Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism 2020937846, 9781503612006

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
INTRODUCTION
PART I. BENAMOZEGH’S TEXTS AND CONTEXTS: MOROCCO, THE RISORGIMENTO, AND THE DISPUTED MANUSCRIPT
1 The Moroccan World of a Livornese Jew
2 An Italian Jewish Patriot in the Risorgimento
3 The Banned Author and the Oriental Publisher
4 Expanding His Readership: Benamozegh’s Turn to French
5 The Afterlives of a Manuscript
PART II. UNIVERSALISM AS AN INDEX OF JEWISH MODERNITY
6 Situating Benamozegh in the Debate on Jewish Universalism
7 Normativity and Inclusivity in Modernity: The Role and Limits of the Noahide Laws
8 Cosmopolitanism and Universalism: The Political Value of Judaism in an Age of Nations
9 Universalism in Particularism: Benamozegh’s Legacies, between Levinas and Religious Zionism
PART III. BEYOND BINARIES: KABBALAH AS A TOOL FOR MODERNITY
10 Kabbalah: Reason and the Power of Myth
11 Beyond Dualism: Kabbalah and the Coincidence of Opposites
12 Kabbalah as Politics
PART IV. PAST ENMITY: MODES OF INTERRELIGIOUS ENGAGEMENT AND JEWISH SELF-AFFIRMATION
13 Religious Enmity and Tolerance Reconsidered
14 “The Iron Crucible” and Loci of Religious Contact
15 Self-Assertion and a Jewish Theology of Religions
16 Modes of Interreligious Engagement: From Theory to Social Practices
EPILOGUE
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A
B
C
D
E
F
G
H
I
J
K
L
M
N
O
P
Q
R
S
T
U
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Citation preview

2 Another Modernity 3

Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture

ANOT H ER MODERNI T Y o Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism

CLÉMENCE BOULOUQUE

S tanf or d U niv e rs i t y P r e ss Stanford, California

Stanf or d U niv er s i t y Pr e s s Stanford, California

© 2020 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available on request. LCCN 2020937846 | ISBN 9781503612006 (cloth) Cover design by Rob Ehle

Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane in 10.25/15 Adobe Caslon Pro

To my parents

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CO N T EN T S

Acknowledgments  ix Abbreviations  xiii In t r od uc t ion



1

Part I. Benamozegh’s Texts and Contexts: M orocco, the Risorgimento, and the Disputed Manuscript 15

1 The Moroccan World of a Livornese Jew17 2 An Italian Jewish Patriot in the Risorgimento 27 3 The Banned Author and the Oriental Publisher 37 4 Expanding His Readership: Benamozegh’s Turn to French46 5 The Afterlives of a Manuscript53

Part II. Universalism as an Index of Jewish Modernity

63

6 Situating Benamozegh in the Debate on Jewish Universalism65 7 Normativity and Inclusivity in Modernity: The Role and Limits of the Noahide Laws83 8 Cosmopolitanism and Universalism: The Political Value of Judaism in an Age of Nations93 vii

viii

CONTENTS

9 Universalism in Particularism: Benamozegh’s Legacies, between Levinas and Religious Zionism 102

Part III. Beyond Binaries: Kabbalah as a Tool for Modernity

107

10 Kabbalah: Reason and the Power of Myth109 11 Beyond Dualism: Kabbalah and the Coincidence of Opposites122 12 Kabbalah as Politics133

Part IV. Past Enmity: Modes of Interreligious Engagement and Jewish Self-Affirmation

149

13 Religious Enmity and Tolerance Reconsidered 151 14 “The Iron Crucible” and Loci of Religious Contact162 15 Self-Assertion and a Jewish Theology of Religions173 16 Modes of Interreligious Engagement: From Theory to Social Practices183 E pil o gue  Notes  197 Bibliography  261 Index  295

193

AC K N OW LED G M EN T S

It is a daunting task to turn my immense gratitude into an exercise in brevity. It all started when the Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies at New York University gave a chance to an unorthodox applicant for their PhD program. My adviser in the Hebrew and Judaic Studies Department, Elliot Wolfson, gave me both guidance and space to grow. The sheer magnitude of his scholarship, his enduring presence, and his dedication have been an inspiration. I also thank Zvi Ben Dor Benite, David Engel, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Elli Stern on my committee, whose judicious observations helped me make sense of Benamozegh’s voices and to start thinking of the book that could emerge from the abundance of Benamozegh materials. I am grateful to Marion Kaplan and Dan Fleming who morphed from teachers into friends, as well as Larry Wolff, Michah Gottlieb, Hasia Diner, and Adam Becker. Joseph Weiler invited me to become a fellow at what was then the Tikvah Institute at NYU, an autonomous republic in Washington Square Park that he codirected with Moshe Halbertal and where all senior scholars found the time to nurture their junior fellows. Pierre Birnbaum, Jonathan Garb, Marc Hirshman, Lawrence Kaplan, James Kugel, Benjamin Sommer, and Yehoyada Amir among others have broadened my perspectives in so many ways, as has Suzanne Stone and the seminars on legal theory at the Center for Jewish Law and Contemporary Civilization. Allan Amanik, Ruth Kara-Ivanov, Yehuda and Michelle Sarna have been the best constellation of

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ACKNOWLED GMENTS

friends. And Zalman Rothschild has since then become the best interlocutor for impromptu treatises about everything and anything. This book required archival and manuscript work and provided a beautiful excuse to travel to Tuscany. My dear friend Francesca Bregoli connected me to Liana Funaro, a living memory of Livorno’s Jewish life, passionate researcher, and a delightful person. I wish to thank Gabriele Bedarida for his kindness and for the pages of Italian Jewish history that he, and his wife, shared with me. I would like to extend my gratitude to the whole team at the Archive of the Jewish Community of Livorno: without their willingness to show me the three volumes of the handwritten version of Israel and Humanity, the project would have lost much of its significance. Upon hearing about my work, the scholar of Benamozegh, Alessandro Guetta, who has now moved on to other research interests, encouraged me and has never failed to be supportive since then. My postdoctoral year at the Katz Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania was memorable thanks to the staff, particularly Carrie Love and Etty Lassman, and the fellows, gathered around the year’s theme on the “New Boundaries of the Wissenschaft des Judentums.” Among other accomplishments, the group took the science of portmanteau to new heights during the weekly post-colloquium Schnappstunden at the renamed MerKatz. I am grateful to the directors of the center: Steven Weitzman for his warmth and attentiveness, and David Ruderman who, before stepping down, selected me to be a fellow. Arthur Kiron, librarian extraordinaire, was an enthusiastic accomplice in all things Benamozegh. During this postdoctoral year, I had the great fortune of working on a book of interviews with Daniel Boyarin. Our conversations, his insatiable curiosity, and his scholarship have guided me since then in more ways than one. My colleagues in the Religion Department at Columbia have welcomed me and supported me with unsurpassed generosity and warmth. I am happy to be in their debt and very pleased to get a chance to express it here. Thanks to all of you. And I would like to particularly acknowledge Gil Anidjar, Courtney Bender, Beth Berkowitz, Elisheva Carlebach, Wayne Proudfoot, and Mark Taylor for giving me such detailed and helpful feedback on the manuscript during a formidable workshop convened by Gil—as did Moshe Halbertal, Jay Harris, Nancy Levene, Pawel Maciejko, and Shaul Magid.

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S  xi

I also wish to express my deepest gratitude to Richard Witten for endowing the chair of Israel and Jewish Studies in memory of his parents, Carl and Bernice Witten. At Columbia, Mark Anderson, Julie Crawford, Marianne Hirsch, Seth Kimmel, Rebecca Kobrin, Agi Legutko, Deborah Martinsen, Christia Mercer, Seth Schwartz, Joanna Stalnaker, Pier Mattia Tommasino, Eliza Zingesser, and Shanny Peer have been a trusted presence. The Kabbalah study-group workshops at Lehigh have become a cherished rite of spring thanks to Hartley Lachter and the hevrei Ellen Haskell, Nathaniel Berman, Glenn Dynner (who also gave me formidable feedback during a workshop at the Center for Jewish History), Leora Zachs-Shmueli, and Eytan Fishbane. When the manuscript was still very much a work-in-progress, Sarah Stein suggested that I send it to Stanford upon its completion. Sarah’s energy and scholarship are matched only by her generosity toward her junior peers. At Stanford, Margo Irvin was a thoughtful and soothing interlocutor. Readers #1 and #2 offered extraordinarily detailed comments and were a fantastic help. Gigi Mark made the whole production process seamless, and David Hornik was a wonderful copyeditor. But this manuscript would have been a disastrous piece of abstract expressionism without Paul Sager’s everjudicious comments and edits along the way. It is also an honor to acknowledge the institutions that generously supported me through these years: the Annenberg Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, and the Nash Family Foundation—with special thanks to Dr. Judith Ginsberg; the Lenfest Grant at Columbia and the Provost Grant for Junior Faculty who contribute to the university’s diversity; and the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University, especially Dana Kresel. My transatlantic journey owes a lot to Tom Reiss and a conversation started on a Parisian terrace years ago—and uninterrupted ever since. I made the final decision to come to New York with Norman and Cella Manea at a restaurant called Compass—which is what they have been for me. From the moment I arrived in New York, Helen Nash has been my anchor. And the names of Pascale and Richard Berner, Sharon Elghanayan and Jon Corzine, Mary and Gerry Millman, George and Pamela Rohr, mean

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ACKNOWLED GMENTS

family to me. I would also like to thank Stéphanie Abou, Chloe Aridjis, Jacques Baudouin, Katell Berthelot, Dominique Bourel, Pierre Bouretz, Frédéric Boyer, Marie Brenner, Ron Chernow, Christopher Dye, Ed Epstein, Jon Finer, Adrien Jaulmes, Julie Just, Florence and Jacky Heyman, Delphine Horvilleur, Olga Kirschbaum, Patrick Koch, Jean-Claude Kuperminc, Rose Levyne, Martine Mairal, Jessica Marglin, Charlotte Morgan, Ruby Namdar, Gil Rubin, Simon Schama, Brigitte Sion, Toby Freilich, Katalina Rac, James Traub, and Ariel Weil. I could not have completed this work without Pierre-Emmanuel Dauzat who, along with his wife Aude, define what an “intelligent heart” can be. Our hevruta—four thousand miles apart—has been a constant source of wonder and thankfulness. An insatiable reader and formidable essayist, Pierre-Emmanuel was also the late Tony Judt’s trusted translator, and I cannot but feel Tony’s touch in his luminous presence. Sunt lacrimae rerum. Tony was my first adviser in the history department at NYU. He passed away of ALS in August 2010. Being his student and assistant was one of the greatest gifts of my life. The memory of his brilliance, humor, and courage will never leave those who witnessed it. Jennifer, Daniel, and Nick—this is for you, too. I can’t help thinking that the world in which I started this project was a very different place—I miss having Philip Roth and Amos Oz in it. And, as I am putting the final touches to the manuscript in times of pandemics, the notion of—and need for—interdependence as what defines our humanity could not feel more tragic, nor more relevant. This book is for my parents. I treasure their love and our happy times, cut so short. But the memory of my father’s laughter makes me smile as I am typing these words, and my mother’s ever-gentle presence is another reminder of the Song of Solomon: “Love is as strong as death.”

A B B R EV I AT I O N S

The following abbreviations are used for certain works of Elia Benamozegh. AP Israël et l’Humanité. Edited by Aimé Pallière. Paris: E. Leroux, 1914. Autobiography Elia Benamozegh’s brief autobiography, published in Nahum Sokolow, ed. Sefer Zikaron le-Sofrei Yisrael ha-Hayim Itanu Kayom, 118–21. Warsaw: Nahum Sokolow, 1890. IH

Israel and Humanity. Edited and translated by Maxwell Luria. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1995. (Luria’s English translation is based on the 1961 abridged French edition.)

Introduction

Israël et Humanité: Démonstration du cosmopolitisme dans les dogmes, les lois, le culte, la vocation, l’histoire et l’idéal de l’Hébraïsme; Introduction. Livorno: Benamozegh, 1885.

MJMC

Morale juive et morale chrétienne: Examen comparatif suivi de quelques réflexions sur les principes de l’Islamisme. Paris: K. Kaufmann, 1867. English translation: Judaism and Christian Ethics with a Criticism on Mahomedism. San Francisco, 1873.

Ms

Manuscript of Israël et l’Humanité. Consulted at the Archives of the Jewish Community in Livorno (Archivo storico della Communità Ebraica di Livorno).

Teologia

Teologia dogmatica e apologetica. Livorno, 1877.

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2 Another Modernity 3

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I N T RO D U C T I O N

H ow di d a r e l at iv e ly little-known nineteenth-century Livornese rabbi who argued for the universalism of Judaism and for unity among religions come to influence theological and political agendas across a spectrum of religious thinkers so varied that it includes proponents of the ecumenical Second Vatican Council, American evangelists, and right-wing Zionists in Israel? What does it say about interfaith encounters that his efforts to work toward unity among monotheisms have fueled such irreconcilable stances? And how can an idiosyncratic figure who sought a means of overcoming religious divisions—one based on Judaism and, more specifically, on a Jewish theology of Christianity—illuminate broader problems of Jewish modernity? And be coopted by a postmodern thinker like psychiatrist Jacques Lacan? These are a few of the questions raised by the life, work, and legacy of Elia Benamozegh (1823–1900). Benamozegh was born in Livorno, Italy, in 1823 to a family of Moroccan descent. A toddler when his father passed away, he was raised by his mother and his uncle, a renowned kabbalist. After a short stint as a merchant, he enrolled in the rabbinic seminary and was ordained in his late twenties. But it is his formative years, spent as an autodidact, that explain his remarkable intellectual voracity. Although he never left Livorno, Benamozegh corresponded with a number of religious or intellectual figures in France, the Maghreb, and 1

2 I N T R O D U C T I O N

the Middle East. In addition to his responsibilities as a rabbi and a teacher— and a self-described Orthodox one—he became a publisher, a prolific writer, and a transnational thinker who authored exegetical analyses, historical studies, and a variety of newspaper contributions in Hebrew, Italian, and French. Intellectually ambitious, he aimed to reconcile such fundamental binaries as East versus West, Christian humanism versus nineteenth-century concepts of progress, Jewish universalism versus singularity, mysticism versus reason, and humankind versus nations. The rabbi influenced Christian-Jewish encounters in twentieth-century Europe through his magnum opus, Israël et l’humanité (translated as Israel and Humanity). The work was published posthumously in 1914, thanks to the efforts of his Christian disciple and former seminarian Aimé Pallière, who edited the work and sought to disseminate his mentor’s ideas. Nevertheless, as much as Benamozegh presented his study as the solution to religious quandaries, the book bequeathed a raft of irresolvable tensions owing largely to his use of conceptual tools such as the Noahide Laws (the seven edicts that offer salvation to non-Jews, according to the rabbinic tradition) and Kabbalah—usually defined as the mystical Jewish tradition— which have lent themselves to ethnocentrism as well as to the universalism he advocated. His idiosyncrasy makes him unrepresentative yet illuminating, and the challenge is thus not only to make sense of Benamozegh’s complexities and contexts but also to reconstruct his views as a starting point for questioning established narratives. Benamozegh stood at many crossroads; his life and writings can thus tell many stories. They help us map out intellectual networks in the Mediterranean and geographies of a Sephardic Enlightenment, upend Orientalism by reclaiming the term Oriental as a badge of honor, understand his publishing endeavors as a cultural and political intervention on behalf of his coreligionists in the Maghreb and Middle East, reassess the meaning of Italian humanism and Christian Hebraism from a Jewish standpoint, resuscitate Kabbalah both within and beyond Judaism, and grasp its contribution to the nascent field of the psychology of religion. Each of these threads constitutes a rich narrative, but the story to which the rabbi best contributes, it seems to me, pertains to the complexities of Jewish modernity.

INTRODUCTION 3

What the rabbi proposed was unprecedented in his time and still relevant to our understanding of strategies by which religions adapt to modernity: (1) that the Jewish tradition had the capacity to solve contemporary quandaries, (2) that kabbalistic concepts enabled it to take part in a larger, transnational conversation about societal changes and progress, (3) that Jewish ideas constituted a stock of tools relevant to religious coexistence, and (4) that greater particularism made for greater universalism. Before him, the most trodden path for making a case for the legitimacy of Judaism had been to demonstrate its rationality. But Benamozegh sensed a modern, cross-denominational need both for reason and for a mythical realm that stood beyond reason— yet without advocating for the irrational or breaking the grand narrative of progress sustaining modernity; he contended that the Jewish tradition could satisfy human aspirations and not tear apart the fabric of society as a whole or of religious communities in particular. And he often invoked a distinct, “Oriental” modernity—independent of the European experience—in order to exemplify this method. Most of the scholarship on Benamozegh pertains to his universalism, his efforts to foster a dialogue with non-Jews, and his reconciliation of philosophy and Kabbalah, but does not address the ways in which he engaged with modernity.1 My work builds on the only previous scholarly monograph, Alessandro Guetta’s Philosophy and Kabbalah: Elijah Benamozegh and the Reconciliation of Western Thought and Jewish Esotericism (2000).2 Guetta’s is a rich and detailed analysis of the philological and philosophical strategies used by Benamozegh to repudiate the long-standing opposition between the rational and esoteric aspects of Judaism. This book takes a different approach by considering how the rabbi expands our understanding of religious modernity and by gauging the impact of his thought to this day. Its central contention is that Benamozegh’s use of Kabbalah in a public discourse, as a stock of political or intellectual references, and his insistence on the theological necessity of interreligious engagement from an assertive Jewish perspective constitute significant markers of a religious modernity that was routinely signaled by rationalism and universalism. This characterization of modern and modernity by Benamozegh is descriptive, and similar to Weberian categories; however, attending to his frustration with such binaries and to his general critique

4 I N T R O D U C T I O N

of modernity makes alternative modalities of the modern emerge: nondualistic, nonsecular, yet not a proponent of the Counter-Enlightenment,3 and vocally embracing the notion of progress as well as a political and social liberal agenda. In teasing out the multiple facets of the concept, I will first focus on the uses of the term modernity that Benamozegh might have encountered and that defined the conversation during his lifetime. The French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), often credited for coining the term in 1859, described modernity as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable”4 while calling on artists to extract the beauty it might contain. This characterization featured modernity as immediate and transient, even though Baudelaire called for finding a sense of the sublime in the mundane, thus elevating the finite into the infinite. Nevertheless, modernity is here essentially contingent, impermanent, and seems to preclude any sense of continuity. While Baudelaire should be credited for popularizing the notion, the word had in fact already appeared in the writings of a few of his contemporaries with a vaguer definition, if any. “Modernité,” the translation of Modernität in Heinrich Heine’s 1827 Reisebilder (Travel Pictures), published in French in 1856, captured a tension between the old and the new, most acutely felt by the nobility and the bourgeoisie, where “the cozy, narrow ways of the forefathers are supplanted by a wide-spreading, unpleasant modernity.” The text further lamented “the loss of national originalities that disappear in the uniformity of modern civilization.”5 Modernity came across as a disrupting and leveling force. Other nuances can be found in the work of Theophile Gautier, who used modernity as a descriptor of English painting and asked: “Does the substantive [form of the word] even exist? The feeling that it expresses is so recent that it might not be featured in dictionaries yet.”6 He later used the term in his tribute to the work of his fellow novelist Honoré de Balzac, who is credited with ushering in realism in literature and whose novels exuded modernity as “something that owes nothing to the antiquity.”7 An ability to capture the spirit of the age and a self-generating capacity defined Gautier’s positive outlook on modernity.

INTRODUCTION 5

Conversely, in his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave (Memoires d’outretombe), the Romantic writer François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) evoked modernité to describe the triteness of his time compared to the dignified past, now out of reach, that alienates the individual.8 While Chateaubriand’s conservative doctrine would be at odds with Benamozegh’s attempt at reconciling the past and present, and while avant-garde aestheticism was far from Benamozegh’s taste, all of these authors assemble a picture of modernity as an antagonism between the old and the new, a case of disruption and impermanence, all of which Benamozegh was keen on remedying through a fresh understanding of religion, and religious unity, to prevent any possible alienation. This sense of disruption, affecting the relation to religion, is what prompted Benamozegh to write Israël et Humanité (1885),9 a short book he envisioned as the introduction to the broader work that he never completed. In the unfinished manuscript of the latter, the rabbi sketched the conundrum of his time: “Once religion proper is dismissed for good, it cannot be long before metaphysics, too, is sent packing,” since the demise of religion would lead in turn to “the subversion of law, justice, moral beauty, virtue, freedom, heroism, and sacrifice, which are nothing but applied metaphysics.”10 Drawing on the nascent psychology of religions, he deemed such a societal model unfit to fulfill the metaphysical needs of the mind and contended that the devolution of society into self-interest and materialism would ultimately endanger freedom.11 He placed the onus on institutionalized religion for being unable or unwilling to address political and societal changes other than by rejecting them. In his 1885 introduction, Benamozegh explained: On the one hand, [you have] the Syllabus [of Errors],12 in which all the conquests of civilization are anathema; on the other, the unquenched thirst

for religious beliefs, the madness of pride and egoism, the wanderings of reason with neither guide nor compass, the eternal trials and errors of a

philosophy without principles, the absolute lack of any respected authority in matters of religion—and thus the individual who falls prey to himself, as though God had never revealed himself.13

6 I N T R O D U C T I O N

A similar analysis opens Benamozegh’s posthumously published major work, Israel and Humanity: This crisis is nothing other than the struggle between faith and reason, whether this latter, in trying to evaluate the world and society, finds itself at grips with traditional beliefs, or whether it undertakes to study the contradictory claims of various religions in the light of historical criticism, ex-

egesis, and science—or, finally, whether, in penetrating to the core of each

religion, it induces free scrutiny, and, unable to settle for the old formulas, drives the investigating mind to search for new ones that will allow it to become reconciled with faith.14

Having listed the various impasses confronting religions, Benamozegh introduced his solution with a preliminary, rhetorical question: “Have all religions, which free-thought today declares fallen, fully revealed their potentialities?”15 In his view, it was both the conservatism and the lack of assertiveness of religions in general and of Judaism in particular that were to blame for the dwindling relevance of faith across Europe.16 Benamozegh wrote against the backdrop of the so-called “modernist crisis” within Catholicism, a controversy that began in the 1890s in France, Italy, and England, and that reacted against the authoritarian leanings of the Papacy and sought to draw on the historical study of the Bible to reshape traditional Catholic dogma and teaching.17 The movement stood against the prevailing neo-scholasticism, which was predicted on an essentially static view of the world and opposed any evolution of the doctrine. Yet, faced with similar challenges regarding the compatibility between faith and science, instead of calling for a reform, Benamozegh called for a return to the Jewish tradition—a return, he argued, that would benefit Christianity, too.

Benamozegh’s Hebraism: The Jewish Tradition as Inclusion

In one of the paradoxes from which his reasoning often proceeded, Benamozegh laid out a novel scheme for reconciling reason and faith—science and religion—through a conscious return to tradition. Tradition had to be reclaimed. And, in order to do so, it had to be comprehended anew by reexamining all of its sources, including the marginalized ones. Benamozegh’s perspectives echo the way Gershom Scholem expressed the paradox of

INTRODUCTION 7

tradition and innovation implied in the term Kabbalah, which means “reception” in Hebrew and thus implies the transmission of a text and the participation of its readers in order for them to make sense of it in their own time.18 Some of Benamozegh’s interpretations, such as his vision of ancient Israel as a proto-pluralistic society, might have taken these innovations a little far, and seem at times designed to meet the expectations of an emerging liberal readership.19 Benamozegh’s choice of the word Hebraism to describe this arguably inclusive and expansive understanding of Judaism, which included both Talmud and Kabbalah, is central to his argument because he saw these as a repository for the textual polyphony, an aspect ignored by philosophy and Reform Judaism—which explained his hostility to the budding movement. In renaming Judaism, as part of an effort to reshape its perception, the rabbi was not alone. Alternative designations for Judaism, such as Hebraism or Abrahamism, gained currency across Europe in the late nineteenth century, aiming to oppose a narrow Jewish legalism and a new focus on race—as in French scholar Ernest Renan’s critique of Semitism.20 In French, the term Israelite was also the word of choice in order to replace the term Jew (juif) and avoid a terminology loaded with centuries of prejudice.21 Benamozegh used Israelite in this sense, for instance in his preface to Zikhron Yerushalayim.22 Two of Benamozegh’s contemporaries, both of whom loom large in his thinking, also used the term Hebraism. Abraham Geiger (1810–74), a rabbi, scholar, and one of the founders of the Reform movement, used Hebraism when trying to convey Judaism’s openness to other religions, whereas it had previously been invoked with negative overtones.23 Samuel David Luzzatto, a more conservative scholar and exegete, and a towering figure of Italian Judaism, coined the term Abrahamism, using it to emphasize Jewish ethics. Benamozegh’s case is distinctive: what could have merely been a translation of ebraismo (Italian for “Judaism”) was designed to link it to the Church Father Eusebius and his Preparation for the Gospel. In that fourth-century apologetics, the term referred to the acceptable, universal part of Judaism, the one defined by the Decalogue, in opposition to the Judaism of the Talmudic period, which was defined more ethnically and narrowly.24 Being attuned to the patristics, and being in conversation with non-Jewish thinkers in general, were integral to Benamozegh’s efforts toward greater unity.

8 I N T R O D U C T I O N

This is one of the instances in which Elia Benamozegh was both in conversation and in conflict with his interlocutors, in Italy and beyond—one instance among many when he was both untimely and of his time. Indeed, it was the articulation of the two that defined his vision of modernity.

Grasping Modernity

Although he did not employ the noun, Benamozegh often resorted to the adjective modern, mostly as a temporal marker25 (“modern reason,” “modern consciousness,”26 “modern exegesis”).27 He did, however, juxtapose it with nouns or clauses conveying rationalism, the decline of traditional religious worldviews and belonging, the scientific explanation of natural phenomena, new forms of normativity, and the rise of individual subjectivity and nationstates, thus effectively asserting the essence of that modernity. At first blush, Benamozegh’s insights on the criteria of modernity vindicate what would become the markers of rationalization and secularization associated with Max Weber. Yet, while he acknowledged the characteristics of his age, he simultaneously rejected them, deeming them unsustainable for building a harmonious society. I argue that, in effect, the alternative path he charted for modernity foreshadows more recent developments in the scholarship of modernity that attempt to complicate our understanding of nineteenth-century religious thought, and I situate my work within this trend. Benamozegh proposed alternative paths to solve what he viewed as a religious crisis of his time, and the notion of multiple modernities, as developed in the work of Shmuel Eisenstadt,28 is a productive way to examine his thought. This multiplicity can be conceptual—a nonsecular understanding of modernity, or an expanded articulation of the dialectics of old and new— as well as geographic, inviting approaches that differ from the narratives of a Western European Enlightenment. In fact, Benamozegh’s modernity does not fit into the category of Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) or Counter-Enlightenment:29 his is a critique of the dualisms between reason and science, tradition and modernity, which he considered to be a Western European problem, whereas an Oriental, nondualistic worldview would warrant an alternative modernity in which reason would not be dismissed and religion would be a convincing and not an imposed proposition. Hence, his statement: “The Enlightened religion, the one that takes into account

INTRODUCTION 9

the state of science, the one that seeks to persuade and not merely to have partisans, comes from [ . . . ] the Orient.”30 Benamozegh’s work prompts us to displace the Enlightenment altogether and to reassess the dynamics of modern Jewish thought, just as Olga Litvak, Eliyahu Stern, or Jonatan Meir31 have done recently with Eastern Europe in their reevaluation of the Haskalah. My narrative complements theirs. Meir, for example, shows that the early attempts at a scholarly study of Kabbalah took place in the East and were subsequently effaced by Western scholars who claimed to have made the first inroads into the study of Kabbalah as a legitimate scholarly object. However, demonstrating that these pioneering efforts and novel ideas came from the East effectively displaces the center(s) of Jewish Enlightenment. Instances abound in which Benamozegh questioned the hegemony of the German-speaking thought and scholarship of which he was an avid reader (as attested in his journal contributions, where he cited and engaged with such thinkers as Graetz, Frankel, Lowy, and Geiger) and made a case for Italian and Oriental Jewish thought. Seeking to enrich the contribution of religion to society, Benamozegh also claimed that the Jewish tradition was uniquely suited to make sense of changing times because of its intrinsic futurity—based on an arguably counterintuitive understanding of tradition, which he defined as an unceasing continuation of the historic event of revelation. A particularly relevant frame of analysis thus rests with the categories proposed by Jürgen Habermas in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, in which he claims that “the secular concept of modernity expresses the conviction that the future has already begun,”32 if only to ponder the similarities of this mode of temporality with Benamozegh’s nonsecular modernity. The binaries present in the work of Max Weber and Jacob Katz, for whom tradition and modernity are distinct categories, as well as in Karl Mannheim’s definition of tradition as a “tendency to cling to the past and a fear of innovation,” thus prove insufficient to account for those conceptions of modernity, which claim to originate from within tradition and to offer a noteworthy synthesis of religion and progress.33 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger’s notion of invented tradition, in which ancient origins are engineered to serve a distinct purpose, especially in the context of emerging nation-states, can shed light on some of Benamozegh’s bold moves to justify

1 0 I N T R O D U C T I O N

Jewish inclusivity. But his defense of tradition, based on kabbalistic hermeneutics, cannot merely be characterized as an invention in Hobsbawm’s sense. It is predicated on seeing a body of revealed texts and interpretations as the germ of the future, as the blueprint of the world waiting to be progressively revealed in the course of time as human capacities eventually develop and come to vindicate a religious construct that predates the modern era. The past is constantly reexamined and projected into the present and the future; tradition is thus a projection and a condition for progress. Benamozegh’s quest for religious unity bespoke his key conviction: that religion, while anchored in history, had to be both relevant in the present and oriented toward the future. Yet in order to achieve such a goal, one had to make religion acceptable to a post-Enlightenment public reluctant to rely on heteronomy and on revealed laws as the authority for determining morals or regulating behavior. Thus Habermas’s reflection on the imperative of modernity to find normativity within itself34—without recourse to religious imperatives and revelation—also sheds light on Benamozegh’s ambition. He saw modeling religion as a place where normativity is both internal and external as paramount for fostering an appeased relationship with religion. Additionally, the articulation of heteronomy and autonomy is part of the necessity for nondualism that is central to Benamozegh’s edifice and also explains why Kabbalah is so pivotal. Another central contention of this book is that Benamozegh made use of Kabbalah as a public discourse, as a stock of political, mythical, or intellectual references, and insisted on the theological necessity of interreligious engagement in order to help deconstruct the binaries that he held to be a legacy of an overzealous Western Enlightenment. It was the intransigent primacy of reason that was causing what Benamozegh diagnosed as a source of crisis of both religion and secularism (and what Weber would call the disenchantment of the world). Recent scholarship has been reassessing this narrative, probing the persistence of esotericism, the appetite for myth throughout the nineteenth century, and the strategies of the various faiths to seek a renewed engagement with their own traditions.35 By highlighting the mythmaking quality of Kabbalah, an exploration of Benamozegh’s thought adds to our growing understanding of such nonWeberian modernities.36

I N T R O D U C T I O N 11

If modernity can be understood as the capacity to reimagine social or religious relationships, Benamozegh certainly offered a different narrative of Jewish modernity,37 and a more assertive one in relation to Christianity. Breaking with the long-standing criticism of particularism leveled at Judaism, he professed that, on the contrary, in its fullest expression, its essence was universalist because it contained the seeds of two other universal religions—and laid special emphasis on Christianity—but it also made a case for the necessary role and presence of laity, based on a sense of the organic interdependence of humanity.38 Benamozegh’s rejection of binaries and his creation of a theology of other religions in which assimilation was predicated on the articulation and preservation of differences foreshadow aspects of postmodern thought, specifically that of Levinas and Lacan—with the latter acknowledging Benamozegh’s influence on his thought. However, pondering Nancy Levene’s Powers of Distinction, in which she claims that the seemingly irreconcilable dualisms of modernity should lead us to understand that inclusion is distinction,39 I argue that one can look at interreligious engagement as an aspect of modernity— which involves a consciousness of the concept’s dualisms, of its inclusion as distinction, and, as Benamozegh intended, an eagerness to resolve these dualisms without erasing them. Such is the generative claim of the book. It should come as no surprise that, as an idiosyncratic and multifaceted character, eager to reach out to various audiences, venturing into multiple genres and reinterpreting them, Benamozegh—as a subject—resists genres, too. With this caveat in mind, I have found microhistory to be the most effective methodology to describe my project, comprehend his work and world, to “think alongside” him, and to depict the arc of his ideas in history. This arguably runs counter to some of the key tenets of microhistory, with its emphasis on the concrete reality of people who left little (if any) trace, and its efforts to conjure up their direct environment40—as well as the capacity to find large questions in small places. If one expands this notion of microhistory from anonymous people to outliers, however, which seems to accord with Carlo Ginzburg’s notion of “anomaly”41 as an object of inquiry of microhistory, Benamozegh becomes a more likely candidate. But it is Daniel Boyarin’s understanding of microhistory in the realm of thought and religion, as stated in his essay “The Cheese and the Sermons: Toward a Microhistory of Ideas,” that I

1 2 I N T R O D U C T I O N

gravitate toward: an interdisciplinary endeavor aimed at the study of concepts and the reconstruction of their contexts, as “ideas are always fully planted in the soil of human social and political life.”42 That the study of the texts and contexts should be enriched with their subtext, as mandated by Bruce Lincoln and Cristiano Grottanelli, also guided my work: Benamozegh’s mastery of effaced references or allusions warrants such an approach, which the work on his manuscript caused sometimes to come to the fore. Conjuring up the context was key to understanding his subtext. This methodology is in keeping with the call for a necessary “attempt to reconnect religion and intellectual history” made by Brad Gregory and his coauthors in the volume Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion.43 The close attention I pay to the fate of Israel and Humanity, particularly in chapter 5, builds on precursors such as David Ruderman’s study of the nineteenth-century bestseller Sefer ha-Brit and Yaacob Dweck’s The Scandal of Kabbalah, both microhistories of now relatively obscure yet influential books. By zeroing in on certain keywords (the question of catholicism as universalism, for instance), examining the modalities of their expression in Benamozegh’s time, and putting them in dialogue with contemporary texts, I aim to appraise the granular level of his ideas and of their expression. Yet my study also engages in broad depictions. The combination of a distinct prescriptive tone and the posthumous nature of Benamozegh’s major work has prompted me to go beyond his lifespan, to evaluate the reception of the concepts he used in his time and beyond, and to move from micro- to macrohistory in establishing the analogies between the concepts to which he resorted and their implementation in time. This involves examining both the genesis and the afterlives of Benamozegh’s thought so as to assess his impact and take the measure of his disputed legacies. Thus, in trying to draw the arc of his thought, the study goes from an initial historic contextualization to thematic and conceptual explorations.

The Structure of the Book

This book is divided into four parts. Part 1 examines the contexts of Benamozegh: the influence of his education in the port city of Livorno at the hands of a Moroccan kabbalist uncle and his coming of age at the time of the

I N T R O D U C T I O N 13

Risorgimento, in which Italian Catholic thinkers played a great role and exerted a strong influence on the young man. Benamozegh refashioned himself from a Hebrew exegete to a scholar of Judaism in Italian, a publisher of books in the Maghreb and the Middle East, and ultimately to an essayist in France. Analyzing his milieu and the various audiences he addressed helps us follow a few important motifs in his work, from the importance of Kabbalah to the articulation between patriotism and universalism. His desire to make a case for Judaism as the answer to the religious crisis of his time led him to write in French his final book, Israel and Humanity, published posthumously in 1914. The afterlives of Benamozegh’s work, through his Christian disciple Pallière, have fueled controversies over the authenticity of the rabbi’s legacy. Yet no previous scholarship had ever compared Benamozegh’s original manuscript to the one published by Pallière in 1914. Having gained access to an intermediary version of the manuscript, my book fills this lacuna and gives further insights into the inner world of Benamozegh and his influences. Benamozegh’s claim of Jewish universalism, an index of Judaism’s adequation with the modern world, must, as I argue in part 2, be measured against the competing claims of philosophy, Christianity, and Reform Judaism, as notably expressed by Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Kant. Central in his system are the Noahide Laws, which, he contended, refute the ethnocentric nature of Judaism. Based on rational revelation but with edicts resembling natural law, they convey both internal and external normativity; this ancient legislation functions as a theological construct that sits well with one of modernity’s features: the imperative of locating normativity within itself. Through them, Benamozegh aimed to rewrite the narrative of inclusion and exclusion in Judaism and Christianity as a modality of universalism through particularism—a concept now perceived as Levinasian but that Benamozegh coined. In advocating for his ambitious project, he turned a blind eye to the limitations of these Talmudic laws, whose hierarchical nature bespeaks minimal universalism or even an ethnocentrism, as the current use of Noahism among right-wing Zionist and evangelical Christian fringe groups makes clear. Another instrument of choice in Benamozegh’s system, which also signified Jewish modernity, was his use of Kabbalah as a means of going beyond the binaries of modernity, as I show in part 3. But in order to do so, he had to

1 4 I N T R O D U C T I O N

rehabilitate Kabbalah for both his Jewish and non-Jewish audiences, insisting both on its dimension of science and knowledge—thereby downplaying the mystical, experiential aspect of Kabbalah—and on its myth making quality, which was needed to provide humankind with allegorical narratives that justify Jewish law and define a collective unconscious. Second, the use of kabbalistic hermeneutics in the coincidence of opposites limited the alienating potential of binaries, such as science versus faith, inherited from the Western Enlightenment. Benamozegh presented Kabbalah as capable of underwriting a political project that would result in turning a secretive, esoteric tradition into an exoteric, public conversation and a path toward coexistence. Yet the ethnocentric tension remains, since, he claimed, it is incumbent on Israel to carry out this mission. Kabbalah indeed became an instrument of political engagement in the twentieth century, albeit sometimes at odds with what Benamozegh envisioned, which testifies to limits or ambiguities in the inclusive interpretation of an arguably ethnocentric tradition. Finally, because Benamozegh’s work is prescriptive, part 4 of the study focuses on the modes of engagement that can be—or were—derived from his writings. Having probed the questions of relevance, enmity, and interdependence in Benamozegh’s work, I will turn to his tone. Here, I apply Hans Blumenberg’s category of modernity as “self-assertion.”44 Voiced with a distinct triumphalism, Benamozegh’s Jewish theology of religions highlights the affirmative character of modernity and of Jewish self-assertion as one of its modalities and changes the terms of engagement with the religious other. I seek to refine these terms—as rapprochement, encounter, or dialogue— and evaluate how interreligious practices have aligned with the concepts he elaborated in post–Second World War interfaith dialogue, most notably at the Second Vatican Council,45 thus testing the strength and limitations of this peculiar, time-bound and yet untimely intervention, and its significance for Jewish and religious modernity.

2 PA R T 1

B ENA M O Z E G H ’ S T EX T S A N D CO N T EX T S Morocco, the Risorgimento, and the Disputed Manuscript

In 1889, Nahum Sokolow, a Zionist leader and pioneer of Hebrew journalism, edited the first biographical lexicon of contemporary Jewish writers.1 In addition to the alphabetical entries, a section devoted to autobiographies featured a dozen significant authors who contributed short sketches of their lives.2 This is the only time Elia Benamozegh, then sixty-six years old, ever offered such an account. Barely three pages long, the essay represents an arresting instance of self-fashioning through self-effacement. Benamozegh devoted one page to his ancestry, a page and a half to his early years and intellectual training, before concluding his narration quite abruptly with his ordination at the age of thirty-five. He then added a few lines about the sorrows of his life and the loss of a promising son.3 As if his intellectual pursuits made up for the apparent unremarkableness of his life,4 he devoted the next three pages of his essay—the same amount of space his gave to his life story—to an annotated bibliography of his publications. What Benamozegh had to say about Kabbalah and Judaism in his variegated writings certainly defined his life and tells us a great deal about him.5 An initial contextualization of Benamozegh’s thinking will illuminate the way he brought together various disparate traditions and created his own distinct synthesis. Through it, he effectively decentered an Enlightenment narrative traditionally centered on Western Europe and made a case for another kind of modernity. 15

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l CHAP TER 1 '

T H E M O RO CCA N WO R LD O F A LI VO R N ES E J EW

The fortune s of Livor no, Benamozegh’s place of birth and of lifelong residence, where his parents had settled after leaving Morocco before his birth, shaped his understanding of diversity, his assertive engagement with the Christian world, and his feeling of alienation from a place once vibrant, but by his time relegated to the commercial and intellectual margins of Europe. His Moroccan background also accounts for his view of Kabbalah as an essential part of the Jewish tradition in an age when it had generally fallen out of favor among the enlightened figures of Judaism.

Jewish Livorno

The free port city of Livorno was the creation of the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany, whose Livornine Charters, promulgated in 1591 and 1593, extended privileges to residents of any nation—from Portugal to Persia. The provisions of the charters granted the right to free and public religious practice as well as protection for religious minorities from excessive taxation, from the Inquisition, from any evangelism by Catholics, and from slander, abuse, violence, and discriminatory practices. The rationale was to attract the Sephardic diaspora: the Tuscan dukes were eager to take advantage of Mediterranean Jews’ reputed control of commerce with the Ottoman Empire.1 These rights remained unmatched elsewhere on the continent and even in the rest of Italy, where the 17

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Inquisition still flourished in the late sixteenth century (and was to last until the nineteenth century). While Italian Jews from neighboring states were actually the earliest settlers, such freedom also drew a number of New Christians from the Iberian Peninsula.2 From the late eighteenth century onward, North African Jews, too, assumed an increasing role in the community. The economic growth that ensued and the fortunes of the city instantiate the “mercantile philosemitism” theorized by Jonathan Karp.3 The city’s reputation led British philosopher John Toland,4 when advocating the naturalization of the Jews in England, to cite Livorno as a model.5 The figure of the rich merchant of Livorno found its way into literature with Isaac Euchel’s ’Igrot Meshulam (1790), a work often compared to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters, in which the Italian-Spanish upper class constitutes an open society with patronage of the arts and free presses.6 The port city was also a point of passage where visitors and temporary residents maintained their customs, a phenomenon that rarely failed to make an impression on outsiders throughout the nineteenth century. Upon his stay in Livorno in 1874, the German theologian and writer Avraham Berliner noted: “The various forms of dress afforded an interesting spectacle to the observer. There were European Jews in overcoats, Berbers in their bright white burnous, Orientals in turbans and many others besides.”7 Livorno’s Jewry fits the label “port Jews,” a social type found in maritime communities in Italy and in the Sepharad world, at the intersection of trade and culture, interacting with non-Jewish communities and offering a model of de facto cosmopolitanism.8 Yet recent scholarship has shown that the idea of “cosmopolitanism” needs to be reassessed.9 This picture of social integration applied primarily to the elite and the heterogeneity in such cities resulted in ethnoreligious tensions between Jews and Christians,10 as well as ethnic tensions within the Livornese Jewish community.11 These frictions abated around the time of Benamozegh’s coming of age as part of a new generation identified as Italian only. In his autobiography, Benamozegh mentions that when he was a young predicator at the Academia Beit Franco, his father-in-law authorized him to preach in Italian rather than in Spanish, at the request of the younger congregants. However fragmented, this plurality of worlds encapsulated in a single microcosm, the one through the many, resembles Benamozegh’s understanding of the world and of religion.



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Benamozegh’s lifespan coincided with a turn of the tide for Livornese wealth. Not only did the ban on commerce with England during the Napoleonic occupation harm Livorno’s economic growth, but the French colonization of Algeria after 1830 and of Tunis in 1881 further reduced Livornese Jewish merchants’ potential role as middlemen between the French and the Ottoman Empire. The weakening of the latter spelled the downfall of the Jewish merchant class, which suffered from a steep decline in trade between the eastern Mediterranean and Europe. The city’s demographics followed suit. In fact, the Jewish proportion of the population declined first in relative terms, from 12 percent of the population (three thousand Jews) in 1725 to around 6 percent in 1822, a year before Benamozegh’s birth.12 In the second half of the century, more Jews left Livorno than settled in the city. Most of those who left went looking for new, more prosperous business ventures in Alexandria, Salonica, and above all Tunis. Livorno’s economic decline foreshadowed or accompanied its dwindling cultural influence in the Jewish world.13 Livorno had once been a hub to which celebrated figures such as the Chida (Haim Yosef David Azulai) would travel and settle.14 The intellectual exchanges that accompanied the city’s earlier heyday, however, began to wane. The history of the Livornese rabbinate remains to be written, but Benamozegh’s appraisal of his relations with the other communal leaders and the Jewish economic elite of the port is less than positive: he portrays himself as a man living “in near perfect solitude [ . . . ] except for the company of [his] books and students,”15 lamenting his intellectual isolation in Livorno and the “holy apathy” (“santia apatia”) he saw as prevailing in his hometown. Writing to the philologist and Orientalist Angelo de Gubernatis (1840–1911) in 1867, Benamozegh commented, “Here lethargy reigns and whoever has less chloroform in their body, they declare him crazy—and maybe he is.”16 In his correspondence with Luzzatto, he twice nicknamed the port city “Beotia,” referring to the central province of Greece often derided for the stupidity of its inhabitants. This detachment is corroborated by the testimony of those who knew him, in which he comes across as stern, aloof, and eccentric. The testimony of an official who visited him in order to gauge his political leanings in 1857 painted him as “stern toward his family.” His disciple Pallière described him as he walked away from their first and only meeting as “absorbed

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in his thoughts, which he accompanied by involuntary gestures [ . . . ] some passers-by saluted him respectfully, others looked at him with curiosity and surprise because of the oddity of his appearance.”17 Livorno shaped Benamozegh’s persona as a remote figure, living in what had become a marginal city and all the more eager to insert himself into the conversation in cultural circles about the religion and the society of the future. A lecture delivered by Benamozegh in 1893, as part of his lecture series for local Jewish schools known as Pie Scuole Israelitiche (the Pious Israelite Schools), illustrates these two poles. The rabbi offered a historical overview, a virtual guided tour, of the old cemetery of Livorno,18 and intended it not only as a tribute to the intellectual heroes of the past, as a symbolic acknowledgment of a bygone world, but also as a political injunction. When he invoked Haim Yosef David Azulai, the “luminary of Judaism,” Benamozegh highlighted a lesser-known aspect of the Chida’s thought: his attachment to freedom, which echoed Benamozegh’s own credo: Freedom! What can you find that is better than freedom of conscience?

