A Yiddish “Fundamentalist”
Die Filosofie fun Yidntum: The Philosophy of Judaism.
by Zvi Cahn.
Farband Publishing Assn. (New York). Two volumes, 320 and 419 pp. $10.00.
Before publication in book form, these volumes were serialized in the Jewish Daily Forward, of whose staff Mr. Cahn is a member. The chapters appeared once a week—on the Sabbath; the author obviously does not adhere to the 613 commandments and prohibitions of Orthodoxy.
At a testimonial dinner for Dr. Cahn, his colleagues on the Forward praised the two volumes as the “major achievement of our time,” the truest guide for the Jewish masses who, seeking and inquiring, do not know “how to approach our great spiritual sources.” The editor himself of the Forward, in a review in his own paper, declared that “this is a book which must be read and reread.” Finally, the General Secretary of the Labor Zionist Farband, which sponsored the publication of the volumes, added his encomium: “a work for our generation and for the coming generations.” The descriptive leaflet that accompanies the book proclaims the author to be “one of the outstanding Jewish scholars of our day.” These details reveal a distressing paradox—the acclaim by non-Orthodox, secular-minded Jews of a work by a non-Orthodox, non-observant author who yet accepts a “fundamentalist” account of the origin, composition, and dates of the books of the Hebrew Scriptures.
Offering not a shred of evidence or explanation of any kind, Dr. Cahn informs his readers that “Biblical archaeology has completely demolished Biblical criticism and has established the accuracy of the dates and facts regarding the twenty-four books of our Bible.” He also assures his readers that “Jewish traditional thinking to the effect that Moses wrote the Torah from start to finish was based on fact . . . and therefore all the arguments of the Bible critics who attempt to tear the Pentateuch apart into various sections, and say that these parts were written in different periods and by different people are false.” Further disregarding established scholarship, Dr. Cahn announces that “there were not two Isaiah-Prophets but only one Prophet,” and “as to the question: Who is the author of Proverbs? No other answer is possible—King Solomon.”
One need hardly multiply such examples. Perhaps what finally ends one’s patience is Dr. Cahn’s conferring the authorship of the Book of Job upon Moses (because such an opinion is mentioned in the Talmud?). Dr. Cahn’s warrant for this conclusion is the most circular of arguments: Moses is the author of Job because Job is Mosaic “in content and in style.”
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Dr. Cahn enlists archaeology in behalf of his “fundamentalist” view by putting forth the claim that archaeology sustains it. Would an authentically religious Jew, whole in his faith, need to adduce such proof? God would be the source of his proof: Torah min ha-shamayim (Torah by divine revelation). Compare what has been written by Robert Gordis, a scrupulous scholar who is in the “tradition”—he is a Conservative rabbi and also a professor of Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary: “Archaeology does not prove the Bible to be true. Archaeology does something much more significant: it sets the Bible in a context. It gives us the background so that we can appreciate what the Bible has to say.”
One might simply dismiss the volumes by Dr. Cahn as “absurd.” Unfortunately, their absurd quaintness is at the expense of the earnest Yiddish reader, who, as often as not, spent his youth in a yeshiva, and is accustomed to regarding a book as a sefer—not just for entertainment but for learning and studying. Among the tens of thousands who turn to the Yiddish newspapers, there are indeed many who devoted years to the Talmud (without benefit of critical analysis or historical perspective), and who later forsook the Talmud—and the world of the Talmud—for the fresher fields of secularism, socialism, Zionism, Yiddish culture. In these past decades, as a result of their experience in America, or of the martyrdom of the six million and the establishment of the State of Israel, old memories have awakened in these Jews, and a revived interest in the meaning and value of the life they once lived. What they now require is an honest, straightforward Guide for the Perplexed. They need a “synthesis” that will reintroduce them to the religious-philosophical heritage of Judaism as coordinated and illumined by sensitive and responsible scholarship. On this account, I make bold to recommend to Dr. Cahn and his promoters a little cheshbon ha-nefesh—soul-searching.
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These two volumes abound in other deficiencies. The differences between Judaism and Christianity are real and it is salutary to bring them into the light, but surely—on the level of scholarship—it can be done without condescension or misrepresentation. Dr. Cahn blithely confuses, for example, the dogma of the Immaculate Conception (that Mary was exempted from the stain of Original Sin) with the doctrine of the Virgin Birth, and he does not seem to grasp fully the doctrine of the Trinity (giving it unwittingly an Aryan slant). Elsewhere, he wrongly refers to Zoroastrians as worshipping two gods, and thus misses the essential point of that religion—that its dualism is cosmological but not ethical—since Zoroastrian fealty to the single “Principle of Light” is the heart of morality, piety, and faith. If this is carelessness, then it reflects an attitude of disrespect toward the Yiddish reader.
Among some graver intellectual lapses, Dr. Cahn seems unable to recognize the distinction between principle (as regulative and allusive) and dogma (as material and specific) and, in consequence, spoils what might have been a good discussion of some dimensions of Judaism. He enumerates “ten forms of thinking” and proposes that “logic is not always one and the same,” thereby identifying the pathology of thinking with the criteria of correct reasoning. Because the multivocal term “intuition” is employed by both Spinoza and Bergson (in almost antipodal senses), Dr. Cahn couples them, making Spinoza a forerunner of Bergson. Then by some feat of his imagination, he transforms Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, and Henri Bergson into—Zionists.
When he gets to modem Jewish thinkers, he offers a lot of “human interest,” but very little solid information. The reader is left on the outside of ideas. Less than a single page of the chapter on Nachman Krochmal deals with Krochmal’s ideas, with the content of his More Nebuchei ha-Z’man (“A Guide for the Perplexed of Our Time”). The Baal Shem, the founder of Hasidism, fares no better: there is little in the chapter given to him of the ot (the letter) and less of the or (the light) of Hasidic teaching. Here, of course, Dr. Cahn had an enviable advantage—he was in a position to go directly to the sources and beyond, to the very atmosphere, the spiritual landscape, of the sources. A pity that he failed to avail himself of this advantage.
It may well be that those who lavished such high praise on Dr. Cahn’s Philosophy of Judaism were not concerned so much with the specific work as with the need for such a work in Yiddish. The fact remains that the Yiddish reader will have to consult other books, even if they deal only with a part of the subject. (The non-Yiddish reader has access to several fine books in English.) There are scholars in our midst capable of producing a comprehensive work of this kind in the Yiddish language; if they were to do so, because of their own roots (and those of Yiddish) their writings would possess a niggun, a melody, evocative of the East European world that was, and is now no longer. Such a work is yet to be written.
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