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Introduction
Erich Unger, a leading intellectual in Berlin after World War I, can be seen
as a European philosopher conscious of the Judaic dimension in Western
thought. His writings show that he responded to many varied philosophical
trends around him, to Nietzsche in Germany, to Levy-Bruhl and to Sartre
in France, to the logical positivists in England. His own thinking, however,
retained certain pivotal anchors, some of which he had developed together
with his friend and one time mentor, Oskar Goldberg.
Unger looked to philosophy to reach out into areas beyond the scope of
reason, using the cognitive function called "imagination." Strictly disciplined
and guided by reason, a "rational mysticism" might apprehend laws of the
universe, principles, values and being in that universe. He thought it impor-
tant to examine this sphere and to discover how it relates to the empirical
world, the world of physics and, especially, to the biological forces of the
world. It was equally vital to him to study the ethical significance of
the relation of the empirical world to that other, the extended natural (not a
supernal) world. At the same time, Unger was working on formulations of
what he saw as the inclusiveness of philosophical truths. Thus, equal value
cannot be accorded to every principle simply because it exists, though a
principle cannot be denied existence simply because it does not fit into
a particular vision. Readers will find echoes of such ideas below;
In Berlin, Unger and Goldberg gathered about them a significant section
of the intelligentsia of the nineteen twenties. At weekly meetings, up to fifty
people would debate the latest developments in science, philosophy, litera-
ture or mathematics. Poets, journalists, writers in every field participated.
Among those who attended occasionally were Walter Benjamin and the
young Gershom Scholem. Here Benjamin heard Unger outline one of his
books, Politik und Metapf?ysik, and wrote to Scholem that, in his opinion, this
seemed to be "the most significant work on politics in our time." We know
from the Benjamin-Scholem correspondence that Benjamin had enlisted
Unger for his projected periodical, ''Angelus Novus." Benjamin and Unger
had much in common; Benjamin and Goldberg very little. Scholem had
received a personal rebuff from Goldberg---one that clearly offended him
271
272 Esther j Ehrman
bitterly since, some thirty years later he related how Goldberg had called
him a "Modephilosoph" (fashion philosopher). Here Scholem had the last
word, since it was he who wrote the entry on O. Goldberg in the Enryclope-
dia Judaica.
Unger's career came to an abrupt end with the advent of the Nazis. Then
in his forties, he understood the direction that events were taking in Ger-
many and left with his family in the summer of 1933, to lead the frustrating
life of an immigrant in France. Seeing the danger signals there in 1937, he
went on to England, where he died in 1950.
The essay that follows here is part of the ongoing confrontation between
Goldberg and Unger on the one hand and Scholem on the other. Scholem
had written a long letter about Goldberg and his ideas to Benjamin in 1928,
the year in which Scholem wrote his essay on Cardozo and Sabbateanism.
The letter was apparently passed around by Benjamin. A copy of it was in
Goldberg's hands; it is among his papers. Manfred Voigts, in his book, Oskar
Goldberg, der mythische Experimentalwissenschciftler (Berlin, 1992), which devotes
one chapter to Unger and one to the philosophical group in Berlin, suggests
that Unger's essay was written to provoke Scholem to a public discussion.
Biographical Note
M. Voigts has published an edition of Unger's Politik und Metapl!Jsik (Konigs-
hausen & Neumann, Wurzburg, 1989) with a fairly extensive bibliography,
also a collection of early essays by Unger, VOm Expressionismus zum A1ythos
des Hebraertums (Konigshausen & Neumann, Wurzburg, 1992) in which the
present essay "Der Universalismus des Hebraertums," probably written in
1929/30, appeared in print for the first time. The translation here is by
Unger's daughter, Dr. E. J. Ehrman.
Most particular thanks are due to Professor Elliot Wolfson for constant
and invaluable advice on making the somewhat intractable German text
accessible to the contemporary reader.
one meaning can replace the other, that in his considerations the notion of
duality also played a significant part, in short that he saw the two connota-
tions of antinomianism as intertwined. We have in no way sought to belittle
the reasoning of Scholem's paper or to simplify his arguments in a way that
might lay them open to easy refutation. This does not mean that such a
presentation would not be necessary as an essential chapter in a discussion
of a religious nature, in which one would need to clarify the meaning of the
phrase, "tending towards annulment if the laul'-the word "law" taken literal-
ly and without Karaite input. Let us now try to present the content of
Scholem's account in broad terms.
Antinomianism denoting a general duality, which characterizes the spiritual
content of this period and its religious understanding of Judaism, derives on
the one hand from the historical situation in which the Marranos (those
Jews forced to become apparent Christians while remaining Jews at heart)
found themselves; it also has its origins in specific contexts belonging to
"older" Kabbalah. The tension of this duality grew to be explosive in the
Sabbatean and Frankist movement and threatened to tear Judaism apart, the-
oretically and physically.
How did antinomianism manifest itself? First, in the mysticism of "early"
Kabbalah, articulated, we are told, in the book Temuna. This book divides
all of universal time into seven separate ages of the world, seven eons, in
each of which the Torah has a different meaning and is understood differ-
ently, proscribing differently and prescribing differently. Already here, in a
mystical way, an antinomian tendency endangers the unequivocal meaning
of the Torah. The seeds of just such a tendency to antinomianism which,
Scholem seems to believe, are to be found in the paradoxes of concepts
used by "early" Kabbalah to apprehend the relationship between the divin-
ity and its modes, the middot, expressed as the world of the sephirot. These
"inner" divine worlds and stages of being, the editor believes, originally
formed part of the domain of the divine itself The continuing web of kab-
balistic speculation led to such complex multiplicity that an overview was
unattainable; it also led to a series of infinite mystery worlds. This finally
distorted the living relationship with God and, in the end, forced religious
consciousness to decide whether to forgo all intelligible schematization of
the mysterium and apprehend it through the senses, or to separate this
world of mystic essences from the divinity very strictly and regain the con-
nection afresh with a simple theology.
Scholem finds the second of these possible approaches in the religious
system of Abraham Cardozo, one of the theoreticians of Sabbateanism, him-
self of Marrano descent. Scholem sees in the theology of Cardozo the full
expression of antinomianism, evident in every area of religion, in theology
(teaching about God), in the history of salvation, in Messianism and in
morality-the antinomianism that, as has been said, became historical dyna-
mite in Sabbateanism and Franksim and nearly exploded Judaism.
Der Universalismus des Hebraertums 275
3. Discussion 1
A few concepts will give some indication of the cosmological and philo-
sophical premises in The Reality if the Hebrews, a work that sets out basic
elements of a philosophical bridging between the world of the Pentateuch
and "our reality." We shall be making reference to part one of Goldberg's
work, to two other writings that expand on its basic thinking, to the Intro-
duction to The Reality if the Hebrews! and to the writer's epistemological sys-
tem, directly connected to Goldberg's position.2
First, a distinction is made between the "pre-universe God" and the God
after and in the creation. The relationship between world and godhead, the
relationship in which the Being of God is necessarily altered through
the act of creation, is very clearly expressed in the Pentateuch through the
fact that God appears and acts manifestly to the senses in the world. This
manifest Godhead, who "causes death and gives life," enacts and wages war,
is the Elohim of the Hebrew nation and is so as a result of a covenant made
between God and the patriarch of that nation. He has a place in space in
which He "dwells," a mishkan, a center for His (visible) deeds-in the midst
of the nation. It is difficult to associate this localization of God at a point
in the world totality with which the whole Pentateuch deals, with the Being
that is "all-embracing" and brought forth the world as a whole, conceived
of as necessarily outside and everywhere in the world, known as One, Echad
And it is specifically this being-in-one of One and Elohim that is expressed
by the central formulation in the early Hebrews' conception of the world,
"Our Elohim is One, Echad" ''We have the pre-universe God as Elohim."