When it is missing, you can’t observe God’s smallest commandment with-

out exposing yourself to persecution or mockery. But when there’s freedom, you can put on your tefillin and go to the synagogue and back without

being harmed, you can build your tent on the terrace without getting the smallest stone thrown at you.19

As forward-thinking as his agenda was, Benamozegh drew deeply, as a rabbi and a thinker, on his world of yesterday, with its web of Moroccan and Oriental connections.

Moroccan Genealogies

Benamozegh’s family’s itineraries exemplify the intense rabbinic circulation between the main commercial and religious cities of the Mediterranean, especially between the Maghreb and Livorno, as religious and scholarly networks were created along the lines built by the commercial ones.20 With its distinguished forebears of judges and kabbalists, Benamozegh’s ancestry is deeply rooted in Morocco. In his brief autobiography, Benamozegh traced his paternal ancestry back to Fez and highlighted an ancestor named Jehoshuah Ben Amozegh, who was granted the title “Prince of the Nation”



THE MOROCCAN WORLD OF A LIVORNESE JEW 

21

for having supported the King of Fez in the seventeenth century and who appears in the final pages of Jacques Basnage’s famed Histoire des Juifs, first published in the mid-eighteenth century and cited by Benamozegh.21 The patronym means “the son of the Berber,”22 suggesting an ancient presence in Morocco since the Amazighs were autochthonous Berbers living in the Maghreb before the Arab conquest who had converted to Judaism in late antiquity.23 From what can be gleaned from the autobiography, Elia Benamozegh’s father, Avraham, born in Morocco, was living childless in Livorno when, at age seventy-one, he asked for the approval of his first wife to marry a younger woman, who became Elia’s mother. In a peculiar retelling, Benamozegh adds that his father entrusted an emissary to the Holy Land to pray for him there so that he should have male progeny. Apart from his brief, 1889 self-portrayal, Benamozegh’s accounts of his family history are rare and oblique. Mostly found in ancillary texts, they all emphasize Morocco as the family nexus. The Coriat family presumably hailed, and took its name, from the Spanish town of Coria and left around the time of the expulsion. Its uninterrupted presence in Morocco has been documented going back to the fifteenth century, in various positions of power.24 Benamozegh was well aware of his illustrious ancestry: “Know that I count, on my mother’s side, ten generations of rabbanim and geonim,”25 he wrote to one of his interlocutors.26 One of these luminaries was his greatgrandfather Avraham Coriat, a renowned dayyan (a judge in a rabbinical court) active in Tetouan (Morocco) who appears in Samuel Romanelli’s 1787 Masa be-Arav (Travail in an Arab Land), a best-selling eighteenth-century travelogue.27 Benamozegh’s father, Avraham, was a student of this same maternal ancestor (also spelled Koriat) in Fez.28 Elia’s maternal grandfather, Avraham Refael Coriat, had moved to the Moroccan city Essaouira (formerly known as Mogador) around 1788.29 The Livornese Jews who resided there offered him the position of dayyan in the Tuscan city, where he went on to codirect one of the many yeshivot, the Beit Yosef Franco, at which Benamozegh would later be a student.30 Avraham died in Livorno a few months after an outbreak of yellow fever that claimed hundreds of lives, including those of his brother Itzhak (author of a short collection of responsa, Ma‘aseh Rokem) and a

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younger son; he was survived by his children Clara (Elia Benamozegh’s mother) and Yehudah. Yehudah frequently traveled back and forth between Livorno and Morocco—exemplifying the intense rabbinic circulation that followed the development of commercial networks around the Mediterranean. Benamozegh’s immediate family was small. While he mentions how his beloved mother knew “a little Bible” in translation, the key figure in Benamozegh’s life was undoubtedly his uncle Yehudah.31 From the time he lost his father at age four, he was taught by Yehudah, who treated him like a son and a student.32 The young rabbi Elia Benamozegh paid tribute to this father-figure in his correspondence with Samuel David Luzzatto, writing, “My calligraphy is African because I learned the Hebraic rudiments from the good soul of my maternal uncle, one of the honorable Coriats.”33

“The First Studies of My Youth”

This account of Benamozegh’s handwriting (where “African” means Maghrebi) offers an anecdotal yet revealing facet of his Moroccan education, which reverberated through his assessment of the Jewish tradition and canon—and crucially in the status and significance he ascribed to the Zohar. Central to Benamozegh’s thought, the Zohar—“the Book of Splendor”—is a foundational text of Jewish mysticism. It is both a commentary on the Pentateuch and a pseudepigraph written in thirteenth-century Castile by Moses de León but misattributed to the second-century Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai (also known by the acronym Rashbi), a sage of the Talmud. Benamozegh’s familiarity with this literature is evident in his autobiographical sketch, in which he describes learning from his uncle as an intimate experience, in a passage replete with a web of metaphors resting on the traditional binaries of light piercing through darkness: During the long winter nights, he read the Zohar with me, by the feeble

light of a tallow candle, at least twice it seems from beginning to end, in-

stilling in me, through words and above all through actions, the flame of the fear of God together with the observance of the precepts and the practice of mystical piety.34

Benamozegh framed his study of the Zohar as an observance of the commandments. Unlike most of his contemporaries, as he stressed in his



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correspondence with Luzzatto, he rejected any possible dismissal of Kabbalah as antinomian (i.e., that its practices would serve as a substitute for, and release a person from observing, the law).35 Further evidence of Benamozegh’s kabbalistic education is the page-and-a-half-long introduction he penned, at the age of fifteen, to a collection of kabbalistic texts compiled by his uncle.36 This suggests that Benamozegh’s early education was more Moroccan than typically Italian.37 Indeed, Italian Judaism, where ecstatic Kabbalah played a significant role, had been only marginally influenced by the Zohar. Benamozegh’s Talmudic training also reflects a Sephardic environment in an Italian context. When describing his initial encounter with Jewish law to his disciple Pallière, who was seeking a way into Judaism, the rabbi suggested a few readings, including Ein Israel (Israel’s Spring; more widely known as En Yaaqov, Jacob’s Spring), the standard manual for religious instruction among Italian Jewish communities.38 It is the text that framed Benamozegh’s understanding of the Talmud. In this, he departed from an understanding of it as a strictly legal corpus and came to emphasize its value as a book of faith.39 Other books Benamozegh suggested to Pallière include Mesilat Yesharim (The Path of the Just), a classical work of kabbalistic ethical literature by Moshe Luzzatto, and Menorat ha-Me’or (Candelabrum of Light) by the fourteenth-century Castilean Talmudic scholar Isaac Aboab,40 whose enterprise foreshadowed Ibn Habib’s Ein Israel in retrieving the aggadic materials dispersed in the Talmud that in Benamozegh’s eyes were no less theologically valuable than the halakhah (the legal system). Another binary Benamozegh rejected was the incompatibility of halakhah and Kabbalah.41 His central and staunch belief that they were actually complementary stemmed from his Livornese learning environment: indeed, several eighteenth-century Livornese rabbis were kabbalists, including Joseph Ergas (1685–1730) and his disciple Malachi ha-Cohen (1700–1772), the greatest Livornese rabbinical authority of the eighteenth century.42 Yet Benamozegh’s stances on Kabbalah also reflected his transplanted Moroccan upbringing and training. Because the Moroccan kingdom was largely exempt from the influence of the first attempts to alienate the Zohar from the Talmud that prevailed in Christian Kabbalah across Europe, the Zohar did not fall into disrepute there.43 The kabbalistic commentaries, their interpretations of the Mishnah

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(the first redaction of the oral law around 200 CE) and of the mitzvot (the commandments binding on the Jews), were popular in Morocco—in particular sixteenth-century Alashqar’s exegesis, with its insistence on the ethical (musar) teachings of the Zohar. So were Cordovero’s Tomer Devorah (The Palm Tree of Deborah) and his student Elijah de Vidas’s Reshit Hohma (The Beginning of Wisdom), both of which were authored in the second half of the sixteenth century and modeled on concepts found in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria.44 Benamozegh kept a hefty musar section in his library45 with works by Cordovero and Vidas as well as more contemporary examples, such as the work of the Bulgarian rabbi Eliezer Papo (1785–1826), Pele Yoetz (The Adventurous Counsel). It comes as no surprise that Benamozegh’s own press issued Reshit Hohma as one of its first titles, as early as 1856; his first published books closely reflect his upbringing and the expectations of his potential audience. Though he eventually settled into a career as a publisher and rabbi, the nonlinear route Benamozegh followed to get there and the frustration he experienced during his detour as a merchant proved essential to his intellectual growth. In his autobiographical account, he recalled that when he reached the age of nineteen, “it was decided that I would go [into commerce] out of the sheer necessity of making a living.” The young man had to support a widowed mother and to become financially secure enough to marry. He was first indentured to the Tunisian firm of Abraham Enriques and then went on to work for the renowned merchant house Cave e Bondi. This detour into business lasted three years, from 1842 to 1846. Recounting the period in the preface to Morale juive et morale chrétienne (1867, translated into English in 1873 as Jewish and Christian Ethics), he described his quasi-solitary intellectual formation as “these vigils of yesteryear, where, next to my dear mother, after hours devoted to professional work, I trembled with a naive joy when, reading the books I had brought from Paris, I saw confirmed conjectures that I had correctly made.”46 Here, books are the validation of Benamozegh’s intuitions, and the confession, with its accents borrowed from romanticism, linking spontaneity and revelation, often featured in his work. His detour into business left the young man all the more dedicated to his quest for knowledge. In subsequent essays on Spinoza, he sketched a rare portrayal of himself at the age of twenty-two, stuck in an unwanted mercantile career but still an avid reader of the philosopher.47 The following year, in



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1846, Benamozegh received a scholarship that enabled him to shift careers and to pursue rabbinical studies at the Bet Josef Midrash until his official ordination in 1855. He launched his publishing house that same year. Soon thereafter, he married a cousin, Rachele Coriat, and then replaced his fatherin-law as a substitute preacher before being ordained as a preacher-rabbi (rabbino predicatore) in 1856.48 Benamozegh’s years spent as an autodidact paved the way to the seminary, but they also left a mark on his self-perception and account for his desire to bridge the gap between binaries, especially between Kabbalah and philosophy.49 This trajectory is documented in the short text he penned for the introduction to Nir le-David, his 1858 commentary on Psalms, in which he admitted, apologetically, to gravitating toward philosophy.50 “Be aware that I first rolled myself in the mud of philosophy and that I have not yet come clean of its stain. My reason told me several times to keep away from it, but until now, I have not had the heart to do so.”51 In a letter to Samuel David Luzzatto in 1859, Benamozegh deferentially hastened to call his study of Psalms the work of a callow youth.52 But he also lamented that his embrace of philosophy coincided with his rejection of Kabbalah: “You don’t know how, after having relished kabbalistic books in the prime of my youth, I, too, started speaking ill of them because I had noticed what everybody was saying about them—and then I realized that without this theology [by which Benamozegh meant Kabbalah], Mosaism lacks grounding.”53 While Benamozegh was certainly idiosyncratic in his approach to Kabbalah, he did embrace a well-established early modern Italian tradition that viewed philosophy and Kabbalah as reconcilable.54 Yet the rabbi mulled over the antagonism and this is one of the instances where, betwixt and between different approaches of Judaism, he dedicated himself to reconciling opposing traditions and to finding his own articulation. Even after taking the more traditional path, this initial spiritual turmoil appears to have shaped him and to have given him an understanding of religion in which psychology loomed large: “Your Pascal, among others, taught me the respect due to religious unrest,” Benamozegh confessed to Pallière later in his life, when his French disciple came to seek the rabbi’s spiritual guidance.55 “Everything is the fruit of long meditations, which date from

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the time when the first studies of my youth impelled me irresistibly toward the path in which you aim to walk today.”56 But the unrest of Benamozegh’s youth was not only spiritual: his coming of age spanned turbulent times and was shaped by the political turmoil in Italy. Benamozegh’s milieu and ancestry certainly made a mark on his understanding of the Jewish tradition: an experience of ethnic and religious diversity in a formerly vibrant port city, an autodidact’s appetite for philosophy and literature, and an emphasis on the narrative part of the Talmud and on Kabbalah can be attributed to his Moroccan education in Livorno. In many ways, it was as an outsider, removed from the centers of Jewish modernity, that he proposed to consider alternative paths to reconcile religion with his time.

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It is difficult to ov erstate the importance of Italian politics and culture for Benamozegh’s understanding of a modernity predicated on both patriotism and universalism, and for the shaping of his political consciousness, which was undergirded by the religious philosophy of Italian Catholic thinkers. His call to envision Judaism as a universal religion, his redefinition of the interaction between Jews and the nation, and his opposition to the religious rejection of modernity, exemplified by the Pope, are all best understood against the backdrop of the Risorgimento, the political, social, and cultural movement that eventually led to the unification of Italy, of which he was a witness and participant.

Jews and the Risorgimento Cultures

Recent scholarship on the Risorgimento has moved away from an essentializing narrative of the political liberation of the Italian states from foreign domination and of the unification of the peninsula,1 and from later constructs of a voluntaristic idea of the nation as opposed to an essentialist (and racist) German notion.2 The Marxist-Gramscian indictment of a bourgeois, “passive revolution” from which the masses were absent has also lost traction.3 Scholars, especially Mario Banti, now emphasize the movement’s multiple cultural facets and the role of the literary canon in the formation of political discourse, with romantic 27

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notions of ethnicity, kinship, and honor, as well as the transposition of traditional (often historical) metaphors.4 Benamozegh’s patriotism both illuminates and reflects these aspects of the movement. The Risorgimento also confronted him, like many other Italian rabbis and lay leaders, with new questions about the viability and meaning of Judaism and Jewish life after emancipation, and Benamozegh responded to this challenge idiosyncratically. The 1815 Congress of Vienna had reversed Napoleonic attempts to unify Italy and restored the old regime on the peninsula, which was once again divided into regional powers. The emancipation of Jews, introduced by the French, was unraveled.5 Grand Duke Leopold II (1797–1870), the ostensible sovereign of Tuscany, whose rule began in 1824 just as the movement was starting, was more lenient and enlightened in his rule than his counterparts in Rome or Naples to the extent that the agenda of religious freedom endured. However, frequent uprisings, disorder, and unrest characterized the period throughout the peninsula. Livorno remained rebellious, and two Livornese Jews—Giuseppe Ottolenghi and Emanuele Montefiore—joined the ranks of the secret society I veri Italiani (The True Italians), linked to Mazzini’s Young Italians.6 In 1848, the Italian Peninsula was swept up in the tidal wave of nationalism that became known across Europe as the Springtime of the Peoples. This is the background against which Benamozegh came of age, inspired by the key figures of the Risorgimento and by the shaping of national consciousness.

Risorgimento Rhetoric at the Pulpit

Not long after the young man entered the seminary in 1845, the investiture of Pope Pius IX in June 1846 raised great hopes among prominent liberal thinkers—among them the philosopher and politician Vincenzo Gioberti (1801–52)—for a liberalization of the Catholic Church.7 By the time Benamozegh completed his studies, in 1856, those hopes had been extinguished. This disappointment inspired sobering reflections on the relationship between politics and religion. One of the pontiff ’s early decisions was to establish a civil guard to secure participation in the armed forces and the support of the middle class in Rome. The civil guard was established throughout the peninsula and



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it included Jews, which represented a real change at a time when even Livornese Jews—who had enjoyed a more privileged legal status than that of their Roman coreligionists—could not bear arms. Having the ability to serve in the civil guard meant that they were full-fledged citizens for the first time. On September 8, 1847, addressing an audience at the Tempio Ebraico (the main Livorno synagogue), Benamozegh began by praising the Pope for his numerous benefactions.8 He struck a religious—and patriotic—tone throughout the address, which culminated in his final words: “Holiness of the Temple of God, holy and pure work of the reformer Pope, holy is the work of Leopold of Tuscany, holy the redemption and Risorgimento of the peoples. So long live Pius IX. Long live Leopold II. Long live freedom, unity, and Italian independence!”9 In that speech, Benamozegh’s widely shared enthusiasm espoused an altogether classic discourse of emancipation, predicated on Jewish worthiness and valorizing the double identity—Italian and Jewish: You are Italian. And what greater glory than these two great names could you yearn for? In you, Israelites,10 you epitomize all of antiquity, in all its holiness, its greatness. You epitomize—you, Italians, you represent modern civilization spread to the four corners of the world [ . . . ] who among you

do not incline your heads reverently before those human and divine glo-

ries named Moses and Dante? Of this double glory, Israelite Italians, show yourselves worthy.11

In February 1848, Leopold II granted Tuscans a constitution, known as the Statuto Toscano. The rights it bestowed did not include Jews at first; they were extended to Jews in a March 1848 decree ensuring equal access to civil and military positions. But already on February 22, Benamozegh gave another speech of exultation. The young preacher voiced the hopes of a generation, while elder Livorno officials cautiously abstained from taking a public stance on the issue. Benamozegh, however, hinting at a possible Austrian reaction and of the impending armed conflict, pledged in the closing lines of his speech that Jews would take up arms and show their loyalty toward the regime. His language was geared not only toward his Jewish congregants but also to a non-Jewish audience, for whom it was meant to dispel the stereotype of rootless Jews of uncertain allegiances.

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Highlighting the dawn of a new era, Benamozegh meshed biblical imagery with mythical and mystical themes and merged the cultures and aspirations of Italians and Jews, joining to liberate themselves from Austrian rule. Brashly borrowing from Genesis, Benamozegh exhorted: “And just as on the first day of creation, pronouncing the imperative Word upon turbulent Chaos, ‘Let there be light,’ You said, and there was light. It was no different with the abyss of the Italian misadventures: Let there be Italy, You commanded, and Italy there was.”12 To strengthen his case for the similarities between Italy and Jews and to insist on the divine nature of Italy, Benamozegh also turned to Deuteronomy 6:5 (“And you will love the Lord, thy God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might”): “Swear that you will always love Italy, that you will love it with all your heart and all your soul, with all your might.” It is equally striking that Benamozegh quoted Dante, placing him on an equal footing with Moses as “princes of human intelligence” worthy of veneration.13 The young preacher also compared other great Italians with Moses, paralleling the legislative activity of Italy’s first prime minister, Cavour, for example, with the Jewish prophet as a “model and precursor of all liberal reforms.”14 Other Jewish as well as non-Jewish figures used biblical tropes to proclaim Italy’s exceptionalism, with a special emphasis on Moses, Exodus, and the return from Babylonian captivity.15 Blending prophecy and Italy was a staple in Vincenzo Gioberti’s writings, such as Philosophy of the Revelation and The Primacy of the Italians, where he aimed to reconcile Catholic faith with philosophy as he identified civilization and religion, leading prominent French philosopher Victor Cousin to dismiss Gioberti’s thought as mere theology.16 The trope of the statesman as prophet gained hold in the first half of the nineteenth century in France as well, though in a more secularized version.17 Numerous concepts explored by Gioberti, particularly the articulation of revelation, nation, and prophecy, left their mark on Benamozegh18 and this inscribed the Livornese rabbi in a Risorgimento discourse (as described by Banti)19 that harked back to a literary and religious canon in order to describe Italian particularism. When the Austrian occupation returned in 1849, Benamozegh, as an outspoken supporter of Italian independence, was suspended from the teaching activities he had taken up early on (and would continue throughout his



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rabbinical career).20 The lifting of this sanction in 1852 improved his circumstances, but the authorities kept him under a watchful eye.21 During these years, Benamozegh published extensively in Hebrew and Italian in newspapers such as Il Corriere Israelitico. Although his publications were mostly journalistic texts geared toward a Jewish audience, he found some veiled ways of expressing his views. In his biblical commentaries, he included oblique references to his own time. His exegesis of Deuteronomy 17 and the laws concerning the kings of Israel in ’Em la-Miqra’22 is an admonition against despotism, clearly spelled out, in which allusions to recent events are only thinly concealed.

Early Writings

Benamozegh’s first published books seem quite remote from his time: they deal with controversies internal to the Jewish community, particularly defending Kabbalah and the Zohar.23 His very first book, ’Eimat Mafgia‘ ‘al ’Ari (The Lion Dreads the Gnat, 1855), is a chapter-by-chapter rebuttal of ’Ari Nohem (The Lion Roars), a disputation of the antiquity of the Zohar by the Venetian rabbi Leone Modena (1571–1628).24 Benamozegh’s sophomore effort, Ta‘am le-Shad, published in 1863, took on the subject of the dialectics of the Talmud and Kabbalah—and the relationship between Kabbalah and tradition more broadly.25 This second defense of Kabbalah was a critique of Samuel David Luzzatto’s Vikkuah ‘al ha-Kabbalah. The title, Ta‘am le-Shad, is a truncated citation of Numbers 11:8, in which the Israelites complain about the manna, which they describe as keta‘am leshad hashemen—“like the taste of a cake baked in oil.” This title involves a play on words: “Shadal” is an acronym for Samuel David Luzzatto and Shad can be read as indicating the “meaning” or “valor” of the new, thus rendering the title as “a taste of the new,” which is ironic since the advocates of the Talmud claimed to protect the law against the antinomianism or baseless innovations born in the fantasies of kabbalists. But ta‘am also signifies the mark for cantillation (“in order to make the Torah tastier, more expressive”),26 which, as seen above, became crucial for the opponents of the claim of the Zohar’s antiquity. Ta‘am le-Shad was written as a dialogue between characters named Phinehas and Hofni, who share the names of the sons of the priest Eli of

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Shiloh who were deemed “base” (1 Samuel 2:12–17). Known as “sons of Belial,” which indicates lawlessness or wickedness (since Belial is a creature believed to have been created next to Satan), both were killed by the Philistines (1 Samuel 4:11). Benamozegh’s characters argue over the main thesis of Luzzatto’s book, referring to his elder only as “the researcher.” Phinehas—portrayed in a slightly less negative light than his brother in the biblical narrative—holds out against Hofni’s anti-Kabbalah arguments. Since the text brims with praise for Shadal, Benamozegh may have been attempting irony or self-distancing: Phinehas, himself a character in a dialogue, questions Luzzatto’s choice of dialogue as a genre, lamenting its lack of realism (an interesting, albeit isolated, instance of mise en abyme in Benamozegh’s work). Yet the overall impression is one of pitting tradition against “the new,” although Benamozegh’s future argument about the capacity of tradition to serve as progressive revelation, fit to engage the challenges of his time, as well as his scathing critique of the Pope’s conservatism, indicates otherwise. First seen as a liberal figure, Pope Pius IX quickly retreated into antimodernism. His encyclical Quanta Cura, issued in 1864, was accompanied by the Syllabus of Errors, which listed the so-called “condemned propositions,” ideas that he viewed as the main errors of his day. The list included religious freedom, the possibility that a non-Christian might go to heaven, the separation of church and state, the embrace of progress, liberalism, and modern civilization, and questioning papal demands for temporal power. For many, including Benamozegh, the infamous Syllabus became synonymous with an utterly inadequate religious response to modernity, and it became a cause of alarm among liberal politicians and thinkers.27 It thus fueled virulent antipapal sentiments in Italy and beyond, which eventually propagated suspicion toward faith in general. Like a whole generation—Jews and non-Jews alike—the rabbi felt betrayed by the Pope, believing that his new conservatism put religion itself in danger. Benamozegh made this view known in an article addressed to Pius IX entitled “Il dovere” (Duty) that he published in L’Educatore Israelita in 1865.28 In the piece, which dealt with the notion of religious responsibilities in the modern age, the rabbi asserted that condemning modernity contradicted the very notion of faith.



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This imperative of adjusting to one’s time while relying on religion as a means of making critical sense of the present served as a thread throughout his subsequent work. From this point forward, Benamozegh devoted his intellectual work to seeking a reconciliation between religion and modernity. More specifically, he would argue that it was incumbent on Jews to participate in society, not only for their own immediate material benefit and physical security but, more importantly, to demonstrate that Judaism, as a culture and religion, represented a “humanitarian duty.”29 For the champions of Jewish emancipation, such as Massimo d’Azeglio, this cause was just a part of the national cause, which, especially in the case of d’Azeglio, did not involve a positive appreciation of Judaism nor real consideration of a possible role for Jews in the new regime.30 It was thus incumbent on Jewish leaders to define Italian-Jewish identity and find a way to participate in the community qua Jews.31 Such is the meaning of a July 1863 open letter to the government written by Benamozegh and signed by a half-dozen rabbis.32 The letter asserted that, as a minority, Jews bear a duty of special vigilance, not merely as a litmus test of loyalty but as an active way of ensuring the probity of government. We would like to express our feelings here with deep honesty. Our government, with all its sincere love for the principles of equality and the secularization of the state, must necessarily, in the formulation of its law, draw

its inspiration, more or less from the opinion and feeling of the majority. This is the natural temptation, the unavoidable tendency of all the states that transition from an absolutist regime to freedom. This is especially so where there is no vigilant minority, strengthened by its rights, which takes

upon itself as its duty the tutelage of its own rights for itself and for the principles of freedom, which are identified with the rights of reason and

progress, and which thus turn the minority into the natural representative, the sentry, the sentinel of freedom and of the future. We are not about to renounce this duty, this most natural mission which falls on us because of our specific quality as a minority.33

His agenda for Judaism and the political ethos of Italy converged yet again: one aspect of the Risorgimento was to educate its citizens and foster a sense of national self-awareness, of identity and purpose, and Benamozegh aligned

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the mission and prestige of Judaism with Italy’s own mission and prestige. In the wake of the emancipation, redefining or deepening the Jewish contribution to the country implied a measure of self-fashioning, “the task of restoring our rituals in a progressive spirit” as Marco Mortara, a student of Samuel David Luzzatto, put it.34 To reach agreement on the substance of this task and the possible reformation of certain rituals, Mortara had called for a rabbinic congress in Ferrara in 1863. Benamozegh bitingly expressed his opposition to such a congress in a number of articles published in the short-lived review L’Israelita. These articles, which emphasized the threat to the essence of Judaism that the reform of rituals would entail, contained intimations of ideas later refined in Israel and Humanity. Benamozegh spelled out here, for example, his views on religion and on tradition as comparable to a living organism, something one could not leisurely dismiss.35 The Ferrara Congress (1863) yielded insignificant results, as did a similar gathering in Florence in 1867.36 Such disagreements implicitly revealed a split between the rabbinate and the actual practices of their congregants: in the words of Michel Meyer, in Italy, Judaism was “esteemed and venerated by almost everyone, but rarely observed in its entirety.”37 This estrangement from religious observance, while maintaining some kind of loyalty to the idea of Italian Judaism, could not go unnoticed: “As far as religion is concerned,” observed the Livornese writer and poet Raffaello Ascoli, “it has totally disappeared. The families that are still religious are quite few.”38 If “religious indifference”39 was a matter of concern, it seems that the makeup and organization of an Italian Jewish identity, central to some contemporaries, was a subject of lament but not a major concern of Benamozegh’s except insofar as his focus was on reaffirming the mission of Judaism more broadly. In his 1865 Storia degli Esseni (History of the Essenes), Benamozegh argued that the years in the ghetto had hampered Jewish creativity and intellectual life.40 His 1867 article “Frederic II and the Rabbinic Doctrines” made a similar claim, this time conjuring up the intellectual world of Holy Roman Emperor Frederic II. Frederic II was a thirteenth-century religious skeptic who fostered an environment of tolerance and included Jewish advisers in his court, which made him a target of the Papacy (and caused Dante to relegate him to the sixth circle of hell).41 Judaism could only fulfill its humanitarian



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mission if Jewish voices could be heard. And to be heard, they needed to write and promote their own scholarship. In his preface to the 1865 volume, Benamozegh called on readers to emulate the scholarly study of Judaism, Wissenschaft des Judentums, a German Jewish innovation, both as a task appropriate for Jews and as a duty toward Italy. It is worth noting that he judged it suitable that this endeavor should be undertaken not just by scholars but also by religious figures: “Who among Jews,” he asked, “is more indebted to this fitting tribute than the rabbinate?” One must, he insisted, proclaim and defend one’s own credo. Scholarship was a patriotic act to which “every individual and every denomination must contribute, in their capacity, as the greatest tribute to the shared fatherland’s glory, and why should the Israelites not contribute Israelite scholarship? Italy has the right to have a Hebraic philological, historical, theological and erudite science, which the other nations, and more specifically Germany, have possessed for a long time.”42 This is an interesting injunction whereby the Livornese rabbi urged Italian Jews to take upon themselves the task of Wissenschaft, thus emulating German Jews and effectively changing the geographies of modern scholarship. Despite his voluntarism, however, Benamozegh’s outspoken manner and agenda made him unfit for serious scholarship. His books in Italian are at times rife with solemnity: his Storia degli Esseni, for instance, is repetitively traversed by addresses to his audience and thus belongs more to homiletics than scholarship. Even as charitable an observer as the rabbi and scholar Sabato Morais suggested as much in calling him a “paladin of kabbalism”: defined as a knight renowned for heroism and chivalry, the word paladin also conveys quixotic tendencies.43 Through his style and tone, Benamozegh consistently divested himself of the very authority that a less impassioned argument would have granted him. Some of the harshest critiques of his work came from Benamozegh’s former student David Castelli, who quipped to the Hebraist and philologist Angelo Paggi: “Not only does Rabbi Benamuseg [sic] lack the fundamental rules of Hebrew language and theology, but now, coming out of left field, he presumes to give us lessons in theology.”44 In his review of Benamozegh’s Teologia, Castelli accused Benamozegh of concocting fake etymologies in the service of preconceived theological arguments.45 With the exception of

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Delle Fonti del diritto ebraico (On the Sources of Jewish Law, 1882)—a more self-contained, albeit often convoluted work—the style of his monographs is consistently at odds with scholarly standards of dispassionate evaluation. In addition to his audacious exegeses, his campaign to reconcile Jewish and non-Jewish knowledge paved the way for further clashes with some of his coreligionists—those who deemed it insufficiently Orthodox, as the next chapter will show. The impact of the thinkers of the Risorgimento, and of Benamozegh’s political milieu in his formative years, demonstrates his capacity for the synthesis of Jewish and non-Jewish ideas, an undertaking that would become a central aspect of his agenda of fostering religious coexistence. Indeed, in the articulation of universal value with Italian patriotism, one can detect the seeds of what he would go on to theorize as universalism via the particularism that was harbored by traditional Judaism and a marker of an inclusive modernity based on religious tenets. His disillusion with the reactionary turn taken by the Pope, and the Vatican’s rejection of modernity altogether, prompted him to promote new ways to reconcile faith and progress without, however, entertaining the possibility offered by Reform Judaism. Because Benamozegh thought that scholarship could achieve such a reconciliation and that it was also an act of patriotism, he argued for an Italian Jewish scholarship, thus effectively calling for an imitation of the German Wissenschaft des Judentums and an expansion of the centers of modern study of religion to Italy. The agenda and tone of his scholarship, however, alienated him from both his more liberal interlocutors and his conservative rabbinate, an antagonism that culminated in the banning of his Bible commentary.

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Benamoz eg h’s endeavors as a publisher have been obscured by his writings but they deserve significant attention. Both activities show a similar engagement, but their intended audiences increasingly diverged over the years. The first book Benamozegh published on his printing press came out in 1852, three years before the publication of his own ’Eimat Mafgia‘ in 1855. Ten years later, he published his last significant contribution in Hebrew: a five-volume commentary on the Pentateuch that was deemed heretical by the rabbinate of Aleppo, in Syria. From then on, he essentially stopped writing in Hebrew and turned to a French audience. In the second half of his life, it was the largely Hebrew catalogue of his printing press, with a distribution and network of authors spanning the Maghreb and the Mashriq, that functioned as his commitment to an Oriental modernity.

Religious and Intellectual Networks in the Mediterranean

Benamozegh’s five-volume Hebrew biblical commentary, ’Em la-Miqra’ (Mother of Scriptures), is a peculiar work whose subtitle in Italian, Il Pentateuco con commenti, ricerche e lunghe note di scienza, di critica e di filologia (The Pentateuch with Comments, Research and Extensive Scientific, Critical and Philological Notes), captures the gist of the work. Rather than a thorough or running commentary on the Bible—he skips entire passages when he sees 37

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fit—it is indeed a pretext for sketches of the ancient Near East or “extensive scholarly notes” (“lunghe note di scienza”). In placing Jewish texts in their historical context, Benamozegh was in tune with his times and with new directions in the science of religion, but his religious agenda1 and his tone made his work unfit as scholarship—something he suspected but refused to amend.2 Benamozegh’s Hebrew texts, written as melitzah—high-flown, Bibleinspired figures of speech—are his most solemn and flowery.3 A staple in Enlightenment literature, melitzah was meant to be at odds with everyday rabbinic language. It served both to anchor the discourse by linking a specific situation through the citations or figures of speech to specific passages in the Bible and, through these sacred echoes, elevate it. But the rabbi carried this style over to other texts. In the pamphlet La verità svelata ai miei giudici, published in 1861, a public defense made in the wake of a trial for libel following a commercial dispute, Benamozegh spelled out his conception of style and of the Hebrew language. Languages, in his view—heavily influenced on this and on many other matters by the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744)—mirror a people’s mind, its culture, and its metaphysical aspirations.4 With its biblical and Talmudic quotations, he called his style a tradition of the Orient,5 but he also held the view that Hebrew lends itself to emphasis and hyperbole, which he meant by an “elevation of rhetorical heat.”6 Benamozegh’s biblical commentary was guided by a mixture of naïveté and polemicism. He opened his Hebrew commentary on Leviticus, for example, with a quotation from Spinoza. In an equally disconcerting move, he had embarked, in his exegesis of the book of Genesis, on a reference to Azariah de Rossi’s controversial Me’or ‘Einayim. Even if de Rossi’s work was never officially banned,7 it was rejected and could only be consulted on request. He also cited the vexing Berosus, the presumptive author of genealogies of Noah, which had, already at the time, been proven to be a hoax invented by the fifteenth-century Christian writer Annio da Viterbo (1432–1502).8 The combination of a controversial author, an unverified source, and a cornucopia of disparate sources (for the account of the first day of creation alone, the list includes a Church Father [Eusebius], Newton, and Descartes on the “Let there be light” verse, the scientist François Arago, the Reform Rabbi Holdheim, and the fifth-century Latin author Macrobius)9 immediately estranged Benamozegh from both the scholars and leaders of conservative communities, of which Syria was a bastion.10



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In 1865, the rabbis of Aleppo issued an edict not only to ban ’Em la-Miqra’ but to burn it. The book was declared herem (forbidden). The most famous previous target of such an order had been Spinoza. This punitive move, the precedents for which had faded far into the past by the nineteenth century, is the harshest form of excommunication: the halakhah forbids anyone to teach, conduct commerce with, or benefit from the excommunicated offender. The Aleppo rabbinate justified this rare act of censure on two main counts: Benamozegh’s claim that the use of external (non-Jewish) texts could advance knowledge of the Torah and the bold parallels he drew between the Torah and paganism. The measure appears all the harsher given that the commentary accompanied the text of the Torah itself. Burning the book thus meant burning the sacred text, an act that is proscribed unless, as Maimonides relates, the commentary was written by a heretic “who does not believe in the sanctity of God’s name and did not compose it for this purpose.”11 The rabbis, in other words, were declaring Benamozegh a heretic. At the Aleppo rabbinate’s invitation, the Damascus rabbinate followed suit, while the Jerusalem one proved more hesitant. It is worth noting that the affair was limited to these rabbinates: the heresy of ’Em la-Miqra’ was apparently not of concern anywhere else. Yaron Harel has argued that the severity of this order of herem resulted from tensions specific to the Jewish leadership in Aleppo, which sought to combat a weakening of traditional observance and the possible irruption of Westernized modes of observance.12 Benamozegh’s reputation and his declarations of Orthodoxy had likely been known to the religious leaders before the ban, since he had been a publisher of some of the rabbis’ volumes of sermons and bakashot (collections of supplications, songs, and prayers traditional in Syrian liturgy). The rabbis nonetheless chose to make an example of him so as to warn against any seemingly modern approach to the Bible and to reiterate the boundaries between Jews and non-Jews that Benamozegh’s commentary appeared to challenge with its endless procession of non-Jewish references. To them, the Livornese rabbi represented a version of a modernity they abhorred. The rabbinic responses to the ban, which accumulated over a number of years, delineate both intellectual and ideological affinities regarding the openness of Judaism to non-Jewish sources and to science in general and are markers of the ideological complexion of the scholarly networks of the

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Jewish Mediterranean. Stunned by this disgrace, Benamozegh penned, a few years later, an impassioned defense of the book entitled Tsori Gil‘ad (Balm of Gilead), a collection of articles published regularly in the literary supplement of the widely read Orthodox newspaper Ha-Levanon,13 with the full support of its editor Yehiel Brill.14 He evoked his pain in the wake of the ban, and claimed—contrary to the judgment of the “excessively zealous rabbis in Aleppo”—to be in “perfect accord with ancient Israelite orthodoxy,” offering examples of luminaries of Jewish thought such as Menasseh ben Israel and Abraham Cohen de Herrera, whose works were fully part of the canon despite their use of non-Jewish sources. Such a move was typical of Benamozegh: going back to the sources of Judaism in order to show its towering figures fearlessly engaging with non-Jews or with science, and carving out a path for the present. Benamozegh found defenders among several notable rabbis who opined that, while the book was arguably disconcerting in its associations between the Bible and the ancient world, it should not have been banned.15 One of them was the rabbi Israel Hazan of Jerusalem, whose letter to Benamozegh appeared only years later in a subsequent book by Hazan’s grandson, published and prefaced by Benamozegh himself. The letter of defense, printed in the preface, was not unconditional, as Hazan was also critical of the polemical aspect of Benamozegh’s public defense: the Livornese rabbi had printed it with the subtitle “A Letter to the Rabbis of Jerusalem.” While Hazan saluted the overall tone of Benamozegh’s defense, he deemed it to have been inappropriate of him to have implied that the rabbis of Jerusalem were complicit in this incident and shunned engaging clearly with the Aleppo rabbinate.16 The fact that Benamozegh would make use of a less than thoroughly flattering missive reveals both a capacity for self-criticism and a need to enlist allies despite some disagreements. Beyond the confusion and shame it inflicted on him, the ban affected Benamozegh’s networks and modified the publishing dynamics in the region. The Livornese rabbi was a significant publisher of books in the Mediterranean, including Syrian materials. Yet this came to an abrupt end with the herem. In 1864, Benamozegh published Rabbi Mordechai Adadi’s Mikra Kodesh, a bakasha, Avraham Dayan’s Tuv Ta‘am, a collection of homilies and Torah speeches, and Va-Yosef ’Avraham, Dayan’s volume of responsa (written



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decisions and rulings given by a legal scholar in response to questions addressed to him); both authors were Aleppians. No book by an Aleppo author came out of Benamozegh’s press thereafter. Indeed, the rabbinical establishment of Aleppo not only burned Benamozegh’s Bible commentary but banned him commercially and replaced him with a printer whom Benamozegh himself had just trained. That same year, 1864, Eliyahu Sasson, the son of the Aleppo rabbi Avraham Sasson, had been sent to Livorno as an apprentice to learn the printer’s craft with Benamozegh. Upon Sasson’s return to Syria in 1865—which happened to be the year the herem against Benamozegh was pronounced—Eliyahu Sasson set up Aleppo’s first printing house. The Aleppo rabbinate gave him exclusive printing rights and declared a twenty-year ban on anyone who might contravene his monopoly. Sasson’s press thus operated without competition in that city until 1887.17 Whether ulterior and commercial motives for instating this monopoly also played a role in the decision to chastise Benamozegh so harshly is a matter of conjecture, but the timing of the affair invites such doubts and certainly affected Benamozegh. In Tsori Gil‘ad, Benamozegh evoked the feeling of “hanging in the air,” suggesting that the ban had deepened the sense of isolation he had already expressed regarding his life in Livorno, and the new dynamics that followed the ban seem to have prompted him to turn to other audiences and to largely abandon writing and publishing in Hebrew. After his response to the Aleppo rabbinate’s herem in Hebrew in 1871, he would rarely ever publish again in that language.18 He did, however, turn to his rather prolific publishing house in order to address his “brethren of the East.” The origin of the books he published and their distribution spanned the Maghreb and the Mashriq: Benamozegh’s press helped map out the intellectual and religious landscape of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Iraq, Anatolia, and, until the ban, Syria. Benamozegh was witnessing the fragmentation of Jewish communities under the pressure of the development of nation-states, and, in the Mediterranean, of possible colonial encroachment on traditional rites and customs.19 He was also conscious of the tension evoked by a modern emphasis on science, reason, and the individual, along with the fractures within Jewish communities in their responses to this new environment. Like most printing houses in the Mediterranean, his network did not connect with Northern or

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Eastern Europe, but the catalogue of his publishing house displays a commitment to fostering unity across and among Jewish communities in the Middle East and Mediterranean, and to addressing laymen as well as the learned.

Publishing Networks and Elective Affinities

Probing Benamozegh’s publishing operations gives a sense of the public he sought to reach. In the inventory of Benamozegh’s publishing house,20 liturgical books and Talmud editions amount to 109 books, about two-thirds of the total, most of which were primarily in Hebrew but had sections in Judeo-Arabic.21 These constituted the more commercial part of Benamozegh’s production, whose competitive advantage was in Judeo-Arabic and Maghrebi titles. A handful of the authors Benamozegh published are relatively obscure, possibly indicating vanity publishing or subsidies from some patron: the munificent Caid Samama sponsored at least thirteen books published in Jerusalem and Livorno between 1837 and his death in 1873, including volumes printed in Livorno on Benamozegh’s press as early as 1860.22 Analyzing Benamozegh’s output as a publisher reveals the diverse range of rabbis who gave their approbations (haskamot) to the books and the range of geographic locations where they lived or were active. “Ostensibly letters of recommendation to rabbinic colleagues” as Elisheva Carlebach has described them,23 these haskamot indicate specific connections, affinities, or interactions in the Mediterranean networks that were revealed in the catalogue of the Livornese rabbi. In the wake of the 1865 herem, its books ceased to feature approbations from Syrian rabbis, and barely any from Istanbul or Izmir rabbis who had been hostile to him. But whereas the rarity of significant rabbis from the eastern Mediterranean is notable (and maybe due to the ban), the catalogue features a number of then-prominent figures of the western Mediterranean. The more relevant and substantial part of Benamozegh’s catalogue— about fifty books—calls for further scrutiny as it showcases authors who seem to have defended him, but who also advocate a certain understanding of an Oriental modernity. Indeed, after the event, Benamozegh seems mainly to have used other voices to convey his message in Hebrew: some of the authors he published challenged both the binaries constructed by the



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Western Enlightenment (such as secular versus religious knowledge) and the rejection of reason or novelty on the part of more conservative communities, while others emphasized the importance of tradition in the making of an alternative, non-European path to modernity. In general, his authors’ views did align with at least one of Benamozegh’s core stances, in a sort of delegated authorship. This effort to strike a fragile balance between tradition and new mores appeared clearly in Eliyahu Hazan’s Zikhron Yerushalayim, published by Benamozegh’s press in 1874. Benamozegh’s preface, in French with a lengthy Hebrew quotation from the letter from Israel Hazan to Benamozegh, captures the latter’s efforts to speak to multiple audiences on their own terms (and in their language). It details the argument of the book and gives an outline clearly geared toward more assimilated Jews. To them, in the preface in French, he provided an apology of enlightened Orthodox Judaism alongside a defense against Aleppo’s “overzealous rabbis.”24 Featuring a few other interlocutors as supporting actors, Zikhron Yerushalayim consists of a dialogue between two key characters, a Palestinian rabbi (ha-ger, the stranger or guest) and an assimilated North African Jew (ha-ezrah, the citizen), who reflect on the effects of modernity and emancipation that Hazan had witnessed as a meshullah (emissary) to Algeria and Morocco. The book highlights the traditions of the diaspora against the temptation of reform but also the necessity of teaching foreign languages, philosophy, and the humanities, in addition to religion, if only to establish the significance of Judaism. Eliyahu Hazan’s stances, however, were more conservative in other ways: his absolute rejection of the Copernican system and of Darwinism put him at odds with Benamozegh’s embrace of contemporary science as part of a broad understanding of progressive revelation.25 They nonetheless shared common ground on the importance of engaging with their non-Jewish environment and with secular subjects. Fostering a sense of unity was a priority for Benamozegh: unity both among different faiths against secularism and among Jews across the Mashriq and the Maghreb, as the abortive publication of his newspaper demonstrates. In 1857, Benamozegh requested permission from the Livornese authorities to print a newspaper in Hebrew for the Jews of Egypt, Persia, and the Maghreb, proposing a digest of translated news from the Tuscan press that would have no political content. Two years later, a single issue appeared. Though unable

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to see the newspaper to fruition, Benamozegh had recognized the needs and expectations of his times: the Jewish press around the Mediterranean started flourishing in the following decades.26 His project, designed to create a sense of awareness and solidarity, a purpose stated in the only issue, was replicated by the bulletin of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (Universal Jewish Alliance) the following year—but with an institutional tone and a civilizing mission quite distinct from Benamozegh’s miscarried project.27 Benamozegh’s promotion of Jewish unity was part of a zeitgeist that also fostered the efforts of the Orthodox maskil (advocate of the Enlightenment) Eliezer Lipman Silberman (1819–1882), who started a successful Hebrew newspaper, Ha-Maggid (active between 1856 and 1903), and a publishing venture (Mekitze Nirdamim) whose focus was on realigning Haskalah and tradition among Western and Eastern Ashkenazi Jews.28 It is worth noting that Benamozegh’s unity agenda did not take the form of Zionism, although the final decades of his life coincided with the inception of the movement. Benamozegh never addressed Zionism directly. He only dealt specifically with Palestine as a symbol and locus of collective memory capable of uniting communities. The closest he came to advocating Zionism was in a thirty-page pamphlet published in 1862, in which he opposed the decision to break away from the custom of funding emissaries from the Holy Land who were sent to collect money from the diaspora. Jewish communities in Italy had decided to stop supporting the emissaries and to allocate more of their resources to their members’ needs. To buttress his position, the rabbi invoked “the hope for a future restoration (utterly reconcilable with the love of the various countries in which the Israelite has been thrust). It is impossible not to see,” he continued, “in a national Israelite sense, that the mutual love, the union that, today, in so many ways, is promoted among us, does not have a more powerful means, a more infallible reason than the memory of the shared homeland.”29 This hope for a restored national homeland did not turn into any political commitment or action, and its messianic overtones did not preclude room for patriotism. Recent scholarship on the Risorgimento, emphasizing the circulation of Mazzini’s ideas and the cultivation of Garibaldi’s persona as a testament to the globalization of ideologies in the nineteenth century, has demonstrated the transnational nature of the movement. It is also as a child of



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the Risorgimento that Benamozegh envisioned the possibility of sharing his worldview and his call for action with a broader audience beyond the borders of Italy, to a country loved by Jews in his time: France.30 In Benamozegh’s view, a genuine understanding of Judaism implied that it could engage with non-Jewish sources and interlocutors. His belief was based on the work of the luminaries of the past who had done precisely the same, and on his belief in the necessity in his time to promote an open version of Judaism. “Let us be bold with the rabbis, not heretical,” he would go on to proclaim in the manuscript of Israel and Humanity.31 This stance had been met with the ire of the most conservative communities of the Mediterranean, whose extraordinary measure of banning and burning Benamozegh’s books reshaped both the Jewish publishing networks of the Mediterranean and Benamozegh’s career. Using his publishing activity henceforth to promote authors whose views on modernity mostly aligned with his own, he militated for what he envisioned as an Oriental enlightenment, free of the binaries its Western version had instituted between faith and reason—thus making a case for what Eisenstadt would come to call multiple modernities.

