Shadows of Sinai cont.

In the Koran

If the purpose of driving home the lesson that the Jews' negative attitude toward himself merely parallels the attitude of their ancestors toward the messengers of "before," Mohammed might found a very rich field of exploitation in both the historic and prophetical writings of the Old Testament. He might have cited vast variety of recriminations and denunciations against the "people of the Book" by verbatim quotations from the Book itself. Instead, makes little or no use of these two sections of the Old Testament but appears to depend, for his homilies of rebuke against the Jews, almost entirely on the testimony from the Pentateuch...

But most remarkable of all is the circumstance that, upon closer scrutiny, the distortions often (in fact, more often than not) turn out to be nothing else but biblical substance fused with embellishments characteristic of the far-flung literature of the Jews in post biblical times-exegetical and homiletical embellishments recorded, frequently in essence, sometimes even literally, in one or another branch of the Aggadah in the wider sense of Midrash, the Talmud...

Rather, we are forced to recognize that his biblical learning had flown and accumulated through oral channels, that is, through accumulated contact and personal contact with "people of the Book": Arabs in his environment who had been converted to Judaism or Christianity; Jews and Christians he had encountered on his caravan journeys; but, above all Arabic Jews he had encountered in the various centers of his native Hejaz, especially in Mecca and in and around Medina.

... it was through this channel of social intercourse and personal association between Arabs and Jews that a rather large variety of Hebrew and Aramaic words-such as Torah, Sabbath, rabbi (rabban), redemption (purqdn), sacrifice (qorbdn)-came to be used in Arabic and found their way into the Koran.

If, therefore, Mohammed's acquaintance with Scripture was one gained by his intercourse with Jews, it was bound to be in the main an acquaintance with the Pentateuch. Whether he was listening to the weekly solemn recital of Torah and Targum in the synagogue, or to discourse involving some point of religious practice, or to an edifying homily on God and man, Israel and the nations, he was as a rule listening to the words of the Pentateuch charged with the spiritof Agadah.

see: Koran and Agada: The Events at Mount Sinai
Author(s): Julian Obermann, Source: The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Jan.,1941), pp. 23-48 Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/529210

When We caused Mount Sinai to shake above the children of Israel as if it were a [mere] shadow, and they thought it would fall on to them, did we not say, "Hold fast with [all your] strength onto what We have given to you and remember all that is within so that you might remain mindful of God"?

And when We shook the Mount above them as it were a covering, and they supposed that it was going to fall upon them (and We said): Hold fast that which We have given you, and remember that which is therein, that ye may ward off (evil)

وَإِذۡ نَتَقۡنَا ٱلۡجَبَلَ فَوۡقَهُمۡ كَأَنَّهُۥ ظُلَّةࣱ وَظَنُّوۤا۟ أَنَّهُۥ وَاقِعُۢ بِهِمۡ خُذُوا۟ مَاۤ ءَاتَیۡنَـٰكُم بِقُوَّةࣲ وَٱذۡكُرُوا۟ مَا فِیهِ لَعَلَّكُمۡ تَتَّقُونَ

29 Zamajshari (ad sura 7: 170

We have seen already that, over against sort of tribute to the generation that homilies reveal a measure of skepticism accepted the Law only under duress.

One homily goes as far as to make Prov. 24:28 address itself to Israel at Sinai: having flattered God with their lips, they were to untrue to him after only forty days. God himself is made, another homily, to say to the people: yesterday you pretended that the Lord said we shall do and we shall hear" and today you (of the golden calf) "This is thy god, 0 Israel" (Exod. 24:32:8).41 Nay, at the very day when they stood at Sinai and said with their mouth "we shall do and we shall hear," their heart was intent upon idolatry. Even those homilies which stress so decidedly the religious perfection of Israel as reflected in the response "we shall do and we shall hear" often imply that, properly speaking, the response should have been in reverse order. In the words of a Midrash: "It would have been more appropriate for them to say: we shall hear and we shall do." And while some homilies see in the improper order only further evidence of Israel's greatness, others take a different view. The Talmud makes a certain "Sadducee" refer to Israel as an "impetuous people" (cammd pezzad) who put their tongues before their ears: you should first have "heard" and then decided whether you would be in position to "do."

For the above quote and all the Koranic references, see: Koran and Agada: The Events at Mount Sinai
Author(s): Julian Obermann

Escaping Judaism - Harry Austryn Wolfson

SOME Jews try to escape Judaism because Judaism is a problem, and escaping seems to them the simplest and easiest way of getting out of a difficult situation. ...There are certain problems of life for which no solution is possible, problems in which the conflict of interests is real and ineffaceable; no amount of twisting of facts will reconcile them. It would seem that the problem of Judaism as well as of other religions belongs to this category.