This means that it is from the pre-universe and extra-universe Godhead that
1 E. Unger, Das Problem der Mythischen Realitat, Berlin, Verlag David, 1926.
2 E. Unger, Gegendie Dichtung-eine Begrundung des Konstruktionsprinzips in der Erkenntnis, Leipzig, Ver-
lag Felix Meiner, 1925.
Der Universalismus des Hebraertums 279
not only the world derives as created and existing separately from God, but
also-together with the creation-that there is an agent-being of the creat-
ing Godhead itself within this world. Indeed, this agent-being is the pre-
universe Godhead inasmuch as it creates, since creating necessarily includes
projecting of the self in some way into that which is being created and per-
sisting in that which has been created. If the Godhead creates the world, it
must remain there in some modality. The creation of the world thus neces-
sitates an alteration in the identity of the Godhead. The Godhead projects
itself into that which has been created, into the projection-being at the
beginning of creation and throughout extended time and space, into that
which has been created as its developing history. The projection-being then
seeks and assumes an ever more specific and narrowly circumscribed posi-
tion in the midst of life. The beginning of the history of mankind, as The
Reality if the Hebrews shows from the Pentateuch, is the history of a "sorting
out" in which birth and choice, causality and teleology work together, end-
ing in a combination, seemingly strange when viewed in perspective and
from the outside, which links the power of the creation of the universe with
a specific branch of mankind, the Hebrews. The Hebrews, viewed histori-
cally,are as it were, the last point in the world totality, a point still connected
with the power to bring forth the world, whereby the completion necessi-
tated experiencing the presence and contact of the Creator Godhead. At
the moment of the creation of the world, God is "Being, Omnipresence"
and is, as Goldberg shows, present at the eschatological moment in time
when, according to Isaiah, "The earth will be filled with the manifestation
of the One God." (Is.ch.6,v.3). In the days of the Pentateuch and in the
"middle days" this is not so; that time is dominated by the relationship of
identity between the pre- and extra-universe God and His presence or
appearance-when circumstances allow;
These concepts in the Pentateuch, which The Reality if the Hebrews eluci-
dates in some measure and which can be complemented and developed on
the basis of that book, are, of course, diametrically opposed to Cardozo's
construct as presented by Scholem. The pre-universe God is self-evidently
the focus and content of the early Hebrew religion in exactly the same way
as is His manifestation, apparent and active at the so-called "revelation."
The differentiation is a delineation and a materialization of the [divine] One-
ness. Cardozo's claim that "the prima causa is nowhere, but nowhere men-
tioned in the holy books" must, according to Goldberg's presentation, be
rejected outright. One would have to say that the prima causa is the subject
at every crucial point, wherever statements are made about the being and
the nature of God, be it in the controlling formulation of identity, "ehrye
asher ehrye," which expresses unequivocally the finality of a principle, i.e.,
beyond which it is impossible to go back, its prima causa character; be it in
the statement of the double I, "an~ ani hu," which expresses the absolute
in the Godhead in that it is conceived as above contradictions; be it in the
Name itself. That this pre-universe Godhead, as Cardozo claims, according
280 Esther J Ehrman
to Scholem, "does have a simple unity which, however, has no religious con-
tent" may explain a religion of a particular kind, such as Sabbateanism. It
has nothing to do with Hebraism. The idea developed by Cardozo, accord-
ing to Scholem, that "an identification of the prima causa with the God of
Israel" is the hallmark of an aberration is such a radical contradiction of the
essential expression of the early Hebrew reality that one would have to say
that it is this identification, this "secret of the double meaning of One," as
Goldberg puts it, this alteration of the identical, which is the center and
fulcrum of pentateuchal reality, decisively formulated in the Shema, "Hear
o Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is One," meaning: Understand that
the One [apprehended as] the Elohim of the Hebrews, is identical with the
pre-universe and absolute first cause, One, Echad. The Reali!} of the Hebrews
thus expresses the very opposite of the theory of Cardozo.
We have isolated the thinking concerning this modification of identity
from Goldberg's system in order to drive home how opposed it is to Car-
dozo's kind of philosophy of religion. We have selected this particular sphere
of ideas because it is the only one that can be said to have echoes in cog-
nate literary writings. We shall leave aside the clear external differences, the
idea of a pre-reality nothingness, out of which both finite and infinite reality
was created and which, itself, is to be differentiated from the Godhead that
it is taken to dominate.
Returning to the subject-matter, where confusion may be the result of
lack of knowledge or of intent, two further criticisms are crucial. First, con-
cerning the idea that the prima causa is within the grasp of "the elementary
reasoning of every schoolchild" in "the ABC of causal thinking." It should
be said that it would be difficult to find a cruder lack of understanding of
the complexity of the concept of a first cause than is evident here in
Scholem's interpretation of Cardozo. The latter would not seem to be aware
that practically all universal problematic questions converge in this concept.
Second, concerning the differentiation of the existential modes of the God-
head, there was certainly no need to refer to Cardozo the Sabbatean in order
to mention this idea, since it does not originate with Cardozo, but is as old
as Kabbalah itself. To save space, it will be sufficient to name only one of
the best known writers. Scholem must know that, three and a half centuries
before Cardozo, Isaac of Acco cites a statement by Rabbi Jacob Nazir con-
cerning Abraham ben David: "the cause of causes (the prima causa) was
never manifest to man-it is possible that there is no emanation of the
supreme cause that contains the highest power, unless it be the 'sar' (or
archon) the Prince of Torah in Merkavah mysticism) that appeared to Moses."
The theology of the much quoted, if rather superficially understood, Gnosis
essentially consists of nothing but such differentiations of the Godhead and,
as Graetz and others-unlike Scholem-have shown, it "connected" these
differentiations with the Kabbalah in the same way that Christianity linked
its content to Judaism, in both cases with equal distortions in the process
(cf. Marcion and especially Saturnilos). So, why Cardozo? One must here be
Der Universalismus des Hebraertums 281
wary in view of the simplistic idea that Cardozo has of the prima causa. It is
questionable whether the idea of a differentiation between the Creator of
the world and a prima causa) although certainly taken on by Cardozo, was
ever fully understood by him. The superficially understood differences, seen
by Cardozo as evident to elementary reasoning, are actually concomitants of
the prima causa. Cardozo's conception is flat; it represents a contradiction to
Hebraism and any deeper meaning that can be developed from such a con-
cept does not derive from Cardozo.
3 Because Gnosis, at any rate Christian Gnosis, has no other function than to protect Christianity
from "The Old Testament"-which leads to ajuxtaposition of highest beings; whereas a simple differ-
entiation can be traced formally along the direction of a specific structure of identity just as much as
the juxtaposition within Gnosis can be seen to be taking the clear direction of polytheism. Very fine
conceptual distinctions come into play here; it is an area where only informed consideration is appro-
priate, not sophisticated tendentiousness serving demagogic ends.