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Benamozegh’s Turn to French

Lac king int er l o cutors in Italy and feeling disgraced in the Mediterranean, Benamozegh turned to the nation that championed the universalism of its republican values in order to advance his views on the universalism of Jewish ethics, which, he claimed, Christianity had preempted as its own. Once again, finding the right tone for convincing his readers and choosing the right audience turned out to be stumbling blocks. Benamozegh published his first book-length work in French, Morale juive et morale chrétienne (Jewish and Christian Ethics), in 1867, two years after his previous book had been burned in Syria.1 Looking back, in 1885, Benamozegh explained that he had decided to publish in French out of a “need to be read”: “Not only is French better known than Italian, after the national idiom”—he likely means Hebrew—“but, unfortunately, studies like this one have found few adepts in Italy; on the other hand, few of my fellow [Italian] citizens do not read and freely understand French.”2 From Jewish and Christian Ethics onward, he would stage his disputation of Christian dogma and interventions into the question of Judaism and universalism in the language of a country that promoted its own, secular kind of universalism. Benamozegh’s first works in French contain two key arguments: first, that Kabbalah is the cradle of Christianity and that the apostles’ improper use and careless dissemination of the esoteric teachings of Jesus 46



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led to a befuddled and untimely messianism; second, that a close reexamination of the writings of Paul dispels the notion of an inherent antinomianism embedded in Kabbalah by revealing the apostle’s antagonism toward it. Benamozegh’s previous defense of Kabbalah, meant for a Jewish readership, was now geared to a wider audience. Jewish and Christian Ethics was the revised version of Benamozegh’s entry for an essay competition organized by the French Alliance Israélite Universelle, aimed at “the encouragement of publications contributing to the emancipation or elevation of Jews.”3 The reward was to include the publication of the winning essay. The competition was overseen by Lazare Wogue, a former chief rabbi and a major exponent of the French scholarly study of Judaism, La science du Judaïsme: a version of the German scholarly movement (Wissenschaft des Judentums) but based on French values.4 As he had done in his commentary, Benamozegh tried to emulate the movement on his own terms and use scholarship for religious purposes—but he failed to convince either camp. Jewish and Christian Ethics appeared in the wake of the storm that swept France with the publication of the Life of Jesus penned by the French philologist and historian of religions Ernest Renan (1823–92).5 The Livornese rabbi was aware of Renan’s work: the year before, in his biblical commentary ‘Em la-Miqra’, he had made multiple references to him, even lauding him as “a great sage of our time.”6 The problem of Christianity’s origins had drawn scholarly and public attention since David Strauss’s own Life of Jesus, published in Germany in 1835. The origins of Christianity soon became a popular subject for Jewish apologetics in Europe and the United States; the goal of reclaiming the Jewish roots of traditionally Christian theology led to attempts to create a Jewish counter-history.7 The first such study by a French author appeared quickly thereafter: Jesus Christ et sa doctrine, published in 1838 by Joseph Salvador, the son of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother.8 Ten years earlier Salvador’s first book, on the Institutions of Moses, had already caused a scandal9 and the argument in his 1838 monograph, that Jesus was no innovator in the realm of Jewish morality, elicited even more outrage.10 The attacks he faced, which imputed a Jewish bias or downright animosity toward Christianity,

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suggest that denominational boundaries for Jesus research were not to be crossed.11 Undeterred by this precedent, Benamozegh, too, arrogated to himself the right to write critically about Christianity and argued that some of his harsh judgments were justified by the kinship of the two faiths and by the need to chastise a brother gone astray. Jewish and Christian Ethics is a bold work. In it, Benamozegh made the case that Christianity had unduly claimed primacy in the realm of ethics when it had actually appropriated the Jewish ones. This became a standard trope in his apologetics and polemics. The minutes of the Alliance Israélite Universelle essay-prize commission reveal the commissioners’ hesitation in the face of an erudite text whose content was potentially inflammatory for a Christian audience.12 They nonetheless awarded Benamozegh the first prize and the prize money, but did not proceed to publish the book themselves. Chafing at the jury’s uneasiness with his work, and oblivious to any possible repercussions, Benamozegh doubled down in his persistence in his cause: “It seems the audacity I exhibit in the dogmatic part did not suit the gentlemen of the Alliance, who do not wish to upset Catholic sensibilities. In spite of this, I did not abandon all hope and I will go on to make other attempts, either with other French publishers or with the Alliance itself, at least to publish the part that deals with morality.”13 A miffed Benamozegh ended up using the prize money to publish the book himself. Following the tepid response the first volume received, he only self-published fragments of what was supposed to be the second part of his study, La Kabbale et l’origine des dogmes chrétiens (Kabbalah and the Origin of the Christian Dogmas).14 The project was parallel to Jewish and Christian Ethics in that it showed the commonalities of Judaism and Christianity while demonstrating Judaism’s antecedence, but it focused more narrowly on a kabbalistic reading of Christianity. In this work, Benamozegh set out to prove that Kabbalah contained theological aspects of Christianity—but not because Judaism was the harbinger of Christianity: reversing the traditional argument of the church, he claimed that this was because Kabbalah was the matrix from which Christianity emerged. Leaving the realm of polemics with Christianity in order to highlight the positive potential of religion, Benamozegh penned another notable piece in French in 1871: an entry in a competition launched by the Ligue internationale



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et permanente de la paix (Permanent International League for Peace)15 called “Le crime de guerre dénoncé à l’humanité” (The Crime of War Denounced to Humankind). Unfortunately, the only trace of this essay that remains is Benamozegh’s outline for it and the minutes of the jury’s deliberation.16 These documents show that Benamozegh was an active member of the league and that he was bent on proving that religious ethics ought not to remain an abstraction. The minutes include an extended description of the essay, whose subtitle was taken from Isaiah 2:4: “nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Benamozegh’s outline displays a degree of lucidity regarding appropriate mechanisms for shaping opinions and the emerging role of public intellectuals.17 As with the Alliance Israélite Universelle competition, the jury’s minutes reveal its members’ perplexity as they tried to grasp a text so steeped in theology. They nevertheless decided to award it a distinction (“mention”) instead of a prize. Regarding the essay’s style, they expressed regret, as others had before them about Benamozegh’s writing, that its bombastic rhetoric tended to muddy its argument.18 The works leading up to his final magnum opus (begun around 1880) show how his writings were increasingly meant to address the general public. Recent scholarship has acknowledged a previous generation of “intellectuals before the intellectuals” and their efforts to reach beyond the caste of the literate in hopes of engaging “the people”:19 the savant was embodied by Hippolyte Taine or Ernest Renan, whom Benamozegh cited abundantly and with whom he may have been in communication, although the tale of Renan visiting Benamozegh, related by one of the rabbi’s students, was never corroborated.20 The importance of a public sphere and the sociopolitical role of proto-intellectuals has been demonstrated to be part of the Risorgimento’s legacy as well.21 In many ways, Benamozegh aspired to the status of public intellectual, a role that fully emerged only toward the end of his life with the Dreyfus affair and Emile Zola’s 1898 J’Accuse—but the rabbi’s prose disqualified him for the task. Benamozegh educated himself indefatigably (as he related in the introduction to Jewish and Christian Ethics) through journals he would order from Paris, and he was immersed in the debates of his time.22 Nevertheless, his silence on the most momentous events of the era, such as the kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara,23 the Dreyfus affair, and the emergence of political

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Zionism, is deafening. The only exceptions are a handful of references to issues such as socialism and the worldview of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65), the politician and philosopher of libertarian socialism, who gained instant fame in 1840 with his pamphlet What Is Property? Because Benamozegh mentions the thinker in passing, it is difficult to gauge how the Livornese rabbi related to Proudhon’s ideas overall. The two certainly shared a visceral opposition to war, but Proudhon’s rejection of the nation-state did not sit well with Benamozegh’s emphasis on nations. Benamozegh nonetheless chose to reference him in his intellectual landscape with no sign of disapproval. He also seemed to express interest in communism in his notes and in his manuscripts, where he conjured up historical events such as the February Revolution of 1848,24 the Thiers government in France,25 and issues of social justice and economics. The last writing he published during his lifetime, a slim volume in French called Histoire et littérature (1897), provides a good instance of his ambitions: despite his reluctance to tackle anti-Semitism, he set out to eradicate its root causes by showing how the ideology and the ensuing persecutions were unjustifiable.26 His writings invoked general political and social trends more than specific events. And even if these observations did not reveal much of Benamozegh’s political affiliations, they partook in his diagnosis of a society in need of justice, freedom and, more broadly, of direction—which, he argued, was what Jewish values could offer. His most influential, posthumous book struck the same tone: effacing current events and prescribing a course of action. Twenty years before his death, Benamozegh conceived of a book project entitled Israel and Humanity to which he would devote the rest of his life and which he announced in an eighty-page “introduction” that he published on his own in 1885. Despite the apparent interconnectedness between Israel—the Jewish people—and humanity, the title phrase, derived from Jeremiah 32:20, raises the question of the uses of the conjunction and: Should the two terms be understood in contradistinction?27 In his lectures on the Pentecost, the rabbi mulled over this apparent opposition and at first stated it flatly: “Humanity and Israel are mutually exclusive terms: rights and privileges, justice and partiality, chosen people and humanitarian providence will wage an eternal war, relentless like water and fire.”28 Yet such challenges only heightened the stakes in his work



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and he revisited the opposition in order to emphasize the underlying misconception: “So Israel and Humanity are opposing terms?” he asked, before providing his own reading. “Do you know how I respond to that? Look at the text of Jeremiah 3, where all people, whoever they are, are called—without ceremony—sons of God. So here, as always, Humanity is represented as a single family with God as its supreme father.”29 The rabbi’s evocation, in this lecture, of his anxiety over the potential disconnect between Israel and the rest of the world would slowly expand into a two-thousand-page unfinished manuscript. His religious disquiet, he claimed, had been assuaged by the mission of Israel toward humanity and the discovery of the conciliatory potential of the Noahide Laws, a core set of tenets binding on all of humanity and akin to natural laws. They complemented the Mosaic law, which was binding on Jews alone. Throughout his previous writings, Benamozegh had argued that a reappropriation of Judaism’s foundational texts and traditions was needed. Israel and Humanity analyzed the consequences of this assessment and offered solutions to the crisis of religion: Israel could provide both old and new foundations for the universal religion because it contains its seeds. Judaism, thanks to the Noahide Laws, had the potential to birth the religion of the future. In its inclusiveness, Judaism was no different from Christianity, Benamozegh claimed in the opening pages—though he meant a potential, reformed Christianity, which would acknowledge its Jewish roots and return to them. In this unfinished project, he also ascribed a major role to Kabbalah in order to offer nondualist perspectives capable of dealing with the binaries created by Christianity and the Enlightenment, as I will show in part 3. While his erudition, scholarly intuitions, and elevated goals for society, such as banning war as a crime against humanity, were praised by all in the French Jewish and non-Jewish circles in which he became active, Benamozegh’s tone and agenda made it hard for his interlocutors to regard him as a savant or public intellectual—the nascent status to which he arguably aspired. As an advocate of what he considered to be the modern, enlightened religion, one “that seeks to persuade and not merely to have partisans,”30 as he defined it in his preface to the work of Hazan, Benamozegh sought too hard. If his agenda was modern, his tone was not, and this raises interesting

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questions about the limits of the notion of self-assertion as an attribute of modernity, a question I will engage with in part 4. And, ironically, his Christian disciple Aimé Pallière’s work of editing his manuscript and making it more accessible ended up stirring controversy for Benamozegh’s legacy. This is the subject of the next chapter.

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Ev en thoug h Benamoz egh pre sented Israel and Humanity as the solution to religious quandaries and conservatism, his work has left a number of irresolvable tensions in its wake. The crux of the problem is that the universalism the book proposes relies on sources that contain ethnocentric biases, as I make clear in parts 2 and 3. These questions troubled Aimé Pallière, the man who nevertheless took on the mission of spreading Benamozegh’s message and who became the key disseminator of the rabbi’s writings and a significant figure in Christian-Jewish encounters in the first half of the twentieth century. His role in the edition of the manuscript has been controversial in some circles: accusations that he falsified or rewrote it (allegedly to support misleading claims about the universalism of Judaism) have never been textually supported since, until now, no one has compared the original manuscript and the Pallière edition. Based on just such a long overdue comparison, this chapter will address the soundness of this criticism and probe the political and theological underpinnings of the accusations.

The Disciple

Aimé Pallière (1868–1949) was a lapsed seminary student in his late twenties when he reached out to the seventy-two-year-old rabbi in 1895. In his autobiography, The Unknown Sanctuary, Pallière credited David Moïse, the 53

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elder of the budding Reform community in Nice, with facilitating his introduction to Benamozegh. Estranged from his Catholic education, Pallière had become increasingly skeptical about its dogmas and the reactionary turn the Vatican had taken. His stance gives us insight into the modernist crisis that had been brewing since the mid-nineteenth century, a crisis that had pushed a whole generation away from institutional Catholicism in search of other religious responses before it fully erupted with the 1907 papal encyclical Pascendis, which introduced, among other things, an antimodernist oath for the clergy.1 Pallière’s ties to Christianity remained mostly emotional: in his memoir, he reminisced that his reluctance to hurt his mother’s feelings by breaking away from her faith resonated with Benamozegh’s oft-repeated assertion that religion could never exclusively be a matter of reason.2 Nevertheless, his first letters to the Livornese rabbi, dating to October 1895, asked for guidance about a potential conversion. Benamozegh’s response presented Noahism as a bridge that could both remedy Pallière’s theological frustration and provide principles for advocating the future of religion to a broader audience. Having identified Pallière as someone who could convey his message and act as “the bond of union between Judaism and Christianity,”3 he believed that the young man could serve Israel—understood both as the Jewish people and their faith—more usefully as a Christian subscribing to the Noahide Laws than by converting and submitting himself to the burdensome 613 mitzvot (the total sum of the commandments recorded in the Torah and accepted as normative among practicing Jews). Early on in their correspondence, Benamozegh sought Pallière’s advice regarding his Introduction to Israel and Humanity.4 The essay, published by his printing house in 1885, laid out the issues that would be at the core of his final work: the question of the universality of Jewish values, the religious crisis of modernity, and the means of eliciting unity among faiths. Pallière encouraged him by noting that, at a time “when the Jewish question here as elsewhere preoccupies people’s minds, serious people would certainly read this pamphlet with interest.”5 Writing in the very first months of the Dreyfus affair, which broke out in December 1894, Pallière was alluding to the upsurge of anti-Semitism roiling France. He regretted that Benamozegh’s Introduction, having already been published ten years earlier, denied the larger



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work “the attraction of novelty,” but he volunteered as a potential editor to help polish the rabbi’s writings.6 Pallière paid a visit to the rabbi in Livorno in 1897. Whether or not they discussed the editing project during his stay in Tuscany is unclear; despite the memoir’s extensive accounts of their conversations, there is no mention of any agreement on the matter. Though this would be their only face-toface encounter, Pallière claimed that after the meeting, “I truly felt myself his disciple.”7 The fact that their correspondence came to an end two years before the rabbi’s passing in February 1900 did not change his sentiments and commitment.8 Subsequently, Pallière’s many contributions to the weekly L’Univers israélite sought to emphasize Benamozegh’s legacy and show how his ideas could foster a much-needed change for the Catholic Church.9 Although he used a pseudonym, his identity was well-known in nascent French Jewish and Christian reformist circles and his contributions made him so visible that he was even considered for the position of rabbi in the Reform community in France. It is worth noting that the leadership of the new congregation did not demand his conversion; the community saw Jewishness as an intellectual stance rather than a belonging based on ethnicity and rites. Pallière initially turned down the position because he considered it at odds with the Orthodox Judaism of his mentor, but in 1922 he did accept it in an effort to allay the quarrels between the Reform movement and the more conservative circles who held Pallière in high esteem.10 In 1904, the rabbi’s son, Emanuele Benamozegh, contacted Pallière and entrusted him with the task of editing the original manuscript of Israel and Humanity, which took ten years to complete. Given the enormity of the manuscript, Pallière’s progress was understandably slow. In 1907, the chief rabbi of Livorno, Samuele Colombo, reported to the well-known excommunicated priest Hyacinthe Loyson that Emanuele was growing impatient and was threatening to publish the unedited manuscript on his own.11 Loyson successfully pleaded in favor of Pallière’s work.12 After negotiations between Pallière and the Benamozegh family about the choice of printer and a complicated subscription process, the book came out in 1914, going almost unnoticed in a country on the brink of war.13 In his preface, Pallière recalled that, at the time of Benamozegh’s death, the manuscript represented a “vast inclusive mass” of “some 1,900 large pages

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of compact writing, without paragraphing, editing, or divisions of any kind, the leaves being written on both sides.” Clearly, the author had intended to continue working toward a version suitable for publication.14 Pallière repeated this critique of the style of Benamozegh’s 1885 précis on a number of occasions.15 His insights ought to be kept in mind when assessing the condition of the Israel and Humanity manuscript. Emanuele Benamozegh left notes suggesting that the Livorno manuscript represented an intermediary editorial stage (implying that Benamozegh had produced an earlier version that had been lost or destroyed), and Pallière’s description corresponds to the appearance of the three-volume bound manuscript held in the archives of the Jewish community in Livorno.16 The present study is the first to compare this manuscript against the 1914 version in order to gauge Pallière’s editorial intervention. Many controversies have surrounded the very whereabouts of the manuscript. Rabbi Eliyahu Rachamim Zini has claimed to own it for years, but this assertion remains uncorroborated.17 Additionally, the late, prominent scholar of Kabbalah, Charles Mopsik, clearly did have access to a copy, as he quoted accurately from it in his study “Le Réseau des âmes dans la cabale” (The Network of Souls in Kabbalah), referencing it as the “original version of the unpublished text” though without mentioning its provenance.18 This text would thus have been a finalized draft and not the initial manuscript itself, but many elements, especially spelling and syntax problems, show without a doubt that the text was authored by an Italian speaker (presumably one who lacked an editor) whose mistakes are similar to those found in the essays published by Benamozegh’s press (the abovementioned 1885 Introduction to Israel and Humanity and the slim 1897 volume Histoire et littérature). The opening, on the first page, “Nous nous demandons” (“We ask ourselves”), which sounds rhetorical and awkward in French, echoes a phrase routinely used by Benamozegh in Italian (“Domandiamo”) in his lectures to his students on the Shavuot holiday (the Jewish holiday that celebrates the giving of the Torah at Sinai, which Benamozegh also calls Pentecost).19 Pallière explained his editorial decisions in his preface: “I have chosen to correct the style and to edit the work as thoroughly as possible, while following the precise order of the original manuscript and shaping it as the author would have probably done himself had he been able. The interpolations and



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digressions have been removed; other materials were shifted back to their natural places.”20 Given the plethora of repetitions and tangents, it is only natural that the text should have been sized down to some seven hundred pages in the 1914 edition.

A Falsified Manuscript?

I was able to gain access, in the summer of 2012, to the three-volume bound manuscript that quietly resides in the archive of the Jewish community in Livorno. My study is based on a close reading of the two thousand pages that constitute the draft of Israel and Humanity and on a word-by-word comparison of the manuscript with Pallière’s 1914 rendering of it. This allows me to empirically scrutinize Pallière’s editorial choices toward his stated goal of making the text understandable and accessible to a broader readership. Certain scholars, having hastily asserted that the manuscript was “in private hands,”21 have ascribed Benamozegh’s universalism to Pallière’s excisions or to a misinterpretation by him of the kabbalistic aspects of the rabbi’s thought.22 My examination of the entire handwritten text finds no support for these claims. The earliest speculation about Pallière’s supposed editorial interventions can be traced back to Eugène Fleischmann’s 1970 Le Christianisme mis à nu (Christianity Unveiled): We have no proof of the authenticity of this book rewritten by Pallière, Christian disciple of Benamozegh and author of a very mediocre book

about him that includes a long preface containing his [Pallière’s] own opin-

ions—opinions, incidentally, just as lacking in depth as those of his master. [...] The author, who always substituted his temperament for a coherent

manner of thought, falls under another influence: he abandons Mazzini

in favor of the Catholic liberalism whose representatives—Gioberti and Rosmini—might have been explained to him by his friend H. Loyson, a former priest.23

All of Fleischmann’s claims here are misguided. The “mediocre” work may refer to Pallière’s memoirs, since he never devoted a whole book to Benamozegh. As previously mentioned, the epistolary exchanges show that the volume was edited but authentic—not “rewritten.” Further, as Pallière

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explained in his foreword, Hyacinthe Loyson shared Benamozegh’s views on the necessity of laying religious foundations anew but was never in contact with the rabbi. Finally, Benamozegh did not need anyone to explain Gioberti’s thought to him. Indeed, this Catholic thinker had been an acknowledged influence on him from early in his life. In his Teologia (1877), for instance, he cited Gioberti no less than thirty-five times. It was the reading of both Gioberti and Mazzini that shaped Benamozegh’s thinking and the use of Christian tradition as part of his own synthesis. Fleishmann’s accusation thus betrays a misunderstanding of Benamozegh’s thought. A careful reading of the genealogies of the rabbi’s thought in the early work as well as the manuscript shows that he derived a handful of distinctive words or phrases from Gioberti, including “the Orthodox Orient” (Oriente ortodosso), “palingenesis” for the creation of the world from existing worlds, and “acroamatism” for the esoteric tradition. These terms are rarely encountered in the Jewish tradition but are ubiquitous in Gioberti’s writings. Among the other grievances scholars have expressed, allegations that Pallière was insufficiently learned may be dismissed if one is attuned to Benamozegh’s Italian voice beneath the French text and the Italianisms in the Hebrew transcription.24 Additionally, the purported lack of a faithful rendering of the tensions and contradictions is, at best, tangentially true, but the unedited manuscript is, at times, unintelligible. In fact, the multiple levels of Benamozegh’s ideas, the urge to compress many thoughts into a single sentence, the subsequent run-on sentences, the polyphony of the languages he used—quoting from Hebrew, Italian, French, and sometimes Latin, often without translating or citing—would pose an undeniable challenge to any editor. Benamozegh’s lack of consistency can be easily documented; inaccuracies of spelling appear not just in this manuscript but even in some of his published texts where authors’ names are frequently garbled.25 Examining the variants shows that a handful of Pallière’s excisions alter the text but in no way betray its overall content,26 and does not support the most serious charge levied against Pallière’s work: that he erased the specificities of Jewish mysticism and promoted a false universalism and, ultimately, a Christian agenda. Pallière was not the only reader of the text. Especially in light of the protracted editing process, it is doubtful that either Benamozegh’s son or



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the erudite Livornese rabbi Samuele Colombo—arguably a disciple himself—would have given their consent to a Christianized version of the text. Pallière credited Colombo for his help, and it seems unlikely that Colombo would not have noticed any major misunderstandings.27 Despite a few remaining inaccuracies and Pallière’s lamentation of his own shortcomings in his introductory captatio benevolentiae,28 his articles in L’Univers israélite on the kabbalistic sources of the Christian Logos,29 based on Benamozegh’s unfinished manuscript, La Kabbale et l’origine des dogmes chrétiens, reveal his familiarity with the corpus and were written with the approbation of Benamozegh’s son. One might also ask whether Emanuele Benamozegh would have promoted a faulty and unfaithful rendering of his father’s ideas. Emanuele’s outreach to Henry Morgenthau, Sr., a financier and prominent philanthropist of the American Jewish community, to solicit funding for a translation into English certainly bespoke his desire to see his father’s work more widely circulated.30 Interest in Pallière spread beyond the French Jewish world as his memoirs were translated into Italian, German (with a preface by the towering figure of Reform Judaism Leo Baeck), and English (translated by the wife of the prominent Reform rabbi Stephen Wise, who had invited Pallière to tour the United States).31 Yet, after devoting his life to promoting the Noahide message, Pallière was unable to make it be heard (a religious dead end to which I will return in part 2, chapter 7), nor could he find a home within Judaism. He ended his life in poverty, finding his final shelter in a convent. Because of this fate, perceptions about the truthfulness of his message have been blurred, leading to various hypotheses about his return—or relapse—to Catholicism and even suspicions about whether he was genuinely detached from Christianity at all.32 Theories of Pallière’s unfaithfulness disturbingly come down, in fact, to a rejection of the very possibility of a non-Jew understanding of a Jewish thinker. All of the scholars who have peddled this version have displayed the influence of the abovementioned rabbi Eliyahu Zini, a former chaplain of the Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa. Zini himself has made the most vocal claims regarding Pallière’s betrayal and has been actively involved in the publication of Benamozegh’s work, insisting that his editorial endeavor aimed to restore the true, Judeocentric nature of his teachings—a purported

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message of Jewish superiority—and strip them of their superimposed universalism.33 In a representative passage, the Rav Zini spars with the scholar Charles Mopsik as he tries to delegitimize both Pallière’s efforts and Mopsik’s defense of the disciple’s reading of Benamozegh’s work and to frame them as an effort to diminish the particularism he claims is the real but excised intention of the Livornese rabbi’s work.34 A luminary in his field, Mopsik did not deny the scope of Pallière’s editorial enterprise, but he pushed back against claims that were tinged with an ethnocentric agenda: “Other Francophones, in the circle of Rav Zini of Haifa, have started a completely new edition of his work, based on unpublished sources, all the while trying to bend his thought toward a Judeocentric, fundamentalist agenda foreign to his genuine doctrine.”35 The hypothesis that Pallière introduced a sudden change of tone is also questionable. If, indeed, Benamozegh’s tone in Israel and Humanity is slightly less polemical than some of his earlier work (especially Morale juive et morale chrétienne), the polemics are in fact subtler—but this was already the case in his 1885 Introduction, a text untouched by the Christian disciple. In the posthumous text, most of the themes already present in Morale juive et morale chrétienne are simply revisited and fleshed out: One cannot hear the dearest and most noble names of Judaism, the echoes

of the writings, the memories of its great events, its hymns and its prophecies from the mouths of so many millions of former pagans of every race

and of every color of every country reunited to worship the God of Israel in

churches and mosques, without feeling seized by a sentiment of pride, satisfaction, and tenderness for the entity who performed such great miracles [ . . . ] never has the reading of the Gospels left us cold [. . . . ] Thus we

surrendered ourselves to our sweet impressions with all the more abandon, knowing that we were returning almost to our own domain, enjoying

our own possession, being all the more Jewish for giving greater justice to Christianity.36

This last clause—“being all the more Jewish for giving greater justice to Christianity”—is crucial: Christianity properly understood, the rabbi is arguing, offers an opportunity to see it as the Jews’ “own good,” including its universalism which I will probe in the next part of the book. But these



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polemics about Pallière—doubting the possibility that anyone not born into a religious tradition can have deep knowledge or intimacy with it, and making into a Jewish ethnocentrist the very rabbi who so seemed to favor inclusivity, however ambiguous—ironically illustrate the current relevance of Benamozegh’s efforts to demonstrate the universalism of Judaism and, even more so, its enduring challenges. Benamozegh’s Livornese background and Moroccan roots positioned him as an outsider in the conversations of his time. It is paradoxically from a city that failed to durably inscribe itself in economic modernity and lost its cultural allure that he became a critical observer of the intellectual debates and religious thought of the era. From his experience of the Risorgimento, he developed a patriotism meant to engender universal values. This would morph, in the rest of his work, into the notion of universalism through particularism. Facing hostility as he tried to shape Italian scholarship and a humiliating ban at the hands of the Aleppo rabbis for his triumphant use of non-Jewish materials in order to prove the worth of Judaism, Benamozegh reinvented himself in order to continue promoting his agenda of religious modernity. Through his printing press, and by giving voice to other narratives of the Enlightenment, notably from what he called the Orient and envisioned as a place where the tensions between tradition and reason or between Jews and non-Jews were irrelevant, he created a platform to reassess Western modernity and to foster a sense of Oriental unity in the process. Whatever the truthfulness of this construct, and despite a tone that often alienated his interlocutors and defeated his ambitions, Benamozegh invites us to reconsider the dynamics of Jewish thought in the nineteenth century and to entertain the possibility of multiple modernities; these, indeed, might be an expression of the universalism he sought to promote.

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2 PA R T I I

U N I V ER S A LI S M A S A N I N D EX O F J EW I S H M O D ER N I T Y

T h e c onc e p t of J e w i s h un iv e r s al i s m , as Benamozegh deployed it, is intricately connected with some of the notions that define modernity, such as the place of reason, normativity, the autonomy of the subject, and the role of nations. The assertive tone of the rabbi’s claim about Jewish universalism should not obscure how indebted he was to earlier arguments on this issue. Indeed, Benamozegh’s distinctiveness does not reside in the originality of each of his arguments. Rather, what was (and, in many ways, still is) novel is his way of reading traditional or classical sources against the grain—and articulating them in order to serve his stated purpose of solving the religious crisis of his time and of charting the religion of the future. In order to gauge the rabbi’s propositions, this part of the book first deals with the way Benamozegh inserted himself in preexisting philosophical systems pertaining to Jewish universalism. I thus start with a typology of the philosophers with whom Benamozegh grappled, from Spinoza to his contemporaries. Some of these thinkers pondered the role of a legal construct that would go on to play a distinct role in Benamozegh’s work: the Noahide Laws. Further chapters in this part thus also discuss the potential ethnocentric biases contained in these laws, biases that Benamozegh ignored and that explain why certain right-wing movements have embraced them. 63

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The Noahide Laws are based on Genesis 9:9, in which God announces, “Behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you.” The ordinances of a pre-Sinaitic code that is binding on the children of Noah— that is to say, all of humankind—are listed in Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin 56a (not to worship idols, not to blaspheme the name of God, to establish courts of justice, not to kill, not to commit adultery, not to rob, and not to eat flesh that has been cut from a living animal). Tractate 59a defines the jurisdiction of these provisions further: “Every law that was enjoined upon the Noahides and was repeated at Sinai is meant to apply both to Israelites and to non-Israelites.” The laws thus offer a path to salvation for non-Jews. Because of their resemblance to natural law, the seven edicts became the focus of such prominent seventeenth-century jurists as John Selden (1584– 1654) in England and Hugo Grotius (1583–1645) in Holland, held as the founders of international law, who sought to anchor their nascent doctrine in Hebrew texts.1 Grotius, who proved an especially ardent advocate of the Noahide legislation—he asserted that it provides points of accord with other faiths and conciliation within his own2—appeared in Benamozegh’s work: the jurist’s doctrine of an international society resonated with the rabbi’s quest for coexistence.3 Starting in the eighteenth century, the Noahide legislation attracted thinkers, notably Mendelssohn, for a different reason: they mobilized it in their defense of Judaism, underscoring its universality. But none went as far as Benamozegh, who made it a central tenet of his defense of Jewish universalism. Indeed, he saw Noahism as capable of solving the religious crisis he had diagnosed and, more specifically, of addressing what Habermas would later describe as one of modernity’s main challenges: “to create its normativity out of itself ”4—a consequence of the rejection of external sources of authority, such as tradition, nature, or religion. Benamozegh’s concept of modernity aimed to show, through this legislation, that revealed and natural laws, and thus external and internal norms, need not be pitted against one another.

l CHAP TER 6 '

S I T UAT I N G B EN A M O Z E G H I N T H E D EBAT E O N J EW I S H U N I V ER S A LI S M

D e f i n i ng t h e c on t o ur s of J udai s m —whether it encompasses a merely ethnic code or a broader set of moral precepts—is paramount to gauging any modality or possibility of Jewish universalism. Spinoza was the first to differentiate between the Mosaic law, specific to the Jews as a nation as well as contingent on the existence of their state, and religious truths of universal relevance. When pondering the philosophical consequences of this system, Benamozegh refused to discount the Mosaic edicts as contingent. Instead he asserted that the duality of Judaism (specific edicts plus religious truths) only bolstered his claim about its importance. Judaism’s impact on Jews and non-Jews alike was evidence of its true universalism. Benamozegh situated himself against Mendelssohn’s interpretation of the dual legislation—by which the German philosopher ascribed universalism to the Noahide Laws exclusively, because they were grounded in reason, whereas Benamozegh saw this definition as limiting and tried to make a case for the universalism of revelation. Finally, he engaged with Kant, not in response to the philosopher’s denial of Judaism’s claim to universality, but because Benamozegh used the Kantian concept of practical reason to describe the proceedings of the Jewish tradition and unexpectedly aligned Kantian and Jewish universalism—while highlighting and praising the anteriority of the universalism of Judaism. 65

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Although they appear in a disparate and sometimes veiled fashion in his work, these three thinkers of universalism, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Kant, play a significant role in Benamozegh’s system. In addition to a discussion of the philosophical tenets of universalism, he also sought to establish the universalism of Judaism based on its antecedence in religious history and on the fact that it gave birth to other universal religions—thus grounding himself in a sort of modern historicism that he resisted when it came to biblical criticism. He also sought to establish Judaism as a delicate and self-aware articulation of reason and feelings, ostensibly anchoring the latter in the nascent fields of psychology or anthropology. All of the multiple facets that Benamozegh teased out were meant to show the adequation of Judaism to its time and to the expectations of his contemporaries—lest they walk away from religion altogether.

Baruch Spinoza

Benamozegh’s quest for universalism thus ascribed a central role to the Noahide Laws as a universalist construct, and projected it onto Spinoza’s work. Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise framed Jewish law as “the Laws revealed by God to Moses,” and as “nothing but the decrees of the historical Hebrew state alone” first implemented by Moses and no longer applicable after the Jews’ loss of sovereignty following their revolt against Roman rule in Palestine, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 ce, the dispersion of the Jews out of the land, and their resettlement in exile.1 He also warned that, in the absence of a homeland, the continued observance of arbitrary laws—which had been deceivingly ascribed moral grounds when they were only motivated by political expediency in the days of political sovereignty— could only have adverse consequences for Jews and fuel negative feelings toward them. Yet Benamozegh’s reading of Spinoza was strategic.2 In Israel and Humanity, Benamozegh opined that “Spinoza tells us that the laws that God revealed to Moses are for the Jews alone and not binding for other people.”3 The Livornese rabbi then quoted from the Theological-Political Treatise: “I wished to know if the universal (catholic) religion—I mean the Divine Law revealed by the prophets and the apostles to the entire human race— is different from the law which the natural light of reason reveals to us.”4



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Despite Benamozegh’s claim, what Spinoza called “divine law” was not the detailed codes prescribing rituals but rather the transcendent imperative of the knowledge and love of God and the behavior required to attain love.5 Benamozegh nonetheless strategically equated Noahism and divine law: “What is most remarkable in this passage of Spinoza is that, when he turns from the consideration of the specific worship of the Jews to that of Noahism, he calls the latter the true universal religion.”6 He elaborated: “There is no doubt that Spinoza’s thought here conforms to the ideas which we are attempting to put before the reader. Alongside Mosaism, the national code of the Jews, there is a universal law.”7 Benamozegh’s phrase “There is no doubt,” just like the Hebrew ’ein safek, typically signaled junctures where he drew bold conclusions from his sources. In fact, in his exposition of Noahism, moreover, Spinoza explicitly rejected the conflation of the Noahide Laws with natural law. The basis for his repudiation was Maimonides’s restrictive interpretation8 whereby the observance of the Noahide Laws, if accessed by reason only, would preclude salvation because observance exclusively based on reason is not sufficient for achieving righteousness. Maimonides’s statement, however, contradicts the premise by which the laws are supposed to open the path to salvation to non-Jews, and thus to demonstrate Jewish universalism, and that very conditionality, the premise by which one has to believe in revelation in order to have a share in the world to come, is at odds with Maimonides’s philosophy and the central role it ascribed to the intellect (notably by making providence a function of intellectual perfection). And such a reading precipitated Spinoza’s break with Judaism.9 In fact, however, this severe interpretation of salvation based on the belief in revelation stemmed from a persistent textual error clarified in later manuscript discoveries.10 Nevertheless, such was the version to which Spinoza had access, and it triggered his indignation. Benamozegh, too, had access to this version and, without questioning this dissonance, quoted Maimonides and the problematic passage,11 glossing over this requirement that the Noahide Laws should be accepted on the exclusive basis of divine revelation. Instead Benamozegh tried to show the flexibility of the Noahide legislation for those who would (potentially) observe it: the observer, he wrote, “can take whatever he wants, so that his personal code [ . . . ] can, if he desires, be augmented with

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such Mosaic observances as he wishes to practice as well.”12 If Noahism is contained within Judaism, such a fluidity in the observance of the law refutes the notion that Judaism is inaccessible. Benamozegh then adjusted Spinoza’s conclusions of a dual legislation to accord with his own theories regarding the universality of the law: “Alongside Mosaism, the national code of the Israelites, there is a universal law, a catholicism, of which the catholicism of the Christian apostles has been but an imperfect realization.”13 (Here, Benamozegh, like Spinoza, employed the word catholic in its original etymological sense of “pertaining to the whole,” which came to have an increasingly geographic—in fact universalistic—definition: encompassing the whole world.)14 Benamozegh’s vision of a universal Judaism based on the Noahide Laws was thus premised on a—strategic?—misreading of Spinoza and a neglect of the philosopher’s unease with the Maimonidean interpretation of a restricted path to salvation.15 Benamozegh would also mobilize Mendelssohn to make a case for Judaism’s soundness in and for modernity through the potential universalism of its legislative corpus.

Moses Mendelssohn

The notion of religio duplex, in which religions have a dual core—a pivotal concept in Benamozegh’s work—flourished in the eighteenth century. In his study of this notion, Jan Assmann retraces the genealogy of the term coined by the jurist and theologian Theodore Ludwig Lau (1670–1740) to describe an intellectual and theological system meant to reconcile “the philosophers’ god and the God of the Fathers.”16 Warburton’s Divine Legation Demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist (the work of an English churchman and philosopher discussed by Benamozegh on multiple occasions) also hypothesized that the duality that had emerged with the revelation at Sinai actually reflected a divide between natural and political theology.17 The possibility of Jewish universalism as advanced in the work of the German philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) rests on a duality as well: the distinction between revealed religion and law. In Jerusalem, he famously held that “Judaism boasts of no exclusive revelation of eternal truths that are indispensable to salvation, of no revealed religion in the sense in which that term is usually understood. Revealed religion is one thing, revealed legislation, another.”18 In this text, a defense of freedom of conscience positing that the



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state should not interfere with the faith of its citizens and ought to protect the rights of its minorities, he turned the treatment of Judaism by polities into a litmus test for all minorities, thus elevating it to a form of universalism. This was not the first time that Mendelssohn decoupled Judaism from its legislation: twenty years earlier, in a clamorous controversy with the theologian Lavater, who publicly dared him to justify his attachment to Judaism from a philosophical standpoint or to convert, Mendelssohn identified the Noahide Laws as natural law: an autonomous, rational ethical system without revelation.19 He invoked the argument of Yosef Caro (1488–1575), the author of the last great codification of Jewish law, by which Maimonides’s restriction of salvation to those who believed in revelation had no textual grounds in the Talmud, in order to reject Maimonides’s contentious interpretation, which would have indeed jettisoned the very possibility of Jewish rationalism and philosophy altogether.20 Yet Benamozegh questioned Mendelssohn’s treatment of revelation and its content: Moses Mendelssohn distinguished between the Mosaic laws written in the Torah and the eternal truths proceeding from human reason. According to

him, these truths, because they have a rational basis, do not come within the special compass of Jewish revelation. He thus recognized the double

character of Divine Law, though it may be debatable to make the Mosaic

code the special consequence of Revelation, to the exclusion of the eternal truths which issue only from reason.21

Such a characterization by Mendelssohn, whom Benamozegh, in a letter to Samuel David Luzzatto, deemed “overrated,”22 is not fully accurate. In another text, Mendelssohn opined that the Noahide system was a religion of humanity (“allgemeine Menschenreligion”)23 but maintained that Jewish law, too, contained rational truths and religious edicts. Whether erroneous or deliberate, this approximation allowed Benamozegh (in Israel and Humanity) to distance himself from Mendelssohn and to emphasize the importance of revelation as an integral part of a religion of reason and of its universalism: “We believe we have demonstrated, in our survey [ . . . ] that Judaism is concerned with other peoples as well, that its doctrines embrace all of mankind—in sum, that Revelation which it has in its keeping is truly universal.”24

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By characterizing Judaism as natural religion plus revealed law, Mendelssohn was operating within a Protestant ethos: he defined religion by separating it from politics and making it specific to the private sphere.25 Despite his rebuttal of Mendelssohn and his abundant criticism of Protestantism, Benamozegh, too, employed “religion” in a similar sense. However, upon closer inspection, his definition is ambiguous: “devotion to and worship of the Absolute.”26 Devotion (or adoration in the French version) can either imply beliefs or refer to an actual worship/praxis that would be more akin to Judaism. Such semantics bespeaks his desire to get his message across to an audience for whom the word religion was immediately intelligible—a word that he appropriated and defined in accordance with his own agenda. Another key term in Mendelssohn’s attempt to establish the possible universalism of Judaism and its compatibility with reason-based modernity is dogma. Because dogma (the set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true) entails both a lack of rational inquiry and an incompatibility with freedom of conscience, it contravenes the possibility of reason as a centerpiece of any religious system and runs contrary to modernity. This explains Mendelssohn’s uneasiness toward the concept, since the purpose of Jerusalem was precisely the defense of freedom of conscience. As Alexander Altmann has argued, however, Mendelssohn’s philosophy cannot be reduced to a rejection of any dogmatic tendency in Judaism.27 The three tenets of Judaism, as he spelled them out in Jerusalem (the existence of God, providence, and revelation), are indeed dogmas—they cannot be disputed lest Judaism become unintelligible—and this condition injects some rationality into a concept that seems at odds with reason. Mendelssohn’s writing looms large in the nineteenth-century reassessment of whether Judaism did have dogmas, a disputed notion and a concern that occupied Benamozegh as well as thinkers such as Luzzatto and Schechter, who strove to show the relevance and rationalism of the set of theological principles that enabled them to define Judaism above and against the various external forces that threatened to change it, especially in an age of emancipation. In 1863, Luzzatto penned a book-length essay, entitled precisely Dogma, in which he demonstrated how towering medieval figures (Saadia Gaon, Ibn



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Paquda, Yehuda Halevi, and Ibn Daud among them) engaged with the concept, and highlighted its treatment by Maimonides. Although Maimonides’s emphasis was on knowledge, not belief, Luzzatto acknowledged that the latter offered easier access to salvation for the masses. For Luzzatto, providing historical evidence of dogmatic beliefs was paramount to his agenda, as it bolstered his case for the continued and robust observance of core principles: a better-defined, and better-understood, Judaism could help fight the decline of Jewish observance. Benamozegh’s 1877 Teologia dogmatica e apologetica (Dogmatic and Apologetic Theology) presented the possibly self-contradictory notion of a progressive, modern credo based on dogma. At first glance, the title seems at odds with his harsh critique of the new, conservative turn taken by the Catholic Church in his time, epitomized by the concept of papal infallibility. The rabbi explained his methodology as follows: “We aimed to distinguish between the demonstrative and apologetic [method]. In the former, one demonstrates intrinsically and authoritatively, as well as extrinsically and rationally, the truth of dogmas.”28 Benamozegh’s method ostensibly differed from the authoritarian approach of the pontiff because he held that the validity of dogmas could be accounted for through reason.29 Writing a decade later, Solomon Schechter (1847–1915), a Moldavianborn rabbi who moved to the United States and became a towering figure of the Conservative movement, took a similar tack, reappraising the legacy of Mendelssohn. The philosopher had, he wrote, “declared that Judaism has dogmas, only that they are purer and more in harmony with reason than those of other religions.”30 This interpretation matched Benamozegh’s, whose interventions were designed to showcase both Judaism and its dogmas as rational, and thus as universal and attuned to modern concerns—implicitly disputing Mendelssohn’s categories. Benamozegh’s take on Mendelssohn enabled him to object to the opposition between revelation and reason that was pivotal in the work of the German philosopher. Benamozegh was determined to show that heteronomy, reason, and universalism were not incompatible, nor were they unenlightened propositions. This stance put him at odds with key aspects of Kantian philosophy.