But then, too, it is not at all necessary to have all our problems solved. Our happiness, and even our intellectual satisfaction , does not necessarily depend upon the perfect harmonization of all our interests . What is really necessary for our happiness and even for our intellectual satisfaction is an abiding sense of loyalty to one supreme interest, and a willingness to resign ourselves to that loyalty. Resignation is the surrender of the human freedom to choose, to judge, to decide, in the face of a paramount loyalty . It is the greatest manifestation of human freedom, the relinquishment of all the petty forms of freedom for the exercise of the greatest of its forms, the assertion of one's inner self as the master of all external conduct. But unless it is the result of knowledge, it is not conscious resignation but blind obedience.

We could easily relieve ourselves of such an intolerable situation by throwing off the burden . But suppose it is something precious and dear to us for its own sake ; throwing it off might relieve us momentarily from the physical strain but the memory of it would haunt us and make us unhappy forever after.

Every conflict of interests which constitutes a problem presupposes one interest at least with which we are reluctant to part. Judaism presents a problem only to those to whom it is an object of devotion or of duty but withal a burden difficult to bear. The peculiar and most characteristic fact about our devotions and duties is that they are not of our own making; we come into them as into an inheritance—a social, if not a physical, inheritance.

It is perhaps quite true that we all come into the physical world with a mind as blank as a tabula rasa, endowed only with potentialities which are vague and formless; but by the time we awaken to conscious membership in the world of men and society we discover that our blank mind is already impregnated with definite thoughts and ideas, that our vague potentialities are already charged with definite tendencies ; and all this has come to pass through the medium of the very environment which sustains our life and by the agency of the same individuals who are responsible for our physical existence and our well-being. We can no more strip ourselves of our social inheritance than we can of our physical inheritance.

I imagine that the Jewish religious problem could be solved at once, for all Jews, and for all time, if we could start on a given day with a new generation of Jews and raise them in absolute freedom from all traces of Jewish influence.

But we cannot rid ourselves of our past without destroying our present and ruining our future. It is the crux of our Jewish as well as our general problems that to continue to be whatever we happen to be makes in the long run for the greatest human happiness—that our devotion and duties are as much an integral part of ourselves as our very life—that man does no more voluntarily change his mode of living than he takes his life—and that if wars to destroy life are unjustifiable then social revolutions to destroy established forms are likewise unjustifiable.

The solution of the religious problem for Jews to whom the problem is real, lies not in the complete elimination of this disturbing element or in impoverishing the content of that element by depriving it of any of its essential characteristics, but rather in the discovery of a new and more satisfactory means of adjustment of this religious interest to all the other interests.

All men are not born equal. Some are born blind, some deaf, some lame, and some are born Jews. The blind , the deaf, the lame all have to forego many a good thing of life. To be isolated , to be deprived of many social goods and advantages, is our common lot as Jews. Are we willing to submit to Fate, or shall we foolishly struggle against it?

Escaping Judaism, By Harry Austryn Wolfson · 1923

Theordor Herzl - The Self-Transformation of Jewry

IN JANUARY 1893 Herzl was invited to contribute to the weekly newspaper of the Viennese Defense Association against Antisemitism, of which Baron Friedrich Leitenberger was an honorary president. Herzl declined. Antisemitism, he insisted, could no longer be fought with the written word; more drastic means were necessary. He then unleashed a flood of radical proposals for solving the Jewish question. Antisemitism had destroyed the promise of Austro-German assimilation. Yet Jews had to end their debilitating condition of marginality. Still a devotee of Austria, Herzl sought new paths to Jewish integration and acceptance.

He advanced several plans, one of which was nothing less than the conversion of Austrian Jewry to Catholicism. Leitenberger met this proposal with sarcastic disbelief. What would Herzl think of next? he wrote back. His ideas were nothing more than “charming salon-chatter.” Herzl's head had been turned by his years in jaded Paris, where only solutions accompanied by “a thousand festering sores or a thousand balls of fire” were able to command attention. Leitenberger then showed Hcrzl’s letter to Professor Hermann Nothnagel, a world-famous specialist in internal medicine, devout Catholic, and like him an honorary president of the Defense Association. Nothnagel was horrified by the conversions proposal.

Leitenberger and Nothnagel may have been shocked by Herzl’s proposal advanced in a decade of rising antisemitism, but conversion had often been advocated, especially in more hopeful times, as the perfect consummation of assimilation. Ten years earlier, at the high tide of his optimism over the prospects of assimilation, Herzl himself had called for conversion.

The logical force of the conversions position was best articulated by the assimilated Viennese Jew Theodor Gomperz, when he lamented that religious differences drove a wedge between human beings: In Gomperz’s view: “Whatever differentiates men, also divides them.” Modern culture, he observed, rested on Christian foundations, for Europe’s literary classics and its historical memories were intertwined with the history of Christianity. Consequently, Jews should seek “union and fraternity” with the majority through conversion. After all, Jewry’s historic contribution to culture belonged to the distant past. Judaism was now “worn-out and out of date,” and persistent “isolation and separatism” on behalf of it was “pure folly.”