282 EstherJ Ehrman
We can now see the essential difference between the stream of the Kab-
balah and the-no younger-line of thinking into which The Reali!J of the
Hebrews fits. The line taken by the spirit of Kabbalah,4 on the borderline
between self and alien, meant that it could articulate and engage only an
emotive and experimental "inclination" for the basic elements of Mosaic
Hebraism. Kabbalah could never itself lead to a crystallization of concepts
that would have provided absolute unity, outright, of the two age-old oppo-
nents, as represented by Talmud and Kabbalah. But then neither would
orthodoxy have wished or been able to bring that about. To produce
the network of concepts needed to avoid getting lost in the labyrinth of the
world's structuring is, in our view, an essential merit of The Reali!J of the
Hebrews. But, one might say, is Kabbalah anything other than just such a set
of concepts? To this one has to reply: such a system of concepts can clearly
not be random, which is why it is not possible to select concepts freely;
naturally, the vast number of Kabbalistic systems of concepts belong to the
totality. The point is that the concepts must not articulate just any but rather
a specific state of the world. The conceptual webs of Kabbalah lead, as we
have said, only to formulations that, if one seeks to cover the structure of
reality of Mosaic Hebraism, offer nothing but vague pointers to such a
totality, never a congruity. On the most vital point, the uniqueness and
supremacy of the Godhead of the Hebrews, they can at best be said to fail
while oscillating into perspectives of alien cults. (To distance oneself from
this type of work on concepts-as Scholem, Graetz and the entire liberal
orthodoxy of Cohen observance have done-simply means running away
from the problem, shocked, instead of driving the underpinning structure
beyond the end of Kabbalah's expedition, to a point of coincidence with
the orientation document of Judaism.) It is not enough to "exclude the evil,"
to localize it outside the philosophy of Judaism and to retain the harsh
phraseology of Cohen, with hardly an echo left of the Pentateuch. Philoso-
phy is all embracing and there is no highest concept of existence or of the
godhead, which allows for anything contradictory outside, for anything out-
side itself Nor can there be a highest form of monotheism that sets itself
against polytheism as a, logically and metaphysically necessary, possible
position, to be denied, rejected outright, without remaining permanently a
simple polarity, i.e., a logically equivalent, opposing partner, instead of pre-
senting a genuinely overriding, unpolarizable concept. It is not enough to
"reject" polytheism-because it then remains as a danger--{me can only
accord it a conceptual place, house its reality within the world structure
unfettered by the limited spheres of a tension-susceptible, abbreviated cos-
mic system, of which there are thousands-on account of which there are
thousands. Polytheism and the danger of polytheism then simply signifies
that the image of polytheism and the image of monotheism interpenetrate,
4 Cf. also here The Reality of the IJebrews on the metaphysical effectiveness of Kabbalah in Dr-times;
the statements are remarkably apt for the speculative Kabbalah of the unmetaphysical era.
Der Universalismus des Hebraertums 283
take up the same space, as it were. The danger disappears if such mutual
interpenetrating of concepts is excluded by a structure with a fIrm frame-
work of concepts that separates,5 such that the framework of concepts has
as a logical postulate of its structure the principle of the uniqueness and
supremacy of the idea of monotheism. The world is infInitely greater in
range, complexity, richness and measure than suits Scholem. To acquire even
a notion of its range, it is not useful to complain about the complication of
Lurianic Kabbalah that, after all, did not see things as easy or "simple"; nor
will it help to follow the path of trivial conceptions that can be multiplied
at will, none of which has precedence over another. A scholarly pursuit in
the direction of the greatest possible multiplicity, difficulty and wealth of
form attainable to the "far-reaching soul" would seem preferable.
We must now make the point that the world is greater than Judaism and,
if we are to bring about a clean relationship, we must take the world as the
measure of Judaism, not Judaism as the measure of the world. Otherwise,
we would be theologians or scholastics. Perhaps-and this is our opinion-
Judaism has no need of scholastics. That would be the case if our measur-
ing of Judaism by the world, adequating it to the world, were not to be an
"artifIcial linkage" and union, but a recreation of its own, original, world-
related delineation, which it had as Hebraism and which it lost as "Juda-
ism." Perhaps Judaism can afford to have a conception of the state of the
world in which everything that is non-Judaism is given its place, "its truth."
Perhaps the essence of Judaism lies in the fact that this situation cannot be
reversed. Polytheism, as a particularly important, if by no means the only
articulation of an extra-Judaic position, "included" in the comprehensive
world structure, is "excluded" into truth, i.e., provides-it does this specifI-
cally-the conceptual criteria for an exact differentiation between the pre-
sentation of "a plurality or multiplicity of gods" and the "alteration of
identity," even for a recognition (conceptually, in the fIrst instance), of how
the modality of an identity is to be separated with precision from the gesta-
tion of the "other," something that one cannot well avoid having to deter-
mine, unless one wishes to prohibit all thinking about "fringe states" such
as "Creation."
But even that is not nearly sufficient. It is not sufficient to collect varia-
tions of positions in philosophies of religion in one conglomerate, as the
Kabbalah frequently does-setting one here, another there, without taking
any account of systematic objections and contradictions that arise from the
mere juxtaposing of these perspectives. A proven collectivity must be con-
ceived of as immediately possible, logical, structural moments, in a non-
random, necessary "order" and sequence. Nothing else can qualify as sys-
tematic in an objectively conceptualized, comprehensive representation. It is
thus not enough to deny conceptions that Judaism rejects as "unreal," nor
5 Cf. the principle constituting spheres in Gegen die Dichtung, p. 170 ff.
284 Estherj Ehrman
to allot them some mythological place (in mystic terms, saying "that might
also be the case." That could result, as it has done in our days, in a Judaism
that is safely categorized as a "religion among other religions," allocated a
place). Such conceptions need to be linked, settled typologically speaking, to
the principle fundamental to Hebraism in an unobjectionable, ontologically
systematic way. There are, it is true, "polytheistic elements" in Kabbalah,
but these constitute either an unwilling polytheism, which is dangerous and
cannot be handled by consciousness or will, or what we have is once again
a pure mythological setting of the perspectives of Judaism next to polythe-
ism, not obligatory, not necessary, not in a valid system. There is only one
way of combating that which must be combated: to allocate to it its true
place in the world. That is the task that The Reality of the Hebrews sets itself.
Denial or the allocation of the wrong place means to be defeated. To com-
pel knowledge and recognition thus appears irrefutably within a religious
orientation. The immeasurable wealth of those uncontrollable systems calls
forth the long since discarded concept, "objective truth" and makes it nec-
essary to apply every conceivable criterion, which then reduces the entire
Kabbalistic speculation to "mere fragmentary material," collapsing in an
epistemological structure.
Philosophical objections to Kabbalah, which only makes limited use of
ontological logic and otherwise proceeds in mythological ways, demonstrate
the difference between the method of Kabbalah and that of The Reality of the
Hebrews. The latter demands and offers a term in ontological logic for every
mythological situation. The methodology of this logic sets a transcendental
order and the apparatus of scholarship will tell, fIrst, whether the order is
complete, whether the schema of the world remains too narrow; secondly,
whether the conceptual elements that give expression to the mythical con-
cepts really serve the understanding of objectivity (i.e., follow the inner law
that informs judgment) or whether they are "custom-made" for a scholastic
or Gnostic translation of myth. We do not intend to set out the whole of
Goldberg's system here; we mean only to mark the difference between his
frame of reference and the Kabbalah's schema of the world. SignifIcantly,
the parallelism between myth and cognition is present throughout his work.
Arising from this consistent linkage there emerges a paradigm, which we
can here only state rather simply, of the metaphysical and mythological
antithesis "monotheism-polytheism." This antithesis must not be taken as
giving value equally, as in the category alternative "one-many" (where
"many" is then simply "denied"); it must be accorded the function "whole-
part," where the metaphysical part is not, of course, denied but is given its
true transcendental and empirical place as "the relative reality of polythe-
ism," this seen (in the fIrst instance, conceptually) as excluded, made alien.
