and Zionism
Jewish Ontological Manifesto

By Jacob Abolafia

One hundred and sixty seven years after Marx’s memorable essay, it is time to once again take stock of the philosophical grounding that underlies Judaism. It is time to reframe “the Jewish Question.”

It may seem that nothing is more tired than “die Judenfrage.” The field is crowded with treatises, articles, and tracts. It seems {every individual facet of Jewish life in the West – political, social, and ritual} has been analyzed from every conceivable angle for a thousand years in a thousand languages. Indeed, the list of authors who have left their imprint on the literature is so intimidating as to be paralyzing (Marx, Freud, the Deuteronomist). For all that, our time seems to lack any serious philosophical treatment of what it means to be Jewish. We settle for cultural and sociological definitions, and rarely do we seek the philosophical. Certainly since the Holocaust, discussion has focused most often on the survival of Judaism (physically or spiritually), without any serious discussion of what Judaism is ontologically.

The following thoughts make one major presupposition: That Judaism may be discussed ontologically, as an entity that exists (ens). With that axiom in mind, I will present two fragmentary thoughts that might serve as an attempt to reground Judaism ontologically. I view these fragments as the first parts of a larger work, the basis for a new discussion about the nature of Judaism in general and Zionism in particular.

Judaism and Alienation

If Judaism has the potential to be more than an entity – an end (telion in Aristotle’s language) or maybe even the highest end (aplos telion) – it is clear that it has not, in our times, fulfilled this potential. I have not yet bothered to state a “Jewish Question” because, to my mind, that problem is self-evident. The Jew exists in society as a Jew, but he does not exist Jewishly. The Jew exists in the land of Israel as a Jew, but she does not exist Jewishly. The Jewish problem is, quite simply, that we have lost Judaism as a way of life. Every person has a way of life (unless he chooses death). For much of human history that way of life has been traditional, a sort of existential given, consisting largely of the customs and expectations of the lifeworld into which a person was born. At a certain point in the development of modern European society, this ceased to be the case. It is my belief that contemporary thinkers about Judaism have neither sufficiently explored the ramifications of this shift nor its philosophical implications for Judaism as a way of life.

Marx says, in a golden sentence: “The devaluation of the world of man is in direct proportion to the increasing valuation of the world of things.”[1] To abstract from this, as material production takes over society, human value, or man’s value for the creation of his own life, decreases. He becomes an assistant to the productive machines that affect the creation of the material world he inhabits. Nature is no longer given or discovered, it is manufactured for human use. This “consumptive production” perpetuates the development of an increasingly produced world, and as the world grows more produced, man’s place in it becomes more and more constricted.

Marx explains this through two concepts, alienation [Entfremdung] and reification [Verdinglichung]: “The more the worker by his labour appropriates the external world, sensuous nature, the more he deprives himself of means of life…the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s.” We must keep this formulation in mind, as well as what Marx holds to be its crucial consequence: “In estranging from man (1) nature, and (2) himself, his own active functions, his own life activity, estranged labour estranges the species from man.” As man lives in an increasingly created world, where he creates products that do not fulfill his natural needs and uses his human power for ends that are not his own, he loses the ability to live his own life, to be fully human. The very thing he creates no longer has a use for him; it is an object, external, reified: “Whatever the product of his labour is, he is not…[the object] becomes a power on its own, confronting him.” Instead of acting towards his own life, he is creating an object of no relation to his life, an object that can be used against him, an object that, in a very real sense, competes with him for space in the world.

Why have I called into service such specialized language and such a technical narrative of industrial development? Whether or not one finds Marx’s philosophical anthropology of capitalistic production convincing (I, for one, very much do), I think it can serve as a powerful analogy for how Judaism in the modern world has lost its ability to function as a way of life. In pre-modern (which for my purposes will mean pre-emancipation) Jewish communities from the Battle of Jericho to the Battle of Austerlitz, Jews were largely free to govern themselves. With a few notable exceptions across the millennia, whether it had political autonomy or not, a Jewish community was run as precisely that. Most communities were insular, and even those during the most cosmopolitan eras of Jewish existence (Hellenistic Judea, Muslim Spain, Mercantile Amsterdam), there was an effective normative structure in place. Even when the “anarchic wind” of Jewish antinomianism blew a bit more strongly during the age of Shabtai Tzvi or Jacob Frank, the breakaway movements were imbued with the sense that their mission was Jewish mission, that their new life was a new Jewish life.