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Immanuel Kant

Alongside autonomy and reason, universality was one of the tenets Immanuel Kant put forward in his definition of the Enlightenment.31 His emphasis on the ability of individuals from across cultures, religions, and geographies to come to the same conclusions about fundamental questions has been interpreted as a response to Mendelssohn’s work. Kant had praised Mendelssohn’s “penetration, subtlety, and wisdom” as well as his perspectives on religious freedom and on the reconciliation of Judaism with other faiths. Kant viewed Mendelssohn as foreshadowing a broad reform not limited to Judaism,32 but he proved impervious to the latter’s conclusions regarding the status of Judaism as a religion. Indeed, he denied it this very quality in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, and by the same token dismissed the possibility of Jewish universalism. Kant posited that to be universal, a religion had to be rational, and only Protestantism, in his view, could be deemed a rational faith. Judaism, he maintained, was only a belief (Glaube) and a set of statutory laws; the morality of the Ten Commandments had later been superimposed on this minimal framework, but it was foreign to its original makeup.33 Kant’s critique of Judaism was threefold. The first part concerns the absence of a requirement of “moral dispositions” and an emphasis on outer observance since the Hebrew God demands acts, not intention: it is a legal, not a moral stance. He held the sacrifice of Isaac to be evidence of this amorality, eschewing the very possibility of universalization since it contravenes the categorical imperative to “act only according to that maxim in which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”34 The second aspect deals with the question of an afterlife and Judaism’s lack of belief in the immortality of the soul: circumscribing punishment to this world further shows that it is a political and not a moral code whose relevance goes beyond the mortal lifespan. The third aspect concerns the question of chosenness, which Kant equated with enmity toward other people—a classic take on the accusation of Jewish misanthropy dating back to antiquity.35 Though Benamozegh discussed Kant more than a dozen times in his Teologia dogmatica e apologetica (mostly referencing citations or quotes from various French journals), he did not address the philosopher’s views on Judaism. He did, however, obliquely engage with him regarding the question of



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practical reason through a mention of the best-selling Hebrew book Sefer haBrit (Book of the Covenant).36 Penned by Pinchas Hurwitz (1765–1821),37 though first published anonymously in 1797, the book aimed to bring a compendium of modern science to Jewish readers through a kabbalistic lens (the first part of the book being a science encyclopedia and the second consisting of a kabbalistic piety manual emphasizing love for one’s neighbor). Without addressing the views that sustain the Sefer ha-Brit—to which I will return in part 3 and which may seem similar to his—Benamozegh chose instead to discuss Hurwitz’s adoption of Kant’s antinomies (the contradictions that follow from our attempts to conceive the nature of transcendent reality as posited in the Critique of Pure Reason). Benamozegh drew a parallel between Hurwitz and Kant: just as the philosopher could only see moral truth in practical reason (the general human capacity for resolving, through reflection, the question of what one ought to do), Hurwitz could only see the existence of God through tradition (Kabbalah, the Prophets, and the Talmud, which he took as a form of general consensus). Benamozegh, who repeatedly emphasized the importance of deliberation within tradition,38 thus set up a parallelism in which he equated practical reason and tradition. By hastening to remark that the necessity of probing truth through practical reason had always been self-evident to most Jewish thinkers, who had therefore never bothered to make it a central argument, he both elevated and relativized the importance of Kantian philosophy and reconciled it with Judaism. Hurwitz, on the other hand, asserted that one eventually had to choose between faith and philosophy39 and resorted to Kant strategically because his work “overthrows philosophy and its teachings,”40 thus using philosophy against itself—a stance alien to Benamozegh’s. Benamozegh did, however, develop a critical view of Kantian philosophy, especially regarding the role of law, which he deemed too abstract and formal, and blind to its actual role for society and for the predictability of human interactions. Such a version of universalism, he held, would be ill-equipped to fulfill human aspirations.41 Benamozegh’s criticism of Christianity in Jewish and Christian Ethics revolved around a similar negation of human nature and the potential alienation induced by the transcendent nature of the divine in Kant’s philosophy, which led the rabbi to dub him the “father of skepticism.”42 The problem, he argued, is not that Judaism denied the gap between

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the human and the divine but rather that Kant denied humanity the knowledge of how to bridge the gap, including through revelation. Benamozegh strove to upend beliefs pertaining to revelation, and more specifically Kantian categories, in which natural religion is objective whereas revealed religions are subjective.43 In doing so, Benamozegh asserted the possibility of a rational revelation: he turned the traditional categories on their head by defining tradition as subjective progress (“progesso subiettivo”) which he pitted against the objective immutability of revelation (“immutabilità obiettiva”).44 The result was an ardent emphasis not only on the rationality of Jewish laws but also on tradition as deliberation and as a hermeneutical tool indispensable for illuminating the law or even any narrative in the Bible likely to be interpreted in a scientific manner, such as the creation narrative.45 “Where is the source of morality?” Benamozegh asked rhetorically. “It is where tradition begins.”46 Kant’s claim regarding the amorality of Judaism thus ceased to be valid. In all of his writings, Benamozegh painstakingly addressed the reproach leveled at Judaism since the Enlightenment—its imputed lack of rationalism—by emphasizing the logic of his reasoning as he deconstructed the tenets of Christian supersession: “So, to be logical, Christianity, instead of envisioning itself as the definitive religion of humanity, should expect, in a more or less distant future, to be replaced by another one. In trying to fight Judaism, as soon as one abandons the premise of a unique revelation that, without any fundamental modification, develops through the ages, one is left with the hypothesis of religions supplanting each other for as long as the evolution of humanity shall last.”47 Frequently dismissive of Protestantism, he contended that Pauline Christianity brought about its own demise by abolishing the law and by claiming that Jesus’s New Covenant superseded the old one, which was meant exclusively for the Jews: it planted the seeds of its own supersession by Protestantism in that Christianity had functioned as a form of Protestantism toward Judaism. To avoid such religious disruptions, progressive and continual revelation warranted true and lasting universalism, one that would not be threatened by modernity—if one agreed with the notion of modernity as self-correction,48 as a way to espouse the concerns of the day and of people’s minds. Progressive revelation, Benamozegh argued, was to be found in Judaism, the core of the



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other two Abrahamic faiths, as I will explore in the next section. Presenting Judaism as the core religion challenged Kant’s system of concentric circles describing the development of faith whereby the inner circle represents the rational religion, its essence and its purity, and the outer circle, Judaism, the historical, contingent religion.49 Benamozegh in fact inverted the Kantian graph. Judaism had to be understood as the kernel, the faith that brings all other faiths together, not only because it is a universal, rational faith but also because it is the matrix of other monotheistic religions. In utilizing Spinoza, Mendelssohn, and Kant, Benamozegh aimed to demonstrate how Judaism was mostly compatible with their respective philosophical systems or to showcase its legitimacy (notably through its manifestation in the Noahide Laws) within a universalism anchored in reason. In addition to the arguments he posed in relation to these three thinkers, which were grounded in the timeless truth of Judaism, Benamozegh also invoked the universalism of Judaism based on its antecedence in religious history.

Judaism as the Origin of Monotheistic Universalism

In Israel and Humanity, Benamozegh articulated the stakes of his plea for the Abrahamic religions and their universalism. It amounted to “the defense of Jewish monotheism” in what he called “its three forms: Hebrew, Christian and Islamic,”50 all of which had been “proven guilty of impotence” in the face of the decline of religions. However, he hastened to refute this broad charge, objecting that “of all the ancient religions, Judaism is perhaps the only one which claims to possess a religious ideal for all mankind. Through an exceptional circumstance of history, it has already been privileged to give birth to two great religions which at present dominate much of the civilized world, and which regard the future as theirs.”51 Benamozegh went on to demonstrate the logic of his argument: “If Judaism had been only a purely national religion, it could not have given birth to two religions with truly universal aspirations.”52 Writing against the backdrop of the “quest for the historical Jesus,” a scholarly effort aimed at eliciting a picture of the man Jesus as distinct from the messiah-figure, Benamozegh sought to conjure up Jesus’s Jewish environment.53 Yet the rabbi’s conclusions about the ethical and revolutionary discourse of Judaism from which Jesus drew his message put him at odds

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with traditional Christian theology and with the historians or scholars of his time. Benamozegh’s agenda and his prescriptive claim regarding Judaism’s capacity to solve the religious crisis of modernity can be compared to that of another rabbi, Abraham Geiger, and to the way he wrote against the grain in the comparative treatment of religions. The only references to Geiger in Benamozegh’s work were in a footnote in Teologia dogmatica e apologetica54 or in his historical and biblical studies in journals.55 Although Abraham Geiger was a frequent interlocutor of Samuel David Luzzatto, there is no evidence that Benamozegh had any exchange with him, nor that the Livornese rabbi requested an introduction from Luzzatto. Geiger’s earliest scholarship bears some affinities with Benamozegh’s future work as both addressed the proximity of other monotheisms to Judaism and their indebtedness to it. Geiger’s 1832 doctoral thesis, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (What Did Mohammed Borrow from Judaism?), indeed established that Islam derived from Judaism,56 thus breaking with a tradition going back to the eighth century, when the theologian John of Damascus had identified Islam as the offspring of a Christian heresy.57 Benamozegh made a similar effort (albeit more philologically superficial and brief )58 in the appendix to Jewish and Christian Ethics, “An Examination of the Dogmas of Islamism,” in which he states that “the borrowings from Judaism [ . . . ] are acknowledged by all serious historians of Islamism.”59 Although this foray into the Quran was timid, Benamozegh was among the more advanced thinkers on the question, given that the place of Islam had mostly been ignored in Jewish thought since the Middle Ages and that the research, pioneered in the Habsburg Empire, was still nascent.60 Both thinkers also broke from their contemporaries’ overwhelmingly reluctance to acknowledge the universalism of Islam.61 Both Geiger and Benamozegh thus viewed the significance of Judaism as a civilizational shift: the force that had brought monotheism into the world (“the idea of the unity and sanctity of God”), refined the notion of ethical monotheism, and shaped the other two monotheistic faiths.62 The two thinkers’ work also belonged to a nineteenth-century movement of thought whose efforts to reclaim the Jewish Jesus have been amply documented. Both claimed that Christianity had but appropriated already-existing and extensive moral values, including the quest for mankind’s unity.63



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Both Benamozegh and Geiger agreed that the essence of religion could be found in Judaism, as its pure and original expression. In Geiger’s view, the reason for Judaism’s appearance as an ethnic faith had to do with a historical process: any religion must first manifest itself in a specific form among a specific group, from which it will spread its consciousness of the sacred to others. It also develops from inner experience to collective, outer forms.64 Benamozegh’s stance was similar: such a pattern of evolution—from private to public—was a universal feature of the history of religions and one that Judaism had introduced to the world—another aspect that made it universally valid and relevant.

Religion and Sentiment: Beyond the Universalism of Reason

Having established the proximity of the three monotheistic religions, Benamozegh focused more specifically on Christianity and Judaism. He began by stating the similarity of their unifying ambitions, but promptly highlighted the divide between the two faiths based on the respective primacy given reason or sentiment: The logical consequence of these universalistic aspirations is, in Judaism

as well as in Christianity, a tendency to propagate, to realize in history the

religious unity which is the very core of their dogmas, to bring humanity in one way or another to recognize this universality, the essential character of their beliefs. But here again, the two religions differ notably in their modality. While Judaism appeals mostly to reason, Christianity tries to rouse emotions.65

This statement weaves together and highlights many of Benamozegh’s influences. First, the concepts of humanity and unity are imbued with Hegelian overtones (“the realization of unity in history”): in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the function of the Absolute Idea (an all-inclusive whole) is to realize itself in a self-conscious spirit characterized by an identity of thought and being.66 In Benamozegh’s presentation, unity (presented as a dogma at the core of both Jewish and Christian beliefs) stands for the Idea and its realization fosters and demonstrates the universality of these religions. Consequently, in Benamozegh’s Hegel-inspired reading, faiths ought to manifest their purpose in history: unless humankind is made to acknowledge their

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goal, the process of unity will be unintelligible and, therefore, unachievable. The more widespread the consciousness of its mission, the more universal a religion can and will be. Advancing this awareness was the task Benamozegh set for himself. As he recast the terms of the debates on familiar philosophical ground, however, the Livornese rabbi flipped the roles typically ascribed to Judaism and Christianity. By making the latter a religion of feeling, he downplayed the role of reason in it, thus undermining the case for Christian universalism. He also posited feelings as a replacement: they occupy an unduly empty space—the space left by the abandonment of the law, as he explained in Jewish and Christian Ethics. The predominant place given to religious sentiments stems from a vacuum: When a nation possesses a revealed code, meant to rule the mind, when in this revelation the entire life of a people is regulated and marked out in ad-

vance…when this nation, accustomed for ages to regard this revelation as its rule of conduct in ethics as well as religion, and the most natural ethical pre-

cepts as positive laws, is told some fine day that this law “is played out” [. . .] who does not see that morality is struck down with doctrine, worship and legislation? Where shall reason take refuge when this great catastrophe arrives?

[. . . .] What shall it substitute for this ruined ethical system? It has neither an ethics of philosophy nor of nature to put in its place: it only has sentiment and of that it avails itself. This is, in my opinion, the most probable explanation for that predominance of sentiment in the Christian ethics. This is why its first founders incessantly appeal to sentiment and not to reason.67

The rabbi’s flowery style is on full display in the French version, which talks about the law as the “empire of souls”68—and so includes a likely contradiction. If Christianity is born out of Judaism, it cannot be completely devoid of ethics even if it gets rid of the law, since the law is not the only vehicle for ethics. Benamozegh made this clear while eliciting ethics from aggadic and kabbalistic materials—which he described as the building blocks of Christianity. What Benamozegh denounced is Christianity’s obfuscation of its provenance; he also warned that emotions, because they tend to be selfreferential, draw the attention inward and not to the external world, and thus provide too weak a grounding for any community or polity. Furthermore,



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the centrality of feeling raises the problem of the stability of interpretations; how can an emphasis on the subject’s perception offer the same interpretative strength as a communal identity based on Scripture? How can one reconcile the individual and a collectivity? This is where Benamozegh held tradition to be a vehicle of modernity. Tradition, Benamozegh argued, is made up of deliberation and practical reason, whereas Christianity and Reform Judaism, having done away with the layers of human voices embedded in Jewish tradition, are monolingual and univocal.69 Resorting to a common trope of his time, he compared Reform Judaism to Karaism, the Jewish movement that originated in Baghdad in the eight century, rejected rabbinic authority, and grounded its observance in the Pentateuch alone: “In our century, within Hebraism, and as the funest legacy of past centuries, the predominant error is a latent or manifest Karaism. Karaism is Hebraism’s Protestantism, minus the latter’s own good. It has, just like it, additional flaws, the essential flaw of any faith: the lack of unity.”70 Benamozegh turned unity into a condition for true plurality. In Catholic countries, the charge that Protestantism was a vehicle of both religious and social fragmentation71 appeared in the work of such Catholicsocialist thinkers as Pierre Leroux, whom Benamozegh often referenced. The rabbi contrasted these presumptive divisions with Judaism’s potential for unification: a religion of the individual within a community, in which feelings are compounded by reason and deliberation. Benamozegh’s approach to the role of emotion in religion was nuanced, however. He recognized its importance, especially in its capacity to foster unity in modern societies, and his analysis conjured up a modern ethos marked by the advent of the psychology and anthropology of religion. In his Teologia dogmatica, Benamozegh engaged with Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72) and more specifically with The Essence of Christianity, which took Europe by storm in the early 1840s with its boast of capturing the “true or anthropological essence of religion.”72 Caustically deeming the work to be “one of the two most subtle of the current errors regarding the origins of religion,”73 Benamozegh refuted at great length its main assumption that “God is man himself deified by man [ . . . ] the standard man, man as a species, interior, perfect, ideal,”74 but that this illusion of the divine gives way to reality. He recapitulated the Feuerbachian argument that “progress makes

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man better understood to himself ”75 and turned it on its head, using an ontological-historical and a theological argument. He grounded his historical objection to the notion of the adoration of God as backwardness in the fact that philosophical knowledge developed in Greece, Egypt, and India— all of which were religious civilizations. From this he concluded that the human mind “remains more or less stationary.”76 Yet his main theological proposition revolves around the “Let us make man in our image” imperative: if man conceives of God in his semblance and if God is reason, then the whole meaning of revelation changes. It is a moment of consciousness of the capacity of the human mind: revelation “is properly and literally the revelation of the potential and collective man [man of the methexis] to the mimetic individual.”77 Benamozegh’s philosophical as well as lexical indebtedness to Gioberti is once again evidenced here through a rare adjective (metessico) found in Gioberti’s Protologia, and coming from Plato’s methexis—participation. In Plato’s methexis, the mundane participates in the corresponding, elevated idea. This correlation describes the circular movement that links humanity to God: first a descending movement (“the Being creates the Existing”) followed by human beings returning to God and creating him in their own image. Because Benamozegh sensed that alienation, occurring when human beings hold that their own essence is situated outside of themselves, was a peril of modernity, he made a case for revelation as the potential of the mind and the essence of human beings. In his syncretic way, he used Greek philosophy, channeled by a Catholic thinker, to reassess revelation as both inside and outside of man. According to Feuerbach, an atheistic humanism and the goal of human self-realization constitutes the “truth of Christianity,” but Benamozegh placed this self-realization squarely within the ambit of Hebraism and kept atheism at bay.78 It can also be surmised that his familiarity with the Italian philosopher Vico, whom he quoted amply in his biblical commentary, led him to play down the presence of anthropomorphism as a legitimate rationale for atheism.79 Vico’s philosophy, viewed among Sephardim as an alternative to the Western Enlightenment and often invoked by Benamozegh,80 emphasized the poetic dispositions of human beings.81 Language is seen as a repository



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of culture and each worldview is couched in a specific language, which reflects its metaphysics.82 So, too, does the anthropomorphized image of God, which should lead to a new understanding of faith’s capacity for fostering creativity and uniting societies. The philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), a key architect of the reconciliation between reason and religious sentiment, does not appear in Benamozegh’s writings,83 but aspects of his work resonate with Benamozegh’s consistent emphasis on the role of religious intuition in revelation.84 The philosopher attempted to reconcile Protestant theology and the Enlightenment in On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers and in his Addresses on Religion (1799), claiming that “religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling. It wishes to intuit the universe.”85 In subsequent works, Schleiermacher reiterated his views on the role of emotion, and made the feeling of utter dependence central to any definition of religion before ultimately rescinding his observations about intuition under the influence of Kant’s admonishment that “intuitions without concepts are blind.”86 Given the wealth of Benamozegh’s references, it is puzzling that Schleiermacher would have escaped his attention. But questioning the role of feelings and intuition in religion was part of the zeitgeist and of the conversations in which Benamozegh strove to intervene.87 He often used intuition and instinct quite interchangeably and deemed them foundational: “Whether one is a believer or inclined to see religious beliefs as mere delusion, no one would dream of denying that this powerful instinct prompts every thinking being to worship something superior.”88 It is Israel’s gift for intuition, he argued, that set it apart. In making this distinction, Benamozegh seemed to contradict his emphasis on reason: “This lack of philosophical speculation is evidence of Israel’s religious genius, for intuition and reflection are two faculties that, most of the time, appear to be mutually exclusive and this has been observed more than once by scholars, precisely pertaining to Judaism.”89 In fact, not only did he qualify the dichotomy (these aptitudes are in fact in opposition most of the time, but not all the time) but his purpose was to prove that revelation, as a manifestation of collective intuition, was in fact conducive to reflection and shaped a robust universalism.

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Building on and against previous conceptions of universalism, and sometimes with great effort, Benamozegh made Hebraism—his expansive understanding of Judaism—meet all the criteria for universalism, and thus for modernity. But in order to address another fundamental question—the inclusivity of Judaism as a religious community—he needed a key theological concept: the Noahide Laws.

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The Role and Limits of the Noahide Laws

Reluctant to be stow authority on the judgment of individuals and suspicious of moral autonomy, Benamozegh envisioned the Noahide Laws as a theological concept capable of providing a solid foundation for normativity in his troubled age. The nature of the normative—that is, the authoritative standards of right action binding upon the members of a group and serving to guide, control, or regulate proper and acceptable behavior, encompassing legal, social, moral, and religious norms—entails that each group produces its own. This question of normativity, as Habermas has argued, destabilizes a key tenet of modernity by which the sources for determining norms or standards have to be found internally, individually, and not in reference to a group or a transcendent authority. Modernity itself is normative, but its normativity can be contested as it relies on the autonomy of the subject and produces a sense of insecurity because the norms, now open to negotiation, may fluctuate. However, because Noahism is a continuum between reason and revelation, autonomy and heteronomy, it quietly offers a middle way and caters to the need for metaphysics that, Benamozegh claimed, remains a defining feature of humanity and a need he had experienced in his own past. In one of the lectures on the Pentecost he gave to his students in the 1880s, Benamozegh shared the confusion that struck him as a believer confronting the paradoxes of revelation: 83

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When I first drank from the pure spring of our dogma [ . . . ] a great, thundering, tormenting doubt nagged me in the depths of my soul, asking stringently: If God’s law is immutable in the future, why had it not been so in the

past? What if man can no longer live without [the law], as he did for so long, and thought, loved, worshipped, deserved sorrow and rewards, without the

Sinaitic law? What if, after its proclamation, the righteous men would no

longer be able to follow any other norm, and in what way did Adam, Noah, Abraham, and all the righteous, saints and patriarchs, servants of God— those who lived before the Law was given—follow another norm as well?1

The rabbi’s address to his students was deliberately dramatic: his language, when asking whether God “defrauded” (fraudare) his creation, wove together images from the story of Jacob in Genesis 32:22, from Psalms, and from Dante’s Inferno. Indeed, he described himself as having been “lost in a dark labyrinth,” about to slip deeper and deeper into the abyss, when the masters of the rabbinic tradition came to his rescue: “The doctors appeared to want to dissolve my doubts, to assuage my anxieties.”2 Despite this tone, Benamozegh’s use of the Noahide Laws as a response to his spiritual unrest was still based on reason more than on sheer emotions—as if only reason could assuage the anxiety he had lavishly described. His case for the existence of a dual system of Mosaic and Noahide laws was pivotal because it made Judaism immune to one of his key criticisms of Christianity: what he depicted as the inconsistency of supersessionism—the doctrine that affirms that the covenant with Jesus has replaced the old covenant. After averring that God’s law ought to be immutable, Benamozegh strove to establish that the Mosaic laws did not supersede Noahism, the previous code, but complemented it. He thus shielded himself from a case of what I will call pre-supersession. In so doing, he further cemented the immutability of divine law and Judaism’s function in safeguarding it. Benamozegh added another perspective to this by arguing that the combination of Mosaic and Noahide laws could achieve harmony, ending the feuds between monotheisms as they would envision themselves as complementary—a stance which he contrasted with a Pauline treatment of Judaism, flagging the apostle’s making of Christianity as disruption and its nefarious consequences. Both the Noahide and the Mosaic codes are part of revelation,



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the rabbi argued, but they must be properly articulated with one another to offer a sustainable legal and ethical system and not merely run parallel courses, nor become conflicting corpora. Universalism entails a sense of harmony likely to emerge from an appeased relation between faiths, as well as between faith and reason.

Regulating Reason?

Although Benamozegh did not cite him, the stakes Benamozegh raised regarding reliance on reason alone aligned him with Salomon Ludwig Steinheim (1789–1866), a disciple of Mendelssohn who published his Revelation According to the Doctrine of Judaism in 1835.3 Steinheim held that the primacy of human reason led to its autonomy and a self-legislation likely to turn into an oppressive self-subjugation of the individual’s nature. For Kant, the rational religion is rooted in the autonomous self, but this is precisely the lack of heteronomy that Benamozegh identified as a danger. He refused to subscribe to a system without safeguards: It is quite true that scientific intolerance is not always the companion of perfect orthodoxy and sometimes, in order to make up for the lack of it, it gets replaced by an even sharper zealousness. An exclusive superstition is

the lot of the unbelieving men and centuries, more than [it is the lot] of the truly religious ages and souls.4

Brimming with the vocabulary of hubris and intolerance, Benamozegh’s depiction of the primacy of rationalism called for religion as a mitigating factor. His analysis is governed by the same argument Vico used when the Neapolitan thinker expressed his defiance toward Descartes and toward an omnipotent subjectivity cloaked in scientific knowledge, prone to objectifying the world.5 Yet Benamozegh cautioned that the abuse of reason by a narrow-minded rationalism should not lead one to stop trusting reason altogether: though it undergirded Judaism, reason should not become self-referential. Additionally, he argued, heteronomy is needed to provide the metaphysics for which humanity yearned—the objects that exist independently of any observer: Tell us about a revelation worthy of the name, a revelation that would teach men truths at which no human effort could ever arrive, that proposes an

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ideal of morality and virtue to which the reason of man alone won’t be able to give birth—and this very reason would bow down in front of such a revelation because it will see the imprint of its celestial origin. But a different

revelation which will only follow, step by step, the natural development of human capacities, which [ . . . ] would only sprinkle eternal truth and unfold according to the capacity of hearts and spirits to welcome it. This very revelation, I shall say, will first look suspicious in the eyes of a wise critic

and be absolutely useless; because it has nothing to say to men beyond what they are already capable of telling themselves.6

Benamozegh’s presentation of the Noahide Laws enabled him to connect autonomy and heteronomy in a way that, he claimed, Christianity had forfeited because of its restrictive and exclusively external models of redemption and more particularly of “imputation” (the theological concept by which the righteousness of Jesus was attributed to Christians).7 In Jewish and Christian Ethics, he asserted that, in Christianity, “its Verb, its Redemption, its action on the human soul—it is impossible to deny it— are thoroughly external, thoroughly objective: they operate outside of man without man taking any part in it.”8 Conversely, Benamozegh reasoned that, in Judaism, “the merits that justify and provide grace are imputed to [man].”9 He drove his point home by pitting Christianity’s narrow path to salvation against Hebraism’s expansive one: “Redemption in Hebraism, in a word, is completely internal, because its dogma, its morality, its observance, are only real as long as man seizes them, assimilates them to his being, and realizes within himself the divine perfections that are contained in it.” 10 This, too, reverses a widespread dichotomy—internal versus external—in which Judaism was said to make no room for a realm of interiority: what Benamozegh proposes is that heteronomy, embraced in its rationality and morality, is felt as autonomous normativity and fosters greater unity within the individual self. At the same time, he insisted that even based on the laws of nature, existence could not be predicated on the abandonment of heteronomy, or only in a disillusionary way. His manuscript reads: We have argued for the necessity of a law proposed to man from the outside: that is, revelation. Here we will confine ourselves to say that, to live



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according to Nature, the way for man, as paradoxical as it may seem, is

certainly not the imitation of Nature because one can only imitate what one knows and how can one know universal Nature!11

Having ostensibly embraced the definition of the Noahide system as being based on reason and tacitly resembling natural law, he reassessed the scope of natural law and showed that its proponents claimed that its reach was limited to the realm of human interactions: The Noahide Law is intrinsically rational. Not so the Mosaic Law, for it

is the priestly law, decreed not only for this world, but for heaven as well. That is, in philosophical language, Mosaism expresses the relation between the earth and the material and spiritual universe. Noahism addresses the

observance of what is true and right to the degree that the interests of the individual and of society require; in Judaism, however, this observance acquires all the amplitude that the universal order itself calls for.12

In this passage one finds traces of ta‘amei ha-mitzvot, the complex justification of the commandments, a recurring theme and endeavor in medieval philosophy. Indeed, as Maimonides suggested, if one were to ascribe a teleological orientation to reason and to subordinate divine precepts to it, it would make them contingent on human understanding and thus intolerably anthropocentric. Here, Benamozegh offers a glimpse into his kabbalistic worldview when he asserts that Noahism only regulates human, earthly interactions, while Mosaic laws have a cosmic effect: the justification of the commandments in the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria, the sixteenth-century Safed luminary, entailed repairing a fragmented world and asserting a privileged relation between the Jews and the cosmos. If there is an intimate connection between the Jewish law and the law of the universe, the Jewish observance of the commandments can create the conditions for greater harmony in the universe as a whole: Necessarily, therefore, the Mosaic code eludes man’s present understanding, which comprehends only a more limited sphere, and its precepts have a far vaster significance, extending to the universe itself. This universe thrusts it-

self on man’s consciousness in the form of revelation, as it speaks to animal

life in the form of instinct. We can say that Revelation is but instinct of a

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higher order, which puts man in harmony with the universal order; and, by means of Israel, links mankind with the entire world.13

Benamozegh played down the ethnocentrism in this passage and the idea of Israel as a connector, as exclusively capable of articulating the relation of the celestial with the terrestrial but also with other nations. Yet the two sets of legislation remain widely different in scope. One is mundane, the other is metaphysical. The discrepancy between the realms of these laws bespeaks an essential asymmetry between Israel and the nations that has been taken to convey a hierarchy—and, possibly, an ethnocentric worldview adverse to a sense of unity or universalism, to which I will return in my study of a kabbalistic universalism in part 3.

Noahism and Its Discontents: An “Equivocal Position”

The Noahide Laws have elicited a suspicion of minimized universalism. The Talmud’s description of the Noahide Laws as consisting of negative commandments seems to further characterize the code as a shrunken paradigm for non-Jews—one that seeks to prevent social harm rather than to build a moral community. Nissim of Gerona, the fourteenth-century Catalonian Talmudist, in his Eleventh Homily proposed the following distinction: the Torah “judges the people in accordance with what is ideally just in itself, whether or not this suits the needs of society,” whereas Noahism proposes a social model with a cautionary assertion: “Whoever violates the [Noahide] laws puts himself in revolt against his fellow men.”14 This disposition, in turn, sheds light on the disturbing discrepancy between the two justice systems: the mercy of the criminal system mirrors the mercy of God in the Mosaic law, whereas the Noahide Laws mete out more substantial punishments. As a result, some crimes in the Noahide code do not count as punishable offenses in the Sinaitic legislation, a consideration that Benamozegh ignored as it might have destabilized the theological and philosophical edifice he had created.15 Indeed, the dissymmetry of potential implementations of the Noahide Laws complicates the promise of universalism, whereas Benamozegh contended that the dual code could only elicit equality between the people under either legislation. The fact that Benamozegh was not aware of the scriptural error in Maimonides’s description of revelation (which I described above), and still



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accepted the interpretation, may demonstrate his commitment to a broader understanding of revelation. By casting revelation not as ethnic but as universal, both for the Mosaic and Noahide Laws, Benamozegh made it a marker of “the spontaneity of the human species” and played down the Sinaitic element.16 Upon such an inclusive conception hinged the possibility of inclusive salvation, a far cry from salvation through Christ. Benamozegh used the Noahide Laws as a way to rewrite the grand narrative of inclusion and exclusion—and of the traditional fault lines and roles assigned to Judaism and Christianity—but failed to address some of the tensions embedded in that code. Since Noahism does offer salvation but mandates lesser commandments, it was occasionally treated as a diminished version of the Sinaitic revelation, as for example in Moses Cordovero’s Shiur Komah (The Measures of the Body [of God])—a part of his commentary on the Zohar, Sefer ’Or Yakar (Book of the Precious Light).17 If rabbinic literature posits the commandments as evidence of God’s love for the Israelites, the limited demands placed on non-Jews raise legitimate questions and suggest lesser expectations—and thus lesser appreciation.18 Israel and Humanity’s legacy comprises irresolvable tensions because the Noahide system raises questions about exclusivism and the true nature of inclusion. While Benamozegh is often credited with advertising the Noahide Laws to non-Jews in the modern period, his promotion of inclusiveness reflected a wider trend of his time, derived from, and in accord with, the demands of Jewish emancipation.19 Such was the intent of the preparatory work of the French Sanhedrin, the assembly of Jewish notables that Napoleon convened in 1807 to provide legal answers to questions submitted by the regime regarding the compatibility of French law and Jewish observance: if the French observe the Noahide Laws, then “all the principles of our religion make it our duty to love Frenchmen as our brethren.”20 Renewed interest in this body of law was not limited to reformists. For instance, Jacob Katz lists Jakob Mecklenburg (1785–1865) and Tsvi Chajes (1805–55) as Orthodox thinkers who were willing to embrace the Noahide Laws and to highlight the righteousness of non-Jews as a way of policing the borderlines between the two faiths.21 Resorting to the Noahide Laws as apologetics was both understandable and paradoxical in an age of equality.22 Indeed, the laws have raised questions

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regarding an ontological hierarchy between Jews and non-Jews, and a hierarchy between religions. In his discussion of the laws, Benamozegh argued that the division into the seven laws might in fact not contradict the existence of a larger body of laws. Although not adding up to the 613 Torah commandments that a Jew must observe, the tractate Avoda Zara (9a) mentions “the thirty laws that they [the non-Jews] are destined to accept in the future.” Expanding the corpus makes the code seem of a less minimal nature: “Whatever the number of the Noachide precepts, it is certain that each represents not just a single commandment, but a unit of similar obligations.”23 This interpretation, and the possibility of expanding a minimal cluster of commandments into a more robust set of laws, still raises questions about “an equivocal position”24–one that gestures toward inclusion for those who manage to follow such abstract precepts. The laws might be perceived by non-Jews as an instance of the inaccessibility of Judaism for non-Jews. The unintended paradox of the laws, which were meant to illustrate the universalism of Judaism, was that they could be seen as reinforcing its ethnocentric nature.

Noahism and Its Discontents: Between Religion and Abstract Inclusion?

The respective normative domains of Noahide and Mosaic law seem to bely the argument advanced by David Novak in his assessment of natural law as a border concept:25 it does provide common grounds, it is indeed universalizable, but it is also too thin to provide a robust ideal or a lived reality. For all the inclusiveness Benamozegh saw in this code, enlisting the Noahide Laws as a means of reforming religion might have put him in a bind—and caused him to fall into abstraction—something for which, as we will see, he repeatedly faulted modernity and its incapacity to respond to practical and spiritual human needs. When proposing Noahism as an alternative to conversion, the rabbi never considered one vexing aspect of this religious edifice: the absence of belonging, of rituals and tradition, and thus a sense of attachment—precisely something he deemed essential, as he expressed it in a letter to Luzzatto, regarding Judaism: “Otherwise Hebraism is sent packing; and it does not suffice to say that it is divine and thus immortal



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because we are not dealing with Hebraism in itself; we’re dealing with Hebraism in the hearts and minds of people and this can go away.”26 How, then, could Noahism find an audience and play any significant role in a modern society in search of meaning if no collective entity emerged from this theological construct? This became a hurdle in his advocacy and a problem for Pallière. This “eminently collective thing,” as Emile Durkheim would describe religious existence in his 1912 Elementary Forms of Religious Life—was simply lacking.27 Considering Benamozegh’s proposal, the Prague-born Israeli philosopher Shmuel Hugo Bergman (1883–1975) expressed this reservation in no uncertain terms: “Would not a universal religion, such as that to which Benamozegh aspired, if constructed round so meager a framework, be but a travesty, or rather a crying scandal?”28 He was joined by the German American philosopher of religion Michael Wyschogrod, a commanding voice in twentieth-century interfaith dialogue: “Judaism has never elaborated the Noahide covenant as a form of election, not unrelated to the election of Israel. It has not, for example, found a place in the synagogue for the Noahide converts, not as Jews, but as gentiles who love and are obedient to the God of Israel who is also the God of all humankind.”29 Benamozegh noted that a place was reserved for non-Jews in the Jerusalem Temple, but never touched upon any details regarding contemporary implementations of the system he advocated (such as establishing congregations or rituals for Noahide communities). Pallière struggled against this absence of meaningful inclusion in practice—an aspect that Benamozegh may reluctantly have been addressing when he admitted that the flipside of the dual system of legislation was its limited means for implementation: its normative validity remained on an intellectual level. According to his binary system, Mosaic law defines personal status while Noahide law defines humanitarian actions. But these broad categories cannot fulfill an individual’s aspirations. Benamozegh seemed to have ignored the violence of the “neutral,” of a sort of benevolent indifference, in which interfaith encounters, as we will see in part 4, have identified a crucial issue.30 While he commented on the danger of believers estranged from religion becoming “spiritually mutilated,” Benamozegh did not consider the Noahide Laws from the perspective of those without any other religious affiliation than this fragile Noahism that he believed it behooved them to build.

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Despite acknowledging a thirst for religious sentiment and the necessity for institutionalized religions to respond to it, Benamozegh’s proposition— through the Noahide Laws—seemed to be less emotional than intellectual.31 Although he took note of the individual’s emotional needs, he seemed most at ease on the intellectual, collective, and political levels.

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The Political Value of Judaism in an Age of Nations

T h e c h arac t e r i z at ion of Judaism as a polity—rather than a religion—formed the core of the post-Spinoza critique of Judaism. Having nuanced the argument and shown the interwoven nature of the Mosaic and Noahide legislation, Benamozegh held the political nature and views of Judaism to be exceptionally relevant to modernity, thus endeavoring to turn an age-old reproach into an advantage. Since political systems were no longer based on corporations and nations had become the basic unit of political modernity, Benamozegh argued that Judaism could offer a template for rethinking politics. Through the articulation of national entities, Benamozegh proposed to read universalism anew: he expressed it in terms of cosmopolitanism and substituted it for a Christian universalism centered on the individual, which, in his view, had traded politics for disembodied morality.

Universalism by Way of the Nations: The Meaning of Jewish Particularism

Both Judaism and the Risorgimento shaped Benamozegh’s political views, and he aimed to align their ideals. Mazzini in particular appealed to Benamozegh, who chose to publish a letter the Italian thinker had addressed to him in the preface of his Teologia dogmatica e apologetica. In it, Mazzini proclaimed the significance and future role of Judaism in the political landscape of the era and 93

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again referred to this era as one “which, like all great revolutionary epochs, is essentially religious,” as he had stated elsewhere.1 The appeal of Mazzini’s ideas for liberation movements from Latin America to China is well documented, but for him, building a nation and its sentiment of collective belonging represented only an initial stage from which a further association of nations and thus of mankind could come into effect. Italy’s mission was to serve humanity in order to gradually achieve unity through education; a nation had first to become a people (popolo) lest it would be nothing more than an aggregate of individuals (gente).2 And this is where a true knowledge of the people was necessary: Mazzini lamented contemporary leaders’ ignorance of the national and social fabric of the masses. Because they saw the people in the abstract, he claimed, these leaders failed to create the conditions for genuine political renewal in the wake of the 1848 Spring of Nations and the European national upheaval.3 Mazzini’s understanding of the nation and his liberal take on religion validated Benamozegh’s own articulation of these ideas in a Jewish key. Benamozegh mounted his critique of Christianity on the basis of precisely these necessary stages, from the individual to the nation to humankind. He had held this view since his 1867 Jewish and Christian Ethics, in which he argued that “Christianity dissolved nations into humanity”4 and claimed that “instead of the dry abstraction man, Hebraism offers its adepts something more real, more alive, closer to who we are, to our affections, our needs—a man, a citizen, a patriot.”5 Judaism, in short, meant political realism. With this accent on the theological and political difference between Judaism and Christianity (thus reintroducing a dichotomy, though he claimed to abolish them), Benamozegh’s apologetics are unmistakable: the political nature of humankind and the necessity for religion to answer its needs were paramount in his thought. To illustrate this interdependence a different way, Benamozegh depicted individuals and nations as interconnected parts of a larger organism. Couching political and social phenomena in scientific language, he detailed societies and polities as a form of life composed of mutually interdependent parts that maintain various vital processes. He thus conveyed a heightened sense of necessity—and of universality. In a word, the election of the Israelites marks the point at which humanity

comes back to itself, where the straight line curves, where the civil world of



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nations is conceived, where the protoplasm forms into a cell, a central cell that, in incorporating all that surrounds it, will become a perfect organism, which

is to say a cellular coordination around a central core. A link was thus created,

a universal link because it was the humanitarian priesthood that was created. And the link being created, the civil world, the humanitarian organism is created because that organism is at once the cause and the sign of its birth.6

This passage was edited in the 1914 edition. Pallière did not keep any of the wording regarding protoplasm, cells, line, and curves.7 It is nonetheless significant in that it instantiates how Benamozegh’s references to biology thinly veiled his political agenda based on the long-standing metaphor of society as a body,8 though refined with the biological concepts of his time. He endowed this operative metaphor with particular theological significance: For Hebraism, the nation, with its mission, its own life, is the link that connects man as individual with a future humanity ultimately constituted in its

definitive unity. This humanity is thus not, in the view of Hebraism, the inorganic multitude of individuals, but the organic unity of nations. For Christianity, on the other hand, as we know, it is the opposite view that prevails.9

Benamozegh belabored Christianity’s flawed foundations and self-understanding: because its individual-centered approach did not have to stand the test of a polity, it gave birth to morality, not to politics: “Politics, however pure, will never be able to compare with plain morality,” he observed,10 and ascribed an undue sense of moral superiority to Christianity’s escape from politics. He furthered his criticism by suggesting that the faith runs counter to the unfolding of history, going from the individual to the community, and to progress: The individual, the nation, humanity, these are the three degrees of development of human nature on our earth. According to the Bible, they traveled

successively in both directions, by a double movement of descent and as-

cent. Humanity, personified and concentrated first in Adam, gives birth to the patriarchs of the diverse nations and they to the multitude of individu-

als. That first evolution accomplished, another begins; individuals, grouping

off more and more, constitute nations, and nations in turn move ever more toward further reestablishing the links of humanity among one another.11

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Supporting his claim with a smattering of references to the naturalists Linnaeus, Lamarck, Buffon, and most importantly Darwin, Benamozegh added the language of evolutionary theory to a Hegelian worldview. He charted the path from the individual to the transcendent unity of humanity while reiterating the development of consciousness of the holy from inner content to outer public forms. He expanded his operative metaphor of solidarity—that of a family nucleus—to humanity:12 “For Hebraism, the world is like a large family where the father lives in immediate contact with his children, who are the various nations of the world.”13 Reclaiming the Jewish provenance of this image displayed once again a tendency in Benamozegh’s thinking: his way of asserting Jewish universalism often sounded like an unvarnished rebuke of Christianity’s claims by advancing instances of Israel’s antecedence in any aspect held to be a Christian innovation, which explained the French rabbinate’s uneasiness with the tone of his text. Benamozegh used this idea of a family of nations to make a case for solidarity through kinship but also to ascribe different responsibilities to each people, according to their status and capacities. He justified Israel’s status as a “priestly people”14 or “priests of humankind”15 with an analogy of family structures in ancient time where it was incumbent on the firstborn to take up a priestly office.16 But this priesthood could also be interpreted as an ethnocentric barrier. In that regard, Benamozegh’s treatment of chosenness is complex. The closest biblical equivalent of the phrase “priests of humankind” is mamlachat kohanim (kingdom of priests)17 in Exodus 19:5–6. “Now therefore if you obey my voice and keep my covenant then you will be my own treasure among all people; for all the earth is mine: And you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” The expressions am segulah (treasure) and goi kadosh (holy nation) recur a number of times in the Pentateuch. The fact that the mamlachat kohanim (kingdom of priests) stands alone has generated a number of interpretations, including that of Rashi, the most influential medieval commentator, seeking to understand why this “kingdom of priests” promise was neither reiterated nor fulfilled. Until the dawn of the Reform movement, however, only a few commentators examined the relationship between Israel and other nations, and what being a “nation of priests” implied for Israel. Two versions were envisioned: an active, educational role or a passive, silent mission. Maimonides envisioned a great but tacit role:18 Israel



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was to indirectly serve as a model by its mere existence and its righteousness through the observance of the mitzvot (“they will imitate your actions and walk in your path”). In the sixteenth century, the Italian rabbi, physician, and commentator Ovadia Sforno (1475–1550) defined this task in a more active way: it is God’s design for Israel to teach monotheism to the nations, but the people forfeited this privilege by worshipping the golden calf and so the task could not be achieved before the messianic era.19 More than two centuries later, Mendelssohn, drawing on Sforno’s exegesis, held that it was incumbent upon Israel to “teach incessantly, to proclaim, and to endeavor to preserve these ideas among the nations by its mere existence, as it were.”20 The mission theory was soon to become a staple of emancipation literature. On the other hand, in his Nineteen Letters, Samson Raphael Hirsch, the nineteenth-century German rabbi and thinker who shaped Modern Orthodoxy, made recourse to the notion of “silent example” and insisted that Judaism has to promote the ethical aspect (“universal justice and love”).21 The outcome was to be a return to God and thus a way to bring about the messianic age. The scope of Jewish universalism here is thus not just about inclusiveness: it is a task that will benefit the non-Jewish world and will have an eschatological impact. I will address the limitations of such a messianic setting in part 4. When Benamozegh expanded on “priestly nation,” that thorny biblical phrase, he imbued it with the spirit of the Risorgimento and gravitated toward a more active role. Mazzini and Gioberti, whom he cited abundantly, themselves made great use of the “priestly nation” trope to describe the political role of a Catholic Italy, and the nation’s essence. The invocation of the spirit attributed to each nation—but interpreted in a theological key—echoed the Risorgimento’s tropes of exceptionalism (as seen in chapter 2), with Benamozegh’s addition of explicit references to German philosophy and the notion of the Volksgeist.22 He aimed to demonstrate the Jewish genealogy of this principle, which he traced back to the sarim, angels assigned to each nation who both protect and represent an aspect of the nation and its fate. It is not accidental that the sarim appear in the book of Daniel, which deals with the rise and fall of empires: these entities came to embody the angels assigned to each nation, their participation in

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the manifestation of the idea of unity and its guiding principles, under one God. While this notion goes back to ancient Israel and is reaffirmed in rabbinic sources, Benamozegh presented it as partly kabbalistic: “For Hebraic theology, the sarim are the abstract elements, attributes or partial aspects of the idea of God, who is the synthesis of them all. This doctrine, explicitly taught by the Kabbalah, is contained implicitly in the Bible.”23 Gikatilia’s medieval treatise Sha‘arei ’Orah, an important reference in Benamozegh’s work, supported his idea of the plurality of God’s attributes, of the “moments of God,” as the rabbi identified the expression Elohei-ha-Elohim—God of gods—with the sarim.24 Benamozegh’s purpose in this part of his work was to emphasize the intrinsic monotheism of Judaism: Israel stands for the shechina, the divine presence in the world, which Benamozegh defined as “the divine in the world; that is, the fullness of the Godhead in its relations with the created, whereas other nations worship only partial aspects of God.”25 With these parallels, he also sought to prove that Judaism had grasped how the different nations and the articulation of their differences could best undergird a robust universalism—which the rabbi also characterized as cosmopolitanism.