(Such an "allocation" does not, as such, resolve the problematic situation.
It only leads to the allocation being applied in The Reality of the Hebrews.) The
more insidiously "abstract" the whole is than the parts, the more drastic,
Der Universalismus des Hebraertums 285
conscious, noticeable are the parts in the visible image of the world, the
more often recurring and extensive-as The Reality if the Hebrews shows-is
the reality of the parts' functions, and the greater is the space taken up by the
manifestations of power of the polytheistic principles than that of the whole,
restricted as such manifestation is among all the countries of the world, to a
desert or to some small point of penetration-and this applies not only to
the visual image.
All in all, it is not possible to face the question of God's being, without
commanding the universality, i.e., the completeness of the category of its
possible conceptions. It is not possible to set up the unbreakable oneness
of God's being until the question of this oneness has been resolved-it is
certainly the most profound one and its initial perception contains more
than one antimony-until all the perils have been integrated, until, quite
literally,the antinomies have been resolved. For this purpose, it is necessary
to unroll the logical modality/universality, where the oneness can be tangled
into coundess pairs of opposites, in order to learn how to separate all the
structures that appear, one from another. It is particularly important to
diagnose with certainty, in opposition to the resolution of the oneness, the
unfolding of the oneness and to delimit it with equal certainty from a genu-
ine multiplicity, as e.g. the opened out oneness that is nominalist and com-
prehensive (roughly as in the position of pantheism). This element, the
complete category, is set out in The Reality if the Hebrews and marks it off
from the Kabbalah. To get to the "supremacy" or to accentuate the value of
a specific principle, such as the monotheistic one, among the possible con-
ceptions of God's being, it is necessary to secure the rights of other princi-
ples, not less but more firmly. True, justice in cognition cannot be a
"partisan" justice, even if it is not "unpartisan" in the normal sense. The
question is more difficult. As far as Kabbalah is concerned, it missed the
epistemological expression of the myth content of Hebraism, because it paid
too litde, not too much, attention to the problem of universality.Whoever
claims to be convinced of the validity of the position of Hebraism, must-
unless he adopts the method of "Christ," i.e., faith-be equally convinced,
and he must be able to legitimate his conviction rationally, that the world is
constructed in the way Hebraism says it is, that such a conclusion is a nec-
essary one, without scholasticism, theology, secret or open "intent," having
accepted the method of epistemology and arrived at the goals contained in
Hebraism.
There remains really no option but to reintroduce the criterion of objec-
tive truth into the world of myth and of philosophy of religion. This truth,
which cannot be apprehended on the level of mythology, can be evaluated
by two characteristic features: one criterion requires a complete parallel on
the level of myth with the epistemological and logical level of the world,
mutually enlightening. The second criterion concerns a feature that shows,
in a rather drastic way, the peculiarly isolated, dead-end, "erratic" situation of
286 Esther j Ehrman
the Kabbalah. The latter is seen to have moved away from the path
of objective cognition because it offers no parallel between myth and cate-
gory, never mind a continuation or extension on the parallel level of the
world. The requisite, even if not realized, transition from the level of cogni-
tion to areas of single fields of knowledge is totally beyond the myth in
Kabbalah. This inevitably means that myth in Kabbalah is not viable,
because it is unable to transfer the revolution that it signifies in the abstract
domain to the empirical domain. Kabbalah ma'asit is not a means to that
end. It is to be understood as a tradition of secret-meaningful or other-
wise-aesthetic concepts that may be compared to an esoteric, unconceptu-
alized, archaic cognition of a natural-real or not real-source of energy
("electricity in antiquity"), energy that can only be taken directly from
the universe. It cannot be traced through an intermediary area, between the
world-all and practice; indeed, Kabbalah ma'asit does not ever sight such an
intermediary domain, which alone can signify "reality" and which would have
to correspond to the, always essential, fundamental areas of phenomena of
every single field of knowledge, e.g. the basic phenomena of physical and
living energy. Kabbalah does not transfer its reorientation into the empirical
domain, nor can it do so, because its theoretical system, to which its myth
corresponds, has too short a structure. It would not be an exaggeration to
say that in no kabbalistic schema are there concepts that allow a continua-
tion of the concepts into the manifold domain of single fields of knowledge.
If we now try to summarize the above and to define the position that The
Reality of the Hebrews sets out in opposition to the Kabbalah, we can juxta-
pose the theoretical characteristics of both positions in terms of philosophy
and metaphysics in the following way:
Kabbalah doe not have within itself a !)1stem of categoria4 ontological completeness.
comprises no parallel system and thus, in the end (as The Reality if the
Hebrews6 describes it), stays as "religion," at best "philosophy of religion"; it
does not qualify as "philosophy."
If now one is convinced that a religion or a religious system is "true," an
expression of "the truth," that can only mean that there is a conceptual
level, relating to the level of reality as a projection, presenting like judg-
ments, objects and procedures, although and just because, on the level of
conceptual category, only its own reasoning is valid. Every "squinting" from
the conceptual domain to the domain of religion ends in scholastics, a rela-
tionship where thinking serves religion. If, however, the autonomous rule
determining legitimacy inherent in cognition is applied and there yet emerges
unambiguous evidence of a religious account, then that account is an ex-
pression of literal reality. So, any philosophical system that seeks to present
a parallel to a religiously formulated system must be set out in such a way
that the "expansion" of the parallel level opens onto the procedures specific
to philosophy, until it comprises only philosophical procedures.
From the "piece" of philosophy added on to a religious situation, it is
necessary to diagnose, as it were, the entire remaining philosophical struc-
ture, at least formally. Kabbalah cannot do this because, although it makes
use of philosophical expressions when describing religious, antithetical pos-
sibilities, it is actually being religiously partisan and to be partisan is to ex-
clude philosophical universality. Real philosophy and surprisingly, the Pen-
tateuch too, only become partisan after all metaphysical sections have been
"heard," i.e., have their place,-that is, at the end.
Now one might well say that The Reality if Hebrews does not have that all
embracing philosophical system. How, then, can one diagnose universalism
from the "piece" of philosophy advanced in the "philosophical and cosmo-
logical foundations" set out in that work? To which one has to reply that it
can be done because, in The Reality if the Hebrews, the entire level of category,
the purely logical sphere, is projected to a level of application, namely the
level of the concept of God, presented by a total disjunction of all religious
positions concerned with the concept of God: henotheism, polytheism, pan-
theism, atheism, monotheism. These are given expression through the com-
prehensiveness of the disjunction: unity, plurality, totality, nothingness, infinity.
Of course, merely setting up these possibilities does not express the move-
ment between the categories nor the inner capacity for modification of each
one of them, which is what really matters. However, the rule that matters to
philosophy is being applied: not to allow the metaphysical possibilities
to deny one another (which is what religions do to one another, and the
Kabbalah does it as well), but to unfold them and mark out the area of
6 Cf. The Reality of the Hebrews, English translation of the title: Die Wirklichkeit der Hebraer, Berlin,
Verlag David, 1925, p. 178.
288 Estherj Ehrman
validity of each (perhaps the Pentateuch does that-if so, it would be doing
what thought itself does). It follows from what has been said that The Reality
if the Hebrews is to be distinguished from Kabbalah because the Kabbalah
cannot see individual religious positions in an all embracing schema, let
alone acknowledge that they have a validity, without endangering its own,
because it is unable to admit simultaneously that they may have a relative
reality and yet are subordinated to its own reality. Now, to the detail.