Conversion to the majority religion was thus considered by some the logical end-point of full assimilation. Herzl’s biographers have accordingly cither judged his proposal as the last gasp of his old assimilationist viewpoint or dismissed it as a wildly far-fetched, theatrical fantasy. But the idea was not a throwback to a past phase. It flowed from a radical idea he expressed to his editor Moriz Benedikt: heightened antisemitism must call forth “a saving act” on behalf of the Jews.
This notion of “a saving act” marked a change in Hcrzl’s thinking. He had once believed that emancipation and assimilation into European society would transform Jews; now he believed that Jews would have to transform themselves, and that this self-transformation would eliminate antisemitism. By bold acts in response to antisemitism Jews could transform themselves, rid themselves of their faults, and gain self-respect and the esteem of their Christian compatriots.

Surprisingly enough, Hcrzl’s proposal for the mass conversion of Jewry represented, for him, just such a bold act. The event would occur “in broad daylight. . . with festive processions,” in the vast square before St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. It would be sealed by a historic alliance with the Pope, binding the Church to eradicate antisemitism. Clearly, Hcrzl still conceived of full assimilation as the ultimate goal of Jewry, and he viewed Judaism as an outmoded faith, an unnecessary barrier to submergence in the majority culture. He confessed to Benedikt: “I am not in the least resistant to formal conversion to Christianity.” But his initial solutions to antisemitism pointed not just in one direction but in two opposite ones: both to the total submergence of Jewishness, and—still dimly perceived—to a new kind of Jewish self-assertion. Hcrzl moved confusedly between these two poles, wanting both, caught in the middle between the quest for total assimilation and on the other hand, for Jewish self-respect.

Hcrzl’s contradictory goals can be explained by his heightened Jewish ambivalence brought on by the strong upsurge of antisemitism. Throughout the 1880s, when he was still optimistic about the prospects of Jewish integration, Hcrzl’s conflicts about his Jewishness were troubling but bearable. But now the situation had changed. Antisemitism unleashed in him abrupt swings of conflicting feelings: rage at Gentiles, wounded Jewish pride, heightened Jewish self-disdain leading him to blame Jew's for antisemitism, calls for Jewish self-assertion and renewed wishes for radical assimilation...

Herzl was aware that conversion was considered an act of disloyalty, cowardice, and opportunism. Thus, his scheme for the conversion of the Jews was meant to transform it from an act of cowardice to one of pride and self-assertion. The act would occur as a grand public ceremony. Jews would convene in St. Stephen’s square and convert “not in shame,” as occurred when individuals converted, “but with proud gestures.” Herzl continued: “Because the Jewish leaders [with Herzl at their head) would remain Jews, escorting the people only to the threshold of the church and themselves staying outside, the whole performance was to be elevated by a touch of great candor.” The leaders of Jewry, including Herzl, would remain the “last generation” of “steadfast” Jews. Herzl conceived of a strategy that would accomplish two contradictory ends: assimilation or the “mingling of the races,” and Jewish self-affirmation. The act by which Jews scaled their immanent disappearance, considered by many a characteristically insidious Jewish act, motivated by “cowardice or careerism,” would be candid, honorable, and audacious.13 Jews would overcome their cautious and timid ways, thus gaining sclf-rcspcct as well as the respect of Gentiles. They would break their old habits and adopt a Prussian-like bluntness, openness, and boldness, Albia's ideal. Hcrzl was intent on remolding Jews in this image.

Why would Hcrzl, along with the Jewish leaders, not convert? The answer can be found in Hcrzls letters to Benedikt and I^itcnbcrgcr. What hindered his conversion was neither belief in nor regard for Judaism, but other reasons altogether. First, “devotion and gratitude" to his father, who would be devastated by his apostasy, and second, “a matter of sclf-rcspcct,” for “one must not abandon Judaism when it is being persecuted.” Hcrzl would remain one of the last of the Jews, not out of conviction, but out of filial loyalty and manly pride. In one account of his scheme, only the sons would be converted, while all the fathers would remain Jews. Jewish fathers, to spare their sons the “mortifications and slights” suffered by Jews, would have their sons baptized, but they themselves would remain proud, even defiant Jews, the last of the Jews. Thus Hcrzl could, at one and the same time, recommend the baptism of >oung Jewish sons and then equally insist that if his son grew to manhood unbaptized, he hoped he would be “too proud to abjure his faith.” (In the event, Hcrzl equivocated in the case of his son Hans, born in 1891. He was not baptized, but neither was he circumcised.)

See: Theodor Herzl, From Assimilation to Zionism, By Jacques Kornberg · 1993