Cosmopolitanism and the “Civil World of Nations”

For all its kabbalistic sources, the cosmopolitan construct that Benamozegh proposed and its role in unifying humanity had Kantian overtones. In his Idea for a Universal History, Kant defined cosmopolitanism as “the matrix within which all the original capacities of the human race may develop.”26 This formulation resonated with Benamozegh’s own understanding: if nations are the means through which humanity perfects itself, cosmopolitanism is an instrument to achieve this self-perfection and to achieve the goal of unity with which Judaism is tasked, both on a cosmic and on a human level, as we have seen. The following passage, in Benamozegh’s cumulative style, and in its search for an articulation between the natural and the human realms, conflates individual and natural bodies: The conclusion that Mosaic Judaism, beyond its own end, is preordained to fulfill a universal or cosmopolitan role comes from there [i.e., the fact that

it contains two sets of laws]. That law is proven more or less in the world of



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nations, where each fulfills a role in humanitarian life, in individuals within society and even in bodies in nature. [It is] a law that one could refer to

as a law of the double life, individual and relational, or even of the double

role that each thing fulfills in the universal life of end and means, save the

difference that elsewhere means and end are more mixed up, and above all

if one is soon conscious neither of one nor of the other, of the role of the

means, which would demand an elevation of spirit that is not ordinary— one capable of making us almost exit from ourselves.27

Unpacking this passage illuminates two pivotal aspects of Benamozegh’s political thought: First, an organism does not exist in isolation, but rather on two levels—both as a self-standing and as a connective entity; in other words, it is an (open) monad and a relational entity, and cosmopolitanism is thus a connecting force. Second, the quotation introduces the notion of humanitarianism, which had gained currency in the nineteenth century, and which he articulates with cosmopolitanism. Benamozegh chose to emphasize cosmopolitanism in a Kantian sense and ignored Rousseau’s Social Contract, in which the Swiss philosopher opined that cosmopolites “boast that they love the whole world in order to have the right to love no one.”28 Again, he sought to discuss cosmopolitanism instead of the cosmopolites—the idea, and not its concrete realization. It was the higher purpose of cosmopolitanism that he emphasized at a time when the intense outbursts of nationalism increasingly made it synonymous with rootlessness, individualistic opportunism, and outright parasitism. It is worth noting that the term cosmopolitan appears more in the manuscript than in the 1914 version and Pallière’s editorial interventions (replacing cosmopolitanism with universalism) arguably manifested an awareness of the term’s negative connotations, especially as it became associated with Jewishness in anti-Semitic slander which stridently pitted cosmopolitanism against humanitarianism.29 Framing cosmopolitanism as patriotism was very much at the heart of Benamozegh’s agenda, and part of reconciling the particular with the universal: “Do ethnic particularism and localization preclude universalism?”30 he asked in the manuscript while stressing the necessity of maintaining this tension, comparing it to “the two poles of a battery, positive and negative,

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which maintain a perpetual stream of life and of warmth of all the parts of Hebraism.”31 Such is the ambition stated in the 1885 Introduction: In any case, we will have proven that Hebraism did not cease to speak of humanity to humanity. On the other hand, we will show how the ideal that Hebraism formed for itself of man and of humanitarian organization, ei-

ther as a state or as a nation, or as humanity, far from being surpassed, was

only approached from a great distance, and that it is in accepting this ideal, in revising its Christianity, that humanity will be able, without renouncing its most valued principles, to believe in God and his revelation.32

The word humanity carried a degree of ambivalence, especially in a theologically or religiously oriented work—conveying both worthiness (distinguishing man from animals) and limitation (opposing man and God, with an emphasis on human frailty).33 The rabbi also used the adjective humanitarian. According to Raymond Williams, this word appeared in the nineteenth century in English and pertained to the characterization of Jesus as human, rather than divine, but soon embraced an ethical dimension. The embrace of Jesus’s humanity entailed a greater emphasis on this world and put people at the center. It thus involved an increased sense of responsibility and of the connectedness between human beings without thoroughly dissipating its religious overtones.34 Claiming to encompass both philosophy and the minimal amount of religiousness indispensable to the life of humanity, and in society, humanitarianism eventually morphed into a secular doctrine of conciliation.35 The French socialist philosopher Pierre Leroux (1791–1871), in D’une religion naturelle, expressed it as the necessity of religion, of “beliefs held by all,” but he quickly turned his generation into advocates of secular morality.36 Indeed, until the late 1860s, the notion of humanity had become a staple in the writings of social-Catholic writers—whom Benamozegh often cited though he recast the concept in a Jewish key. By demonstrating how Judaism also had a conception of humanity, Benamozegh sought to reclaim the notion of solidarity—present in all these writers’ agendas—as part of the Jewish patrimony. In his system, humanity is an aggregate, an accumulation of parts, of secular entities, mirroring the relationships of individuals in



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a society: “humanity or the world of nations,” or “the idea of humanity or the civil world of the nations”37 express a singular born out of a plural, an interconnectedness born out of difference, and a universalism born out of interdependence.

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Benamozegh’s Legacies, between Levinas and Religious Zionism

Particularism as Universalism: Levinas

Benamozegh introduced a definition of particularism conducive to universalism: “If there is any kind of particularism among Jews, it is so they can be more universal, more cosmopolitan, more catholic.”1 The universal predicated on the particular foreshadows the definition given by Levinas: “a particularism that conditions universality,”2 of which he offered variations such as: “Jewish universalism has always revealed itself in particularism.”3 A few lines earlier, in the same essay, “Jewish Thought Today,” the philosopher described, without naming it, the Noahide legislation. On other occasions, however, he did explicitly refer to it,4 including in the following assertion where he links humanity, Jews, and non-Jews: “A Jew can communicate just as intimately with a non-Jew who portrays humanity—in other words, with the Noahide—as with any other Jew.”5 This articulation begs the question of the possible influence of Benamozegh on Levinas.6 Even though he makes no textual reference to Benamozegh,7 Levinas was undoubtedly exposed to the thought of the Livornese rabbi through two of his main interlocutors, Jacob Gordin (1888–1947)8 and Léon Askénazi (1922–96),9 known as Manitou.10 Both the Russian-born Gordin, who was trained in philosophy in Germany, and Askénazi, his proud, Algiers-born student, who was educated in Algeria and 102



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Morocco, tried to foster greater unity within the Jewish community while engaging non-Jews and non-Jewish sources. Both expressed an interest in Kabbalah and the Noahide Laws and acknowledged the impact of Benamozegh on their thinking.11 In one of his lectures, Askénazi specifically evoked his own study of Benamozegh with regard to the legislation, calling him the “founder of the Noahide movement.”12 For all his familiarity with Talmudic sources, Levinas’s attention given to Noahism as a Jewish articulation of the particular and the universal might also have been facilitated by Jacob Gordin, who was a former student of the Marburg seminary founded by the neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918). Cohen held the Noahide Laws to be evidence of Judaism’s invention of a civil status and of its concern with the relationship between Jews and non-Jews.13 Yet gauging Cohen’s terminology and philosophical leanings makes an affinity between Levinas and Cohen less likely than a proximity with Benamozegh: Levinas only makes two brief references to Cohen in his work—a paucity which, as we have seen, does not preclude a measure of influence.14 Yet lexical differences are noteworthy: Cohen uses “singularity (Singularität)” and not “particularism (Partikularismus)” to describe Jewish exceptionalism,15 and, even though he tried to make a case for the social worth of Judaism, he still operated under a Mendelssohnian framework, decoupling religion and philosophy. In Cohen’s system, still infused with Kantianism, the particular should yield to the universal, lest it exclude itself from the philosophical system in which it should partake. Levinas, on the other hand, as Benamozegh had done before him, makes particularism a philosophical lynchpin of the universal: it is a path toward a concrete, pluralistic universalism. Benamozegh deemed abstract universalism, as heralded by Pauline Christianity in its bid to abolish national identities or lineages, to be unfulfilling for the human soul and thus dangerous for society as a whole. Ignoring the problem of a lack of community I addressed earlier, he held that Noahism promised pragmatic coexistence based on shared moral principles. However, the embrace of the Noahide doctrine by contemporary conservative and fringe religious Zionists sheds light on a different set of tensions contained in the very proposition of Jewish universalism: a Noahide articulation of a

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link between Israel and the nations in which a hierarchy subsists and can lend itself to its most ethnocentric expression, one that may even jeopardize the very coexistence it flaunts. A Benamozegh influence on the trajectory of Noahism as a theological and political tool coopted by the religious right wing can be traced back to Askénazi, whose own religious Zionism was inspired by Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook (1891–1982) in the late 1950s. The Orthodox rabbi who would go on to become leader of the Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) movement, which, with messianic accents, was responsible for the modern religious settlement movement in Judea and Samaria,16 introduced Askénazi to the thought of his own father, Abraham Kook, prompting him to move to Israel in 1968.17 From then on, Askénazi’s universalism was increasingly traversed and altered by Abraham Kook’s “national mysticism.”18 The writings of the first chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine, who was also a poet, jurist, and kabbalist, oscillate between tradition and modernity, between Jewish particularism and openness to the nations. The writings share some affinities with Benamozegh, which I will further explore in part 3—all of which nourished a distinctive dialectical tone, giving Kook’s thought a dynamic quality but also lending itself to vehement Jewish exclusivism, recuperable by the nationalreligious camp.19 Upon his move to Israel, Askénazi taught in nonacademic institutions in Jerusalem for an audience composed mostly of francophone students,20 some of whom were also mentored by Zvi Yehuda Kook and have become high-profile right-wing religious Zionists.21 The turn to the Livornese rabbi among the settlers’ movement appears to be a quest for theological legitimization, beyond the traditional Rav Kook reference, on how to deal with the question of “the nations” (while always questioning the authenticity of the text of Israel and Humanity on passages that do not seem pugnacious enough). The mentions of Benamozegh in Nekuda, the monthly opinion outlet of the movement since 1979,22 were sufficiently remarkable to draw the attention of Yair Sheleg, a senior Haaretz writer who covers religious Zionism.23 The agenda behind the implementation of the Noahide Laws comes down to promoting the legal status of ger toshav (resident aliens) as a constitutional development, a version of secondclass citizenship for Israeli Arabs, which Askénazi proposed in 1993.24 A more aggressive version of this move had taken place in 1988, when the Kach



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party of the ultranationalist, ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn-born Meir Kahane seized on the Noahide Laws as an opportunity to mask discrimination under the pretense of legal pluralism. Kahane was banned from running for office by the Central Elections Committee for being “antidemocratic and racist,” a judgment that was confirmed by the Israeli Supreme Court.25 Yet thirty years later, in July 2018, a law was passed effectively promoting these worldviews without any stated theological considerations.26 The influence of right-wing Zionists has grown and benefited from an alliance with American evangelical movements, and one of the ways in which their views align is Noahism. The first Noahide convention in Fort Worth, Texas, in April 1990, organized by Kahane, was an early instance of this rapprochement. Christian Noahide communities had started making contacts in Israel in the late 1970s and 1980s when their movement took shape: in the late 1970s, following the lead of a Baptist leader, disillusioned Christians in the Southern United States turned to the Noahide Laws, Pallière’s writings, and Benamozegh’s teachings to redesign their own set of beliefs (while faulting Pallière, however, for not breaking from the Catholic Church).27 As Askénazi himself noted, the new Noahide movement did not take off in Europe and is essentially Protestant and of modest size.28 The inclination toward creating new religiosities outside of institutional churches (which had been seen as discouraging by many observers), and toward the individualizing of faiths, suited the American ethos better. Additionally, the ground was more favorable in the United States because of the echo given to the Noahide campaign under the auspices of Chabad, the Jewish outreach group. Starting in the 1980s and led by the Rav Menachem Schneerson, it aimed to educate the general public about Noahism and to enter the political arena.29 A proclamation by President Ronald Reagan in 1982, on the occasion of Schneerson’s birthday, explicitly mentioned the laws as a “moral code for all of us regardless of faith” and instituted that day as a national day of reflection,30 followed by a congressional resolution in 1991 that was signed into law by President George H. W. Bush. The appeal of the Noahide Laws to right-wing Zionists in Israel illustrates the ambiguity of the ancient legislation regarding the promotion of religious unity and coexistence. Just like the Noahide Laws, Kabbalah was also often described by Benamozegh as an instrument of religious coexistence

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and as the possibility of appeased modernity, but it, too, has lent itself to extreme views, as I show in the next chapter.31

o If universalism is a marker of modernity, Benamozegh invoked different vehicles for this universalism within Judaism. First, he made a case for his understanding of tradition, such as Talmudic discussions, which are made up of deliberation and practical reason and reconcile the particular and the collective, the heteronomous and the autonomous. Second, he showed a route whereby the universal can be located within the particular—which does not mean an emphasis on the abstract individual, as Christianity had proposed, nor a purely philosophical universalism. Benamozegh’s contention that the emphasis on either the nation (a collectivity) or on individuals had theological sources and carried crucial consequences for the kind of modernity societies choose for themselves constitutes the gist of Buber’s 1950 Two Types of Faith. The German philosopher discerned in the oscillation between these two poles (the Hebrew ’emunah, a collective trust in God in which one finds oneself as a member of a community, and the Christian pistis, a salvific belief in Jesus to which one is converted as an individual) a source of the tension: “The crisis of our time is also the crisis of the two types of faith [. . . . ] Christian Pistis was born outside the historical experiences of nations, so to say in retirement from history, in the souls of individuals.”32 For Benamozegh there could be no retreat of religion from history (and this included the present time) as it would lead to such attitudes as disastrous papal conservatism. Nor could history retreat from religion—which would leave human beings without transcendence. Benamozegh held that in order to better articulate the relation of this world to transcendence, of microcosm to macrocosm, one had to turn to Kabbalah. Just as Jewish universalism suggested a horizontal continuity between human beings, Kabbalah could provide a continuum between human beings and the divine realm—and thus break artificial binaries and mend the fractures of modernity.

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B E YO N D B I NA R I E S Kabbalah as a Tool for Modernity

Fractur e s and f issur e s are often invoked to capture the individual’s experience of modernity: modern consciousness is “divided within and against itself ” between worldly attachments and transcendental aspirations, a split between inner perception and the outer world, a fragmented comprehension of oneself between autonomy and heteronomy.1 One of Benamozegh’s contributions was to acknowledge these splintered selves and to turn to Kabbalah to provide a religious framework capable of overcoming the destabilizing effects of modern disjunctions. The Livornese rabbi presented the Jewish tradition as a potential response to the spiritual unrest of his time, a means of articulating anew the relationship between inner and outer reality, the law and its symbolism, this world and the cosmos. Recent literature on Kabbalah and modernity has sought to probe what Eric Jacobson has called the “clandestine affinities” between the two.2 Yet Benamozegh had already endeavored to bring to the fore the affinities between the Jewish tradition and the needs of his time. In many ways he engaged with the popular work of the German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, whose 1869 Philosophy of the Unconscious took Europe by storm and whose subsequent work, The Religion of the Future, in 1874—its full title is The Auto-Destruction of Christianity and the Religion of the Future—also captured the anxiety and the psyche of his time. 107

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Benamozegh read and amply quoted from the French version of the latter work and was particularly receptive to Hartmann’s urge to find a future religious path grounded in traditional faiths but channeling them anew: “It is natural,” he wrote, “that these efforts should be connected with traditional religions, whether because it would be a hazardous and impractical undertaking to start afresh, or because the idea of historical continuity has imposed itself upon the modern consciousness as an invaluable good.”3 If modernity implies a break—an epistemological disruption or a temporal discontinuity—Benamozegh’s response to modernity was to go beyond this apparent rupture by finding, in Kabbalah, the intellectual and spiritual tools that dispel the fractures in the individual’s psyche, within communities, between different ethnic or religious groups, and by extension in society as a whole.

l CHAP TER 10 '

K A B BA L A H

Reason and the Power of Myth

Benamozegh penned his defense of Kabbalah as a marker of modernity in a counterintuitive fashion: as both science and myth. By calling it theosophy and imbuing it with scientific overtones, he presented a version of Kabbalah compatible with reason—a version distant from what common enlightened views of it would have been. By highlighting its mythical qualities as well, however, he also sought to demonstrate the need for human narratives that go beyond reason.

Reassessing the “Pariah Science”1

Benamozegh defined Kabbalah as theosophy, science, or acroamatism, only rarely making use of the term mysticism.2 In an 1864 article in L’Univers israélite, “La Kabbale ou la tradition théosophique” (Kabbalah, or the Theosophical Tradition), he explicitly equated the two terms Kabbalah and theosophy and continued to do so through the last volume he published during his lifetime, 1897’s Théosophie.3 His stance was the same in both his public writings and his private correspondence. In an 1877 letter to Morais, he observed: “It seems to me that you display ideas hostile to the kabbalistic theology—or rather theosophy, as I call it.”4 The rabbi’s 1868 article “Our Theosophy,” published in Il Corriere Israelitico, sheds interesting light on this lexical choice, which highlights revelation: “One does not and cannot speak 109

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of theosophy, except to describe a dogmatic system which, rightly or wrongly, claims a revealed origin.”5 By presenting theosophy as based on dogma rather than an individual or collective experience of the divine, Benamozegh sought to reshape the perception of Kabbalah against accusations of “practical” Kabbalah (i.e., magic) or superstition, for which he blamed “the cult of the Hasidic ultra-kabbalists.”6 He insisted on a more intellectual and inclusive understanding of the tradition. The term theosophy gained new overtones, however, with the creation of the Theosophical Society in 1875, designed to promote the “synthesis of science, religion and philosophy.”7 Benamozegh’s use of the term predates the ascent of the theosophical movement and its scope is notably different. In his usage, it is an aspect of a specific institutionalized faith, solidly grounded in it and enriching it. The movement, founded by Madame Blavatsky, made no claim to be a religion, and its success testifies to the late-nineteenth-century Western zeitgeist and the taste for occultism and esotericism. Given the popularity of Blavatsky’s teachings, the Livornese rabbi was likely aware of the phenomenon8 but made no mention of it. The noun theosoph (theosophos) was used by the Church Fathers as a synonym for theologian but, in most instances, the two terms did not overlap. Theosophy as a knowledge of God does not imply theology but rather the quality of being “moved by the divine science,” as its etymology conveys. The term itself was the coinage of the third-century Neoplatonic philosopher Porphyry, who used it to describe the ideal reconciliation of a philosopher, an artist, and a priest; Benamozegh’s manuscript does cite Porphyry as an instance of agreement between rabbis and philosophers.9 From its origin, then, the term has conveyed a notion of linkage. The systematic use of theosophy to refer to Kabbalah flourished in the Baroque era in Germany (1600–1720) around Jacob Boehme (1575–1624)10 and saw theosophy gain the prestige of a philosophical doctrine, though in a Christian context.11 But it was the German historian of philosophy Jakob Brucker (1696–1770) who spelled out the new understanding of theosophy in his Historia critica Philosophiae (Leipzig, 1741), a reference throughout the Enlightenment that was elegantly plagiarized by Diderot in the Encyclopedia’s twenty-six-page article on theosophy.12 The popularity of the



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Encyclopedia in learned circles across Europe helped to spread the use of the word and it gained currency again with the pre-romantic movement in Germany, which saw the seventeenth-century Rhenish mystic Jakob Boehme as an influence.13 In Italy, Antonio Rosmini (1797–1855), a Catholic philosopher and contemporary of Benamozegh, further expanded the use of the term theosophy in his posthumous Teosofia (1859) to designate the general metaphysics of being.14 Because theosophy involves a degree of interpenetration between transcendence and immanence, between the created world and the unknowable, it makes nature into a point of contact and a mode of revelation that dispels the accusation of pantheism that had long been leveled at Spinozism and Kabbalah since the Pantheismusstreit (pantheism controversy) of the late eighteenth century.15 Man is given a pivotal place in theosophy: God’s revelation entails a role for humankind, a triangulation between God and nature, so that, in the words of Antoine Faivre, “the fragmented, splintered ‘multiverse’ becomes the universe once more.”16 Faivre further holds that theosophy conveys “a world bearing meaning and composed of living pluralities.”17 Views of such a multilayered universe appeared in the sixth century bce in the writings of the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximander and were reclaimed by the Dominican friar, philosopher, astronomer, and poet Giordano Bruno, who argued that the universe is infinite, rejected the geocentric conception of it, and was burned at the stake for heresy in Rome in 1600—both of whom featured in Benamozegh’s writings and public lectures.18 The plurality of worlds accords with the rabbi’s conception of a multifaceted universe and its secret unity. In the wake of Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Moshe Idel's taxonomy complicates our understanding of theosophy by adding that it “denotes experiential knowledge of the hidden life of divinity.”19 Such an experiential aspect of Kabbalah hardly appeared in Benamozegh’s writings. The form it would have taken in his time was Hasidic literature, which he ignored (in what was probably a deliberate omission, since the inventory of his library shows that he owned several of its major texts).20 Benamozegh’s concern was that the movement opposed precisely what the rabbi advocated: a true engagement with the non-Jewish world.21 A common criticism by enlightened Jews was that Hasidism represented a retreat from

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society.22 By placing Hasidism outside the scope of his inquiry and calling its practices senseless, Benamozegh stayed away from examining Kabbalah as a practice or any version of a Kabbalah-based experience that could tinge his argument for theosophy with irrationalism or ethnocentrism. Nor did he pay any attention to other kabbalistic circles, some of which were active across the Mediterranean during his time. They included the Beit El group in Jerusalem, whose pursuits had nothing to do with mystical experiences and were centered on metaphysical knowledge.23 And for all his advocacy of Oriental Judaism, Benamozegh’s only reference to a modern Sephardi kabbalist in a text written for a broader audience was to Rabbi Khalifa Ibn Malka, a renowned seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Moroccan merchant and kabbalist who appears in a brief and convoluted passage of Israel and Humanity that was excised from the final version.24 Instead, he zeroed in on the more intellectual understanding of the Hebraism he sought to promote toward a Western audience. The rules of this engagement had to be grounded in reason. It is not incidental that another word of choice for Benamozegh to describe Kabbalah was science, which may be understood as scholarship (“science” in French and “scienza” in Italian referring to both the humanistic and the naturalistic disciplines)—a terminology that, like theosophy, can be found in Christian Kabbalah.25 Finally, Benamozegh often also gravitated toward the term acroamatism— a lexical choice that tends to be obfuscated by Pallière’s decision to replace the word with the more intelligible term esoteric (regarding esoteric theology or doctrine) in the 1914 edition, kept as is in the English translation. Only by probing the manuscript can one get to the sources of Benamozegh’s thought. Connected to secret Aristotelian doctrine, acroamatism implies the orality linked to secrecy: “a progressive unveiling of what used to be veiled and a successive composition of what used to be traditional [with “traditional” connoting “transmission”]”—a process which Benamozegh sees as “the method of evolution of Hebraism,” and of the progressive revelation of religion.26 Beyond its Aristotelian origin, acroamatism signals the influence of Vincenzo Gioberti who used the term consistently, especially in his project of reforming the church through a return to its more elitist traditions. Such an agenda resonated with Benamozegh’s views on religious history, and specifically with



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his account of the Gospels, which he painted as the flawed understanding by laymen of a message destined for a handful of initiates.27 Benamozegh’s carefully chosen lexicon—theosophy, acroamatism, and science—and his studied avoidance of mysticism testifies to the lack of relevance of the latter term for him, or his defiance toward it. “Public opinion,” he noted, “is not generally favorably inclined toward mysticism and especially those who misrepresent it.”28 Boaz Huss’s discussion of the category of mysticism as an extension of Western Christian concepts should be brought to bear here.29 Categories such as mysticism belong to a European and Protestant ethos: framing mysticism as a private, subjective, experiential, apolitical, and asocial phenomenon conjured up a Protestant approach to religion. When Adolph Jellinek, a fervent advocate of Kabbalah, called it “Jewish mysticism” in Germany in 1853, and deemed it “an essential stage in the spiritual development of humankind,” he was operating in the context of a Protestant milieu and adjusted Judaism to the categories of the dominant ethos. Benamozegh and his contemporaries in Catholic countries made less frequent reference to mysticism as a category30 Moreover, mysticism fails to capture the Livornese rabbi’s understanding of his own project—defined as theosophy and appealing to the intellect. If we use the standard definition of mysticism as “a kind of knowledge which is by its very nature incommunicable,” it is at odds with the rabbi’s vision for Kabbalah in his time and with its stated purpose of educating both Jews and non-Jews while using it as a corrective for the ills of his era. Benamozegh’s focus is not on an individual’s experience but on the building of a community and, to foster this civic engagement, he marshaled the tools he judged necessary, of which myth was one.

The Uses of Myth

Modernity changed the understanding and uses of myth. Myths challenge an overzealous historicism likely to foster a sense of discontinuity in the human psyche that leads to religious and social alienation. Historicism, in Blumenberg’s definition, is “the interpretation of any individual historical phenomenon as having a specific character that in each case is the product of a process or a historical development rather than a spontaneous generation or a transcendental interpretation.”31 But Benamozegh was adamant

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that modern historical consciousness ought not to discount its underlying metaphysics, of which myth was an expression. Human phenomena were, indeed, a product of a specific time and place, but they bespoke greater, collective aspirations. By retrieving ancient, mythical narratives, mostly kabbalistic, that resist history and express a belief in the common origins of mankind, Benamozegh set out to use religion to assuage the fragmentation of modernity. With the Enlightenment, the subject no longer needed to resort to external, stable, and collective moral sources in order to foster a perception of unity between the self and the world—to “make sense of it,” as Charles Taylor has put it.32 Myth, however, could play such a role: Talal Asad has demonstrated how myth came to be conceived of as a return to the original way of grasping a spiritual truth.33 Indeed, envisioning myth as deception, as Plato did, had in fact been a disruption; a survey of the dichotomy between mythos and logos (traditionally framed as rational, philosophical, and scientific thought) shows that mythos was initially associated with truth and a speech act imbued with authority.34 Such a power of mythos is illustrated in Hesiod’s Works and Days—a book that influenced Benamozegh’s thinking; he referenced it three times in Israel and Humanity, as well as in his biblical commentary. For Benamozegh, recasting religion as myth meant seeing it as metaphysical truth and poetry, as both an intellectual and an emotional endeavor. Retrieving myth as a way to foster collective identities had started gaining momentum a century prior, both among English deists in England and more importantly, for Benamozegh, by Giambattista Vico.35 If properly understood as mythmaking, Kabbalah served a number of distinct purposes: deflecting the accusation of a Jewish literalism, creating a fictionalism that would make Kabbalah immune to historicism, and emphasizing human unity in its capacity for self-understanding through narrative.

Deflecting Accusations of Literalism

Benamozegh envisioned Kabbalah’s potential for mythmaking as the best defense of Judaism in the age of biblical criticism, which focused on the authorship and historical sources of Scripture—but also against the longstanding accusations of literalness, by which Christian philosophers portrayed



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a Jewish legalistic mindset lost in Talmudic minutiae. By the nineteenth century, this trope had morphed into, among other things, Renan’s denial of the mythologizing faculty to the Israelites—and to Semites in general.36 For Benamozegh, Kabbalah was the key to deflecting this claim. “Kabbalah,” he told Luzzatto, “renders Christian polemics useless and powerless because it fills the immense void left by material Mosaism.”37 With this peculiar association of Mosaism with “material,” Benamozegh hinted at the Pauline dichotomy between Judaism and Christianity, conceived of as law versus spirit, which had led Paul to cancel the law. Benamozegh couched it in a language of modernity, making it into a dichotomy between materialism and spirit, before turning it around and demonstrating that Kabbalah could amend these oppositions, answer the aspirations and ideals of the age, and avoid further apostasies, which had been one of the motifs for a Jewish rejection of Kabbalah. “Mosaism, deprived of theosophy,” he wrote, “can neither retain nor fulfill those who follow it,”38 and this is why, he creatively explained in La Kabbale, Paul’s antinomianism was what accounted for his (sometimes obscure) anti-kabbalistic formulations.39 Benamozegh’s strategy achieved two purposes. First, departing from the interpretations of his time, such as that of the historian Heinrich Graetz, who held that Paul had limited knowledge of the Hebrew Bible, Benamozegh placed Christianity squarely within the ambit of Judaism, which furthered his agenda of highlighting the proximity of the two religions. Second, he enhanced the standing of Kabbalah from a Jewish perspective: the rites and narratives of Kabbalah could actually make the observance of Jewish law more compelling. The rabbi’s defense of Kabbalah adumbrates what Scholem—whose contempt for Benamozegh is documented—expressed in a 1937 letter to his publisher, Schocken, as he explained his interest in Kabbalah: “I was interested in the question: does Halakhic Judaism have enough potency to survive? [ . . . ] Does it have enough vitality in itself to survive for two thousand years without degenerating? [. . . . ] The question was tied up with my dreams about Kabbalah, through the notion that it might be the Kabbalah that explained the survival of the consolidated force of the Halakhic Judaism.”40 Jewish law, he meant, could not endure in the modern era without a narrative, a myth, to justify and support it.

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In his attempt to demonstrate the harmony between law and Kabbalah, Benamozegh used myth to revisit the ta‘amei mitzvot (reasons for the commandments), the kabbalistic version of these justifications.41 This version was at odds with philosophical speculations that sought to find rational, autonomous reasons for ethical conduct; however, if myths were part of the fabric of Kabbalah, and could be studied rationally as a reflection of the human psyche, they formed a new narrative for the commandments, one in which they tap into a primordial and poetic truth or psyche and create a deeper connection to religion. Benamozegh proposed a synthesis that was philosophical, theological, and somehow psychological: he substantiated his intuitions by reference to the nascent science of psychology of which he was an avid reader, as evidenced in his mentions of Eduard von Hartmann (who had just popularized the notion of “collective unconscious”)42 and Jean-Philibert Damiron among others. Benamozegh shared Damiron’s opinion that in order to ground moral sciences and metaphysics anew, one could not do without psychology.43

Introducing Elements of Fictionalism

In his famous definition of myth, Roland Barthes held that it “has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal.”44 If myth can appear as a way to claim that the kernel of the original truth is invariant and resists history, Benamozegh did not completely relinquish history, either; as seen in part 2, history formed part of his apologia for Judaism. In his manuscript, he introduced elements of what would later be defined as fictionalism—a middle path between history and myth.45 It would be a grave error to confound what Genesis intends to make us believe with what, according to us, is true, false, or incomplete in the narra-

tive. For us, the most important thing is what the Bible wants us to believe, the idea it implies about its God. Yet what the Bible wants us to believe is, without a doubt, that Adam was the first man and that from him stemmed

all human families. For our current purposes, this is enough: universalism

is and will remain the prevailing character of the god in the Bible: this is what we want—no less, no more.46



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The density and complexity of this quote, which might explain why Pallière excised it, is quite revealing. Here, Benamozegh takes aim at a scholarly trend that had gained ground in his time: the documentary hypothesis (a method of biblical studies focused on the origins and composition of the Pentateuch that refuted the assumption of a single authorship by Moses and posited multiple redactors, based on independent texts dating from a few centuries after Moses’s life).47 The rabbi did not invalidate the premises of this work, but he did complicate its conclusion: regardless of the layers of the redaction, and—even more so—the identity of its redactors, he argued, it is the intention that takes precedence and that sheds light on the theological ambitions of the authors, whoever they might be. Fictionalism is an operative and productive concept here: it holds that claims made within a specific discourse should not be regarded as aiming at literal truth but, instead, as a sort of “fiction.”48 It contends that “the simplest fictionalist approach to a discourse takes certain claims in that discourse to be literally false, but nevertheless worth uttering in certain contexts, since the pretense that such claims are true is worthwhile for various theoretical purposes.”49 This proposition highlights the notion of a purpose, which justifies the detour through which, the rabbi suggested, a deeper truth could be accessed. The utilitarian nature of these fictions, of which Bentham is held to be a precursor, befits the prescriptive nature of Benamozegh’s writings.50 Applying this concept helps to make sense of Benamozegh’s sometimes convoluted thinking. Consider his voluntaristic definition of “historical,” for example: “We mean by historical all that the writer believed to be such, regardless of the objective reality of his narrative.”51 While he acknowledged the scholarly breakthroughs made by source criticism, he claimed that this would not alter the theological value of the text. More significantly, and adopting a less religiously oriented stance, he conveyed that the mindset of the author always undergirds the text: history is a record of these intentions. In doing so, Benamozegh offered a Vicoian response to the concerns of rabbis in his time, who were bent on deflecting the pretensions of biblical criticism. This reading of history gives insight into the psyche of an era, its own version of timeless phenomena or archetypes. In fact, fictionalism is all the sharper as it contains a degree of historicism. Yet Benamozegh tied any

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specific, contingent phenomenon back to its reflection of a people’s value system and expression of an essential truth.52 Benamozegh’s reasoning is comparable to the approach to philosophy and Kabbalah of the nineteenth-century maskil Nathan Krochmal, whom Benamozegh referenced.53 Krochmal held that the dangers of historicism must be fought with historicism: the way to combat the perplexity induced by modernity is to use the tools that created the disorientation in the first place, and with them salvage Kabbalah and the timelessness of Judaism.54 Whether genuine worldview or strategy, this is the same “shift of the center of gravity” that Solomon Schechter endeavored to achieve: moving from claims about the veracity of the Scriptures to probing what their symbolism seeks to convey.55 Benamozegh’s work on philology operated along the same lines as his work on myth: in an age when the discipline was increasingly seen as a secular endeavor, he revisited language as a mythical substrate, showing its affinity with an original, metaphysical truth. He adopted this approach early on, in the first volume of ’Em la-Miqra’, when commenting on Genesis 1: 22: “And God blessed them. This precious teaching, which flows from the depths of the Hebrew tongue, teaches, in its greatness, the truth of the opinions of the kabbalists and their parables, which grasp at the roots of language.” The capacity of language to access primordial truth is a central tenet of Kabbalah, which is understood as a language-based blueprint for the creation of the world. But such a conception also resonates with a modern understanding of language as the receptacle of human imaginations and narratives, thus reflecting the fundamental aspirations and characteristics of humanity. The Livornese rabbi’s desire to find connections among humanity’s unconscious or myths, probably inspired by Vico’s own fantastic etymologies and his aim in New Science to “discover the ways in which the first human thinking arose,”56 sometimes led him to amalgamate too much—and this accounts for the contempt in which some scholars held him. Political communities, he noted, were fostered by myths; his remarks coincided with the rediscovery of Vico by the French historian and public intellectual Jules Michelet, who contended that myths not only have an explanatory power closely comparable to nonmythical thinking but also regulate secular societies.57 Yet Benamozegh transposed this political consciousness back onto the realm of the religious consciousness of humankind.



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Years before Carl Jung, Benamozegh claimed myth and Kabbalah to be an expression of the universal psyche—a language shared by humanity. Kabbalah’s mythmaking function, the emphasis on the collective unconscious and on the archetypes found in and spread by it, indeed became an inspiration to Jung’s later writings.58 His focus was not on the architecture of an individual’s mind itself, but on the ways in which the mind can comprehend collective expressions of metaphysical aspirations, and ultimately of the divine. Deciphering the unconscious was part of the notion and task of progressive revelation, as he understood it from a kabbalistic perspective: the unconscious had to be turned into greater consciousness. Benamozegh started exploring the notion of “consciousness of consciousness”59 in his 1877 Teologia and referenced Hartmann’s influential 1869 work Philosophy of the Unconscious. In 1897, three years before his death, Benamozegh wrote: I have long been at work on perfecting my theory of concentric conscious-

nesses that culminate in God, the consciousness of consciousnesses as the

first protological principle of the universe, in the place of intelligence, will,

etc. Now that the Unconscious is playing an increasingly important role, we may allow that it is the sense or the awareness of the greater field of

shared consciousness; it has at least been proven that we do not have total understanding of ourselves, and that our consciousness has no insurmountable boundaries.60

His operating model here is that of the iggulim, the arrangement of the sefirot in concentric circle kabbalistic and not that of the sefirotic tree where the sefira keter (crown) is at the top. Here in the circle model, keter is the outer circle and encompasses all the other sefirot61 as the culmination, the all-encompassing consciousness. Thus the nineteenth-century sensibility in Benamozegh is unmistakable; he linked the unconscious and progress in a kabbalistic framework. Yet a significant distinction remains: Benamozegh aligned the unconscious with the not-yet-revealed divine, which should eventually result in the revelation of God himself (“consciousness of consciousnesses”) in and as the human mind.62 Benamozegh’s questions echoed his peers’, and if they cannot be deemed original, his synthesis is idiosyncratic and wide-ranging, to a fault. One of the first reviewers of the original French edition of Israel and Humanity, Maurice

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Vexler, remarked on the breadth and audacity of Benamozegh’s worldview and theology, as well as his tendency to extrapolate: “From acts and from testimonies true in themselves, and which are, in any case, highly remarkable and very meaningful for the religious history of Judaism, he derives systematic consequences that go far beyond them in their significance. It must be admitted that Benamozegh appears to have never been able to distinguish between real history and theological interpretation, religious speculation and metaphysics.”63 Indeed, a number of Benamozegh’s minutiose close readings and intuitions are weakened by the sudden and triumphant extrapolations into which he repeatedly ventured. For instance, in one of his attempts to debunk any claim of religious violence based on the Hebrew Scriptures, he contended that the thorny notion of false gods was not biblical because ’elilim, the word for idols, was made up of “lo”+ “el” (“not”+ “god”), which does not mean no-gods, and thus false gods, but gods unworthy of that name.64 Based on this tenuous and questionable nuance, which he anchored in other books of the Bible,65 Benamozegh proclaimed that the language of false gods “is the language of philosophy, not of the Bible.”66 The explanation, excised by Pallière, instantiates the tendency toward sweeping exegesis that supports Vexler’s appreciation of Benamozegh. Yet, instead of discounting it completely, as many of his contemporaries did, I will look at the significance of this tendency in the next chapter. Unlike scholars of religion, who examined the texts as artifacts and teased out their collective representations, Benamozegh aimed to gauge the prescriptive nature that could be elicited from the texts and from their mythical component. This is why the figure of Adam occupies such a place in his work; he saw it as a symbol and an injunction:67 “If, in this narrative, one refuses to see a myth, we dare anyone to find anything worthy of capturing attention, if only for one instant.”68 Such a characterization of Adam provides insight into the rabbi’s thinking: We assert only that one has but to read the biblical narrative in order to

discover something other than the literal meaning. If a historical Adam ex-

isted, a mass of mythic ideas has nevertheless added to what tradition might have known about him to the point of making him unrecognizable.69



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While Benamozegh acknowledged the accretions of myth on the putative historical character of Adam, he further contended that such additions should not obscure the underlying intentions of the text: Whatever the case may be, scriptural or not, this imposing conception of Adam is incontestably Hebraic and rabbinic. It should therefore be taken into account when we study the universal beliefs of Hebraism.70

With this disclaimer, “scriptural or not,” which warrants using fictionalism to characterize his method, Benamozegh discouraged any literal reading: what the rabbis and Kabbalah want us to believe, to paraphrase his words, is the unity of humankind, exemplified through the character of Adam.71 Yet, as I will show at the end of this part, the wide-ranging receptions of Benamozegh’s attempt to establish the universalist intention of the rabbinic and kabbalistic texts showcase the limits of a self-declared political agenda of universalism when repressing other forces, notably the more ethnocentric ones, at work in these textual sources. Finally, giving such importance to the category of myth raises another concern: the exegesis of religious texts can become an exercise in comparative mythology, where syncretism lurks. Collapsing distinct, national instances into archetypes puts pressure on another aspect of Benamozegh’s thought and his emphasis on universalism-through-particularism. Syncretism is a totalizing endeavor, the dangerous narrative of pure religion against which Benamozegh cautioned in regard to Christianity (and against which Levinas also admonished later; both thinkers adamantly claimed the necessity of a universalism capable of maintaining distinctions).72 The universal religion is not a pure religion, he held: it is a product and the promise of multiple religions. Anchoring himself in theosophy and its interpretative method, Benamozegh purported to demonstrate that, in a Jewish worldview, true unity would only be achieved through consciously channeled diversity.

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Kabbalah and the Coincidence of Opposites

In Benamoz egh’s pre sentation, Kabbalah—as a form of progressive revelation—is a vehicle for achieving religious and human diversity that can transcend traditional dichotomies and anticipate scientific breakthroughs. In the credo that seals his 1877 Teologia apologetica e dogmatica, the rabbi evoked the discoveries of his time to make his case: I believe in fact that the atomism that prevails today, and at the same time

the tendency to go back to Leibnizian Monadism, the impossibility now

acknowledged even by positivists and atheists of sticking to the vulgar con-

cept of matter, the incompatibility of atomism with the expansion that will always entail ulterior divisions—the infinite divisibility, as philosophy has it; the spiritualism which, by consequence, knocks on the door of the most

atheistic science in order to take its stead and also of its rivals and finally, in the realm of the theory of knowledge, the ever-greater supremacy of

idealism (positivist or metaphysical) over other theories that give reality to the world outside—I believe that from all these reigning and cooperating

tendencies, we are amply allowed to assert that spirit and matter, inner and outer, just as theosophy posits it, can never be separated.1

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atomism, since it is predicated on the opposition of atom and void) helped him establish a certain prevalence of monism in its idealism, akin to Leibnizian monadology which, in turn, supported a Kabbalah-inspired reading of the world.2

Kabbalistic Hermeneutics

In his early text ’Eimat Mafgia‘ ‘al ’Ari, Benamozegh postulated that Kabbalah possessed its own tools of interpretation and cognition, citing Aristotle: Every science has—in addition to its subjects—a style and a form (metodo)

[in Italian in the Hebrew text] that suits it and distinguishes it from the other sciences. Kabbalah should likewise contain within itself the style which anyone interested in it must learn. In fact, it is useless to approach it with the instruments of rational inquiry without taking into account its own interpretative rules: they are an essential part of it.3

What Benamozegh introduced here is a definition of kabbalistic hermeneutics, the theory and methodology of interpretation, in which Benamozegh posited two imperatives: (a) applying rules of interpretation internal to Kabbalah in an effort of deliberation understood as a progressive and collective endeavor, (b) that these efforts would nevertheless be driven by elite minds. We saw that he held revelation to come first as an intuition, but theosophy should not be only intuitive: it required progressive clarification through an unfolding, dynamic process he called tradition. In the religious order itself, tradition is the condition and instrument of religious progress, not in the way it is sometimes understood, through extrinsic causes, but through an intrinsic evolution.4

Benamozegh’s comparison between the physiological and the religious order aims to prove that evolution is internal, and this corresponds to his understanding of tradition as an organic evolution, the progressive disclosure of God’s purposes and of the divine altogether. Consequently, Benamozegh held that it was from within, from tradition, that Judaism could find the resources to adapt to its new environment. In doing so, he refuted the notion of modernity as a break. But he assessed that the challenge for modernity

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was to find the right hermeneutical instruments in order to interpret the tradition, which, he claimed, properly understood, naturally leads to progress. And the key concepts of Benamozegh’s system, apt to reconcile the self and modernity, religion and progress, were berur and ‘illuy.

Berur: Refining the Intellect

Benamozegh wove together the Enlightenment understanding of progress (as defined by Condorcet as self-improvement) and his own religious beliefs, best expressed in his statement: “Everybody realizes how this capacity of God for disclosure is the origin of human perfectibility—of progress.”5 Yet, for human beings, a first step toward understanding God’s disclosure is a refinement of the intellect. In Israel and Humanity, the rabbi used the term berur (spelled birour) in a prescriptive mode: “One knows the important theosophical doctrine of birour, choice, separation, according to which Israel would be responsible, everywhere and at all times, to sort out the false from the true, the sacred from the profane, what is pure from what is impure.”6 Berur in Hebrew indeed signifies “choice” as well as “separation”: its triliteral root, b-r-r, denotes purification as well as the process through which this purification is achieved, which thus explains the meaning of selection or separation. In his unfinished La Kabbale et l’origine des dogmes chrétiens, Benamozegh briefly introduced the concept of berur, in a typical comparative move, by drawing parallels with the second-century Egyptian Gnostic teacher Basilides:7 “Like the kabbalists,” the rabbi explained, Basilides “taught diakrisis—which is the cleansing work within nature that kabbalists call birur, of which the word diakrisis is only a faithful translation.”8 His emphasis on such cognate concepts between Judaism and Christianity and views on nature and metaphysics were meant to offer evidence of the Jewish origins of Gnosticism. Berur as “purification” and “sifting,” however, is also pivotal in the teachings of Isaac Luria, spread by his student Haim Vital, and those teachings revolutionized Kabbalah in the seventeenth century. In Luria’s cosmology, the world results from God’s contraction (tsimtsum) of the divine infinite light into vessels in order to make space for finite realms.9 The vessels into which God’s light poured could not contain the contracted divine light and cracked (shevirat ha-kelim); the sparks, luminous



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shards of the vessels, are now trapped in the world. Through prayer and observance of the commandments, however, the sparks can be reunited with God’s essence. The world comes into existence as an outcome of this withdrawal, resulting from that tsimtsum and the paradoxical, simultaneous presence and absence of the divine. It is thus incumbent on human beings to elevate the now-scattered sparks of the primordial light and repair this creation. The theological necessity of berur appears distinctly in Mavo She‘arim, a volume of Luria’s teachings assembled by his student Vital. After the breaking of the vessels, the “emanation of those worlds created the need for tikkun [repair], in order to separate the ‘extraneous matter’ from the [edible] food. This refinement [berur] could not occur without appropriate distancing and emanations. Each world renews the [need for] an additional berur and also introduces new dimensions of matter and extraneous matter.”10 Because it leads to separating the true from the false, Benamozegh presents berur as a necessity that applies both to cosmogony and intellect, to matter and psyche; it emphasizes the continuum and a connection between these dimensions, central in Luria’s worldview. In his appendix to Israel and Humanity, Moshe Idel detects Luria’s influence in the transferring of the revealed reality from the transcendental to the immanent as it “speaks about the divine sparks engulfed within this world.”11 However, Benamozegh did not mention his sources and Luria’s presence in the rabbi’s work, which is geared to a general audience, is a complicated matter.12 Given the ethnocentrism present in Luria’s anthropology, as transmitted by his disciples,13 resorting to berur in order to demonstrate the universalism of Judaism and its importance in fostering ways of coexistence is somewhat counterintuitive, and this is why Benamozegh might have hidden the provenance of the concept, since it was at odds with his own project. Benamozegh was also silent toward another use of berur, namely in the heretical writings of Nathan of Gaza, the companion and partner of the heretic Sabbatai Zevi, notably Drush ha-Taninim (Homily on the Dragons [or Sea Monsters]). The clarification and purification of the lowermost parts of the creation through a descent involves a messianic task: “And this clear abyss is not refined and will not be refined by anyone but by the King Messiah.”14 Here, berur is an instance of redemption through sin, a concept completely absent in Benamozegh’s work; his understanding of human

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nature and progress did not involve any prior active debasement in order to rise up. Benamozegh’s berur consists in constantly refining one’s perception through one’s intellect15—a sort of discernment. Berur laid the foundation for an expanded concept of the imitation of God, a core notion in Benamozegh’s work; he wrote that “the idea that man should follow the path of his Creator, that his calling is simply to imitate God, [is] a notion that is often found in the Scriptures, though it does not usually receive the attention it deserves.”16 Benamozegh’s understanding of imitatio dei is rooted in his cosmology, which rejects the notion of a creation ex nihilo, positing instead that God engaged in berur himself as he redeemed the world from previous dark powers. Could it be possible for God to be called in Judaism the “acquirer of the

world,” insofar as he would have brought it out of chaos or brought it back

from the chaotic, disorganized and maleficent powers which possessed it before? God thus appears, since the inception, as the redeemer God.17

The imagery of the primordial chaos, the Tohu and Bohu, is a divine act of separation which attracted the attention of medieval theologians.18 Through the awareness of berur, man emulates the act of divine separation and subsequent acquisition—in the act of discerning. But Benamozegh added another layer of complexity, contending on a number of occasions that “for Kabbalah, the purpose of the cult is to harmonize the lower world with the other universes.”19 Having stated this aim, he mentioned the ideas of the sociologist and founder of positivism Auguste Comte,20 whose materialism he rejected because of its claim that the superior can be explained by the inferior: these, Benamozegh claimed, were but partial views. The kabbalistic imperative was more expansive and stemmed from the theurgy by which human actions impact the divine, which in turn impacts this world; the inferior is also explained by the superior. This is what Benamozegh called reciprocal action, “not in the rationalist sense, but the kabbalist sense, of elevation.”21 This flow maintains tension and adds to the prescriptive nature of elevation: Benamozegh asserted that divine unity was predicated on human unity,22 which raised the stakes for humanity and for the task he had ascribed to himself.