Instead of positing a complete order, one that has to provide location and
value, to provide higher or lower ordering and be compatible with philoso-
phy, the philosophy of Kabbalah (and, incidentally, the so-called world
religions) tried to define the infinite within a fragmented order, with its own
reality. This injures the principle of totality while remaining "ambiguous."
Because the Kabbalah has no theory of alien cults, of elohim aherim, it can-
not be aware of a possible orbit of rights. This means that Kabbalah, which
seeks to qualify as philosophy, simply repeats the-religiously justified-
rejection of the alien cult, a rejection that, from the point of view of a spe-
cific people (the Hebrews), should follow as a philosophic necessity. Kab-
balah repeats the religious rejection without, as philosophy must, examining
and determining whether the rejected' religious position deserves to be
negated and annihilated in itself or as an encroachment in a domain in
which it is not due. A relativism of religions cannot be overcome if it is not
there, if the sphere of its validity has not been found and delimited. All of
this may be withheld from the internal perspective of religious systems; it can
and must be uncovered by the external perspectives and by general philosophy.
If one wishes to counter the thesis that Kabbalah has no theory of alien
cults with the statement that the personification of "evil" and its hosts has
a considerable role in its metaphysical speculation and cosmology, the reply
must be that this morally determined division of the world into "good and
evil," affirming and denying, is a repetition of a point of view that is ade-
quate in a religious document of internal perspective, concerned with deeds
and conduct, but inadequate in philosopy, the domain of observation. Such
repetition adds a supetjiuous band of theory to the document of religion. If
the Pentateuch intends to offer a hypothetical redrawing of a structure of
world dimensions, then the parts of the world-and in the animate world
alien nations must be counted as these-must be able to recognize them-
selves spontaneously and they must be able to do so in accordance with a
.!J!stematic modification of the moral dimension. A "central" ruling position must
be characterized by the fact that it can give expression to the relative "right"
of the rest in such a way that this rest can recognize itself in such an
expression (in the theory of its cult) and that there yet remains a residue;
the residual then acquires prime importance and leads to the ultimate,
unmistakable, decisive position, one that cannot be "fitted in," outside of all
religious positions. Philosophy must not decide "too early"-in the past-it
must not make a moral rejection too early and it must construe matters in
such a way that the alien spirit can recognize itself just as it can recognize
itself. How to avoid this developing into relativism and to show, once and
for all, how to attain the possibility of a final and absolute position, the
basis for which is a relativity that must have preceded and been abrogated,
belongs to the discussion of that subject. However, a criterion can be given
here. It is in the justified assumption that, ultimately, the real universal spirit
will be the one that can bring forth a structure that it allows for all others
in their appropriate placings. Leaving aside the dispute between philosophy
and religion about reality, we can formulate a provisional theory. It envi-
sages the hypothesis, yet to be verified, that the spirit of Hebraism can rep-
resent and acquire the remaining spiritual world, that such a representation
is its hallmark-but that the reverse is not possible. We even have here
something like the possibility of an experiment. We can only suggest it. If
the rational construct of myths alien to Hebraism is validated in their con-
tent, the religious/philological material of these myths must emerge from
the obscurity that an incorrect and partial examination can never penetrate,
in the same way as the question of Hebraic ritual emerges-although it may
not be possible to invert such a procedure. Solving riddles has long been a
good method in determining matters.
The path now leads from the plane of philosophical, i.e., all-embracing,
general considerations, to the domain of specific perspectives, i.e., of single
fields of knowledge; the inadequacies of this path, as we shall see, are,
according to The Reality rf the Hebrews, characteristic of the differences
between the world of scholarship and the approach of Kabbalah.
A philosophy of Hebraism that does not wish to be identified with scho-
lastics, would thus aim at nothing short of the possibility of a legitimate,
overall perspective. If only on account of the absence of a theory of alien
cults, Kabbalah must be denied a claim to universalism from the outset.
And from this there stems a further inadequacy:
We cannot here discuss the concept of "fixation" in The Reality oj the Hebrews.
Suffice it to say that it designates positions basic to the non-henotheistic
and the non-genuine polytheistic cultures, alien to and opposing the world
of gods. It includes our culture consciousness as one in a series of non-mythical
spiritual positions: allegorizing polytheism (e.g., of Rome)-now no longer
taken seriously-"philosophy" in the Western sense, abstract monotheism,
pantheism and, lastly, so-called "world religions." All, in a way as a unit,
stand in opposition to the strictly cuitic, or more specifically ritual religion of
national religions in the genuine periods of myth. All, taken together, may
be seen as the age of cultlessness. That such a concept, which can only be
recognized and defined by its opposite, is absent from Kabbalah and from
the character of myth to which it can lay claim, whereas the Pentateuch is
well aware of such a concept, needs no elaboration. It is a position that
philosophy is obliged to know, to locate and perhaps to overcome; religion
is not under any such obligation.
The above are the criteria that determine the divergence of Kabbalah from
the standard requirements of a philosophical orientation. Kabbalah, although
inftltrated by philosophy, is pure mythology, i.e., mythology that is cut off
from experienced reality, particularly so because the speculation that accom-
panies its myth has no way of descending from the heights of abstraction
to the lower regions of experienced reality, i.e., to areas open to specific
sciences. We now have the means to determine this matter: If the basic
concepts of specific sciences, life, matter, consciousness, the relationship of
individual to plurality in all its forms-if these basics are sufficiently affected
and changed by philosophical consciousness, so that such a change is nec-
essarily felt in the domain of concrete matter, of empirical sciences, then
we can say that the philosophical level is continued into the empirical
regions. It is not possible to treat myth philosophically, i.e., to attribute to it
the significance of reality, unless the meaning of myth is presented in such a
way that the phenomenological content of literally concrete experience is
affected in everyone of its fields. Apprehended experience has a definitive
contribution to make on this subject and can therefore serve as the clearest
means of differentiating between paths to knowledge, indicating whether
access to these problems is open or closed to experience. We must be con-
tent with this general indication of the task since it was never our intention,
in the context of this analysis, to present even an outline of the content of
The Reali!J of the Hebrews. That task is undertaken and begun by Goldberg in
his work that, in its overall aim and in the detail of its sections, contrasts
with the very hallmarks of Kabbalah. However, a delimitation from
Kabbalah as a whole is necessary, so that the lack of meaning of Sabbatean
theology can appear clearly and the present attempt at its resuscitation can
be seen to be based on ignorance of substance and on a form of deviation
particular to Kabbalah. Let us now pursue that subject in some detail.
5. AnalYsis II
We have outlined some aspects of the concept of God that Cardozo took
from earlier speculations-and to which he added anything but depth-and
set this against the Hebrew concept. We have been unable to fathom
Scholem's statement, rather more literary than philosophical, concerning Car-
dozo's perceived danger to monotheism. We cannot tell whether the writer
sees this danger in the confrontation of prima causa and divine Creator or
rather in the dynamic unity of the divine Creator or, perhaps, in the fact of
assigning the Lurianic "Pleroma" to the world of creatures or, perhaps, in
all three constructs equally or, perhaps, not in one of these but very much
so in the others. He speaks of all this as one. However that may be, it is
clear, on the one hand, that Scholem holds at least some of these moments
responsible for shattering the principle of monotheism. It is equally clear
292 Esther J Ehrman
that in the unaltered content of Kabbalistic speculation that they retain, Car-
dozo's theories concerning the concept of God are peripherally connected
to the sphere of Hebraism, but that they are right outside the regions of
Hebraism in everything that is particular to and characteristic of Cardozo,
in everything that he has added, everything that is not older than he is. It
should be said here that Scholem ought to have felt obliged, in the context
of Luria's exclusion of the sejirot and parzufim from the radius of the God-
head, elsewhere presented as particularly daring and original on Cardozo's
part, to at least refer to azmut vi-kelim, to the great rift that echoed the con-
flict of universals and split intellectual opinion some three hundred years
before Cardozo; its derivatives and variations contained all of Cardozo's con-
siderations. It would not then have seemed as if Cardozo's originality lay
only in his thoughts about Luria, thoughts that others see already in the
Zohar itself concerning Kabbalah.