I would analogize this period in Jewish history to Marx’s understanding of man as a species being, living in “sensuous nature.” The Jew, in his communal environment, whether it was the hill country of Ephraim or the low country of the Spanish Netherlands, was in his natural state. His action, his labor, was as a Jew among Jews (not insignificantly, my term “Jew” replaces Marx’s “human”). Just as Marx’s pre-capitalist man lives in an organic world, a world that transcends his own production and which is at hand for his human needs, so to does the pre-modern Jew. As long as the Jew was living entirely within a world bounded by the Jewish textual tradition, as long as he created according to that tradition and reproduced the world of that tradition, he could be alienated neither from it, nor from himself as a Jew.

How then, did this world end? Alienation begins with enlightenment, when tradition itself is revealed as man’s creation. To follow Marx’s analogy, the Jew lost his understanding of himself as a species. This is, of course, already evident in Spinoza, whose ruthless disenchantment of tradition laid the groundwork (as disenchantment must) for an understanding of tradition as other. When man could see beyond the lifeworld of Judaism, suddenly he, like Marx’s laborer, had to battle that tradition for control of his life. Unlike Marx’s worker, he eventually won. He was emancipated. Where before he had been enfolded by a lifeworld, now he “objectively” saw that he had been entrapped.

With the destruction of Judaism’s traditional authority, its ability to function as a way of life was also destroyed. Parts of life, even in the most devout communities, gradually became modernized. Forms of economic life developed in tandem with those of the gentile world. Political, social, and economic changes pulled more and more Jews towards a non-Jewish environment where they gradually became full citizens of modernity, for better and worse. Life was no longer cohesive.

Just as unalienated man works for himself, because it is his human nature, the unalienated Jew works as a Jew. No part of his life is separate from his Judaism. As soon as his income or his understanding of political authority, or even his language becomes that of the gentile reality, the entire structure of the Jewish lifeworld is revealed as a reified bit of stage trapping to him. He may choose to step out of it like Dorothy into a Technicolor Oz. This situation leaves him, of course, in precisely the situation with which this essay began. The emancipated Jew was not necessarily unreligious, just as the Jew who hoped to return to a Jewish lifeworld (say the Zionist or Bundist) was not necessarily devout. Thus the Jew (as in the traditional “Jewish Question”) finds himself stuck between society and Judaism, fully at home in neither. Our initial sketch at an analysis is complete. It remains to look towards a solution.

Judaism and Interpretation

I began with an assertion that Judaism could be treated as a unitary subject. I will now reveal a key mechanism behind this claim, that is, a transhistorical love for and devotion to the textual tradition. If there is an unbroken Ariadne’s thread running through Jewish history, it is the interpretation, misinterpretation, and reinterpretation of texts. Recent scholarly work[2] has shown that even books of the Hebrew Scriptures themselves include important bits of interpretation about earlier books. The earliest systemic moment of interpretation can be found in the books written after the return from the Babylonian exile. This can be seen in details as general as the Chronicler’s retelling of the stories of Kings and Samuel or as specific as Daniel’s reinterpretation of 490 (9:2) of a number given in Jeremiah as seventy (25:11). While there are traces of such interpretive moves earlier, the writings of the postexilic period are important because they crystallize an important pattern in Jewish interpretation.

After the return from Babylon, Jewish leaders faced a hermeneutic crisis. They had the distant memory of what Judaism had been, they even had the authoritative texts associated with that memory, but they had lost almost entirely the lifeworld within which those texts had existed. For proof of this one need only cite the fact that Aramaic, a language of which their great-grandfathers had been ignorant (c.f. 2 Kings 18:26), was now their own lingua franca. There were certainly concepts to which they had clung by the waters of Babylon, such the Sabbath and sacrificial cult, but these concepts had been lived so richly in ancient times, with so much unrecorded ritual detail and meaning, that liturgical recitation could never reconstitute them. The post-exilic moment represents a rebuilding of Judaism not as it had been, but as it was imagined to have been from textual residues and limited individual memory. In an historical sense, the Israelite cult of Ezra and Nehemiah is not the same religion or culture as that of the Priestly Source or the Deuteronomist. Yet clearly it is the same. The spirit of Judaism, its infectious iconoclasm, its fierce morality, its Sabbath all live on and are reborn in the Second Temple period.