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‘Illuy: From Visions of Ascent to Nineteenth-Century Doctrines of Progress

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Benamozegh linked berur to the second term in his system of kabbalistic hermeneutics: ‘illuy, “ascent” or “rising.” He made it a prerequisite for, and a modality of, change.23 He redefined ‘illuy to mean elevation, which expands our understanding of evolution; in his words, ‘illuy is “something more than ‘evolution’”:24 “the term [ . . . ] is in common use today, but does not denote the second element [elevation].” He held ‘illuy to be “very characteristic of the Jewish doctrine, for it brings together the two ideas of movement and elevation.”25 As often when he embarked on bold interpretations, Benamozegh claimed his ideas to be firmly within the ambit of Jewish tradition while proving vague about his sources: “This word [‘illuy] belongs to Hebraic theosophy [ . . . ]” he wrote in Israel and Humanity, “but the concept itself, and the doctrine that proceeds from it, are not found only among the kabbalists. It is the patrimony of all rabbinic Judaism; or, to be more precise, Kabbalah—here, as in so many instances—is a faithful exponent of Judeorabbinic thought.”26 Describing ‘illuy as the heritage of all rabbinic (i.e., Talmudic-era) Judaism, however, is an overstatement: the word ‘illuy does appear in late midrashic literature, but only as a form of exaltation.27 When he linked ascent to what he called “progression in the creature itself ” (by which he means human beings as God’s creation), his focus seemed to be an intellectual ascent, in which sense the verbal form of ‘illuy is justified. Benamozegh avoided ‘aliyah, the term describing more traditional, physical forms of ascent that can be found in rabbinic descriptions of the entrance into heaven (such as in the tractate Shabbat 88b) or of the ascension to the palace and the throne of God in the tradition of merkavah mysticism (mysticism of the chariot) or heikhalot literature (literature of the palaces, from 100 BCE until 900 ce) that expanded on the Talmudic accounts about visions of ascent into heavenly palaces. The more common forms of ascent that can be traced back to antiquity, including angelization, were of a corporeal nature; claiming that the tradition of ascent goes back to rabbinic literature is thus only partly true.

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It is in medieval and early modern texts that these meanings of ascent went on to be depicted as an actualization of the intellect. Such works, which bear the imprint of Neoplatonism and Maimonideanism, include Zoharic literature (Tiquney Zohar), Abraham Abulafia, Isaac Cordovero’s Pardes Rimonim, Haim Vital, Isaac of Acre, and the sixteenth-century Jerusalem rabbi Yehudah Albotini.28 In Abulafia’s ecstatic Kabbalah, ascents or descents function as metaphors for intellectual activity, potentially opening up to prophecy as the ultimate proximity to the divine and the perfection of the intellect.29 Among Italian kabbalists of the early modern period, two cognate concepts appear: the elevation of matter in the work of Menachem da Fano (1548–1620) and the elevation of creation in the writings of Emmanuel Hai Ricci (1688– 1743).30 These are the closest to what Benamozegh sought to convey: the possibility of spiritualization of matter as well as his rejection of the disjunction between matter and spirit, which he had sharply criticized in his Teologia. Additionally, the Neoplatonic influences in Benamozegh’s worldview manifested themselves through the concept of a universal soul. The individual is neglected, and narratives of the ascents of specific individuals’ souls or of meditation practices found almost no echo in his work.31 Nor did he mention the figure of the tzadik as axis mundi, found in Cordovero’s Sha‘arei Tzadiq (though Benamozegh did cite Cordovero on other occasions) but also in Hasidism (he may have abstained from making reference to it given his deep antipathy toward the movement).32 This silence is revealing, however: Benamozegh’s way of ignoring the corporeal ascents of singular individuals is aligned with his presentation of Kabbalah as theosophy and as a science; instead of individual, experiential practices, he used the trope of ascent to describe evolution and prescribe a collective endeavor.

Assimilation as Elevation

Benamozegh’s treatment of berur and ‘illuy as the roadmap to progress reflects his efforts to articulate theosophy with the scientific discoveries of his time33 in which assimilation played a distinct religious role. Pallière located berur under the rubric of “assimilation theory”34 in the 1914 edition but edited out one of the lengthier passages that addressed the concept, where it is indeed defined as a form of assimilation:35



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We have said enough about this question of Egyptian borrowings. Conces-

sions which were meant to be carefully thought out—it would not in the least be contrary to modern scholarship and Orthodoxy, which fortunately

agree: spontaneous and unconscious assimilation (berur), perhaps against

their own will, in a very objective and providential action, not to say necessary, which is very possible and is very much the case in general.36

In this quite convoluted sentence, eventually edited out—another apt example of the stylistic complexity faced by Pallière—Benamozegh suddenly equates berur with assimilation, but this amalgamation deserves some clarification. Berur does mean separation but only a temporary one, not a definitive separation, which would be indicated by the word pirud.37 Berur allows for a selection process capable of evaluating each created entity (a category that can be applied to a concept or a nation), assessing its quality, and better assimilating it. In defending the place of foreign accretions in Judaism, Benamozegh’s agenda was twofold. He was defending Kabbalah against the scholars of religion who characterized the tradition as non-Jewish because it was made up of foreign accretions (and, as a consequence, making Kabbalah’s alleged irrationalism non-Jewish). And he was also defending an openness of Judaism to non-Jewish sources, the view that had prompted the Aleppo rabbinate to ban his Bible commentary. The following passage from Israel and Humanity illustrates the metaphysical groundings of his stance. Berur, he argues, refutes all attacks by rationalist critics in regard to what they call foreign

importations—Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, or Roman—into Judaism. From the theosophical point of view, these importations, to the extent

that they are true and undeniable, become perfectly legitimate and orthodox. What is more, they were judged to be so long before negative criticism

had created a need for this theory, which proves that the doctrine is not

a polemical expedient but, indeed, one of the fundamental ideas of kabbalistic theology. Acknowledging this means that the God of Israel is the Elohei-ha-Elohim, the synthesis of all others.38

Yet if the divine itself is a synthesis of other deities, and if Judaism—with its imperative of imitatio dei—is synthetic as well, the question raised earlier by the treatment of myth as a form of syncretism lingers. What is the

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nature of such a synthesis? And what is the destiny of other faiths? Are they subsumed? Benamozegh did not answer the question, nor did he raise it. Assimilation, in fact, provides insights into Hebraism at its fullest. “Autonomy and assimilation exist,” he argued, “because of each other. And the stronger [the autonomy], the stronger the organism is as it assimilates more. And it assimilates more by becoming stronger.”39 Thoughtful observers will have already noticed that this way of under-

standing the influence of other religions on Judaism in no way diminishes

its originality and autonomy. Indeed, there is no other way of accounting

for otherwise incontestable facts and of safeguarding the integrity of the Hebraic spirit and the immutability of Mosaic revelation.40

These two passages exhibit two important features of Benamozegh’s thought: the role of biological metaphors with his specific insistence on the notions of the organic and the organism, and the question of religious originality. His theory of assimilation is the nexus between emerging concepts, both in the natural sciences and in scholarship on the history of religion: In order to live, an organism needs to assimilate foreign elements and forti-

fies itself all the more as these are increasingly incorporated into it. It is no exaggeration on our part to say that the highest religion should be able to

adopt all the good contained within others and that, as a consequence, one should not believe that it occupies this preeminent place without admitting that the religion also possesses this assimilating faculty at the highest level.41

This choice of the phrase “the highest religion” alters the nature of berur, which functions as a trope for inclusivism while at the same time denoting a hierarchy that could lead to exclusivism. Benamozegh posited the subsequent elevation as “a new instance of the way Israel assimilates the borrowings from paganism and of this ascension that Hebraism sees everywhere, in life and in history, and through which, from the inferior levels, things ascend to the loftiest spheres.”42 This distinct capacity of separating and transforming the profane appeared in the kabbalistic writings of Rav Kook a few decades later and offered the same kind of tension: the profane can only be channeled through the priestly nation.43 Even if the process is understood to be a contribution to humanity, and implicitly creates an organic solidarity between



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its members, the contribution of Judaism is decisive and recreates a sense of hierarchy. Regardless of its ethnocentrism, it is important to put the concept of berur in dialogue with the literature of its time, because berur signals a discreet jab at Renan. In his Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques, Renan held that “the great Indo-European race” is “obviously destined to assimilate all others”—apart from the Semites, who could not be assimilated.44 Under Renan’s operative categories, detaching Christianity from its Semitic and ethnic cradle was the first step toward showing that Christianity was the only possible universal religion—an assertion that Benamozegh sought to annul by exposing Christianity’s Jewish origins. And to further disprove Renan’s argument, Benamozegh set out to show that the capacity for assimilation was not specific to Christianity but was in fact the theological, progress-oriented prerogative of Judaism.

The Coincidence of Opposites

Completing the hermeneutics of berur and ‘illuy is Benamozegh’s interpretation of the coincidence of opposites.45 The concept of ’ahdut shava (indistinct unity) first appeared in the writings of Azriel of Gerona in the twelfth century and of Nicholas of Cusa in the fifteenth.46 Kabbalistic influence is recognizable in both traditions and is inscribed in the very Godhead, known as ’ein sof, which provides a model containing opposites. In his commentary on Genesis 1:1, Benamozegh gave two possible explanations for the plural of Elohim: it could be due to the fact “that God is whole with all types of wholeness, or that he is capable of opposites.”47 Through this otherness found in the divine itself, Benamozegh signaled that duality—or plurality—is everywhere, including in man, especially given the centrality of the imitation of God in the rabbi’s project.48 The nondualistic worldview expressed in Kabbalah foreshadowed Hegel’s notion of the absolute as an infinite, all-encompassing moment that holds both emptiness and fullness, evil and good, justice and mercy. Yet Benamozegh was critical of Hegel, suspecting him of locating his notion of synthesis on man’s level—and not from any metaphysical standpoint.49 Benamozegh’s defense of Kabbalah rested on its connective potential, on the

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common ground it offered between the verticality of revelation and the horizontal nature of universalism, the imitation of God and the impact of mankind on the divine. Only unresolved tensions and an awareness of the dual that does not resolve itself in dualism help foster real connections, he argued. The coincidentia oppositorum is a source and a locus of divine energy through the friction between opposites, as are the sefirot, where dualism is dismissed and the system of divine emanations constitutes a constant upward and downward flow. The coincidence of opposites involves finding points of contact between seemingly dissimilar groups—an endeavor familiar to Benamozegh in his probing of the points of contact between Judaism and other faiths, a practice he urged upon his readers as a means of promoting religious rapprochement. The transposition of the concept of berur outside of Luria’s cosmology and the theological-political dimension that Benamozegh ascribed to it, as well as to ‘illuy, exhibits his commitment to turning Kabbalah into a set of instruments that would befit the notion of progress in his time, particularly the Enlightenment’s injunction of self-improvement that he managed to translate into an imitation of God. Even if he did not dwell on the sources and muted the ethnocentrisms of the concepts, these instances of berur and ‘illuy show what was at stake in his kabbalistic hermeneutics: a theologybased impetus for coexistence and progress. But he also meant to foster public engagement and shape a consciousness of the collective and of communities, which defines politics.

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Benamoz eg h’s appr ehension of Kabbalah foreshadows one of the turning points in its development in the twentieth century, in which its themes and concepts can be used as a political discourse. Yehuda Ashlag, Rav Kook, and Léon Askénazi claimed Kabbalah as a centerpiece of Jewish thought and deemed it necessary to translate it into concepts intelligible to the non-Jewish world.1 This paradigm shift, in which one could now cite Kabbalah in a public debate, including with and about non-Jews, was a novelty. Kabbalah became an instrument of political engagement. Yet Benamozegh’s leanings make him illegible by contemporary standards. In what may appear paradoxical today, it was his progressive politics, aligned with the Italian liberalism of his time—expressed, for example, in his lost essay “The Crime of War Denounced to Humanity” as well as in his agreement with Proudhon on the question of property as theft2—that led him to defend an orthodox version of Judaism. He rejected Reform Judaism, claiming that only orthodoxy was plurivocal; he lambasted the interdiction of divorce in European societies (“absurd, contradictory, immoral, antisocial”) in the French introduction to a relatively conservative text written in Hebrew;3 the French journals he referenced span the political spectrum from the left-leaning Revue politique et littéraire (also known as the Revue bleue) to the more conservative Revue des deux mondes. Beyond ideological affinities, his intervention aimed to make 133

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Kabbalah relevant to the polis as a whole, and, in order to do so, the Jewish tradition had to leave the realm of secrecy. In the pamphlet Bibliothèque de l’Hébraïsme (Library of Hebraism), self-published three years before his death, Benamozegh addressed this daunting and almost heretical task in which he and his printing house participated: In order to divulge these doctrines in a profane language, known by everyone, one should understand that I had to muster my courage, think about the religious purpose that I have ascribed to myself, and, fortunately, follow the example of our masters, who have moved forward on that path, from [respecting]

the most rigorous mystery to the printing of our texts and our commentaries.4

The text reads like a final confession in which he depicted himself as an innovator, yet still part of a tradition of disclosure—and such a composite accorded with his understanding of tradition as change within continuity.

From Esotericism to Exotericism

Even if Benamozegh framed Kabbalah as theosophy and used the term esoteric with caution, preferring mystery or secret doctrines, what he enabled is effectively the passage from esotericism to exotericism as part of a broader endeavor: the transformation of an esoteric tradition into shared humanism, on Jewish terms. Such is Hannah Arendt’s reading of Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, in which she posited that the role of Kabbalah in shaping European culture had to be uncovered and acknowledged.5 The movement from esotericism to exotericism through a wider circula-

tion of manuscripts and printed kabbalistic work participated in a larger phenomenon of a modernization of Kabbalah, initiated in the late sixteenth

century in the Mediterranean. It was envisioned not just as an esoteric tradition but as an expression of the needs of the Jewish communities in response to their environment, as Roni Weinstein has described it.6 It would be a mistake, however, to pit exotericism squarely against esotericism: in Leo Strauss’ definition of the former, hidden teachings are veiled by external teachings, but the divulgation of the surface teachings remains significant.7



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Benamozegh’s Bibliothèque de l’Hébraïsme features one of his rare mentions of the rationale for his move toward disclosure: Didn’t they add that this ever-increasing publicity would be fully manifested in the days of the Messiah? Mine is just another step in this direction: this is what a fearful conscience will go through, as mine did.8

Thus the task that he took upon himself—to disseminate kabbalistic concepts to a larger (and not necessarily Jewish) audience—had a specific purpose: his ambition of fostering greater harmony for both individuals and nations by making kabbalistic tools available goes hand in hand with hastening the coming of the Messiah.

Recentering the Orient

Regardless of the messianic agenda of the rabbi’s undertaking, Kabbalah played an important part in Benamozegh’s plans for the regeneration of society through a novel understanding of religions in general and of Judaism in particular. And in that configuration, the Orient, as the rabbi described it, occupied a significant place where kabbalistic wisdom flourished and where Enlightenment binaries had little purchase. Benamozegh put the Orient alongside Kabbalah at the forefront of a new definition of modernity—and turned it into a geographical and quasi-mental space unencumbered by the dualities whose irrelevance he endeavored to demonstrate. One may wonder how specific Benamozegh is in his treatment of the Orient; recent scholarship has analyzed the reaction of European Jews to being Orientalized9 and has shown how they gained agency by creating a counter-narrative and establishing themselves as a sort of cultural broker, both fully Oriental and fully Occidental and contributing to both. Benamozegh claimed such a middle category, but he was less interested in Jewish emancipation (which had been his focus earlier in his career) than in proclaiming the value of Judaism itself. He used the language of Orientalism in order to flip Orientalist arguments. “The Jewish race, as it is said today, loathes abstraction,” he wrote,10 but it was precisely abstraction that he held responsible for multiple woes of modernity induced by Christianity’s abstract universalism. One way Benamozegh addressed Orientalism was to engage with the German Orientalist Johann David Michaelis, who applauded the Mosaic

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law but detached it from current Judaism (in what Jonathan Hess has called a “political supersession”) and held Europe to be the more developed version of the Orient.11 In response, Benamozegh highlighted the continuum between ancient Israel and contemporary Jews. His stance was a temporal version of universalism—not only could the Mosaic values be transported in space without losing their relevance, but also across time: he debunked Michaelis’s notion that Europe was the mature version of Judaism, along with Renan’s variations on Semitism and infancy. In his earlier writings, he described Hebraism as a “middle link” or “middle ring” (anello mediano), an image borrowed from Vincenzo Gioberti but infused with Kabbalah.12 This would become a metaphor of choice, especially in Israel and Humanity, a symbol of the coincidence of opposites or of a continuity between seemingly disjointed worlds also portrayed here as a connecting thread: And even if the Bible is the most measured, sober, Occidental book of all the ancient Orient, and if it is almost the connecting thread between

these two literatures [Oriental and Occidental], this is not to say that the

words are devoid of flowery locutions, redundant, metaphorical, or above all hyperbolic [. . . . ] It is in fact from these locutions, not just from the

Germanic forest, that in great part, in my opinion, the romantic genre of contemporary literature derives.13

This invocation of the Orient captures the strategies of reappropriation Benamozegh deployed in his writing: investing a mainstream term with his own interpretation grounded in Judaism—an understanding of Judaism that fit his views and by which he sought to change the conversation of his time. In Storia degli Esseni, his assessment of the Orient enabled him to mount a forceful critique of the views of passivity associated with Orientals and with a vapid mysticism.14 He debunked the prevailing view both of the Orient and of the meaning of contemplation and marshaled other voices to defend his views: This is the sincere mysticism that inspired Vincenzo Gioberti when he wrote these words in Philosophy of Revelation, and which every good Is-

raelite can share: “The real contemplative life implies activity, external or



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sensible. It implies activity, because it augments it, or even because true

activity is thought. [It implies] external activity, because this is necessary in order to develop the intellect and move to the stage of pure mind. The

Orientals and the ascetics who reject the external life and view the contem-

plative life as mere passivity do not understand what true contemplation is about.”15

This is one of the very few instances in which Benamozegh used the term mysticism, though he qualified it by claiming that, in the Jewish Orient, mysticism was only marginally contemplative. He nuanced the meaning of the term, showing that it was a mode of knowledge calling for an engagement with the world. By referencing Gioberti’s Philosophy of Revelation and its rejection of the dichotomy between contemplation and action, Benamozegh implicitly strengthened his stance against Renan’s claim about the inertia of Judaism. It was only because of a misleading conception of mysticism that Hebraism (which insisted on the Kabbalah component of Judaism) had been called both mystical and passive.16 In Benamozegh’s view, however, mysticism aimed to improve man, not by retreating from society but by being an integral part of it. The quotation continues: This is how we see the orthodox Orient, the Prophets and the doctors who, when they push contemplative life to its ultimate implications, do not stray from the path that leads to the improvement of man as a whole. Heaven

and earth: if these were not synonymous for them, they were certainly tightly connected. Morally speaking, Hebraism located earth in heaven a long time ago, before Copernicus was born.17

In a Saidian approach, a Western discourse on the Orient assumes the West’s intellectual authority and turns the Orient into an object of investigation qua domination, a polarization between “us” and “them,” thus effectively creating the “other.”18 Benamozegh made any Occidental domination irrelevant: first, because the Orient had a lot to teach, and second, because his purpose was to examine the perceived borderlines of Western culture, religious and philosophical, and to destabilize them. What was held by Orientalists to be outside or at the margins of Europe was, in fact, inside. Benamozegh placed

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the Orient back at the core of Europe (understood as Christian Europe)—an Orient that had shaped the West before being otherized and effaced, just as Christianity had effaced its Jewish provenance and indebtedness. His role was to make European readers aware of the contribution that would prove key to the “improvement of man as a whole” and partake in the future of religions—which was deemed crucial to achieve their unity. The contribution of the Orient rested on the greater harmony he postulated—between the external and the internal, man and society, contemplation and action, faith and reason. Even if he sometimes essentialized “the Oriental”19 in order to answer its critics, Benamozegh’s understanding of the Orient implied a potential for a philosophical regeneration, in contrast to the backwardness typically associated with the term in his era. Deeply intertwined with Kabbalah, and equally in need of reevaluation, the Orient in Benamozegh’s work functions as a geography, a mental space, and a concept in which new continuities can be established, instead of the perilous dichotomies he saw as created by Western European civilization and which threatened to exhaust it.

Neither Idealism nor Materialism: Kabbalah as Corrective

Another opposition that concerned Benamozegh was that of realism and idealism. The rabbi painted, in kabbalistic terms, the great danger of a rude awakening to the real. He equated Adam’s fall to “the Dormità (the slumber), that comes down in the Zohar, the ideal, the Logos, the Zeir Anpin when it falls into finitude and comes down into the real.”20 The task of humanity is to maintain vigilance, to not let itself fall into lethargy—even a paradoxical, idealism-induced lethargy. He thus revisited the meaning of the Fall, which then appeared as a metaphor for the fate of a self-satisfied society and a call for action and progress. In this regard, Benamozegh showed distinct affinities with Gioberti’s later writings, most notably his posthumous 1857 Protologia and his treatment of original sin. The purpose of revelation, rather than aiming to repair original sin as Christian dogma held, was to reunite the natural and supernatural, which, Benamozegh felt, scholasticism had artificially and wrongly treated as opposites. Distinctions should not amount to oppositions, he claimed, and the creation of false dichotomies (flesh/spirit, church/nation,



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spirit/letter) was the problematic legacy of Christianity. These were also its reasons for neglecting this world: “placing its kingdom outside of this world” made Christianity less invested in improving it.21 In one instance, in his Teologia, he criticized the socialist thinker Leroux’s book De l’humanité, in which he mentions two skies22—an absolute one and a relative one, the latter being the progressive manifestation of the former. “What Leroux lacks, and what theosophy makes, is a distinction between the ideal and the real, between malkhut and tiferet.”23 This distinction allows true reconciliation to happen. The fight against materialism, a fixture of late nineteenth-century political thought, often appeared in Benamozegh’s writing. But his response is notably different from those of his contemporaries: instead of resorting to traditional morality, he invoked Kabbalah-based ethics. In his effort to foster new civic and religious engagement, Kabbalah could work as a corrective: “Don’t you think—good Lord!—that there is a need for Kabbalah to correct the current materialism? Maybe what we need are beautiful and well-done spiritual philosophies, accepted and well regarded, applauded for taking on this thirteenth labor of Hercules?”24 At least this was the task he assigned to himself. Without defining the term precisely, Benamozegh’s most explicit engagement with materialism appeared in Storia degli Esseni, where he dealt with Proudhon, tangentially addressing his views on property.25 The Hasid calls the public domain, the public street, the communal prop-

erty, his own domain. Conversely, he refers to his house, his own home, and private property, as that which is not his own just as Proudhon’s powerful intellect defined property as theft . La propriété c’est le vol, [Proudhon

wrote,] and explained the “Lo tignov” of the Decalogue as if it rather said: “Thou shalt not possess.”26

This quotation showcases Benamozegh’s extrapolations between what the author said and what the rabbi took it to mean. Proudhon acknowledged the Bible’s influence on him, notably in his famous 1840 pamphlet What Is Property? containing the line “Property is theft,” but he did not conflate this rallying cry with the eighth commandment, turning “Thou shall not steal” into “Thou shall not possess.” I noted earlier the interest in communism that Benamozegh expressed in his notebooks.27 Other hints of his views on production and property

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relate to the creation narrative: he pointed out that one single word in Hebrew designates both to make and to acquire28 and, in a manuscript passage excised by Pallière, drew social observations from these semantics: “Isn’t that, as we have observed elsewhere, a first glimpse into the theory that bases property law on labor?”29 Although brief, Benamozegh’s kabbalistic critique of society—of private property, materialism, and alienation—foreshadowed the teachings of Yehuda Ashlag (1885–1954), which offered an idiosyncratic reading of Lurianic Kabbalah that broadly channels Marxism.30 According to Ashlag’s political cosmology, God created the universe in order to find a way to give, and others to whom to give. In this construct, giving is, indeed, God’s essential nature—but what God gives is himself. By contrast, human beings are meant to be receivers and, specifically, to receive from God. Yet the principle of imitatio dei complicates what might otherwise be unilateral dynamics: imitating God implies that his creatures will become givers as well—and the study of Torah should develop the will to give; the ultimate achievement of humanity, and the purpose of its evolution, is to receive God’s gifts—only to share them, in turn, with other human beings. Another synthesis of Kabbalah and Marxism would later appear in the work of Walter Benjamin, providing further evidence that, by the twentieth century, a Kabbalah-inflected terminology had entered the realm of philosophical and public discourse.31 Benamozegh’s views were too inchoate to form a system, but his work did signal a desire for social justice. He intuited the perils of alienation that would stem from forgetting the role of man in the coproduction of the world, a part of imitatio dei. The twentieth-century sociologist of religion Peter Berger would later posit that “an alienated consciousness is an undialectical consciousness.”32 What Benamozegh saw in Kabbalah was its potential for injecting a necessary dialectics into religion and raising the stakes of human engagement in a triangulation between the divine and the world, between the profane and the sacred, Jews and non-Jews. If the pivotal place of man smacks of Christian humanism, the coincidence of opposites, the notions of clarification, elevation, and of imitatio dei made the rabbi’s kabbalistic theosophy distinctly dialectical and emphasized the necessity of such dialectics in order to challenge an uninterrogated modernity.



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The Symbolism of Adam

Benamozegh was bent on putting Kabbalah to the test of science but also of politics, and his treatment of the figure of Adam proved a way to engage with the racially based political conceptions of his time. After initially having qualms about evolutionism, Benamozegh enlisted Darwinism to advance his universalistic agenda: Let us listen to science, which concludes from the Darwinian system that, “based on the principle of natural selection and the variation of character-

istics, it does not seem implausible that animals and plants may have been

formed by some inferior intermediary. If we agree to this assumption, we also have to admit that all the organized beings that ever existed might stem from a primordial, unique shape.” Adam would thus be not only the

father to the human species but to all that is alive. The world would constitute one single family, albeit endlessly varied in its members.33

This endorsement of Darwinism served as a rejoinder to the pre-Adamites. In an attempt to make sense of human diversity, pre-Adamism posited that Adam was not the first inhabitant of the planet. Traditionally attributed to La Peyrère (1596–1676), the notion dated back to the early modern period.34 With the advent of nineteenth-century biology and evolutionism, these theories took renewed hold. In the debates that raged in journals, polemicists promoting pre-Adamism espoused theories of racial supremacy or embraced an anti-Semitic agenda.35 Benamozegh never entertained this supposition: a pre-Adamic world disrupted not only the validity of the Scriptures but also the central notion of humanity as one family.36 The rejection of the myth of Adam, as a single and common origin of humankind, was a threat to the premise of a human community. In his view, Adam was the myth to which the Scriptures had resorted in order to make humanity understand that the one was meant to contain the many. Benamozegh used the rare term polygonism to describe the multiple pathways of the divine plan toward unity: “Alongside polyglottism, which deals with the extrinsic shape, we will place polygonism too, which regards, so to speak, the intrinsic form, the religious idea, whether it addresses one intelligence or the other, in order to make itself accessible.”37 He probably derived this view from the Giobertian

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concept of poligonismo, a term meaning that only God is complete and humanity can only have access to fragments of truth.38 The assonance between polygonism and polygenism, which posits nonunified origins, is remarkable: Benamozegh used the latter concept to subvert the former. The variegated nature of humanity did not indicate scattered origins but rather access to various degrees of consciousness depending on each nation’s capabilities and different stages in their development. We will see, when dealing with the Law of humankind, that Hebraism

attributes polyglottism to it: the ideal unity is the Logos, or Tiferet, also

called celestial Adam, the unity of all ideas, the Idea par excellence, the intelligible world; in a word, the Torah, as we call it. And from there comes

polygonism, since this is far from humanity being absorbed in Israel and all the other peoples canceled out. What greater absurdity, by the way, than priests without laity!39

The concept of polygonism is germane to Benamozegh’s contention that the organic unity of the world rests on the interdependence of nations based on their respective qualities—hence the final exclamation: a world made up exclusively of Israel would not be sustainable. However, a tension in the passage captures Benamozegh’s own: the French “tant il est loin qu’il y ait absorption de l’humanité en Israël” can mean either “long before it is absorbed in Israel” but also “far from being absorbed.” It is because of ambiguities of this nature that Benamozegh’s work lends itself to multiple interpretations. In the first instance, humanity will be absorbed in Israel, if only in a very distant messianic future. If he meant this, however, his stance would be at odds with the stated goal of Judaism, a case of universalism maintaining difference, as the rabbi enunciated it. In the second instance, however, if “tant il est loin” meant “far from being absorbed,” the passage fits with Benamozegh’s presentation of a difference-based universalism and with the tone of the passage. However, such an interpretation does not take away the distinct prospect of a messianic era possibly subsuming otherness, which appears in other places in Israel and Humanity along with the biblical mention of the tents of Shem in which he lays out the hopes for a messianic age, which I will discuss in part 4. Benamozegh’s claim of Jewish universalism shaped his exegesis but has left it open to contradictory analysis. Adam does signal a universalistic



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trope, but some of the rabbinic evocations were ambiguous and Benamozegh truncated them in order to support his agenda. Consider the following demonstration of the unity of mankind through Adam: The rabbis have so little sympathy for the idea of a local and national God that they traced the Mosaic religion back to the very origins of humanity. Thus, by concentrating on Adam—the primordial unity—everything

which will then find itself distributed and diversified among the various

terrestrial families, [and] all of the national geniuses, and by linking their

own religion to the first man, they meant to indicate that, in a certain sense, it was suitable for humankind as a whole.40

While he acknowledged the specific Jewish nature ascribed to Adam by the rabbis (“linking their own religion to the first man”), Benamozegh immediately qualified his stance: the primordial, original religion subsequently expressed itself in different ways and it is in its variegated forms—the geniuses here, or the Volksgeist or sarim discussed in chapter 8—that it became the possession of humanity. Another tack taken to buttress the universalism hypothesis is that of a cosmic Adam: Such is the meaning of that Aggadah which describes an Adam whose stature reaches from one end of the world to the other. And from still

another perspective, the Kabbalah sees in Adam the male principle of the

world and in Eve, the female, both being represented later by the two cher-

ubim of the sanctuary, who were also male and female, born of the Logos (Tiferet) and the Cosmos (Malkhut).41

In keeping with his hermeneutics, the distinction between the ideal (tiferet, male) and the real (malkhut, feminine principle) is immediately complemented by a nondualism of the system, which draws more on the androgynous creation narrative of Genesis 1 than on the separation of Genesis 2. By bestowing a cosmic conception on Adam, Benamozegh aimed to endow it with the mythical universalism he ascribed to Judaism (“what boldness and breadth of vision. In its perception of the original unity of the human race, Jewish universalism attains improbable proportions”).42 However, this part of the tradition of Adam as a supernal anthropos—a celestial

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being—possesses discrete elements of the Christian tradition:43 the image of Adam’s body spanning the world and filling it has been linked to a Gnostic reading of it as the cosmic Jesus and is supposed to announce his messiahship.44 Yet Benamozegh seemed to link the whole tradition to Judaism: [We do not wish to suggest that] apart from this nearly cosmogonic tradition, the rabbis do not acknowledge an historical Adam nearer to us and

created in our image [. . . . ] Whatever the case may be, scriptural or not, this imposing conception of Adam is incontestably rabbinic and Hebraic. It should therefore enter into our calculations when we consider the universal tenets of Judaism.45

The nature of Adam’s soul, specifically Jewish or not, remains uncertain here, although there is a stock of images wherein the souls of Israel were contained in the first Adam. In another passage, Benamozegh spoke of “the celestial man, which is composed of all the souls.”46 He cited the tractates Yevamot 63b and Avodah Zarah 5a to support this view, but abstained from quoting the kabbalistic treatise of Haim Vital’s Liqqutei Torah or Sha‘ar ha-Psuqim, which offers more complicated insights such as: “The primal Adam comprised all the souls and all the worlds, but when he sinned, all the souls fell from him into the shells that were divided into seventy nations.”47 Yet Benamozegh’s vagueness enabled him to claim that “all the souls” were organized as a cosmopolitan, organic aggregate, in the kind of interconnected humanity he consistently advocated. Similarly, when quoting from the medieval midrash which expounds on Genesis 1:1–2—“The wind or the spirit, say the rabbis, is the soul or spirit of the first Adam”—he did not address the thorny debates or ethnocentric heritage attached to the kabbalistic exegesis.48 Another example of Benamozegh’s use of Adam as a way to posit universalism is his treatment of the cherubim on the ark cover in the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctuary of the Tabernacle and the place where the divine presence dwelled. He was not the first modern author to tease out their symbolism: in his commentary on Exodus, Abravanel described them as an image of brotherly love while, two centuries later, Hurwitz took it further and posited the cherubim as an instance of the love of the neighbor in Judaism—a central tenet of the ethical compendium of his Sefer ha-Brit.49



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Yet Benamozegh’s reference to Adam and Eve is remarkable in that it used gender—one of the rare appearances of gender in his work—to offer a more extensive picture of a universal spirit. Benamozegh contended that, after the expulsion from Paradise, the cherubim figures in the Holy of Holies50 encompassed male and female archetypes, and the cherubim also replaced Adam and Eve in Paradise.51 This relation applies not only at the intermediary stage, which is called Tiferet or Logos, but specifically at that of the name Adam who, with another Eve, form two cherubim, Tiferet and Malkhut, or Logos and Psyche, the ideal and the

real, spirit and matter. This latter Adam is the closest type to the Adam

in Genesis, and as Genesis itself says that two cherubim came to replace Adam and Eve, expelled from Paradise, this seems to facilitate the move to

a higher register of thought and to erect a bridge that will lead us there. All the more probable given that tradition, sustained by some evidence in the

Bible, ascertains that the cherubim situated in the Holy of Holies were, like Adam and Eve, male and female.52

Yet again, Benamozegh’s exegetical choices gloss over two less-universalistic features of Jewish tradition. Although the duality of Adam and Eve is present in rabbinic texts,53 Benamozegh chose to insist on their description as the sefirot of tiferet (the balance between judgment and mercy) and malkhut (kingdom) found in Menachem Recanati or Nahmanides, thus evoking measure. But he proved selective and silent with respect to Leviticus Rabbah 26 or the midrash Exodus Rabbah, which claim that these two faces (du-parzufim) represent the duality of the divine voice: one face, of light, for Israel, and another of darkness, for the nations.54 Benamozegh also ignored a tradition in which the cherub is the firstborn and, as firstborn, identified as Israel, thus effectively placing Israel in the Holy of Holies, in direct contact with God’s presence, and establishing Israel’s primacy over other faiths.55 Benamozegh also introduced a further element of complexity. In a passage excised from the 1914 edition, he alludes to Jeremiah 32:20, in which Adam can indeed mean humanity—but excludes Israel: A verse of the Psalms should be placed among this number. Men will say that

the righteous has a fruit, certainly that there are gods who judge on earth.56

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What does this mean? It is undoubtedly humankind speaking to humankind

when it was polytheistic. We could easily demonstrate that the name Adam

tout court sometimes signifies the Gentiles to the extent that it is the Gentile who is cited in the passage where we read “be-Israel u be-Adam”—“in Israel and in humanity”—the phrase that inspired the title of this book.57

The whole passage in Jeremiah reads: “You displayed signs and marvels in the land of Egypt with lasting effect, and won renown in Israel and among mankind to this very day.” Here, the Prophet’s prayer to God summarizes the relationship between God and Israel but distinguishes it from the relation between God and mankind. Thus Adam is a universal Adam. The multiple understandings and images of Adam are both the appeal and the weakness of the system. The unsolved—or unsolvable—question of the Jewish Adam or the universalistic Adam, the ambiguous statements, shed light on the spectrum of universalism or ethnocentrism in which Kabbalah can be invoked. The same question regarding ontological differences based on Kabbalah is present in Rav Kook’s seemingly universalistic worldview, which has inspired Israel’s religious right. Rather than the kind of rapprochement Benamozegh had hoped for, Kabbalah has provided the grounds for a virulent ethnocentric stance that has gained momentum among right-wing movements.58 The turn to Kabbalah to justify the superiority of Jewish blood over non-Jewish existence found its most shocking instance in the infamous pamphlet Barukh ha-Gever (Barukh the Man/Blessed Is the Man), in which the teachings of Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburg were collected by one of his students in order to support the crime. Chillingly, the pamphlet praised Baruch Goldstein, the mass murderer who perpetrated the 1994 Purim Day massacre in the Ibrahimi Mosque (located in the place known to Jews as the Cave of the Patriarchs), in which he killed twenty-nine Palestinians and wounded 125.59 A Missouri-born Hasid who advocates the return of monarchy to the land of Israel, Yitzhak Ginsburg is the head of the Od Yosef Chai ( Joseph Still Lives) yeshiva in the Yitzhar settlement. His teachings have attracted an audience both internationally and among the fringe settlers’ movement. The lifting of binaries through Kabbalah, a move geared toward universalism, might reinstate new binaries, but Benamozegh gave a hint to his students that he was aware of how insuperable the task was:



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Humanity and Israel are mutually exclusive terms—rights and privileges, justice and partiality, chosen people and humanitarian providence will wage an eternal war, relentless like water and fire. Finding the nexus be-

tween these antithetical terms, finding the equator between these poles, the dialectical means that reconciles the antagonism, that would be the high

mark of intelligence, the signature of truth. And if you were to succeed in that task, we would say, very well done, indeed.60

Benamozegh was thus fully cognizant of the challenges of reconciling terms that seemed to be mutually exclusive, and yet this is the very opposition—Israel and Humanity—that he chose as a title for his project. For all its limitations, the nexus he found was certainly Kabbalah, which was also Benamozegh’s conduit for proposing an alternative modernity. If modernity entails a rupture in a narrative, he certainly offered one through a novel perception of Kabbalah among both Jews and non-Jews, by urging them to acknowledge the common source of their beliefs. Against the disenchantment of the world induced by excessive rationalism or the incapacity of religions to account for their own tenets, he offered, through Kabbalah, a mythlike linchpin to religion. In his exposition of the myths nested in monotheism, Benamozegh rejected the irrational as well as the pretenses of rationalism. Against dualities, which had been, in his view, hastily erected by the Enlightenment, he relied on kabbalistic hermeneutics and the coincidence of opposites to shape a new narrative of history and progress. Additionally, by showing the affinity between Kabbalah and the Orient, he displaced the locus of this new, appeased modernity, thus advancing the possibility, or desirability, of multiple modernities. Finally, another modern gesture Benamozegh made was to envision Kabbalah no longer as esotericism but as a politics, and more specifically a politics of coexistence. Especially because Benamozegh’s thinking was prescriptive, putting this reconciliation to the test was paramount, as we will see in the next part of the book.

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2 PA R T I V

PA S T EN M I T Y Modes of Interreligious Engagement and Jewish Self-Affirmation

Benamoz eg h’s ambition to bl az e a path toward religious unity was meant to include all of humanity and all religions. He did not, however, undertake any outreach to, and only limited intellectual grappling with, Buddhism or Hinduism.1 In his roadmap, moreover, special attention was dedicated to the rapprochement between Judaism and Christianity, a choice he felt the need to explain in the following terms: If I specifically address Christianity, it is because it represents a considerable part of humanity. Professed by the most civilized nations, it is one of

the most scholarly religions. It was the first one that sought to embody the ideal of the prophets among the Gentiles, and it continues to grow. The

honor of the main attempt at a universal religion falls to it, and so does the responsibility for its failure.2

This passage puts the ambiguity of the rabbi’s tone and stance on Christianity on display, all the more so as he couched it in a language of Western cultural dominance of which he was critical but which he did not escape. For all the flaws he analyzed, he nevertheless claimed that Christianity had been an experiment in universalism that could be used toward his own goal of religious unity, and he endeavored to make space for a Jewish theology of Christianity and for the possibility of Christianity reforming itself through 149

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a return to Judaism. I propose that, in both tone and substance, attempts to actively account for other faiths from a Jewish-theology standpoint, and to subsequently engage with them, are one of the features that define a modern Judaism. Benamozegh, in particular, endeavored to demonstrate, from within the Jewish Scriptures, that other religions—most notably Christianity—had been given a place and a role in and by Judaism, thus making a case for their interdependence and making the political implementation of theological interdependence a defining aspect of modernity.

l CHAP TER 13 '

R ELI G I O U S EN M I T Y A N D T O LER A N C E R E CO N S I D ER ED

A first step toward reimagining interreligious engagement rested on the substitution of the concept of relational dependence for that of religious enmity, and on a critique of tolerance in light of typologies of pluralism and inclusivism.

Neutralizing Religious Enmity

A notable aspect of Benamozegh’s work on religious unity is his effort to neutralize the notion of religious enmity—a category, he argued, that was created by Christianity and which was bound to foster ontological hostility.1 Benamozegh aimed to redraw a distinction between political and religious enemies; this argument was part of his critical reappraisal of Christianity and a continuation of his pointed critique of Paul’s abstract universalism, famously captured in the apostle’s negative definition of Christian identity as “neither Jew nor Greek” in Colossians 3:11 and Galatians 3:28. Benamozegh’s critical appraisal of Paul’s impact in his effort to erase ethnic and national differences and in his invention of the universal man foreshadows recent scholarship on Paul.2 For Benamozegh, Christian religious enmity was the consequence of Paul’s dismissal of nations and of politics, and a misunderstanding of psychology: political enemies are essential to the formation of national identities, but since 151

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nations are precisely what Christianity sought to put an end to (the apostle “abolished and effaced nations within humanity”),3 Benamozegh rhetorically asked, “Does Christianity know the political enemy? No. Does it know social justice? Again, no. Yet we boldly affirm that, without a political enemy, there can be no fatherland. Without social vindictiveness, no society, no justice.”4 Predicating the shaping of social and political entities on conflictuality, Benamozegh pointed out the conundrum created by the apostle and its sole outcome: “Christianity, which never had political enemies, still needed to have one when it found itself engaged in the world, and this was the religious enemy.”5 The fault for this severity, thought Benamozegh, lay with the theory of imputation, the centrality of redemption through Jesus. Recognizing that different religious traditions pursue the same goal of redemption but acknowledging their different paths, however, would deflect any religious conflict. Rather than supporting his argument textually, for instance with Paul’s inflammatory epistles (such as Romans 11:28, where the apostle called the Jews “enemies of God”), Benamozegh chose to invoke history and the conquering turn taken by the Papacy: he retraced the steps by which Christianity moved from “universal apathy”6 regarding national distinctions to being a conquering “universal empire” eager to cancel out nationalities. In the absence of a political opponent, an enemy has still to be found, and competing religions and their adherents fill the role, which leads to religious stigmatization and persecution. The question of enmity appeared in Benamozegh’s writings in Jewish and Christian Ethics in 1867. By 1872, the rabbi had submitted his aforementioned essay “The Crime of War Denounced to Humanity” to the Ligue de la Paix essay competition. The connection he made between nation-building and the need for an enemy probably derived from Hobbes, whom he occasionally quoted. Accepting Hobbes’s premise of the “state of war as the normal state of the nations,” the rabbi posited the urge to find enemies as a constitutive feature of political entities, even in times of peace.7 Whereas Hobbes addressed the sovereign’s prerogative of creating the friend–enemy distinction (“no citizen can privately determine who is an ally or a public enemy”),8 Benamozegh did not. His concept of the enemy as a marker and condition of the political bears some affinity with the notion of “enemy” later



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developed by the German philosopher Carl Schmitt, insofar as private enmities are excluded from both writers’ constructs: “The enemy is solely the public enemy,” Schmitt suggests.9 However, the comparison does not extend much further, as Schmitt argued that by demanding that we love the private enemy (inimicus), Christianity de facto relegated true enmity to the public and political realm with the category of hostis, the public enemy—and thus established that the political did exist in Christianity from its inception, which is at odds with Benamozegh’s characterization. Moreover, the “friend–enemy” criterion of the realm of the political developed by Schmitt does not really apply: friendship does not have political weight in Benamozegh’s eyes. Relying on the traditional paradigm of a nation as extended kinship, it is brotherhood to which he gave a prominent place—as he had in his construct of humanity as an organism made up of families and nations.10 While establishing any polity’s need for foes, Benamozegh deflected the accusation leveled at Judaism of inculcating hatred for one’s enemy. To do so, the rabbi attended to the contentious part of the Sermon on the Mount that traditionally had been held as inciting hatred against one’s enemy. The passage in the Gospel of Matthew (and its parallel in the Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6:26–27) reads: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor’ and ‘hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:43–44). The injunction to love one’s enemy, which expanded the mandate of Leviticus 19:18 (“love your neighbor”) and Deuteronomy 6:5, has paradoxically played an important part in sowing religious discord and creating religious foes.11 The unilateral stance of love for the enemy elevated Christianity’s moral status while fueling a tradition that took aim at Judaism’s perceived pettiness. Benamozegh opposed this self-aggrandizing Christian reading and charted new polemical territories: indeed, a previous attempt to defend Jewish ethics by reclaiming the concept of brotherly love, such as Hurwitz’s, had given an explanation of the text without pitting it against Christianity.12 Because the text of Matthew is thorny, modern advocates of religious coexistence, such as Martin Buber, have striven to address its misleading dichotomy: what sounds like an allusion to the Mosaic law (although the source is uncertain, since it is only introduced by “You have heard”) is indeed absent

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from the Hebrew Bible. It could nevertheless be argued, against Benamozegh, that Psalms 31:7 and 139:22 do mention hate with regard to idol worship, but these statements are descriptive not prescriptive.13 Buber, in Two Types of Faith, also weighed in on Jesus’s statements about the love for one’s enemies and tried to correct the misreading and rehabilitate the Hebrew Bible: The Old Testament commandment of love [ . . . ] does not admit of the

interpretation that one ought to hate the enemy [. . . . ] [ Jesus] nowhere indicates here that he has non-Jews in mind [. . . . ] But the interpretation

quoted in the text which was apparently a popular saying, that one was free to hate the enemy, misunderstood not merely the wording of the commandment to love; it stood also in contradiction to the express commandments of the Torah (Exodus 23:4) to bring help to one’s “enemy.”14

Consistent with the central argument of Jewish and Christian Ethics—a refutation of the primacy of Christian morality—Benamozegh went on to dispute the revolutionary content of Jesus’s ethics and marshaled evidence for the provenance of the ethical message of the Gospels in the Hebrew Bible, including the injunction to love. Additionally, Benamozegh contended that enmity was not the same as hatred: an enemy ought to be opposed, not loathed. This, however, could be put to the test: “Unlike other peoples, [ Judaism] conceived of mankind as one, by virtue of its common origin, nature, and destiny of all men. It is in this sense that we must understand the rabbinical dictum: ‘It is you, Israelites, who are men; but the pagans do not deserve that name.’  ”15 Benamozegh here attenuated the ethnocentrism of the formula whose implications have been far-reaching and had served as an excuse for the conquest of Canaan. He recast the understanding of humanity and turned humanity into a quasicovenant: whoever accepts the humanity of the other is human; failing to see the humanity of the other pushes one outside the realm of humanity. In the manuscript of Israel and Humanity, rather than clearly mentioning the tractate Yevamot 61a, he quoted from it without a citation (“It is you, Israelites, who are men; but the pagans do not deserve that name”), but expounded on the thorny assertion as follows: “It is evident that one is alone in possession of the instinct or intuition of a humanity united by its origin, nature, and destination, and that one is alone in being truly cosmopolitan, in being human.”16



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Humanity here seems to be conditional and is achieved exclusively in an awareness of what human interdependence entails. It is not an ontological feature and the consequences are ominous: “In refusing him [the other] the honor of a common origin, we justify fighting with him, despoiling him, even killing him as soon as our interest requires it.”17 If one does not see or acknowledge the humanity of the other, his or her own humanity is left to conjecture. Benamozegh’s axiom seems to be related to what Levinas posits in Humanisme de l’autre homme (Humanism of the Other), where humanity is found in the recognition that the other person comes first.18 There is thus such a thing as a mortal enemy: one who refuses to acknowledge a shared humanity. This exclusion renders Benamozegh’s construct fragile—as it does Levinas’s.19 The core of Benamozegh’s claims about the question of enmity pertains to its religious basis and the confusion between the political and the theological realms. His stance on enmity highlighted the danger of a Pauline, totalizing religious order. In his roadmap for the future of religion, the rabbi offered a seemingly paradoxical conclusion: religions could only survive by acknowledging the primacy of politics and polities lest the undue omnipresence of religion lead to its corruption and eventual demise. It was due to the absence of such dispositions in Christianity that it ended up being overwhelming, turning private conscience into a public affair and thus creating the conditions and environment for religious persecution. Benamozegh’s response, however, was not simply to advocate tolerance. Here, as always, Benamozegh targets two audiences—Jewish and Christian—and takes a stance in the political debate about tolerance and secularism without mentioning it.