What all this has in common with The Realiry rf the Hebrews is a few
peripheral questions, but not a single answer. We shall now follow up our
proposal to discuss briefly the remaining questions raised in Scholem's chap-
ter in the history of religion and contrast it with The Realiry rf the Hebrews.
The reader should note how markedly the structure of Scholem's essay par-
allels certain important themes of Goldberg's work, making one think of
the "apocryphal review," the only clear reference that we found in Scholem's
concluding remarks. Perhaps the writer of the outline of Sabbatean theology
wished to have this lack of clarity in evidence, using obscure phrases such
as "the messianic phraseology of Zionism," which "is not the least mislead-
ing of Sabbatean statements," "which could prevent the renewal of Juda-
ism." Perhaps, by not naming names or clearly identifying movements (how
proper in a historical warning), he wished to create murky waters in order
to fish in them, holding a super-clever answer ready in case of a possible
reaction to what had been dimly alluded to: "He who defends himself and
does not name himself is accusing himself." The tragedy of silence and wait-
ing in matters of fact is not above reproach. As distinct from the personal
sphere, in matters of fact it is essential not to leave any dispute unopened.
We confess to feeling just as much under attack by what Scholem does not
think or write about or against The Realiry rf the Hebrews as by what he does
say. In short, we would see an attack behind everything that Scholem pur-
veys, on the basis of his overall philosophy. Consequently, the cue that he
gave is only the stimulus, not the reason for the fact that we cannot leave
unchallenged his views on theology, history, Kabbalah or Judaism. These
views themselves provide the reason, even where their author does not ex-
press them directly, let alone defend them. Although the parallels between
Scholem's account and the structuring of certain themes in The Realiry rf the
Hebrews are interesting, we do not wish to embark on the wearisome game
of decoding "key" statements. These, it has to be admitted, can never be
irrefutably worked out; they always allow for arrogant rejection, the allega-
tion that due attention was not given to the core, but only to the periphery
Der Universalismus des Hebraertums 293
has taken its place. However, the elements of the scientific, physical cosmos
that make up the consciously self-restricting, abstract picture offer only a
deliberately "poorer" picture of the "real" cosmos. Nothing is more com-
mon than a confusion of one with the other. The real cosmos has as many
building elements as the world, not as many as physics. The components of
consciousness and of life need to be penciled in, and thus the "abstract
picture" in turn alters; out of the physical cosmos there emerges the philo-
sophical cosmos. The constant changing of the world optic perspective that
consciousness undergoes when sense perception is raised to abstraction and
the newly attained abstractions are made concrete, can be compared to a
constant outward movement in respect of one area, one base, one category,
within which vision had but now been contained. The Reality if the Hebrews
posits as basic to its philosophical and cosmological thinking such a struc-
ture of the philosophical cosmos. From it we can take certain concepts that
lead to the representation of "the worlds," excluding any finite and infinite
object categories and- any modification of the relation between these. Ac-
cordingly, in the abstract image of the cosmos taken philosophically, i.e., as
universe, the three comprehensive world elements are spirit, matter and ani-
mate life as given. While these stem from the region of the infinite, they
take up the space of "finite reality," a continuum that, as ontological reason-
ing shows, must needs be far more comprehensive than the experience giv-
en to us, than "our" world. A heuristic application of the so-called totality
principle as the real guiding factor of cosmological construction coincides
with the principle of a self-regulating, methodically active autonomy of con-
sciousness as the only instrument for philosophical tele-orientation. (Any
"experiment" using physical instruments is by definition not applicable, i.e.,
in the context of the problem) inoperative.) Such autonomy shows nothing as
clearly as the distance between the real and the possible; more specifically,it
shows the real as the "event" in the series of possible realities. The extent
of experience, "our world," is seen, in the far more comprehensive scale of
completeness, as a limited section of something that is clearly itself "frag-
ment," i.e., the empirical potential: the philosophical cosmos completes ex-
perience. Experience includes neither the point of origin nor the totality of
structures that "figure" in its empirical individuation; for example, the con-
strued history of the origins of the earth and of its creatures, which naive
consciousness unthinkingly includes in the world of experience, just as it
includes the world of atoms, is actually taken as the true cosmos, i.e., "added
by the mind, of necessity." In the same way, that which is missing in experi-
ence necessarily designates that which must define the cosmos.
Searching for a totally comprehensive structure, we shall find in The Reality
if the Hebrews the cosmic total reality "life," filled with the totality of all think-
able structures of organized life, each one of which must be thought of as a
fact of the cosmic totality, represented separately in the empirical domain.
The totality, oriented as the category of the possible) contains infinitely more
structures than actual experience, which thus allows definition and limita-
Der Universalismus des Hebraertums 297
9 In this way, the so-called "doubling objection," often justifiably raised against the doctrine of the
Ideas, loses its force, since the original and the copy, the center and the peripheral projection, neces-
sarily differ considerably.
298 EstherJ Ehrman
fined in The Realiry of the Hebrews. We cannot enter here into their broader
delineations within which, at a certain point, the mythical content is recog-
nizable. What is important is that all the descriptions are literal and "un-
symbolic," in methodological terms conceptually pure, necessarily taken
from the "natural" components of the world and not set through with any
mythical concretization, as Kabbalah is wont to see it.
case all the value symbols are inverted. The fact of a movement in the di-
rection of extra-sensual, prime cause, abstract, is only one, though undeni-
able, component in the historical happenings of religion. Nothing emerges
from this formally because it is conditioned by judgment, i.e., it is linked to
a metaphysical and historiographical system.
The determining question still remains, namely how such a general view
can translate into local parameters, and how it can fit into a context of reli-
gious value and structured history. Biblical criticism usually places the ge-
netic option into the Pentateuch itself, since it speaks of "stages" in the
history of religion, the "primitive, sense-determined" and the wholly spiritual,
"pure," which allegedly interpenetrate in the Pentateuch. It sees the purest
form of intellectual understanding of the divine first in the Psalms and it
accordingly rates these more higWy than the Pentateuch. This value per-
spective shares with modern Biblical interpretation a philosophical line that
also sees the undeniable movement from myth to intellectual as an "upward
development." Cardozo envisages a similar movement, only he describes the
process that modern scholarship takes to be upward as negative. His emphasis
is on the non-abstract, the aspect of the prime, archi-causal being that is
not accessible to rational and causal thinking. Indeed, he does not accept
the abstract as in any way part of the being of the God of Israel, seen by
him solely as the revealed God. He consequently views as decline that which
faith and scholarship both see as progression (that is, if one disregards the
latest variation in so-called Biblical research, hostile to its subject, which,
while it recognizes a value perspective in such progression, does not agree that
it is present in Dr-Israel, thus negating a feature that is presented as positive
in Cardozo's theology).
