Return to the Promised Land.. Jacek Surzyn

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СКАЧАТЬ According to the author, for many emancipated Jews, they serve as an alibi for their own unacceptable conduct toward the Diaspora. Actually, as Hess describes behaviors oriented at the emancipation and social integration, he writes about a treason on the part of all those who do so. The traitor Jews lose their honor, try to mask their roots and hide their religion, to become someone incognito, someone who can develop their attitude anew. Shortly speaking, they do anything not to be recognized as Jews, thus defiling the honor of the whole Jewish community.³²

      All these thoughts produced Hess’ image of the Jewish community even when – as he points out – he actively participated in the creation and development of the socialist idea.³³ Even at that time, he believed in the Messianic idea, which translated into a specific kind of socialism, different from the scientific socialism represented by Marx.³⁴ That Messianic belief was for Hess the basic ←32 | 33→category necessary to build the concept of Jewish national revival, and more broadly, causing the progress and restoration of human history.³⁵ Hess makes a few comments on Christianity, pointing out that it has played a positive role, directing people toward the great goal defined by Judaism as the advent of the Messianic era. Although Christians believed that the Messianic era had come and the Messiah (Jesus Christ) had already saved mankind, according to Hess, the history did not confirm this view. Thus, Christianity proved to be just a stage leading up to the Messianic era and was not the finis historiae – the age in which the holy history of mankind was completed. Christianity only took mankind from the dark ancient times to modern times, and by popularizing the idea of Messianism, it evoked universal yearning for the period of happiness. But it was also the religion of death, because in Christianity salvation and eternal life only applied to individuals, not meeting Hess’ criteria. The only real flee from death is Judaism and its concept of general, not individual, immortality – eternal existence of peoples and nations in the state of the Messiah, Erec Izrael. The historic role of Christianity ended at the moment of restoration of nations to a new life. Thus, Christianity fulfilled its historic (in other word, “Messianic”) mission.³⁶ ←33 | 34→According to Hess, the latest three hundred years’ period in Europe’s history was sufficient witness of accuracy of his diagnosis concerning the decline of the historic role of Christianity: on the ruins of “Rome,” a new world was created with the idea of free nations shedding the chains of “death.” Hess clearly glorifies the French Revolution, which hatched the “soldiers of civilization, … gradually sweeping away the dominance of the barbarians; and with their strong Herculean arms will roll off the tombstones from the graves of the supposedly dead peoples and the nations will reawaken once more.”³⁷ But according to the author, the healthy tissue of the nation survived thanks to Jews dwelling in all the corners of the Christian and Islamic world. Hess distinguishes between Jews living in the region where Islam meets Christianity and Jews living in the West. In the former, he can see sticking to the original healthy religious dogmas, reflected in unwavering faith and conviction of the coming of the Messianic era: the formation of the state of Israel and the saving mission of the Messiah. In his opinion, this provides an opportunity to awaken Jewish nationalism. The situation was different among the Western Jewry, who by departure from the Jewish faith and culture lost their hope and the attitude of waiting for the Messianic era. Therefore, reform was necessary to restore the spiritual and social life in the West. This task was fulfilled by the father of Jewish enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, who through Haskalah blew a new spirit in the Western Jewry, giving them hope for national revival. Mendelssohn combined the tradition of rabbis and religious prophets with modern social transformations initiated with the French Revolution.³⁸ According to Hess, this is the real national renaissance ←34 | 35→linking tradition with modernity. The true awakening of nations, including the Jewish nation, is taking place just now, leading to the Messianic era.³⁹

I. 4 Judaism: Religion of the Future

      Further, Hess moves on to analyze the essence of Judaism in order to specify its mission.⁴⁰ First of all, he stresses the obvious fact of two thousand years of Jews’ permanent isolation – living in ghettos, most of them are completely closed to the external world, which has certain consequences. The consequences are twofold, both negative and positive. On the one hand, Jews’ isolation leads to their far-reaching alienation, which means that for non-Jewish environment they are strange, and this has always been good fuel for strengthening various stereotypes, especially when they have a strong religious basis. Christianity, which originated from the Jewish religion but positioned itself as a strong opponent of Judaism and developed its main dogmas by negating the sense and essence of traditional Hebrew monotheism, consolidated in tradition the negative stereotype of a Jew-Pharisee. Traditional Christian anti-Judaism definitely aroused in many Christians the aversion to Jews as those who rejected the Messiah (in the ←35 | 36→mild version) or those who were responsible for the death of Christ, and thus condemned and rightly suffering. There is no doubt that Jews to a certain degree contributed themselves to that negative image, because an important element being the basis of Judaism was perceiving the tragedy of exile from the perspective of the right punishment for their own sins. Another factor reinforcing all those tendencies is the very character of the Jewish religion, with its rituals and strict rules hard to understand for non-Jewish environment.⁴¹

      But in these characteristic Hess can also see a positive aspect of Judaism, because Jews’ isolation and closing in a ghetto allowed them to preserve all that was the most important, i.e. the already highlighted essential elements of their faith, for example the common indifferentism of Judaism, significant in the context of transformations of the contemporary world. Judaism appears to the author as the religion of life, overcoming death, and thus able to implement the idea of universal humanism. At the same time, the author criticizes many attempts to reform Judaism that have been made for centuries, because in his opinion, they always went in the direction of making Judaism similar to Christianity and actually were influenced by that religion, without focusing on the specific character of the Jewish religion.⁴² Jews survived in ghettos without creating a caste of priests and their servants, which according to Hess was extremely important, because it prevented serious social tensions present in the external world, which consolidate the injustice of social life and generally contempt for other people. According to him, Judaism managed to avoid all those negative phenomena and even reduce them by including Jewish content in all the expressions of social life. Hess can see many such motifs in culture and science.⁴³ He also comments on the attempts to reform both Christianity (referring to the example of Martin Luther)⁴⁴ and Judaism (Moses Mendelssohn and his enlightenment-Haskalah). ←36 | 37→Hess can see positive aspects of these reformatory attempts, but he can also see their negative effects, which mostly result from the approach characteristic of these reforms – they always have a negative attitude to the reformed content, i.e. they reject the present state of their religions and consider them to be detrimental. They strongly advocate rejecting all that has been achieved so far and creating something new (or returning to sources, which seems to be a delusion, since the “sources” are simply the present idea of what a certain religion should look like, yet always perceived from the contemporary perspective). Therefore, Hess mentions a crisis of reforms made within Judaism and their dangerous consequences for the Jewish community: “Our reformers, on the contrary, attempted to reform the basis itself. Their reforms have only a negative purpose – if they have any aim at all – to firmly establish unbelief in the national foundation of the Jewish religion. No wonder that these reforms only fostered indifference to Judaism and conversions to Christianity.”⁴⁵ Any reformation attempts also caused great damage to Christianity, which according to Hess ultimately lost its chance for the “national character,” oppressed by the malady of materialism and spiritualism.⁴⁶ The result of contestation of this state was new movements appearing on the basis of some philosophical concepts oriented at the creation of the “religion of the future” – religion that must revive the spirit of faith anew, this time originating from national roots.⁴⁷ In this meaning, Hess could see the role of the whole religious reformation tradition, which in his opinion initiated the process of peoples regaining their national awareness, the sense of being a nation. For him, the religion of the future will be the national religion, СКАЧАТЬ