Replacing Tolerance with Interdependence

Although Benamozegh’s hometown of Livorno was famed for its religious tolerance, the rabbi held the concept to be an insufficient proposition; it was but a variation on pragmatism or utilitarianism—whose application to the realm of religion had gained traction in the nineteenth century based on Mill’s reading of Locke.20 The rabbi deemed such stances to be fragile constructs or mere expedients. The correct response, in his view, was to imprint in people’s minds the necessity of religious diversity; the belief that every faith was a part of an organic whole could foster respectful religious interactions.21 Benamozegh’s nuanced stance on tolerance was based on an early (but

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probably misattributed)22 essay of Locke’s, “Reflections upon the Roman Commonwealth,” in which the English philosopher posited the necessity of separating church and state, for which he has often been compared to Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. Against Locke, Benamozegh refuted the notion that the Roman statesman Numa had offered harmony between civil and religious institutions, or a viable religious synthesis.23 In his view, this position amounted to nothing more than “an imaginary product of all cults [ . . . ]. In any case, such a conception did not reach farther than the borders of the empire, and the concern wasn’t in the least the religious destinies of the human species, but exclusively the empire’s peace and prosperity.”24 While Benamozegh proclaimed the limits of the concept of tolerance, he nevertheless also refuted the notion of Semitic intolerance. The Noahide Laws were pivotal in his view as Pallière presented it in his preface to the 1914 edition of Israel and Humanity, where he also pushed against an antiIslam discourse, albeit vaguely: From here the respect that Judaism has always professed for other religions

and this affirmation repeated by its wise men that, in order to be righteous and pleasing to God, in order to belong to the true religion, there is no need to practice the Israelite rituals.

One therefore sees how mistaken is the opinion of certain critics ac-

cording to whom Semitic monotheism would necessarily foster intoler-

ance. If one agrees to get to the bottom of the issue, this does not seem

to be accurate, even regarding Islam, but with regard to Judaism, nothing could be more stringently debunked by facts.25

Noteworthy in this passage is also the premise that true universal religion does not involve or demand adherence to the Jewish rituals—a clear departure from the norms of Christianity as instituted since the eighteenth century, especially when considering such episodes as the rites controversy that gripped Catholicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and led to the ban of non-Christian traditional rites.26 Disentangling salvation from the observance of rites and accommodating various rituals seemed essential in Benamozegh’s defense of Judaism. The rest of the passage, however,



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qualifies Israel’s capacity for welcoming otherness in its midst and raises the question of the limits of pluralism and inclusivism: Israel’s attitude is far more than plain and simple tolerance—examples of which we can fortunately find elsewhere but which are imposed by circumstances rather than by beliefs themselves. This is the implementation of the

idea that Judaism is the locus, the center of the universal religion and that the other religions find themselves attached to it and are therefore legitimate inasmuch as they are faithful to its principles.27

Benamozegh postulated that Israel’s tolerance is not dictated by circumstances but by a set of core beliefs whereby “each people is respectively equipped to perceive a particular aspect of Divinity,” thus legitimizing each faith.28 But in proposing this system as a blueprint for coexistence, nowhere did Benamozegh entertain the possibility that postulating such a centrality of Israel, thus de facto relegating others to a subordinate function (albeit each of them vital, as Benamozegh would object), could discourage any engagement on the part of other faiths. To be sure, softening accusations of idolatry and making conciliatory gestures toward other monotheisms was a prerequisite for coexistence—a strategy initiated in the thirteenth century by the Meiri, the towering Talmudist and rabbi from Narbonne, who wrote that “nations are bound by ways of religion and believe in His (blessed be He) existence, His Unity and His power, even though they are in error concerning some matters.”29 In adopting this stance, Benamozegh departed from the Zoharic literature (which he otherwise revered), as it placed special emphasis on the demonic nature of Christians. Moses Mendelssohn pursued this irenic effort, but Benamozegh went further than the German philosopher by recognizing the moral value of Christians.30 Benamozegh envisioned the various religions as presenting aspects of the divine that can be channeled into the “synthetic unity or monotheism.” His claim that polytheism can be negated by absorbing it, a variation on the potential for assimilation found in Judaism, is a stumbling block of his system.31 Despite his claims of diversity, Judaism is a subsuming force which effaces singularities. These tensions aside, enabling coexistence remained a token of relevance in the modern world. Thanks to his notion of assimilation, Benamozegh

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thus argued that nothing was beyond the realm of Judaism—by way of its theosophy: [Theosophy] would profess the principle that in all truth, holiness is always

inherently mixed with error, or with limitation, ignorance, imperfection, finitude. The former is the interior, the latter the husk, the envelope, the exterior. The former is the enlivening spirit, the latter the body that serves as

an obstacle or as a means, depending on whether it agrees or not with other beings or ideas; it is either good or bad according to whether it contains interiority or not, and the degree to which it contains greater or lesser interiority determines whether it lives or dies, or to what degree it is able to live.32

The imagery belongs to Lurianic Kabbalah: the husks (qlipot) stand for evil forces that aggregate around holiness and their presence also shows the mixed nature of all things, including the divine. Benamozegh contested the Christian understanding of holiness as purity as well as its dualism (spirit and body). His argument is based on a quotation from Gikatila, one of the authors most cited by Christian kabbalists, especially his Sha‘arei ’Orah.33 De porta Lucis (1516), the abbreviated and free translation of the text by Paolo Riccio, a German Jewish convert and physician to Emperor Maximilian I, became one of the key texts for Christian Kabbalah. From the unpublished manuscript form of Israel and Humanity: No falsehood is completely devoid of some elements of truth. Otherwise

it could not endure. Theosophy openly teaches this by labeling as truth

that which keeps error alive, the Holiness that gives it life. This is why evil, falsehood, heresy, and false gods try, the Kabbalah tells us, to appropriate, to swallow up, to absorb some part of the truth and of Holiness, while the

religious art consists of liberating it from its prison, by making the demon cough it up in order to bring the true and the Holy to its wellspring and to its center. This is what we saw in the Job text.34

Benamozegh addressed both the rationale for religious diversity and the roots of evil: holiness is in need of error because error invites imitatio dei in the work of separation (berur) and elevation (‘illuy), as discussed in chapter 11. True holiness involves a consciousness and goal of unity and of the mission to fulfill it.



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Having replaced the notion of false gods with one of gods who are not worthy of that name, as we saw in chapter 10,35 Benamozegh further explained this important aspect of religious error employing a kabbalistic understanding of the divine—namely, the fact that when people worship their deities they can only be praying to one of the attributes of God: “They are false in that they are incomplete.”36 Polytheism is thus a misunderstanding of the part for the whole; such a misguided fervor is an error that may be addressed and redressed. While seemingly softening the charge of polytheism, Benamozegh ignored the harsh language of the Bible against Balaam and other gods and, disturbingly, went to great length to justify the injunction in Deuteronomy 12:3 to destroy the pagans’ altars, by asserting that it was out of charity that this injunction had been given. Indeed, he claimed, Judaism’s respect for life included not only humans but also animals and thus all of creation—and speaking against such pagan rituals amounted to defending life.37 Finally, he rejected the reading that equated the “false gods” with the gods of another nation, thus preserving the universalism of Judaism: the gods of another nation are not false gods, they are just partial aspects of the divine that have to be understood as part of a greater whole, and of which, as we have seen, Elohei-ha-Elohim, the god of gods, is the final expression and elevation. Since working toward unification is incumbent on man, human diversity is the hallmark of creation and the material from which humankind operates to complete this unification. From this it follows that God does not reject the plurality of gods and each nation having its own. From a kabbalistic perspective, Benamozegh claimed, error is not disqualifying, but instead paradoxically sustains holiness in this world: “This is what theosophy openly professes by calling this truth that error keeps alive the holiness that life gives to it.”38 Such a defense of pluralism, based on the misconceptions that gave birth to it, is an arresting one: How long can the world be sustained by its errors? How soon can redemption come about? If pluralism is a marker of modernity, Benamozegh’s modernity is problematic because the pluralism it undergirds is a temporary one; if his ultimate aim is religious synthesis, that pluralism would be subsumed and effaced. In order to make sense of this tension, it is thus useful to probe his worldview against the contemporary categories of pluralism and inclusivism, as I do in the following section.

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Pluralism and Inclusivism

Pluralism designates both a social fact (the amicable interaction between various groups) and a worldview—or, as Peter L. Berger points out, a stance that turns religious plurality as a fact into an ideology.39 This double meaning makes the concept both ubiquitous and elusive. Thinking alongside the rabbi illuminates the nuances and limitations of the threefold categories routinely used to describe the ideological approaches to religious diversity: exclusivism, inclusivism, and pluralism.40 Exclusivism posits that only one belief is valid. At the other end of the spectrum, a pluralist approach contends that more than one set of truth claims may be correct and admits different versions of the same truth—each offering a partial perspective on the nature of ultimate reality, as well as a separate path to salvation “equally effective in producing changes from selfcenteredness to reality-centeredness.”41 Underlying a pluralistic approach is theological interdependence: the various faiths acknowledge their need of each other in order to spread divine truth to all mankind.42 Inclusivism, as a middle way, asserts that only one religion is correct, but that other religions may participate in or partially reveal some of the truth of that one true religion. Robert McKim has argued that inclusivism and pluralism can concern different aspects—for example, salvation and truth: the systems can be inclusivist with regard to truth and pluralist with regard to salvation. This applies to Benamozegh, whose thinking fluctuated between expressions of pluralism and a more consistent inclusivism.43 The Noahide Laws imply salvific pluralism. But the category of pluralism is applicable if a faith recognizes itself as provisional, in pursuit of or as part of a covenant. In the rabbi’s construct, this is not the case with Judaism since it is the source religion and is exempt from this provisional nature. The category of covenantal pluralism, in which religions deploy their respective strengths in order to fulfill the covenant with God, is also applicable to his thought. Yet such an emphasis on covenant suggests that despite his claims of finding religious unity for all of mankind, Benamozegh’s focus was monotheistic. Additionally, Benamozegh’s system did posit a plurality of religious truths accessible to each nation according to its tradition and psyche, but these truths are only partial. Without the awareness of a whole, fragmentary



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truths ran the risk of being hypostatized and thereby of becoming evil, which is the illusion or belief that incomplete truths constitute an absolute. Religious diversity can only be sustained if one is cognizant of its theological underpinnings and of its provisional nature on the path to a greater purpose of unity. If diversity is indeed a common reality and responsibility, religious encounters are all the more needed in order to make the world aware of its mission to unite humanity.

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In his man uscr ip t, Benamozegh described theosophy as a “forme mitoyenne,”1 which can be translated either as an “adjoining form” or a “dividing form” (or “shape”). Indeed, the term is generally used for walls or fences in row houses. Certainly because of this peculiar use, the phrase did not make it into the 1914 edition. Such a characterization of Kabbalah, however, is felicitous2 and captures a crucial aspect of Benamozegh’s system, whereby the greater the proximity, the greater the tension and potential for division. Having pondered the meaning of the encounters, I will examine their occurrences in the Bible and the tradition, zeroing in on the “iron crucible” of Egypt, the metaphor Benamozegh used for the complexity of religious assimilation.

Places of Encounter

Inscribed in the very word encounter is a dynamic tension (in the combination of the prefix in, “toward” and the adverb contra, “against”) and a possible hostile confrontation with the other. In Middle English, encounter meant a meeting of adversaries. The German word for encounter, Begegnung, helps us explore the nuances of the term in another language and expand the concept. The root gegen signifies “against,” but it is the voice of the verb begegnen that imprints a different perspective on the character of 162



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these confrontations—willed or merely endured. Martin Heidegger posits that begegnen is a “middle voice”—neither active nor passive: the event of the encounter is something/someone that encounters us. “How things come to be for us is therefore via this ‘letting encounter,’ or [ . . . ] a ‘letting-standagainst.’  ”3 One has to simultaneously trigger the encounter and let it occur. In Being and Time, Heidegger’s musings on the etymology of Begegnung as Gegend (neighborhood) suggest that it is a space, a region of confrontation with das Gegnende, that which is opposite. The place of these encounters matters: Do they occur at the margin or at the center? At the top or at the bottom? How does this situatedness affect the nature of the encounter? These questions echo in Benamozegh’s depiction of Egypt. The land plays a particular role in Benamozegh’s modes of contact as he points out “the resemblance between the words Mitzrayim, Egypt, and metzarim, frontiers or limits, to indicate that Egypt was the nearest country to Palestine, not only geographically but also from a religious perspective.”4 Egypt is the locus of the two types of religious interaction described by Benamozegh—on the one side among initiates and, on the other, among an unruly, diverse crowd.

The Initiate and the Possibility of Dialogue

Benamozegh’s depiction of Egypt as the place of religious mysteries where initiates of diverse origins shrouded their dialogues and knowledge in secrecy is another example of his reinterpretation of the literary and historical conversation of his time in the service of his own theological agenda. In the early days of German Romanticism, Schiller published an essay entitled “The Legation of Moses” (“Die Sendung Moses”). The text featured Moses as a Hebrew raised as an Egyptian priest and trained in the mysteries of Egyptian religion.5 Schiller placed Judaism firmly in the ambit of Freemasonry, its symbolism and mysteries: echoes of his essay found their way into an anonymous text published in the short-lived magazine Der biblische Orient (The Biblical Orient) in 1821. One of the anonymous coauthors is presumed to be the German rabbi Isaac Bernays (1792–1849), who contended that the Egyptians had a mystery religion that remained hidden until the Neoplatonists revealed it in the Ptolemaic period, in a development parallel to Kabbalah.6 Benamozegh’s thesis was similar: because their monotheistic

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ideas ran against the popular religion in Egypt and would never be accepted by laypeople, the Egyptian priests guarded them as mysteries, transmitted through hieroglyphics, and the Israelite priests were initiated into these mysteries.7 Polytheism [is] pagan exotericism and monotheism its secret doctrine, where the latter is Jewish exotericism and polytheism its acroamatism. Provided, of course, that one does not exclude the other, neither among the pagans nor among the Jews since, just as with them acroamatic polytheism or

emanatism subordinates itself to exoteric monotheism; and here is the key.8

The proposition that polytheism was the external form of paganism concealing an inner monotheism had already appeared in La Kabbale et l’origine des dogmes chrétiens.9 In that narrative, only the most elevated minds had access to such awareness. Their shared, secret knowledge encompassed the mystery of creation and all realms of life, including natural science.

The Initiates and the Mixed Multitude

Benamozegh’s inroads into Egyptology participated in his systematic project of validating Kabbalah; he argued that the scholarship about the role of secrecy in the ancient world supported his reading of Kabbalah as tradition. Moreover, Benamozegh’s analysis of the influence of paganism on Judaism demonstrated the most unsuspected and subterranean commonalities among religions, albeit at the rarefied level of initiates. The rabbi’s description of the relationship between Moses and his Midianite father-in-law Jethro (the father of Zipporah) exemplified the fluidity of the contacts between Hebrews and pagans and sought to disprove the exclusively ethnic nature of Judaism often leveled as an argument against it.10 Benamozegh paralleled the virtuous character of Jethro with that of Melchizedek, another righteous pagan ruler; the rabbi contended that both monolatrous, non-Jewish figures shaped Judaism.11 In his assessment, the prophets “were in intimate contact with two pagan priests: Abraham as he received Melchizedek’s blessing and Moses, by marrying Jethro’s daughter and by accepting his spiritual guidance. In both cases, it is the gentility, or to say it better, humanity, that gives priestly ordination to Israel.”12 The rabbi added his voice to a long tradition of interpretation of Jethro’s advice to Moses and of Moses’s deference to his father-in-law. Based on



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Exodus 18:13–27 and Deuteronomy 1:12–17, the passage played a significant role for Jewish and Christian political thought in the Middle Ages and the early modern era.13 Reflecting on the ideal government and ruler, the Catholic theologian Aquinas, the Jewish exegetes and philosophers Ibn Ezra (1089–1167) and Abravanel (1437–1508), the kabbalist Yohanan Alemanno (1435–1504), as well as John Calvin (1509–64) all contended that Jethro’s reaction to Moses’s leadership ought to inspire contemporary rule. Abravanel used it as a template for the constitution of the Venetian Republic while Calvin clearly fashioned the advice as a repudiation of both the spiritual and the temporal ambitions of the Papacy. While Abravanel was prudent about the role of Jethro and claimed that Moses learned only political skills from him, Alemanno’s treatise Hai ha-‘Olamim, which dealt with the ideal development of man, contended that Moses studied both political and divine wisdom with his father-in-law. Benamozegh’s emphasis on Jethro’s role in Moses’s education and on the role played by the Midianite in the fashioning of the people of Israel aligned him with Alemanno’s views, but the Livornese rabbi went further in contending that Jethro appeared to be the recipient of a tradition descending from Adam that was not passed down to the sole descendants of Abraham but belonged to humankind: The sacred name of God [ . . . ] was engraved in the wood of Moses’s rod. It had been handed down from Adam to Seth, who bequeathed it to his successor and, passing thus through the generations from hand to hand, it ended up coming to Jethro, who planted it in his garden. It was there that

Moses saw it; he was able to pull it out of the ground, something no one before him had been able to do. This fable is transparent enough to render its hidden meaning easily decipherable. The chain through which the staff passes from Adam to Jethro represents the religious tradition and it is from Jethro that Moses receives this staff, carrying the holy name, the symbol

of a new revelation. Zipporah’s father is thus one of the founders of the religion of Israel, to which it brought the non-Semitic element destined to complete its humanitarian mission. Such is the truth, somewhat hard for the national pride, which the midrash enshrouded in an allegorical veil.14

The story of Jethro illustrates what Benamozegh meant in his advocacy of myth as a much-needed way to convey religious ideas. Here, the nonlinear

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transmission of Adam’s staff, engraved with the name of God, instantiates the detours beyond a strictly Jewish lineage, a tradition fertilized by pagans— in an allusion to the soil in which Jethro enabled this tradition to grow (since Moses plucked the staff from Jethro’s garden). Benamozegh concluded his retelling of the episode with the rhetorical phrase “somewhat hard for the national pride.” Yet his proposition surreptitiously bolstered that pride, since the capacity to borrow from other traditions and assimilate foreign accretions, as seen in chapter 3, demonstrated Judaism’s robust constitution. The question of borrowing sources and the ways to do so is central in religious encounters.15 However, it is worth noting that the triumphant conclusions that he drew from source criticism differ radically from what the Catholic modernists concluded—that it jeopardized the very possibility of theology, whereas Benamozegh saw even multiple foreign contributions as positive. In a sentence from the manuscript excised in the 1914 edition, the rabbi defined “borrowing” as what is “paid back with accrued interest.”16 According to his logic, any theological loan by Israel results in a net gain for the world: based on the kabbalistic concepts of berur and ‘illuy, Judaism metabolizes what it takes from other traditions, elevates it, and thus improves humanity as a whole—but only through the vehicle of Judaism. Benamozegh’s interpretation of the significance of Jethro in Israel and Humanity differed from the account he had given in ’Em la-Miqra’, his earlier biblical commentary (1862), in which Jethro played a more modest part. It would be mistaken, however, to contend that the characterization of Jethro as a forefather and, more broadly, of the role of non-Jews in Judaism was an exaggeration imputable to the poor knowledge of the editor, Pallière.17 Indeed, the manuscript of Israel and Humanity has exactly the same wording, as did a few texts regarding the episode that Benamozegh self-published toward the end of his life. Jethro appeared in all of these texts as a marker of Judaism’s acceptance of pagans and of their influence in shaping the Jewish religious tradition.18 The biblical and midrashic consideration given to the Midianite priest supports Benamozegh’s view that Judaism as a faith—and as a civilization—was made complete by its foreign accretions and by its capacity to deal with otherness. In that regard, Jethro serves as evidence that Judaism gives special prominence to non-Jews and welcomes their ethical teachings, as the rabbi wrote in a late book on history and literature:



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Moses’s relations with Jethro were always, in my eyes, of the utmost im-

portance. First, because of what the Scriptures record, either through his advice—always welcomed by the inspired Moses which, in a system rest-

ing on revelation is all the more remarkable and not so easy to explain, especially coming from a Gentile—or through Moses’s eagerness, almost supplication, to have him settle down at his side, as his mentor and his own eyes, according to the text.19

Establishing Hebraism as an assimilating force was a way to revisit and subvert the vexing issue of Jewish misanthropy—a long-standing dispute revisited by some of the leading scholars of his time.20 The rabbi engaged in polemics with figures such as Cornelis Tiele, the Dutch historian who developed the notion of “world religions” and held that only Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity could fit this definition as they rose beyond their national associations.21 The more independent a religion is of its national origins, the more ethical it is, Tiele claimed. Benamozegh implicitly challenged this view by claiming that Judaism’s hybrid nature, although predicated on its specific national identity, was a token of its inclusivity and its greatness. Benamozegh invoked “the midrashim, full of enthusiastic descriptions of Jethro and of the benefits that Moses derived from his stays with his fatherin-law.”22 Such dialogue, however, only involves a few select people. The level of these exchanges shows that the formation of various faiths, or reconciliation between them called forth by Benamozegh, may appear through these figures who, unlike the apostle who distorted Jesus’s message, do not cling to partial or figurative truths.23 If these interactions are profitable at a priestly or initiates’ level, the numerous instances in the Bible when otherness—mostly that of the lower class—is not viewed favorably provide a counter-narrative to the benefits of encounters with the religious other, and one disturbingly predicated on social belonging.

The Mixed Multitude

The case of the ‘erev rav, the “mixed multitude,” whom Rashi identified (based on an older source) as converts who left Egypt with the Israelites (Exodus 12:38), raises questions about the gains derived from interaction across religions when not at a rarefied level of initiates but at a laypeople’s level.24

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Called “beasts” in the Zohar, the non-Jews of Egypt are mentioned at every negative juncture in Jewish history and have facilitated the denial of the humanity of non-Jews.25 Although Benamozegh did occasionally resort to disparaging comparisons in his commentary on the Pentateuch (such as using an image of “the ape mimicking the human” to describe the Canaanite religion), he did not deny non-Jews their humanity and went to great lengths in order to reverse any such possible interpretation.26 Benamozegh alluded to the fact that the Zohar Bereshit ascribes all evils to non-Jews, mentioning their role in the ’asafsuf (riffraff ) rebellion described in Numbers 11:4, when they loudly bemoaned their lot and claimed to miss Egypt. In the manuscript, he also acknowledged their traditional role in the golden calf episode: who would not agree, he wrote, that “a mob of inadequately converted neophytes did not play a major role, if not the main one?”27 “The Talmud goes even further,” the rabbi noted: “Every single time the Bible mentions am (people or masses), it refers to the Ereb [sic] rav, in contrast to Israel, a name reserved for the descendants of Abraham.”28 However, he immediately downplayed the extent of the group’s apparent negative impact: “Fetishism can go together with monotheism. There are facts in the Bible that prove it.”29 To support his argument, he contended that the golden calf filled a certain theological role since it was one of the living creatures present on Ezekiel’s celestial chariot.30 The same view—emphasizing the divine intention even in the most idolatrous actions—informed Benamozegh’s observation that there had to be a reason why Moses, aware as he was of the problem posed by the non-Jews for his people, did nothing to drive away this multitude. Why, then, at the first stage, in his people’s very youth, when he had every reason to keep them at a distance from such influences, did Moses not fear

to welcome such an overwhelming mob, which—if not of the worst kind—

was made up of elements that were quite heterogeneous, to say the least. Or was Moses blinded to a degree that would harm the lowest of men, and all

the more as he [otherwise] shows himself so jealous of the integrity, purity, blood, and faith of Israel? Or should we, with Moses, acknowledge and rejoice about the anticipated effects, that is, they [the mob] would accept our

system and legitimize the mixed theological product which came out of it?31



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In his manuscript, Benamozegh portrayed the ‘erev rav as a litmus test and as evidence that Moses’s decision to leave Egypt together with non-Jews was an instance of agency given to the prophet and of his awareness that great benefits could and would be derived from foreign accretions, even from the seemingly lowliest individuals, once they were assimilated.32 The Exodus was thus actually the enactment of what Benamozegh had depicted as the contribution of Hebraism to coexistence: in the Exodus narrative, berur—the kabbalistic separation and purification that leads to assimilation—played itself out. Shaul Magid’s reading of the ‘erev rav contends that the kabbalist Haim Vital’s text (see note 32) included a surprisingly more positive portrayal of the non-Jews and views it as a counter-narrative designed to absorb conversos who flocked to Safed.33 In that reading, the tradition constructed a category, neither Jew nor non-Jew, of people who benefited from revelation yet could not fully articulate its meaning.34 This reading would accord with Benamozegh’s method of softening the binary between the Jews and other nations, granting them access to revelation through the Noahide Laws and allowing for a degree of inclusivity derived from a Kabbalah-based exegesis of the Torah. In assessing sources eliciting exclusivism, Benamozegh created a distinction between the language of philosophy and of the Bible interpreted by way of Kabbalah. He claimed that it was philosophy, rather than the Jewish tradition, that was likely to drive wedges, and then turned to the kabbalistic tradition and hermeneutics in order to find metaphors of identity formation and coexistence. He found one in the image of the “iron crucible.”

The Iron Crucible

The rabbi’s emphasis on the Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt sheds light on the process of identity fashioning: the land is, according to the biblical phrase, the “iron crucible” where Judaism was engineered.35 With this image, Benamozegh alluded to Deuteronomy 4:20, in which the iron crucible is juxtaposed with Israel’s chosenness in order to manifest a necessary transformation prior to reaching the worthiness of election: “But the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace [crucible], out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance, as you are this day” (images also found in 1 Kings 8:51 and Jeremiah 11:4).

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The dual purpose of the term crucible (creuset in the French original) captures the rabbi’s worldview. On the one hand, a crucible is a ceramic container in which metals are melted—and, using his metaphor, a place where identities blend: a melting pot. The “mixed product” (to use Benamozegh’s words) is couched in terms of an alchemical process that appears in the Zohar, 2:189b (Ki-Tissa), and is also mentioned in Vital’s Sha‘ar ha-Pesuqim, 56a. The rest of the Zoharic passage indicates that prior to the exodus, Israel was not a nation (“Until they went out of Egypt, they were not a nation and did not seem worthy”): The iron crucible—this image can only have one meaning, conveyed by the

use rendered by the crucible, which is to melt, purify, combine the metal.

Could one render more precisely the action and result of the stay in Egypt, according to what we have said about it following theosophy, which fortunately agrees here and elsewhere with contemporary science? And it is not

just for Egypt that this image is employed—so it also is for the scattering of Israel in general. Just as one makes silver in the crucible, so will I make the house of Israel with you.36

Here again, Benamozegh sought to align science and theosophy, as he did when laying out the concept of berur. Yet the word crucible conveys the additional meaning of trial, which echoes Isaiah 48:10: “Behold I have refined you not as silver but in the furnace [crucible] of affliction” (‫בְּחַרְתִּיך בְּכוּר עֹנִי‬,‫בְכָסֶף‬ ָ‫וְלֹא‬,ָ‫)הִנֵּה צְרַפְתִּיך‬. The moral purification, the refinement, in Isaiah comes at a high price but signals an opportunity for elevation.37 The text features an additional play on words, visual rather than aural, since “in the crucible” here is ‫ בְּכוּר‬which reads like bekhor, the firstborn, which is prophetically applied to the nation of Israel. For all the ills of Egypt, Benamozegh viewed the sojourn in this land not as a curse but as a sign of a harsh yet divine providence. In developing his argument, he first presented the views of William Warburton, the eighteenth-century English priest and theologian (1687–1779) whose Divine Legation of Moses was a famous critique of deism: Warburton [ . . . ] thinks that the Israelites, since they could not conquer

the land of Canaan as long as they were not a numerous people, were sent to Egypt, of all countries, because it loathed strangers and especially the



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Hebrews, whose contact they avoided. It would thus have been to better isolate them that Providence sent them to Egypt.38

Warburton’s stance aligned with Benamozegh’s characterization of Egypt in ’Em la-Miqra’, in which he insisted on the affliction of the Israelites and the sinful environment they had to face in a hostile country, which precluded any kind of interaction with the local people. But Israel and Humanity took a different tack; there, this episode helped Benamozegh advance his argument about identity formation as a godsend. To support his claim about the inherently religious nature of Egypt, he marshaled arguments from contemporary thinkers, particularly François Laurent (1810–87), a noted Belgian historian and legal scholar who studied the relation between church and state as well as international law: It is nowadays vindicated by an illustrious publicist and in words that

sound like they come straight out of the very theory of the theosophists. Mr. Laurent [ . . . ] formulates his views as follows: “The Hebrews were, from the most ancient antiquity, in relation with the theological people par excellence. Abraham, Joseph, Jacob, etc.: the Egyptian education is a providential fact.”39

By making use of the image of the crucible, Benamozegh advanced an argument about the role of otherness in the formation of Jewish identity and religion—a process that he claimed to be at work during the sojourn in Egypt and in “the scattering of Israel in general.”40 In his interpretation, the meaning of the diaspora of Israel was not just a divine design so that Israel could fulfill its priestly mission across the world; it was also an imperative for the shaping of Judaism as a religion and a nation. At first glance, however, Benamozegh’s thesis of humanity as an organic articulation of ethnic and religious differences does not accord with the blending of identities in a crucible, where elements are melted together and cannot preserve their singularity. Yet the idea of alloying would reconcile the two propositions: in that process, secondary constituents, or elements, are mixed with the primary metal and refine it, but all of these elements keep their distinct properties since alloys can be separated back into their initial metals. Additionally, the traditional translation of Isaiah 48:10—“I have refined you not as silver”—can also be

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translated as “I have refined you not with silver.” And, if the refinement is not done with silver, it could indicate that an element of lower quality was used in the process. This clarifies the process but shows how the hierarchy is maintained. The reciprocal action and the capacity of taking on others’ properties are still at work, but distinctions are, indeed, preserved.

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S ELF - A S S ERT I O N A N D A J EW I S H T H E O L O G Y O F R ELI G I O N S

Under ly ing Benamoz eg h’s wor ldv ie w is an inextricable link between theology and identity. The Jewish theology that he advocated reimagined a relationship with Christianity—one where the tradition of a minority, namely Judaism, could be used to overcome the flaws of the dominant culture. Because of its confident (and at times triumphant) tone, it is also a statement about Jewish self-perception in modernity. A theology of religion, as defined by Alan Race, is “an attempt to account theologically for the world’s religious quest and commitment.”1 Benamozegh developed a Jewish theology of other religions based on his insistence on relational dependence rather than tolerance, which he viewed as a weak concept derived from a utilitarian understanding of relationships, thus disregarding religion as an expression of metaphysical quest and muting the very specificity of each religion. Benamozegh’s move is thus a rupture. Historically, because it predated the other two monotheisms, Judaism had no need to account for these other faiths or to offer a systematic theology of their religious otherness. In fact, “Jewish theology is responsive to the lived experience of the Jews,” as Eugene Korn has put it2 and retracing the history of these responses has often been construed as theology itself. However, in that endeavor, the treatment of religious otherness has been taken as no more than a contingency.3 Among the 173

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key tenets of Judaism—such as the thirteen principles established by Maimonides—the recognition of other faiths, their necessity, or the legitimacy of religious pluralism occupies no prominent place, if any at all.4 Benamozegh endeavored to change that perception and to demonstrate, from within the Jewish Scriptures, how other religions—most contentiously Christianity— had been ascribed a place and a role in and by Judaism, thus making a case for their interdependence. Recent scholarship5 has indeed highlighted that Benamozegh had not plainly noted the historical proximity between monotheisms but rather their intrinsic linkage, and indeed had established a textual and theological proximity and thus a sense of design and continuity.6 This move is noteworthy and foreshadows the subsequent work of such twentieth-century thinkers as Rosenzweig, Levinas, Soloveitchik, and Heschel.7 Yet what makes Benamozegh’s work so distinctive is that his quite triumphant tone when flaunting the openness of Judaism, a tone for which he had been slighted by his contemporaries, actually signals a modern turn in Jewish self-understanding and self-assertion. Benamozegh flipped the script used by Christian Hebraists, for instance, who claimed that Jewish Scriptures revealed the coming of Jesus but that Jews had obscured this reality.8 Fighting such instances of typological reading, the exegesis by which figures or events in the Hebrew Bible prefigure aspects of Jesus or will be superseded by them, the rabbi showed that Christianity had in fact been shaped by Judaism and that the new faith was part of the old one: Christianity was only an aspect of Judaism, an adjuvant in the service of a greater purpose of religious unity. Benamozegh’s Jewish theology of Christianity is predicated on the notion that Christianity had been or could be collapsed into the Noahide Laws. In reminiscing about his conversation with his mentor, Aimé Pallière wrote that Benamozegh had said that “what has been known by the name of Christianity is in reality the Noahide religion”9 and characterized it bluntly: “[Regarding] Noahism, one may continue to call it Christianity disencumbered, of course, of the Trinity and the Incarnation, beliefs which are contrary to the Old Testament and perhaps even to the New.”10 Notable precedents in identifying the Noahide Laws with Christianity include the anti-Sabbatean rabbi Jacob Emden (1696–1776), who wrote: “The writers of the Gospels never meant to say that the Nazarene came to



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abolish Judaism, but only that he came to establish a religion for the Gentiles from that time onward. Nor was it new, but actually ancient; they being the Seven Commandments of the Sons of Noah, which were forgotten. The Apostles of the Nazarene then established them anew.”11 This passage establishes an indebtedness toward Christianity that is meant to assist Judaism to fulfill its mission, restate its message, and provide the capacity for outreach that Jewish theology lacked.12 But Benamozegh took this interrelatedness further with some bold statements in Israel and Humanity, such as “the Aggadah above all, of which the Gospel is indeed a chapter,” in which, in order to reveal the core of the two faiths, he dared to describe the Gospel in terms of Talmudic narrative.13 Deliberately addressing his Christian audience, he exhorted: I hope that Christians will not forget that what speaks in these pages is the Judaism from which Christianity was born; that the interests of the

one and of the other are interdependent; and that, finally, it is Christianity, reformed to be sure on its first model [i.e., Hebraism], which will always be

the religion of the Gentile peoples. And this [i.e., the reform of Christianity] will come about through Judaism itself.14

Despite some impassioned appeals like this one, Benamozegh’s ambition was to rest his case in an ostensibly rational manner. He thus modeled his argument on logic-based demonstration, further proving the value of Judaism since it is equipped to speak to reason and demonstrating that the awareness of such proximity will occur “in the only serious, logical, and durable way.”15 The oscillation of Benamozegh’s tone, from rational to impassioned, deserves more attention than the dismissiveness reserved for the “paladin of Kabbalism” (Sabato Morais’s epithet for Benamozegh) as it reveals a new, modern turn in Jewish self-assertion.

Self-Assertion and the Affirmative Character of Modernity

The second half of the nineteenth century ushered in, among European Jews, attitudes of what the historian Graetz described as “growing self-confidence” or what Paul Mendes-Flohr characterized as “self-affirmation” at the turn of the century.16 I resort to self-assertion in the sense Hans Blumenberg ascribed to it in the wake of his polemics with the philosopher

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Karl Löwith. Löwith argued in his 1949 Meaning in History that modernity stemmed from the secularization of Christian ideals. Contesting this thesis, Blumenberg viewed modernity less as the triumph of reason than as man’s “self-assertion” against the Christian or Hebrew tradition and the concept of divine omnipotence.17 Blumenberg defined self-assertion as “an existential program according to which man posits his existence in a historical situation and indicates to himself how he is going to deal with the reality surrounding him and what he will make of the possibilities that are offered to him.” Benamozegh’s view of the role of Judaism mirrors the greater relation of modernity and religion: Judaism would occupy a place that would be neither an accommodation with the dominant culture nor a replacement of that culture, but an impetus to foster a new view of its place in society.18 Resemblances between Benamozegh’s work and the philosophy of Rosenzweig in their relationship to Christianity have been invoked, with their efforts to connect, in a triangulation, God, humanity, and the world—as well as creation, revelation, and redemption. I would argue, however, that those resemblances lie less in the stock of images used by both thinkers (the sun and its rays)19 than in their tone,20 in what that tone reveals of the reimagined relation between Judaism and Christianity (or, less so in the case of Rosenzweig, between Judaism and other religions) and of the way in which that form affects the content. Rosenzweig’s ambition was to prompt Jews to affirm revelation from a Jewish standpoint, which draws him close to Benamozegh’s understanding of revelation as a token of universalism, though one that should be expressed from a Jewish standpoint.21 If Benamozegh seems to invite a conversation with Christianity, it is not a dialogue of equals. Leora Batnitzky has remarked with respect to Rosenzweig’s work that dialogue does not amount to mutuality; it is a means for one tradition to reconsider its own flaws but not necessarily find common ground with the other. If dialogue results in an “asymmetrical relation of self-judgment,”22 Benamozegh’s case for self-judgment is minimal: it asked his coreligionists to start reappraising the significance of their tradition and engaging seriously with Kabbalah, but it mostly claimed to give other faiths the tools for this self-reformation.23 Pallière would take this up in a series of articles in which he sought a solution to the crisis that beset the



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church—crystallized by the authority of a conservative Papacy and its hostility to science and democracy.24 For all the validity of the comparison with Rosenzweig, given the nature of the two writers’ engagements with Christianity, it has many limits. Whereas Rosenzweig seems to ascribe politics no significant role in humanity’s redemption, asserting famously that “the true eternity of the eternal people must always be alien and enraging to the state and to the history of the world,”25 the political is inescapable in Benamozegh’s thought and it is an integral part of his effort to foster a theology of Christianity from a Jewish standpoint. An aspect of Benamozegh’s contribution to, and reflection on, Jewish modernity lies in its novel narrative of other faiths and its assertive engagement with other religions, to which Judaism claims to offer a chance for self-reformation which would be desirable in the contemporary world, on religious and political grounds.

Reforming the Other? The Work through the Margins

The injunction of Leviticus 19:17 looms large in Benamozegh’s work: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall surely rebuke your neighbor, and not bear sin because of him.” Rebuking—and reforming—the neighbor but also the brother constitutes both one of the tenets and also one of the limitations of such an injunction and system. Some of the Christian traditions, such as Gnosticism, which Benamozegh invoked to show the religion’s proximity to Judaism, did not belong to Christianity’s canon but to its margins. Still, he demonstrated the fluidity of this canon and argued for the need to go back to its roots, which might have included religious strands now considered heretical. This return was needed in order to bring about a new self-understanding of the Christian tradition itself, conscious of its foreign accretions, multiple facets, its marginal currents, and its debt to Judaism—all of which could ease its transition into modernity. Benamozegh’s operative principle, and his gesture of bringing the margins toward the center, actually anticipated contemporary strategies of interreligious dialogue.26 Such was the stance taken by Irving Greenberg when he outlined the possibility of each religion recovering theological themes from the other, “often by recognizing that this has been a minor theme in its own tradition.”27 This framework is a distinct contribution that can be identified in Benamozegh’s work.

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His advocacy for the “pariah science”28 (as he described Kabbalah) and his way of reading against the grain certainly explains why, among the key proponents of his views, two of them were at the periphery of their own religious tradition. Both Aimé Pallière and Hyacinthe Loyson sought to bring about change based on what was ostensibly outside the church—but had in fact been an essential part of it. In that respect, Benamozegh signals a change in which Europe, or at least European modernity, came to think of itself as the heir to heresies.29 The role ascribed by Benamozegh to this reckoning (lest the collective religious psyche become alienated) adumbrates the centrality of Gnosticism and pantheism in European thought between the two wars, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust. If modernity is the “rupture that reconfigures past and present,”30 a new representation of the intersection between Judaism and Christianity, it destabilizes and then reconfigures the past and what used to be, for Judaism, a marginal presence. Benamozegh’s Hebraism (whereby the role of Kabbalah in Judaism would be given proper consideration) remained a metric by which other faiths were measured; despite being used to reform other religions, it seemed less likely to be reformed itself. This judgment might be nuanced since ascribing Kabbalah a prominent place at the center of Judaism did amount to a religious revolution among the Jewish detractors of the theosophical tradition. Nevertheless, in his work as a publisher, one geared toward traditional Jewish communities, Benamozegh promoted models of religious change that did not call for an overhaul but rather enabled a greater flexibility and belonged to what he characterized as the Oriental tradition. A model of this approach is the work of Israel Hazan who, serving as chief rabbi in Rome, questioned Catholic authorities about decisions pertaining to Jewish law and customs and featured prominently in his work the topic of huqot ha-goyim, the status of the laws of non-Jews. Hazan adopted a stance based on reason: only nonrational laws of other faith communities should be dismissed out of hand. If their beliefs were based on reason, they were permissible to the Jews.31 But his responsa address customs, not tenets of the Jewish faith. From this discrepancy stems another set of questions: Can any fruitful interreligious dialogue be predicated on such asymmetry in expectations? Or should one, in fact, adjust one’s expectations of what dialogue really means and base it on the Rosenzweigian model, as self-judgment?



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The rabbi, theologian, and activist Abraham Joshua Heschel (a major figure of twentieth-century Jewish thought in America from the 1940s until his death in 1972) affirmed a different standard. In his address and article “No Religion Is an Island,” he made a forceful statement about dialogue by using—with a twist—the words of John Donne, the seventeenth-century poet and dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London who famously declared “No man is an island.” Heschel outlined ways of speaking to the faithful of other religions, and precisely because of this relationality demanded that Jews “ponder seriously the responsibility involved in Jewish history for having been the mother of two world religions. Does not the failure of children reflect on their mother? Do not the sharp deviations from Jewish tradition on the part of the early Christians who were Jews indicate some failure of communication within the spiritual climate of first-century Palestine?” (see note 32). While Benamozegh did conceive of interreligious relations as relations between brothers or between parents and children, he did not envision the possibility of a parent prompting the children to rebel, and did not seriously reflect on the flaws of Jewish leadership in Second Temple Judaism that could have encouraged the emergence of, and a parting of the ways with, Christianity. Joseph Soloveitchik (1903–93), the prominent thinker of modern Orthodoxy in America, became the spokesman of an opposing stance regarding a theology-based interreligious dialogue, one especially adverse to tentative institutionalized interfaith engagements in the post-Second World War era. He expressed his qualms in a famous article, “Confrontation.” His main justification for negating the very possibility of such dialogue rested on the fact that it would be, at best, a delusion.32 That type of interaction, he argued, is limited: it can only take place in the “unredeemed present,” whereas the messianic era, which is the horizon of the monotheistic creeds, will bring, alongside redemption, a justification for a given religion’s exclusive claim to truth. Indeed, testing Benamozegh’s understanding of the messianic thus proves crucial for assessing the limits—or lack thereof—of inclusiveness in his thinking.