There remains the need to point out, on the basis of the argumentation
in The Realiry if the Hebrews, that Cardozo's interpretation is just as one sided
and, in a deeper sense, just as noncomprehensive as the equally one-
sided emphasis in so-called "rational" theology and philosophy, in the high
rating given by the "pure and intellectual," the (presumably) abstract and
comprehensive minded, to the extra-sense being of God. Early Hebraism's
claim is that it can harness together these two tensed tendencies, which ease
away if they are isolated from each other and become independent in lines
of thinking that make either for only concrete, only seeming, only manifest,
or for only mental, only abstract and universal. As The Realiry if the Hebrews
describes it, Hebraism is concerned with the most tensed, that is most live
coming together of the concrete and the universal, with giving finiteness to
the infinite, maintaining both fully upright.
The work also examines (in a different context) to what extent the real
and final universalism is concrete as opposed to abstract. A history of the
decline can only be a history of that de-tensing. De-tensing means an artifi-
cial taking apart of that which at the limits of the power of consciousness
may be thought of as one. It means a desire to divide up that which is
undivided in being. The result is that consciousness's simultaneous
300 Esther j Ehrman
"hostile to revelation" the duality can only be overcome with the sense of
the greater claim, that of cognition. The only thing to do is to use the organ
ratio to stretch reality, as it were, beyond the complexity of a system initially
transmitted as transcendental, by means of that which opposes it most
strongly: the concrete evidence of the universal and the divine presence,
somewhat more accessible to abstract thinking. The only thing to do is,
slowly and step by step, to think about the conditions of a concrete reality
and presence of the universal and, in The Realiry if the Hebrews, that is the
purpose of the so-called "theological development." This concerns not only
a "change of perception"-although it does that too-not a change of per-
ception having any kind of status, one that may be conceived by mere history
or perhaps by a history of "salvation." Rather, in this historical perspective
of consciousness's perceptions of the Godhead, we find a reality correspond-
ing to "religious content," disclosed by, directlY ascertained from consciousness; we
find the conditions for such unmetaphorical way of being real and for the
self-representation of this reality in consciousness. Goldberg, therefore,
describes "the development from national religion to world religion" in
general terms; he does not bring Hebraism as illustration until he has dis-
cussed the reality of religious content as such.
In the non-metaphorical and non-abstract sense, reality carries the condi-
tion of limitation. In the case of the metaphysic of Hebraism, this character-
istic limitation, a characteristic of the general condition for every "event" in
the reality of experience, is presented in such a way that the limitation
becomes a means for orientation in a systematic world transposition of the
properties of the Godhead that express non-limitation, i.e., the concept,
limitation, leads to a topologically and schematically different localization of
the so-called "omnipredicates," such as "all-powerful," "omni-present," etc.
Set against these omni-predicates in the actuality of creation, are (according
to The Realiry if the Hebrews) the self-limitation of the infinite as moment of
limitation and eschatology as the suspension of the limitation. In the "phases
of theological development," The Realiry if the Hebrews shows the progression
from so-called naive acknowledgment and awareness of moments that counter
the "empty" omni-predicates in early Hebraism. Such awareness, with the
knowledge of a limitation comprising knowledge of nonlimitation, testifies
to the possibility of living reality and empirical existence in the metaphysical
and moves from the spirit of the awareness of limitation, i.e., of the real, to
the position taken in later Hebraism; drawing from the God that is near
ever more towards the God in the distance. The progression is immanent
testimony that no new event of metaphysical experience can have been pos-
sible within the ambit of these people. The analysis shows how, in the end, a
speculation that is increasingly colored by pantheism and that increasingly
legitimates the Godhead with something-if such a thing is possible-that
stands in opposition to it (e.g. "nature") breaks out into the flattering, meta-
phorical, eager, superlative omni-predicates. These not only prejudice the
302 EstherJ Ehrman
dimensions that make possible the implementation of the law-and this po-
tential situation will be opposed by a situation of equal world historical
force. Even these indicators risk causing fundamental misunderstandings,
above all a misunderstanding due to trivialization; it is remarkable that this
likewise applies to all beginnings of practical Kabbalah; it is also a feature
of every dull political undertaking that likes to liven itself up by a clever use
of Messianic perspectives. It is a misunderstanding though trivialization in
the sense that such a reductive procedure, if one can speak of it in this
context at all, often presents itself as a "precondition"; as if it were possible
to cut up live reality into any number of little sectional conditions, evoke
and range sequences of conditions ad lib; as if the being of organic life
could be put together in sections in just any order, instead of according to
prescribed phases, each of which contains all: the divine and the human, the
whole that is empirical and transcendental.
In Cardozo's Messianism, we maintain, the value accorded to cognition,
to ratio, seems, in true theological fashion, to afford the metaphysical
domain its total independence. God hears the word of purified cognition in
a way analogous to hearing the pleas of the righteous. To this interpretation
of Sabbatean theology, which we have described as a parallelism between
metaphysical being and ratio, with a correspondence that may, perhaps, lead
to true coinciding on a psychological level (the relationship between faith
and cognition), but not ever on the level of the real (the relationship
between cognition and being), we would like to add a few features.
Can the person of the Messiah have any distinguishing characteristic other
than that he repeats a metaphysical act that belongs to the category of events
in Dr-time? It is certainly a genuine "inner" Messianic facet that such a rep-
etition was brought about through an indestructible cognition; but the evi-
dence that cannot deceive, the sign, also the hallmark, the necessarily out-
ward, visible, at the same time all-conquering proof is his act. The act is the
criterion for cognition-not the reverse. To say that absolute, rational pene-
tration of the "mystery of faith" is the unequivo~aJ hallmark of the Messiah
indicates that a psychological coincidence of faith and knowledge is being
referred to-and that linking cognition and act, an act that repeats, reenacts
an act of Dr-time is not what had been thought about. We have, further
"Revelation and tradition are only testimo1!Jl' for the one recognizing the
Messiah. But should one not rather assume that repeating a metaphysical
reality in the Messianic era is testimony of "revelation," of tradition and of
cognition? "OnlY" testimony for recognition; this clearly indicates the still all
too separate duality of the domain of cognition and the metaphysical world
in Scholem's account. If we then read in that account that "the fundamental
claim of rational cognition is made with the greatest emphasis, specifically
for the most paradoxical mysteries of faith," leading to "an almost Mai-
monidean concept of the redeeming power of cognition," we note once
again the naked counterplay of faith and knowledge and the fact that the
actual moment of verification, one that must be placed cifter this antithesis
306 Bstherj. Bhrman
has been resolved, that the real repeatability of the mystery itself was not under
consideration. Unquestionably, the "paradox" of a new realization of the
mystery that presupposes a rational understanding must be greater; just as,
equally unquestionably, the progress from cognition of the mystery to that
mystery being made real indicates an understanding of the redeeming power
of cognition that is totally "un-Maimonidean."
All this should make it clear that Sabbateanism, even when it continues
the most powerful Kabbalistic tendency in validating ratio, remains theology.
Against this we have sketched the non-theological base in The Reality of the
Hebrews} from which we have taken two characteristics, the construct princi-
ple and the repeatability principle.
extended to the whole biological reality. Ritual thus becomes a seal character-
izing the Godhead who gave it and to which it is appropriate. The fact that
ritual in ancient Hebraism does have a series of universal statements, such
as the decalogue, where it ought, as ritua~ to have only specific statements,
is merely !J!mptomatic of such universalism. Ritual repeats the whole prob-
lematic concerning the concept of God, as briefly discussed above. The
combination of universality and concreteness that characterizes the concept
of God in ancient Hebraism, is also the hallmark of its ritual. The universal-
ity can be seen from the fact that this ritual, while wholly removed from
the formal generality of moral statements in the vast majority of cases, yet
contains the entire arsenal of the moral canon. Formal ethical meaning may
not attach to its statements, since that meaning would be legitimized by its
universality-instead of being legitimized by the characteristicum attaching
to the Godhead. It is, however, this that marks the essence of the concept
"ritual." For logical/abstract generality differs from metaphysical universality
inasmuch as the latter encompasses concreteness, while the former excludes
it. To be more eox:act,the latter can exist together with it, the former cannot.
