Confronting Antisemitism from the Perspectives of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism

Armin Lange, Kerstin Mayerhofer, Dina Porat, Lawrence H. Schiffman

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783110671889
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Jewish History
• Index: History

This volume engages with antisemitic stereotypes as religious symbols that express and transmit a belief system of Jew-hatred. These religious symbols are stored in Christian, Muslim and even today's secular cultural and religious memories. This volume explores how antisemitic religious symbol systems can play a key role in the construction of group identities.

II Confronting Antisemitism in the Study of Holy Scriptures and Related Writings in the Modern Period

The Impact of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Discovery of the “Original” Version of the Ten Commandments upon Biblical Scholarship: The Myth of Jewish Particularism and German Universalism

Bernard M. Levinson

In memoriam, Hans and Sophie Scholl, founders of the White Rose movement, executed February 22, 1943, for their opposition to National Socialism

Introduction

In 1773, the twenty-four year old Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, perhaps the greatest writer of the German literary tradition, anonymously published an essay entitled Zwo wichtige bisher unerörterte biblische Fragen: Zum erstenmal gründlich beantwortet, von einem Landgeistlichen in Schwaben [Two Important but as yet Unaddressed Biblical Questions: Fully Answered for the First Time by a Country Clergyman in Swabia].¹ In this text, the young Goethe experiments with many of the literary devices that will mark his mature work. The composition presents itself as a letter written by a rural pastor to a trusted old friend. Writing on a cold wintry night, the pastor describes the confusions in the mind of his son, triggered by the son’s study of theology at the university. This essay is the first work of literature known to me in which the newly emergent discipline of academic biblical scholarship, just then being introduced into the curriculum of the European university, is directly thematized, let alone given literary treatment. Goethe’s essay marks an important moment in cultural and intellectual history. The essay is significant to the topic of ending antisemitism for a number of reasons: first, for its reflections on the relationship between Judaism and Christianity; second, for the way it creates a myth of Judaism as the particularistic “Other” in opposition to an allegedly normative, universal German identity; and third, for its intellectual afterlife.²

The distinctiveness of Goethe’s essay for biblical scholarship is its claims regarding the composition of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. The essay deconstructs the conventional view of the Pentateuch as a unified literary composition, presented as spoken by Moses prior to Israel’s entry into the land of Canaan. Specifically, it raises the question whether the Ten Commandments, or Decalogue, commonly known to us today could really have been the original text of the covenant between God and Israel that is narrated in the biblical book of Exodus. Goethe’s pastor argues that the biblical text has undergone a severe disruption and that in order to recover its pristine condition, extensive surgery is necessary to repair the textual trauma and to restore the Bible to its original sequence. In using the language of literary disruption and in reordering the sequence of the biblical text to make it conform to a claimed more correct historical sequence, Goethe’s protagonist anticipates and reflects the developments then taking place as academic biblical scholarship was just beginning to take shape in Europe.

Nearly one hundred years after Goethe, perhaps the most brilliant of all German Bible scholars, Julius Wellhausen (1844 – 1918), credits Goethe as having anticipated one of Wellhausen’s own claims. Goethe was correct, Wellhausen argued, that the most ancient version of the Ten Commandments was not to be found in Exodus 20 (see Appendix 1), as conventionally understood. Rather, the earliest Decalogue was located in Exodus 34 (see Appendix 2), in the narrative of the renewal of the covenant and the replacement of the tablets of the law after Moses had destroyed the first set of tablets during the episode of the Golden Calf. In terms of content, the two texts differ in that Exodus 20 contains several broad ethical or moral prohibitions, such as “do not kill” (v. 13) and “do not steal” (v. 15), while Exodus 34 gives more of its attention to matters of cultic ritual and the ritual calendar. These perceived differences were central to the claim made first by Goethe, and then later by Wellhausen, that the familiar Decalogue of Exodus 20 represents a later composition than the sequence of laws in Exodus 34: in other words, that Exodus 34 preserves the more original and primitive version of the two legal passages. Wellhausen’s model stood for more than a century as a nearly classical position. Multiple generations of biblical scholars, with only a couple of exceptions, continued to draw upon it, viewing Exodus 34 as the original of the Decalogue.³