This cycle of the destruction of a lifeworld followed by a new interpretive reconciliation to old texts is repeated again and again throughout the centuries. After the age of Alexander and the destruction of the cultural habitus of the ancient Near East, Judaism adapted its Hellenistic guise. Cherubs were no longer things on which the Godhead rode, but daimones, parts of the spirit world. The monistic ontology of Mesopotamian cosmology gave way to dualistic Hellenism. The nefesh, literally the breath in the windpipe, became the psyche, the thinking soul. This shift was in many ways the most fateful one for the development of Judaism, as it gave rise to the earliest forms of Rabbinic biblical interpretation (as well as paved the way for forms of Christian exegesis).

Perhaps the most obvious of these interpretive turns occurred in the wake of the ultimate devastation of the Jewish lifeworld, the destruction of the Second Temple and, shortly thereafter, the final end of political Judaism. The destruction of the Jewish polity pushed the Rabbis to develop a new conception of Judaism as a way of life, namely, that of Diaspora religion. It was this understanding of Judaism that stood behind the Judaism practiced in the Ghetto of Venice, the Mellah of Fez, and the Shtetl of Berdychiv. There were some major changes (the Diaspora had little need for the laws of ritual agriculture or those governing political action), but on the whole, the texts remained the same, once again grafted onto a strange rootstock, serving a new way of life. Every adaptation to a new lifeworld occurred concomitantly with a new interpretation of the old words.

I have, admittedly, given the subject of Jewish history and hermeneutics the shortest of shrifts. It too deserves the careful and loving exposition that I cannot here provide. I introduced it only to make room for the possibility of a prescriptive answer to the Jewish question, which heretofore we have treated only descriptively. Our task is clear. We have borne witness to the destruction of the Diasporic lifeworld, through its annihilation in Europe, its slow atrophy in the cosmopolitan West, and its plausible obsolescence in the face of Zionism.

It is therefore our task to do as those who call themselves Jews have always done, rebuild a way of life in the shadow of our textual tradition. Not to do this would be to shirk the duty that Jews have borne on themselves not only to observe the commandments but to live in them. I cannot outline here precisely what this way of living will look like, but it seems to me there are several key elements that must not be absent:

1) Any such project must be a form of radical Zionism. The Land of Israel is not only the cradle of Jewish civilization, it is its incubator. It has always been an assumption of Jewish interpretation that a Jewish lifeworld in the fullest sense (including the laws of ritual agriculture) can only be established in the Land of Israel. We, who have the possibility of such a life, cannot abdicate from this responsibility.

2) Any such project must be whole-heartedly committed to a way of life built on the interpretation of (and the interpretation of interpretations of) the Jewish textual tradition that traces itself (however tenuously) back to Sinaitic revelation. Not every thought by a Jew constitutes part of the Jewish tradition. We must be wary of false prophets.

3) This project must not fear to engage in the “long, brave, industrious, and subterranean seriousness” (Nietzsche) that any great interpretive act demands. We cannot worship the texts of our tradition as idols, for indeed we live in the twilight of the idols. Those who claim to have a monolithic interpretation of the text and fear innovation are the most rabid modernists; they simply conceal this fact under black hats and bad faith.

Within these general guidelines, it is my hope we can once again rediscover Judaism as a way of life, and within it, a Jew who is not alienated from himself. This does not mean walling the Jew off from modernity, for, as seen above, the construction of a wall is but another form of reification. The Jew as species-being, as Jew in the fullest sense, can only exist in a world built out of interpretations of the Torah. He interacts with the wider world, to be sure, but he does so guided by something other than his own subjective ends. This is not the place to gesture towards particular developments that hint at new forms of textual interpretation that might serve as the tool in our constructive project. Suffice it to say that I do not believe this to be a Sisyphean labor; indeed I believe it is a labor we can successfully undertake. In the words of Rabbi Tarfon: “It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task. Yet, you are not free to desist from it. If you have learned much in the Torah, much reward will be given you.”

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[1] Citations are from the Philosophical and Economic Manuscripts of 1844, Sect. 22: “Estranged Labour” in the Complete Works (Paris: 1972) Vol V.

[2] Much of this explanation is deeply indebted to James Kugel’s The Bible as it was (Cambridge, MA: 1997)