It is a confusion of the formal and general with the metaphysical and uni-
versal to say that such moral statements are to be attributed to the dictum
of an abstract, moral god, instead of to the ritual of a universal God. Moral
signals logical autonomy; ritual signals measures taken to realize the God-
head in the world of experience. This would not be an alternative if the
question were only about such general statements as those of the Deca-
logue and a philosophical concept of the divine being, such as rational the-
ology offers. It would then be easy to understand the bare abstractness of
the Godhead and the bare abstractness of morality as conceptually homo-
geneous. Since, however, the ancient Hebraic concept of God is not
abstract-only and since, further, the conceptually general Decalogue stands
in the midst of wholly specific commandments, equally attributable to the
essence of the Godhead (specific commandments, unlike the specia~ judicial
commandments that are special in the sense of a deductive unfolding-are
simply specific, as such) and since, methodologically, cognition necessitates
a unit, a single principle characterizing and explaining the divine command,
the principle cannot have the standpoint of morality, but only the stand-
point of ritual. Specifically determined laws cannot be understood as state-
ments of morality or of a god determining morality only, but universalistic
statements can be seen as pertaining to the ritual of the universal Godhead.
In The Reali!J if the Hebrews we find the statement ''As opposed to the moral
laws of the other metaphysical nation-laws, the biological universalism of
Hebraic metaphysic leads to 'moral' laws which do not become meaningless
when separated from the remaining ritual, but which contain in themselves
the possibili!J if a universal application."
In the course of last section, we have indicated the differences between
The Reali!J if the Hebrews and the Kabbalah in almost all essential aspects. In
doing so, we have taken particular account of the Sabbatean distortion of
310 Esther j Ehrman
the Kabbalah that Scholem adds on to his account of its theology by way
of a critique, intended or easily inferred, of Goldberg's system. While this
might conclude our remarks on the factual content of this account, it seems
relevant and, in this context, even of general import, to look at the psy-
chology of the, not uncommon, type of historical perspective evident in
Scholem's history of religion. The orientation that determines the views of
a critical historian nowadays concerning philosophy, Kabbalah and the his-
tory of religion deserves some attention.
First and most significantly: Scholem does not have any declared stand-
point. We have before us, in his account, a type of historical presentation,
easily and frequently used, in which a stated, clear overall stand expected of
every critical historian, but especially of a critical historian of spiritual history,
is replaced by-silence concerning the determining viewpoint. A straight-
forward reporter may not have, and may not need, a point of view and yet
claim historical accuracy-if such a thing is possible-for his account. The
reporter who passes judgment in his account is bound to declare the princi-
ples underlying his evaluation quite clearly, even if he does so dogmatically,
so that the reader may know that he has before him not only a historical
account but also an ideology. The greater his claim to scientific research in
the account, the less willing will an author be to admit to an ideology. The
well-known tragic fact that there is no such thing as a neutral report should
not be the pretext for an orgy of subjective narrative and judgment or for a
blurring of the fundamental difference between the-perfectly legitimate-
paradigmatic handling of history that seeks general validation for a perspec-
tive of systematic values based on empirical/historical material and the -
equally legitimate-attempt to eliminate any overall value judgment for the
sake of documentary accuracy. A lack of concern about mingling the two
trends in the writing of history may be less important in external history,
e.g., the history of wars or of politics (partly because external factors are
largely unaffected by any "higher" world view and partly because they re-
tain their relatively stable and "objective" state more easily in a stream of
opinions than do internal factors). A historical method that presents judg-
ments together with reports without communicating explicitly the principle
of orientation on the basis of which the judgments are made leads, in a
spiritual history, to truly chaotic consequences. Everyone is familiar with in-
adequate transmitters in spiritual matters, both in the field of "history of
philosophy" and, particularly, in editings of alien religious institutions. Wher-
ever the subject is other than spiritual i.e., where it is imperative to differen-
tiate the two-that is in the vast field of external history-there will always
remain a core interpretation, in whichever way it may be highlighted, to
which cling rests and a starting point that echo a general consensus: No-
one will deny that Greece repelled the Persian advance at Marathon and
Salamis and, if "world history" is, inevitably, the history of once great
powers, then one of the unquestionably relevant facts might be the process
whereby, in the course of a thousand years or so, power in Europe shifted
Der Universalismus des Hebraertums 311
from the Mediterranean to the North. However, where the subject is in the
mind, where the mind is the subject-and at the same time the object-of
a history, no matter of substance can be taken from such an internal hori-
zon and transmitted from one conscious mind to another without showing
the definite imprint of the transmitter's persona.
It is therefore essential to know this persona, so that it may be set along-
side the information offered and separated from it. It is enough for Paul
Deussen to write the name Schopenhauer at the head of his version of the
Upanishads to let the reader know what the editor and commentator intends
to do and to direct his sight to the Indian world of thought. Indeed, it is
enough for the most ignorant person in the field, with but the slightest
knowledge of the topic, to note the higWy unpleasant tone in Graetz's his-
torical work on the subject of Kabbalistic writings in order to become aware
of the total incompetence of the narrator here. Having hawked the stand of
Rabbinical liberalism throughout thirteen volumes, Graetz deceives nobody.
That is not the case where someone writes a short, arrogant essay about
one of the fundamental spiritual forces in Judaism such as Kabbalah (and
this does not only apply to the Sabbatean distortion) and coins judgments
in tones of a philosophical and historical judge without revealing the system
of underlying criteria for those pronouncements other than in occasional
obscure dicta that claim to be self-evident. We have tried, in some measure,
to resolve the riddle of the underlying criteria that the writer kept quiet. We
must accept the risks involved in this kind of analysis. Nothing is easier for
the one who has been forced out from behind his cloak of obscurity than
to deny our solution. We shall leave it to other, later critics to decide
whether we were wide off the mark.
We estimate that Scholem's optic is rougWy that of the religion of the
Enlightenment as formulated by Cohen, characterized by the fact that it
feels obliged to understand all religious material as psychologically introvert
or as symbolic or, at best, as real to faith; the variant here shows a certain
added sensibility. Scholem would probably admit to the well known "puri-
fied" religion of reason, residue of several ecstatic faiths. The latter presum-
ably relinquished any motivation to consider Kabbalistic material altogether;
the former would declare its reluctance and poor understanding of the sub-
ject. Significantly,it is by no means only the essentially apostate Sabbatean-
ism of the 17th and 18th centuries that distresses Scholem so much today.
By virtue of his use of "antinomianism," the central concept of his account,
he draws a line linking the explosion of the open antinomianism in Sab-
batean theology that ends in the sick doctrine of the necessary apostasy of
the Messiah, back to a latent kind of antinomianism in early Kabbalah itself.
Since it is acceptable in works on the history of philosophy to attach the
label "antinomianism" to Gnosis, Scholem copies this particular wisdom and
speaks of the undertaking "to take the Ur-Gnostic central idea of antinomi-
anism and integrate it into the world of Judaism itself." He is unable to see
antinomianism in any direction other than one of danger. Scholem's simple,
312 Estherj Ehrman