I will not go into the details of the debate about the relative dating of the two texts here. Rather, I will focus on the Nachleben [afterlife] of Goethe’s essay as an important moment in cultural and intellectual history, one that has been insufficiently examined. While biblical scholars have certainly noted the essay’s influence on Wellhausen, the cultural biases that govern the essay and the way it constructs a double myth (both about Judaism and about Christianity) have not been addressed.⁴ Conversely, within academic German studies (Germanistik), despite the iconic status of Goethe, his ideological use of formative biblical scholarship to construct a myth of German identity seems to have escaped attention.⁵ Despite the rich literary and cultural issues it raises, the essay was not included in the recent Princeton series of Goethe’s works in English translation.⁶ I am preparing the first comprehensive English translation and commentary of the essay, to place it in its cultural context and address these issues in an integrated way.

The Intellectual Structure of Goethe’s Essay

As I noted above, in Goethe’s essay, the fictional pastor in the letter writes to a colleague about his concern for his son. The young man has recently graduated from a theological faculty, but he lacks any historical understanding of religion. In a question and answer format that explicitly evokes Luther’s catechism, Goethe’s pastor argues that the familiar Decalogue of Exodus 20 could not possibly have been inscribed on the tablets of the covenant that God first made with Israel: “Nicht die zehen Gebote, das erste Stück unsers Katechismus!” [“Not the Ten Commandments, the first paragraph of our catechism!”].⁷ The proprietary genitive already begins to hint at the direction of the following textual arguments: Goethe argues that the “Ten Commandments” that are central to the Christian catechism cannot properly be ancient Judaism’s Decalogue. Why does he make such a claim? Just beforehand, and before turning to any direct textual study, Goethe’s village pastor begins to reflect on the theology of history. His prior assumptions there provide the foundation for the textual arguments that ensue. The extended metaphor of God as divine gardener who grafts (pfropfen) a slip (Reis) onto a root stock (Stamm) warrants particular attention:

Das jüdische Volk seh ich für einen wilden unfruchtbaren Stamm an, der in einem Krais von wilden unfruchtbaren Bäumen stund, auf den pflanzte der ewige Gärtner das edle Reis Jesum Christum, daß es, darauf bekleibend, des Stammes Natur veredelte, und von dannen P[f]ropfreiser zur Befruchtung aller übrigen Bäume geholt würden.

Die Geschichte und Lehre dieses Volks, von seinem ersten Keime bis zur Pfropfung ist allerdings partikular, und das wenige universelle, das etwa in Rücksicht der zukünftigen grosen Handlung mit ihm möchte vorgegangen seyn, ist schwer und vielleicht unnöthig aufzusuchen.

Von der P[f]ropfung an wendet sich die ganze Sache. Lehre und Geschichte werden universell. Und obgleich jeder von daher veredelte Baum seine Spezialgeschichte, und nach Beschaffenheit der Umstände seine Speziallehre hat, so ist doch meine Meinung: hier sey so wenig partikulares als dort universelles zu vermuthen und zu deuten.

[The Jewish people I regard as a wild, infertile stock (or “tribe”) that stood in a circle of wild and barren trees, upon which the eternal Gardener grafted the noble scion Jesus Christ, so that, by adhering to it, it ennobled the nature of the stock and from there slips were fetched to make all the remai...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• I Confronting Ancient and Medieval Religious Traditions of Antisemitism
• II Confronting Antisemitism in the Study of Holy Scriptures and Related Writings in the Modern Period
• III Confronting Antisemitic Traditions in Contemporary Christianity and Islam
• Editorial Board
• List of Contributors