The Shadow of Messianism

Benamozegh’s choice metaphors to describe the redeemed future entertain the possibility of reducing the multiple to the one and thus of a limited inclusiveness. Such is the case of the tents of Shem (Genesis 9:27). This biblical

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passage, which follows Noah’s curse against Canaan and contains his blessing, reads: “May God enlarge Japheth, and may he dwell in the tents of Shem; and may Canaan be his servant.” In the nineteenth century, the tents of Shem became an archetype of otherness and coexistence.33 Noah’s three sons had been constructed into one of Benamozegh’s favorite and most complex metaphors for articulating the individual/collective nexus of the messianic, on which he elaborated at length in the body of his manuscript. The tradition of assigning ethnicities based on the biblical genealogies started with Flavius Josephus. This typology gained new currency with the emergence of racial theories, as the three sons of Noah provided a frame. Shem, the oldest, was the forefather of the Hebrews (and Persia and India). Ham, the middle son, was the ancestor of Africa, Arabia, and the Fertile Crescent. Japheth, the younger, is identified with Greek culture and more broadly, Europe. One predicts, in the form of a blessing, that the Eternal God of Shem will

one day be recognized as the universal god of Japheth as well as of Ham. The Word will live in Shem’s tents [. . . . ] The same system is also followed by the Talmud of Palestine and that of Babylon.34

In the notes of his manuscript, Benamozegh further engaged with the tents of Shem by quoting the following midrash: At the head of this first Sanhedrin sat the Prince; at the head of the seventy

sons of Jacob, Jacob himself; at the head of seventy nations of the globe, Israel descending from Shem, to whom was promised the religious direc-

tion of his brothers or, according to the biblical statement, that those who would take shelter under his tents would worship the same God as he in his

temples. For even though one wishes to bring the Word, and that he will live not for Japheth but for God, the consequence will be the same because if the God of all now lives in Shem’s tents, it is there that all must worship him.35

Even if the metaphor arguably exemplifies a type of reductionism, Benamozegh’s numerous silences betrayed either a lack of or an all-too-clear awareness of the conflicts between his interpretation of the texts and their other exegesis and full implications, which he spelled out in his discussion of Renan in a passage later excised by Pallière: “Messianic ideas [ . . . ] far from



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being specific to Israel, display, more than anything, a cosmopolitan character—or rather, are only based on a cosmopolitan idea. For, indeed, its most striking aspect is precisely the concern with the religious fate of humanity.”36 Benamozegh may appear to have addressed the ethnocentrism of the messianic and to have neutralized it, but in reality he failed to do so: the tents of Shem remain an instance of potential reductionism. The metaphor of Israel as a ring, which ran through Benamozegh’s work, raises a similar question and problem: it represents both a connector (as Gioberti described with the term anello medio) and a cycle in which the beginning will be identical to the end.37 The ring shape belongs to a kabbalistic geometrical grammar of linear circularity. The line must be considered in conjunction with the circle, as occurs in the images of the circular ladder (sulam ‘agol) and/or spherical ladder (hasulam hakaduri).38 Such a shape captures Benamozegh’s description of Israel’s vocation and of its chosenness: “The Israelites’ election signals the point at which humanity retraces its steps, where a straight line is curved inward.”39 Indeed, if Israel is tasked with recreating this unity of origins, it is incumbent upon it to foster this inflection. The ring as a messianic shape appears in the Zohar Bereshit: “It is written, ‘Next to the enclosures are the rings to be, as housings for the poles’ (Exodus 25:27). Who is that enclosure? A closed site, opened only by a single narrow path, intimated secretly. Thereby it is filled and traces gates to kindle lamps. Because it is a site hidden and concealed, it is called enclosure; this is the world that is coming.”40 What is often understood as the world to come is in fact the world that is coming: a continuous source of emanation, “constantly coming, never ceasing” (Zohar 3:290b)—an unceasing process that Benamozegh described to his students. This world is also constantly coming into being because this world refers to the sefirah of binah, of understanding—the action of deriving one matter from another matter, in an unceasing process. The ring offers a nondualistic approach to the binaries of the world: “The conjunction between the literal and Zoharic meanings of the ring, which overlap in their depth, is the word bekravenu [in our proximity]. The Israelites obviously meant that they did not know whether or not the God they adored was an immanent or a transcendent God, or whether He was alien to the world, or not. Nevertheless, it is under this dual aspect that He is constantly represented by Kabbalah (arih anpin and zeir anpin).”41

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Benamozegh’s statements capture human uncertainty regarding the presence of God in this world, but this uncertainty only heightened the intellectual stakes of approaching the divine: “Man in search of God requires a multiplicity of paths and an expansion of consciousness best described through these circular shapes: I have long been at work on perfecting my theory of concentric consciousness culminating in God, the consciousness of consciousnesses [ . . . ] to place consciousness as the first protological principle of the universe, in the place of intelligence, will, etc.”42 Reminiscent of the concentric circles in Cordovero’s Pardes Rimonim, Benamozegh’s description and the lack of certainty in his search for God in no way indicated existential anxiety, or that it could be assuaged by a kabbalistic approach to the primacy and limits of intellection: the rabbi confidently asserted that Kabbalah functions as the locus where one can fathom the gift of “the intelligible and superintelligible at the same time.”43 The nondualism Benamozegh vehemently advocated can be envisioned as a bridge between modern and postmodern thought. Indeed, the Livornese rabbi surreptitiously appears in the life and work of the psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, whose writings and seminars, from the 1950s until his death in 1981, shaped critical theory, linguistics, and poststructuralism. According to one of his students, Gérard Haddad, the psychoanalyst praised Israel and Humanity as a “major book,”44 describing it as “the book that would have made me convert to Judaism, had I needed to.”45 Kabbalah— specifically the triune structure of the sefirotic tree (that is, the upper nodes of the tree, where the emanations of wisdom, understanding, and knowledge flow into one another)—arguably played a significant role in leading Lacan to “overcome binary logic.”46 Yet Benamozegh’s stance, with its kabbalistic nondualism, was suffused with nineteenth-century positivism and teleological grand narratives, incompatible with the premise of postmodern critique. Benamozegh’s confidence in progress rested on the mission of Jews as a connector between religions and between the earthly and the divine, and on the potential for coexistence, to whose modalities and implementations I will now turn.

l CHAP TER 16 '

M O D ES O F I N T ER R ELI G I O U S EN G AG EM EN T

From Theory to Social Practices

Benamoz eg h’s wor k aimed to bring about religious unity, and he found a disciple and a posthumous audience for his calls to promote coexistence. To weigh the value of his work by measuring its practical impact, an assessment of the implementation of this prescriptive and convoluted thought is needed. It is therefore appropriate to close by examining the theory and practices of interreligious dialogue, including the Second Vatican Council in 1965, against the conceptual legacy of Benamozegh.

Refining the Terms of Interreligious Engagement

While most of the scholarship on interfaith encounters has focused on the interwar and the post-Holocaust eras, the earliest instances of such interactions go back to early modern Europe.1 But in the 1890s, the increasing religious conservatism, political anxiety, and the beginnings of racial antiSemitism, heightened by the Dreyfus affair, gave these interactions a renewed urgency as their participants were committed to combat anti-Semitism from a religious standpoint by emphasizing the link between Judaism and Christianity.2 Assessing the work of Benamozegh and retracing the stages of this endeavor prior to the Second World War helps refine the categories used to describe these modes of interaction and to consider how they have applied to intellectual efforts and social practices. The prevailing terms for interreligious 183

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interactions—encounters and dialogue—are often used quite interchangeably. I propose to add the term rapprochement as a first stage, followed by consecutive stages of encounter and dialogue, in order to better capture the various modalities of interreligious engagements. I take the term rapprochement, for the initial stage, from Benamozegh in La Kabbale et l’origine des dogmes chrétiens: “the rapprochement that constitutes the purpose of this book.”3 Prompted by a few individuals writing from the perspective of their own tradition, these types of theological agendas pave the way for their social and political implementation but do not imply any specific partner in that endeavor—as attested by the fact that Benamozegh wrote with a vast and imprecise audience in mind. They coincide with the advent of the public intellectual and of religious figures claiming this role. The second stage, encounters, features instances of interreligious interactions conducted as the continuation of the political and civic sociabilities that were born in a world of salons. More ideologically driven than premodern interactions, they do not occur under the tutelage of any institution. The third stage, dialogue (understood in a generic and certainly nonRosenzweigian way), happens within an institutional frame, which the efforts of the Vatican in the wake of the Second World War came to represent. The interactions at a grassroots level described in the previous stages no longer happen in isolation and define themselves in opposition or in accord with the official stances taken by the respective institutions on interreligious issues. The analysis of the stages matters, as they imply a different genre and tone in the conversations and interventions taking place.

Interreligious Encounters in the Nineteenth Century

Benamozegh’s interventions took place at a time when discussions on the possibility of a universal religion and the very concept of world religions had become part of the zeitgeist.4 In 1893, as Benamozegh was at work on Israel and Humanity, the World Parliament of Religions convened in Chicago. The proceedings featured a phrase taken from the book of Malachi in which humanity yearns for unity: “Do we not all have one Father? Did not one God create us?” (Malachi 2:10). Benamozegh, too, had quoted the prophet in a hopeful exhortation at the end of his 1885 prospectus for Israel and Humanity: “He shall reconcile parents with children and children



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with parents” (Malachi 3:24). Yet there is no evidence that Benamozegh had any connection to the meeting, and the “parliament” mostly emphasized a common spirituality. But even if the meeting’s message differed, however, its diagnosis was the same and showed a deep concern for the place of religion in modernity. In an address entitled “Elements of Universal Religion,” the German-born American rabbi Emil Hirsch led the assembled notables in an interfaith prayer that brimmed with references to a new, idiosyncratic religion of the future, evoking Prometheus Unbound—an allusion to the Greek mythical figure and, more importantly, to Shelley’s version in the 1820 drama with its vision of an ultimate regeneration of mankind through the union of Europe and Asia. Although he subsequently modified his views and encountered some resistance,5 Hirsch’s initial specificity-dissolving universalism was far removed from the Italian rabbi’s project and can be compared to more contemporary manifestations of Kabbalah as a spiritual movement that have culminated in the opening of the star-studded Kabbalah Centre. The Centre is loosely inspired by the teachings of the Polish-born and Marxist-influenced Yehuda Ashlag, but its broad appeal comes from its nondenominational, easily accessible teachings, more akin to self-help musings than to theological cogitations.6 The era saw the emergence of interreligious “circles” and “friendships” in which the experience of coexistence at an interpersonal level was conveyed by the names of these groups, as in L’Amitié Judéo-Chrétienne de France (the Jewish-Christian Friendship Society of France). Aimé Pallière and Hyacinthe Loyson were full participants in such noninstitutional groups, seeking to advance a liberal agenda that their respective religious institutions had been reluctant to tackle.7 Both men made public presentations of Benamozegh’s writings and ideas; Pallière even taught a weekly Kabbalah class to Christian reformists. These weekly talks were advertised mostly in progressive Jewish and Christian newspapers.8 These encounters found an echo in print as well. Shortly after the rabbi’s death, in the summer of 1902, Pallière penned a series of articles about Jewish responses to the current crisis of Christianity based on his mentor’s teachings.9 Whereas tradition seemed to be synonymous with conservatism, Pallière strove to demonstrate its relevance and to show how a “disencumbered Christianity,” in the words of Benamozegh—freed of the dogmas of

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the Trinity and the Incarnation—would provide an answer to the crisis: “The dogmas that are crumbling after having been considered during the centuries as an impregnable fortress, are precisely those which Israel stubbornly denied for nineteen hundred years.”10 These exact themes are also at the core of a book published a few weeks after Pallière’s articles, Alfred Loisy’s L’Évangile et l’Église, the book that prompted observers to dub the moment “the modernist crisis.”11 In the title, “The Gospel and the Church,” the “and” is actually a disjunctive and pits the Gospel against the church. Although Loisy made no reference to Pallière, they had unquestionably moved in the same circles.12 While these encounters gained some visibility, they were mostly the work of reformists and still not representative of the stance of the church.13 Pallière voiced criticism of the mounting anti-Semitism (alongside the two leadings theologians of the time, Henri de Lubac and Jules Monchanin) in circles such as the Foyer judéo-catholique de Paris ( Jewish-Catholic Center of Paris), founded in 1936.14 Other groups, such as the Mission spirituelle de France (Spiritual Mission of France) and the Union civique des croyants (Civic Union of the Faithful), were also active and meshed political and theological agendas.15 Benamozegh’s ideas, voiced by Pallière, shaped a specific zeitgeist beyond Christian reformists; the rabbi’s fostering of a French Jewish identity, and presentation of a Jewish universalism based on differences, had a measurable impact on the generation of Jewish intellectuals that came to be known as the Ecole de Paris after World War II.16 This group featured major thinkers such as Edmond Fleg and André Neher who came of age at a time when Pallière’s activities made him a key figure of Jewish life in the interwar period. He was a preacher at the Union Libérale Israélite (ULI) starting in 192217 and a founder and president of its youth movement (the Jeunesse Libérale israélite).18 He penned articles for that group’s magazine Chema as well as the magazine Menorah and was an ardent supporter of Zionism.19 Because he embraced Benamozegh’s belief that fostering a robust cultural and religious identity entailed knowing about other faiths, Pallière organized encounters with Christians so that young Jews could familiarize themselves with Christian theology, refute any claim of Christian superiority, and reassess their own tradition. None of these encounters involved the main institution of



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French Judaism, the Consistory, and thus can be seen as efforts made in the margins of any official stance. Neither the Jewish nor the Christian position on interfaith engagement had any institutional existence at this point. These encounters and groups were thus meant to engineer new religionbased social relations. And the robust identity they cultivated inspired Jewish intellectuals to publicly criticize the church when they felt that it had fallen short, especially after the Second World War. The beginnings of institutional interreligious dialogue are traditionally dated to the Seelisberg Conference—the International Emergency Conference on Anti-Semitism.20 In the summer of 1947, sixty-three Jewish and Christian delegates gathered for a week in the Swiss Alps to discuss theological issues in the wake of the Shoah and to examine the textual roots of anti-Semitism based on the work by the French Jewish scholar Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt.21 For the first time, a joint declaration was issued by Jews and Christians that offered ten points for revisiting the relationship between the two monotheisms based on their common origin. Entitled “An Address to the Churches,”22 the text had little immediate impact, but did plant the seeds for a more profound development seventeen years later.23 The Second Vatican Council of 1965 issued the famous “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions,” Nostra aetate (In Our Time). The text consisted of six parts, but it was the fourth that made history as it signaled a new chapter in Catholic relations toward Jews. That part of the declaration condemned anti-Semitism as well as the continuing accusations of deicide leveled at Jews; it also stated that “the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God.” The sixth part called for the creation of sustained interfaith dialogue—between the church and Jewish representatives—thus effectively providing a new, formal framework for conducting interreligious engagement. Regardless of the actual implementation of this provision, it portended a new stage in religious interactions. Benamozegh’s influence was primarily channeled through Josué Jéhouda (1892–1966), a member of the Jewish delegation who sat on the commission specifically dedicated to the fight against anti-Semitism. Jéhouda never failed to proclaim his fidelity to the teachings of the Livornese rabbi and published some of Benamozegh’s work in Switzerland.24 The case for Benamozegh’s influence on another member of the delegation, the Romanian-born Swiss

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rabbi Alexandre Safran, is more conjectural because Benamozegh does not appear in Safran’s writings, even though some of his writings address themes similar to Benamozegh’s, notably the rapprochement of Jews and Christians, with esotericism as a connector.25 Benamozegh’s influence among postwar French Catholic thinkers, especially left-wing Catholics (who became known as “the other left”), was most felt from the mid-fifties until the mid-seventies. This strand of French Catholicism, which included figures such as Jacques Nantet, strove to offer an alternative path in a polarized Cold War world and to resist the allure of communism based on a new understanding of the social message of the church.26 Nantet’s Les Juifs et les Nations (1955), published by Éditions de Minuit—Pallière’s last publishing house—made numerous references to Benamozegh and the necessity of thinking of Christianity as part of Judaism.27 In 1967 he became one of the cofounders of La Fraternité d’Abraham, promoting interreligious dialogue, with André Chouraqui, Si Hamza Boubakeur (rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris from 1957 to 1982), and the Catholic Michel Riquet. In 1962, the priest and peace activist Jean Toulat (1915–94) started his prolific writing career with a manifesto entitled Juifs mes frères (My Brothers, the Jews) in which he acknowledged his indebtedness to the influential intellectual Robert Aron, who had introduced him to the writings of Benamozegh.28 Although not a member of the Ecole de Paris, Aron gravitated toward the movement thanks notably to his admiration for Benamozegh, whom he called “one of the masters of Jewish thought.”29 Robert Aron claimed the importance of Benamozegh in fostering rapprochement, but he also wrote an Open Letter to the Church of France lamenting the absence of a real, institutionalized dialogue despite the progressive positions the pontificate had taken.30 It mirrored a deeper frustration with the church’s direction (or lack thereof ) in a post–Nostra aetate environment, where the Vatican had taken symbolic steps but had not reaffirmed or refined its theology toward other faiths.31 Building bridges while still demanding that the church take responsibility for its dereliction was the task that another claimant of Benamozegh’s legacy, the Argentinian-born Rabbi Leon Klenicki (1930–2009), took upon himself as he pursued Jewish-Christian dialogue at the World Union for Progressive Judaism and the Vatican.32



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Such liminal influence was enough to fuel an obsession among right-wing fringe Catholics with Benamozegh and Pallière, accusing both of participating in a conspiracy to Judaize the church—a case study in conspiracy theories. Because of Benamozegh’s influence on at least one of the Jewish envoys to the Seelisberg Conference, the rabbi looms large in the anti-Semitic pamphlet The Problem with the Jews that was distributed to Catholic bishops prior to the vote that was scheduled for the conference’s final session. The instigator was right-wing French journalist Léon de Poncins (1897–1975), author of numerous books brimming with “Judeo-Masonic” conspiracy theory.33 Yet Poncins’s treatment of the rabbi is milder than the strident denunciation of Benamozegh’s followers, most notably Pallière, and of Jews in general for their schemes for infiltrating the church and substituting their own theology for the teachings of the Gospels—a probable allusion to the Noahide Laws. The attacks on Pallière offer a glimpse into the specific hatred aimed at those trying to build bridges, whose efforts are vilified as treason.34 Such theories are still being peddled on the internet.35 Many Jewish responses to the possibility of interreligious rapprochement or dialogue have also displayed skepticism or outright rejection. The hostile and complex reception to Pallière’s edition of Israel and Humanity, from both Christian and Jewish actors, seems to offer a case study in resistance to the possibility of interreligious dialogue. The article “Confrontation” by Joseph Soloveitchik epitomizes this theological position by claiming that interfaith encounters can only take place in the realm of activism, social justice, or joint communal efforts, and that sharing inner conversations with another faith was tantamount to betraying one’s “intimacy with God.”36 The terms used to criticize Pallière’s edits—they were done in “an extremely unfaithful manner,” Rabbi Zini has written37—indeed convey an overtone of betrayal, especially regarding the book’s esotericism, which represents the utmost intimacy with God. Pallière’s endeavor tested the limits of venturing into another tradition, of border crossing in the absence of conversion, even if it was Benamozegh himself who dissuaded his mentee from converting. The cross-faith translatability of religious knowledge and experience remains contentious. One of the claims of Benamozegh’s manuscript was that while “truth was a matter of faith for the Christians,” it was a matter “of science for the Jews.”38 Here the term science harks back to the definition of

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theosophy as the knowledge of the divine. Could the emphasis on faith versus science in approaching the divine thus be a case of irreconcilable differences? In Benamozegh’s understanding, the impetus for interreligious rapprochement was not predicated on what Heschel proposed in “No Religion Is an Island”: “fear and trembling” in a Kierkegaardian experience of the anxiety of the believer and “the tragic insufficiency of faith” become the bond, the shared experience of human limitation.39 Heschel’s words betray a twentieth-century sensibility in which the dissonance between Israel’s mission toward humanity and its historical destiny was depicted as a tragedy wherein humanity needs Israel for its salvation, while Israel needs humanity to legitimize its mission and being—but was nearly destroyed by humanity. This framework was already applicable before World War II but took on a new meaning afterward. Such an existential sense of insufficiency was alien to Benamozegh. The unrest he abundantly described did not call for a leap of faith but resulted in a restless attempt to reconcile conflicting imperatives in Judaism, to answer the religious crisis of his time, to bridge the gap between religion and reason, and, in order to do so, to find the textual grounding and legitimacy in the Jewish tradition. Benamozegh’s politics of self-affirmation involves a Jewish theology of other faiths, but his construct begs further questions: If other religions serve as an affirmation of Judaism as a matrix, does this make them ancillary and does it lessen their value? And can interreligious encounters be predicated on religious unity—and on a reduction to a single form, so that the religion of the future would be a return to its origins, that is, Judaism? Benamozegh’s construct of Judaism as a core and a corrective for, in principle, all religions (though in practice mostly Christianity and Islam) found an echo among Christian reformists and advocates of interreligious encounters. But since his interpretations and his metaphors cannot completely dispel the ethnocentric leanings of the texts, those eager to find an ethnocentric subtext in his writings have done so. His intervention may be taken as a novel way to assert Jewish particularism and explains his appeal for the far right: the ontological differences between religions and nations, which Benamozegh saw as a reason for cooperation—but whose intrinsic hierarchies ascribe Judaism a prominent role—can indeed justify granting second-rate status to non-Jews.



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For all his proclaimed desire to foster religious reconciliation, Benamozegh’s divided legacies appear irreconcilable. It is the combination of his assertive tone and his interpretative strategies, which muted or played down the more ethnocentric aspects of his exegesis—as well as a degree of inconsistency with regard to the nature of the pluralism that he proposed—that explain the plasticity of Benamozegh’s reception. Yet a number of his intuitions, which the analysis of the Israel and Humanity manuscript helps us seize more clearly, are worth considering for their creativity and modernity: such is Benamozegh’s characterization of Kabbalah as an adjoining form. In a typical synthesis, he resorted to a famous philosophical concept of Platonic forms to describe Jewish theosophy, and then turned this abstract, eternal idea of Kabbalah into a tool for promoting greater religious unity—an implementation bound to be flawed, and yet necessary.

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EP I L O G U E

The first r e v ie w of Israel and Humanity appeared in 1914. It was penned by Maurice Vexler, a promising rabbi soon to perish at Verdun. Vexler’s perceptive review captured Benamozegh’s achievements and shortcomings— and his idiosyncrasy. He characterized Benamozegh’s mindset as a “very peculiar” one: “The modern and the ancient coexist in him, and the mix of the two is disconcerting.” Still, Vexler contended, “regardless of what one may think [of Benamozegh] as scholar, historian, exegete, or grammarian, his speculative boldness, the audacity and magnitude of his religious conceptions, and the freshness and spontaneity of his theological sensibilities make him one of the most notable Jewish theologians to emerge in the modern period.”1 If modernity implies self-assertion and disruption, Benamozegh’s gesture was unquestionably modern. He consciously strove to change the narrative of the relationship between Judaism and other religions as well as between Judaism and his era, seeking to demonstrate the affinity of his faith with modernity. At the same time, though, he offered a critique of that modernity, combating what he viewed as a modern sense of alienation induced by abstract universalism and unexamined rationalism in a society stripped of metaphysics and myth. In his efforts to foster interreligious rapprochement, Benamozegh charted new paths. With his discourse of civic engagement and hermeneutics 193

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of coexistence based on Kabbalah and his vision of universalism through particularism, he aimed to bring together seemingly irreconcilable faiths and to demonstrate their interdependence. Yet because his construct was predicated on the notion that Judaism was the matrix of Christianity and Islam and that it needed them to fulfill a mission of religious coexistence that would bring about the unity of mankind, Benamozegh’s worldview contained a religious hierarchy. His universalist readings of sources that exhibit ethnocentrism, and the textual strategies that he deployed to mute it, allowed for multiple, irreconcilable readings. His insistence on the figure of Adam, his advocacy of the Noahide Laws as a basis for a universal religion despite the hierarchy they implied, the inevitable reduction of the multiple to the same in the messianic era (in the metaphor of the tents of Shem), only add to the unanswered questions and the plasticity of his legacy. The spectrum of interpretations is demonstrated by the strange bedfellows who have claimed that legacy, ranging from true advocates of religious coexistence to far-right Jewish and Christian groups. Benamozegh’s work has proven to be a Rorschach test on which to project conflicting ideas about Jewish universalism and about the very possibility of it. Benamozegh’s work and legacy can leave one disoriented, as it did Vexler. Such perplexity is assuaged, however, when one reads him as a cultural critic who offered a trenchant diagnosis of modernity as he saw it in Western Europe. Benamozegh certainly foreshadows efforts to complicate the dual rationalism and disenchantment inherent in the Weberian construct of modernity. In the rabbi’s view, a critique of zealous rationalism should not entail a distrust of reason but rather a call to reassess its role. This was his solution to reason’s challenge to religion: “Unable to settle for the old formulas, [reason] drives the investigating mind to search for new ones that will allow it to become reconciled with faith.”2 Among the new formulas Benamozegh proposed was the use of kabbalistic hermeneutics, and more precisely the coincidence of opposites and the principle of nondualism. Even the notions of “old” and “new” are in fact qualified and subjected to this nondualism. This is illustrated by Benamozegh’s understanding of tradition as a body of revealed texts and interpretations whose meaning is progressively disclosed to human consciousness and which is expansive enough to remain in harmony with the changing times. At this



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juncture, because he proposed another kind of modernity in his grand narrative aimed toward progress, Benamozegh suggests that there could be other paths, which supports the notion of multiple modernities.3 Nonbinary thinking, rooted in kabbalistic hermeneutics, was one of these paths, he believed, and should be embraced by Europe to contend with its moral and religious crisis. From there a number of conflicts resulting from essentialized dualisms would be neutralized. And yet, in one of Benamozegh’s paradoxes, his magnum opus, Israel and Humanity, was predicated on two terms irreducible to one another. In 1871, responding to the banning of his work for heresy, Benamozegh sketched a portrait of himself that rejected that accusation but captured a certain alienation: “neither rebel nor recognized writer, neither heretic nor believer, neither infidel nor kabbalist, neither philosopher nor rabbi, neither blasphemer nor orator. I am neither assimilated nor awaiting the Messiah, neither Hillel nor Shammai,4 neither day nor night.”5 While this depiction of his peculiarity was meant ironically, it nevertheless captures his elusive character. Benamozegh occupies a space in-between and so does his vision of overcoming binaries and ending religious enmity. It was from this in-between place, in which Jewish tradition was assertively kabbalistic and universalist, that he proposed a different modernity—and such an in-between space is worth returning to.

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N O T ES

Introduction

1.  Moshe Idel, “Kabbalah in Elia Benamozegh’s Thought,” in IH, 378–402; Richard Cohen, “The Universal in Jewish Particularism,” in Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics, ed. Jeffrey Bloechl (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 135– 52; Marc Gopin, “An Orthodox Embrace of Gentiles,” Modern Judaism 18, no. 2 (May 1998): 173–96. The studies that tangentially touch on the implications of modernity for Benamozegh deal with the rabbi’s relationship with science but do not engage the question of modernity itself. See José Faur, “The Hebrew Species Concept and the Origin of Evolution: R. Benamozegh’s Response to Darwin,” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 63 (1997): 43–66; Daniel Langton, “Elijah Benamozegh and Evolutionary Theory: A Nineteenth-Century Italian Kabbalist’s Panentheistic Response to Darwin,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 10, no. 2 (2016): 223–45. 2.  Alessandro Guetta, Philosophy and Kabbalah: Elijah Benamozegh and the Reconciliation of Western Thought and Jewish Esotericism, trans. Helena Kahan (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006), translated from the 2000 French edition. See also Alessandro Guetta, ed., Per Elia Benamozegh: Atto del convento di Livorno (Milan: Edizione Thalassa de Paz, 2001). For a less scholarly but insightful monograph, see Gabriella Mastri and Marco Morselli, Elia Benamozegh: Nostro contemporaneo (Turin: Marietti, 2017). 3.  See Isaiah Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000), 243–66. 4.  See “The Painter of Modern Life,” in Charles Baudelaire, Selected Writings on Art and Literature (New York: Penguin, 1995), 390. 197

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5.  In this convoluted passage, Heine describes the spirit of the time and its nostalgia: “This tone resonates in the heart of our nobility, that sees its castles and coat of arms fall; it vibrates in the heart of the bourgeois whose cozy, narrow ways of his forefathers are supplanted by a wide-spreading, unpleasant modernity.” Die Nordsee: Die Reisebilder von 1826 mit den beiden Gedichtzyklen (Tiel: Campagne, 1870), 61. Baudelaire probably knew of the text, prefaced by Théophile Gautier, his “friend and master” to whom he dedicated his Fleurs du mal in 1857. 6.  Théophile Gautier, Les Beaux-Arts en Europe, 2 vols. (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1855), 1:19. 7.  Théophile Gautier, introduction to Oeuvres complètes de H. de Balzac (Paris: A. Houssiaux, 1855), 6. 8.  When describing his trip to Ulm, Chateaubriand lamented “the vulgarity, the modernity of the customs building and of the passport, juxtaposed with the storm, the Gothic gates, the sound of the horn and the noise of the torrent.” Mémoires d’outretombe (Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1976), vol. 2, book 37, chap. 6, 636. 9.  The full title is Israël et Humanité: Démonstration du cosmopolitisme dans les dogmes, les lois, le culte, la vocation, l’histoire et l’idéal de l’Hébraïsme; Introduction (Livorno: Benamozegh, 1885). I shorten this reference hereinafter to Introduction. 10.  IH, 42. 11.  Teologia, 18. “For certain naturalists and physiologists (Linnaeus, Buffon and Quatrefages), religiosity is the characteristic of human nature and through it, alongside mortality, it distinguishes itself from all other animal species.” 12.  Benamozegh is referring here to the Syllabus of Errors issued by Pius IX, which registered the errors of contemporary political thought and emphasized the duties of Roman Catholic rulers to shield the church from modernity in all its forms, including religious toleration. See chapter 1. 13.  Introduction, 54. 14.  IH, 40. 15.  IH, 42. 16.  Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 17.  A classic reference to this specific crisis of modernity in Christianity is Émile Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste (Tournai: Casterman, 1976; new ed. Paris: Albin Michel, 1996). See also Pierre Colin, L’Audace et le soupçon: La crise du modernisme dans le catholicisme français (1893–1914) (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1997). 18.  Gershom Scholem, “Revelation and Tradition as Religious Categories” and “The Crisis of Tradition in Jewish Messianism,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), 49–77 and 282–303; Scholem, “Tradition and Commentary as Religious Categories in Judaism,” Judaism 15, no. 1 (Winter 1966): 23–39. See also David Biale’s analysis in his Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).



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19.  Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Canto Classics, 2012). 20.  The word Hebraism was first noted in 1718 and disappeared in the 1930s. Benamozegh’s Hebraism, unlike Luzzatto’s Abrahamism, whose emphasis on ethics clashed with the aesthetics of Hellenism (which he called Atticism), is not in tension with other concepts, especially with regard to the Greek legacy to Europe. Indeed, Benamozegh rejected the binary opposition between ethics and aesthetics because it would defeat any attempt to prove Judaism’s universalism. 21. Phyllis Cohen-Albert, “Israelite and Jew: How Did Nineteenth-Century French Jews Understand Assimilation?” in Assimilation and Community: The Jews in Nineteenth-Century Europe, ed. Jonathan Frankel and Steven Zipperstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 88–109. 22.  Elia Benamozegh, preface to Eliyahu Hazan, Zikhron Yerushalayim (Livorno: Benamozegh, 1874). The many occurrences of the word Israelite in his work in fact refer to the Israelites in the ancient Near East. 23.  See Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Theological Anti-Semitism (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 77–94 and 121–32. 24.  “This conception of Judaism may even be found among the Fathers of the Catholic Church. Eusebius, in his Preparation for the Gospel characterizes the Mosaic religion very judiciously, and asserts that it has authority only over Israel.” IH, 257. 25.  The adjective appears 121 times on 96 pages in IH. 26.  IH, 49. 27.  IH, 58. 28.  Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2003). 29.  Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 1–21. 30.  Benamozegh, preface to Hazan, Zikhron Yerushalayim, 1. 31.  Olga Litvak, Haskalah: The Romantic Movement in Judaism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press 2012); Eliyahu Stern, The Genius: Elijah of Vilna and the Making of Modern Judaism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Jonatan Meir, “Haskalah and Esotericism: The Strange Case of Elyakim Getzel Hamilzahgi (1780–1854),” Aries 18 (2018): 153–87. 32.  Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 7. 33.  On the Katz model, see David Ellenson, After Emancipation: Jewish Religious Responses to Modernity (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 2004), 121–38; David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Stern, The Genius, 3–8. The quotation from Karl Mannheim is from his “Conservative Thought,” in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., Karl Mannheim (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 157.

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34. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, 6. 35.  Jason Josephson-Storm, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). David Biale, Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982 ); Eric Jacobson, “The Future of the Kabbalah: On the Dislocation of Past Primacy, the Problem of Evil, and the Future of Illusions,” in Kabbalah and Modernity, ed. Boaz Huss (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 47–75. 36. Nilüfer Göle, “Snapshots of Islamic Modernity,” in S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2005), 91–117. 37.  The literature on Jewish modernity is abundant but on the multiple loci of Jewish modernity in Europe, see Jacob Katz, ed., Toward Modernity: The European Jewish Model (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1987); Arnold M. Eisen, “Rethinking Jewish Modernity,” Jewish Social Studies (new series) 1, no. 1 (Autumn 1994): 1–21; Michael M. Meyer, ed., Judaism within Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press), 2001; Feiner, Jewish Enlightenment. For a more multidisciplinary approach, including the arts, see Jacques Picard, Jacques Revel, Michael P. Steinberg, and Idith Zertal, eds., Makers of Jewish Modernity: Thinkers, Artists, Leaders, and the World They Made (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016). 38.  Paul Hedges, Controversies in Interreligious Dialogue and Theologies of Religion (London: SCM Press, 2010); Jenny Daggers, Postcolonial Theology of Religions: Particularity and Pluralism in World Christianity (New York: Routledge, 2013); Hugh Nicholson, Comparative Theology and the Problem of Religious Rivalry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 39.  Nancy Levene, Powers of Distinction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). 40.  Carlo Ginzburg, “Micro-History: Two or Three Things That I Know about It,” in Threads and Traces: True, False, Fictive (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 193–214. 41. Ginzburg, Threads and Traces, 220–22, on the distinction between the “anomaly” in microhistory and the “analogy” in macrohistory. 42.  Daniel Boyarin, “The Cheese and the Sermons: Toward a Microhistory of Ideas,” in Socrates and the Fat Rabbis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), xii. Boyarin invokes Natalie Zemon-Davis and Carlo Ginzburg who, along with Robert Darnton, introduced the notion of microhistory to the Anglo-Saxon world (it had originated with the Annales school). See also Bruce Lincoln, “Theses on Comparison,” Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 121–30. 43.  Brad Gregory, “Can We See Things Their Way? Should We Try?” in Seeing Things Their Way: Intellectual History and the Return of Religion, ed. Alister Chapman,



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John Coffey, and Brad Stephan Gregory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 24–45. 44.  Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 47. 45.  Ecumenical is generally understood as dialogue within the church; interfaith is between the monotheistic religions and interreligious concerns all of them.

Part I

1. Nahum Sokolow, ed., Sefer Zikaron le-Sofrei Yisrael ha-Hayim Itanu Kayom (Warsaw: Nahum Sokolow, 1889), 118–21. Translated literally, “A Memorial Book for Contemporary Jewish Writers.” Arguably the first such biographical lexicon, it was produced under the auspices of the Polish Hebrew newspaper Ha-Tsefira (published between 1862 and 1931), which featured the most prominent writers of the day. Over 270 writers are listed in the biographical section, but only thirteen, including Benamozegh, in the autobiographical section. I will shorten this reference hereinafter simply to “Autobiography” and refer to the Italian translation of the text which was published in an edition of Benamozegh’s selected writings compiled in Scritti scelti, special issue of La Rassegna mensile di Israel 20, no. 3 (1954): 17–23. 2.  Mendele Mocher Seforim (1836–1917), the founding father of modern Yiddish and Hebrew literature, is the most prominent contributor. The list also comprises scholars such as Arieh Lob Feinstein (1821–1903) and Abraham Epstein (1848–1918). It is notable that Benamozegh appears among the Ashkenazi writers, which demonstrates a certain visibility beyond a French and Sephardi orbit. 3. Autobiography, 18. 4.  Dante Lattes (1876–1965), a student of Benamozegh who became a writer, professor of Hebrew at the Institute of Oriental Languages, and longtime director of the Italian Rabbinical College, observed in the preface to Benamozegh’s autobiographical sketch: “These autobiographical notes tell nothing new about the life, the ideas and the works of the Livornese rabbi. In essence, there was no extraordinary event in his childhood, nor in his youth nor during his manhood that would have deserved a special mention.” Autobiography, 16. 5.  Mentions of his relatives in this text nearly always adhere to a similar pattern: a brief biography immediately followed by the works they published. He used the same format in referring to his family in an 1894 lecture on cemeteries in Livorno. Of the man who taught him French, he wrote that he was “a very learned man, although he had never published anything apart from a small preface to the Chuppath Chathanim by Rabbi Meldola.” He was referring to A Treatise on the Laws of Marital Life (1797) by Rafael Meldola (1754–1828), Livorno-born rabbi, ordained by the Chida, who became the rabbi of the Sephardi synagogue in London.

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Chapter 1

1.  This perception was “a mixture of myth and reality,” according to Esther Benbassa and Aron Rodrigue, Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th–20th Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 44. 2.  Cecil Roth, “Notes sur les marranes de Livourne,” Revue des études juives 91 (1931): 17–21. 3.  On the growth of Livorno, see Corey Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno and the Transformation of the Mediterranean World 1574–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). On “mercantile philosemitism,” see Jonathan Karp, “Economic History and Jewish Modernity: Ideological versus Structural Change,” in Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook, ed. Dan Diner and David B. Ruderman (Leipzig: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 249–66. 4.  John Toland, Reasons for Naturalizing the Jews of Great Britain and Ireland on the Same Foot with All Other Nations (London: J. Roberts, 1714), 42. 5. Toland, 42. 6.  Quoted in Feiner, Jewish Enlightenment, 286. The protagonist in ’Igrot Meshulam comes from Aleppo—a very conservative community. On his journey to a more enlightened community, he rebels against his father and grandfather whose world revolves around the Talmud and magic. 7.  Avraham Berliner, in Il Vessillo Israelitico 24 (1876): 334, translated from Die Jüdische Presse, July 15, 1874. 8.  The “port Jew” concept was introduced in the 1990s by David Sorkin and Lois Dubin. David Sorkin, “The Port Jew: Notes toward a Social Type,” Journal of Jewish Studies 50, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 87–97; Lois Dubin, The Port Jews of Habsburg Trieste (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). See also C. S. Monaco, “Port Jews or a People of the Diaspora? A Critique of the Port Jew Concept,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 15, no. 2 (2009): 137–66. On Livorno, see Francesca Bregoli, Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014). 9.  Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti, “The ‘Jewish Nation’ of Livorno: A Port Jewry on the Road to Emancipation,” Jewish Culture and History 7, no. 1–2 (2004): 160–62. 10.  Upon his visit to Livorno in 1762, Edward Gibbon offered a less positive perspective: in “the land of Canaan for Jews,” he wrote,“religious hatred” lingered on, and he mentioned a few episodes of stones thrown at houses or a random shooting four decades earlier. Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 71. 11.  As Francesca Trivellato describes it, Livorno was “a highly diverse and yet highly segregated society that resembled late-Ottoman Alexandria more than today’s London or New York.” Trivellato, Familiarity of Strangers, 73.



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12.  Ulrich Wyrwa, Emanzipation im Vergleich, Juden in der Toskana und in Preußsen im Vergleich: Aufklärung und Emanzipation in Florenz, Livorno, Berlin und Königsberg i. Pr (London: Leo Baeck Institute, Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 6; Roberto G. Salvadori, Breve storia degli Ebrei toscani (Florence: Le Lettere, 1995). Other sources include Umberto Cassuto, Universal Jewish Encyclopedia (New York: Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Inc., 1939). The most detailed source, which analyzes the 1841 census, is Anna Sercia Gianforma, “Gli Ebrei di Livorno nel Censimento del 1841,” in Ebrei di Livorno tra due censimenti (1841–1938): Memoria familiare e identità, ed. Michele Luzzatti (Livorno: Belforte, 1990), 23–59. See also Renzo Toaff, La Nazione Ebrea a Livorno e Pisa (1591–1700) (Florence: Olschki, 1990). 13.  On Livorno’s cultural influence, see Lois Dubin, “The Rise and Fall of the Italian Jewish Model in Germany: From Haskalah to Reform,” in Jewish History and Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ed. Elisheva Carlebach, John M. Efron, and David N. Myers (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1998), 271–95. 14.  A prodigy, bibliophile, and prolific writer, Jerusalem-born Haim Yosef David Azulai (1724–1806), known as the Chida, traveled North Africa and Western Europe on fundraising missions as an emissary for the land of Israel, and died in Livorno. His work encompasses Talmud compilations, commentary on the Zohar and on the Shulchan Arukh, as well as his Encyclopedia of the Great Sages (Shem ha-Gedolim). Benamozegh was the first to publish his travelogue, which included Magal Tov (the good journey or circle), in 1879. 15.  Elia Benamozegh, Lettere dirette a S. D. Luzzatto da Elia Benamozegh (Livorno: Benamozegh, 1890), 2. 16.  Cited in Liana Funaro, Un tempio nuovo per una fede antica: A Cinquant’anni dall’inaugurazione del Tempio ebraico di Livorno (Livorno: Belforte, 2012), 57. 17.  See Aimé Pallière, The Unknown Sanctuary (New York: Bloch, 1928), 178. 18.  Guglielmo Lattes, “Sunto della V.a conferenza del Rab. Cav. E. Benamozegh,” Il Vessillo Israelitico 42 (1894): 10–14. 19.  Benamozegh, fifth lecture, “Sunto della V conferenza dell’ Ecc[ellentissim].mo Rab[bino]. Benamozegh,” 13. 20. Avraham Coriat’s posthumous volume Zekhut ’Avot (Pisa, 1812) provides insights about Jewish life in Mogador and Livorno. On these dynamics, see Évelyne Oliel-Grausz, “La Circulation du personnel rabbinique dans les communautés de la diaspora sépharade au XVIIIè siècle,” in Transmission et passage en monde juif, ed. Esther Benbassa (Paris: Publisud, 1997), 313–34; Jonathan Ray, After Expulsion: 1492 and the Making of Sephardi Jewry (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 103–5. 21.  Jacques Basnage, Histoire des Juifs depuis Jésus-Christ jusqu’à présent, pour servir de continuation à l’histoire de Joseph, 2nd ed., vol. 9, part 2 (La Haye: Chez Henri Scheurleer, 1726), 827.

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22.  See the entry “Ben Amozegh” in Abraham I. Laredo, Les noms des juifs du Maroc: Essai d’onomastique judéo-marocaine (Madrid: Consejo superior de investigaciones cientificas instituto B. Arias Montano, 1978). It is also spelled Amozig or Amussech, and sometimes Ben-Amozig, in various documents. 23.  It is unsurprising that Benamozegh made no mention of his Berber roots since research on Berber history and identity did not emerge until the first decade of the twentieth century, driven by ideological concerns. See Emily Benichou Gottreich and Daniel J. Schroeter, eds., Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). See also Daniel J. Schroeter, “On the Origins and Identity of Indigenous North African Jews,” in North African Mosaic: A Cultural Reappraisal of Ethnic and Religious Minorities, ed. Nabil Boudraa and Norman Krause (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), esp. 172–77. 24.  Sidney Corcos, “Coriat Family,” in Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World, vol. 1, ed. Norman A. Stillman (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 680–81. 25.  Historically, the ge’onim (geniuses) were the presidents of the Babylonian Talmudic academy between the sixth and eleventh centuries, but the name came to signify “leading authorities.” 26.  After the publication of Samuel David Luzzatto’s epistolary, which included less-than-positive accounts of Benamozegh, the latter defended himself, making this statement among others. See Yosef Colombo, “Una lettera inedita di Elia Benamozegh ad Amadio Momigliano,” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 55 (October 1969): 440–47. 27.  Samuel Romanelli, Travail in an Arab Land, ed. and trans. Norman A. Stillman and Yedida K. Stillman (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004). In Romanelli’s 1787 elegy for the death of Yehudah Coriat (spelled Koriat in his travelogue), the Pisaborn maskil writes positively of Coriat, a rare exception to his usual scathing depictions of superstitious masses. See pp. 138, and 201n43. 28.  The only other mention of Benamozegh’s family history, somewhat stealthily couched in a flowery style, can be found in the preface to the 1862 edition of Berit ’Avot, by his cousin, Avraham Coriat, a rabbi and dayyan (rabbinical judge) who died in 1845 in Mogador, Morocco. This text includes an account of the siege of Mogador by the French on August 15, 1844. Coriat’s vivid description makes it hard to believe that he was not an eyewitness to the events, but he was not. It also demonstrates his propensity for stylistic hyperbole. Avraham supplemented the text with a preface and one of his few halakhic responsa. Avraham Coriat, Berit ’Avot (Livorno: Benamozegh, 1862). 29.  See Daniel J. Schroeter, Merchants of Essaouira: Urban Society and Imperialism in Southwestern Morocco, 1844–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 7. The sultan intended to revive Mogador by founding the town of Essaouira as a royal port, imitating Livorno, which was designed for commercial trade and administered by the palace. 30.  Elia Benamozegh, fifth lecture, “Sunto della V conferenza dell’ Ecc[ellentissim]. mo Rab[bino]. Benamozegh,” Il Vessillo Israelitico 42 (1894): 13.



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31. Autobiography, 18. His mother also appears in the preface to Benamozegh’s Morale juive et morale chrétienne (hereinafter MJMC) (Paris: Kaufmann, 1867), 5. 32.  In Autobiography, 18, he notes that the two sons of Yehudah lived far from him and probably remained in Mogador, since this is where they write from, and appear in Berit ’Avot. 33. Benamozegh, Lettere dirette a S. D. Luzzatto, 3. 34. Benamozegh, 18. 35. Benamozegh, 18. 36.  The authors featured in this anthology, Ma’or va-Shemesh (The Luminary and the Sun), played a significant role in his nephew’s subsequent work. The volume includes the writings of Nahmanides, Isaac Luria, Ibn Attar and the first edition of the Sefer ha-Malkhut by Abraham ha-Levi. Yehudah Coriat, Ma’or va-Shemesh (Livorno: 1839). 37.  Moshe Idel, Kabbalah in Italy, 1280–1510: A Survey (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), esp. 113. 38.  ‘En Ya‘aqov is a sixteenth-century anthology of aggadot (singular, aggadah: the nonlegal or narrative material, including parables, maxims, tales, and other folkloric or moral elements) from the Talmud and rabbinical literature, compiled by the Salonikan rabbi Jacob Ibn Habib and based on the Babylonian Talmud. When the Talmud was banned in Italy in 1553, the ‘En Ya‘aqov started to be used as a substitute to bypass censorship and was thus widely used; its aggadic content and a change of its name to ‘Ein Israel made this possible. See Marjorie Lehman, The En Yaaqov: Jacob ibn Habib’s Search for Faith in the Talmudic Corpus (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 124. 39. Lehman, The En Yaaqov; Marjorie Lehman, “The Ein Yaakov: A Collection of Aggadah in Transition,” Prooftexts 19, no. 2 (1999): 21–40. 40. Pallière, Unknown Sanctuary, 166–67. 41.  On this incompatibility and on the possible relationship between Kabbalah and halakhah, see Meir Benayahu, “The Controversy between Halakhah and Kabbalah” [in Hebrew], Da‘at 5 (1981): 61–115; Moshe Hallamish, “Kabbalah in the Legal Decisions of Joseph Karo” [in Hebrew], Da‘at 21 (1988): 85–102; Jacob Katz, “Post-Zoharic Relations between Halakhah and Kabbalah,” in Jewish Thought in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Bernard D. Cooperman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Center for Jewish Studies, 1983), 283–307. 42.  Ariel Lattes and Aldo Toaff, Gli studi ebraici a Livorno nel secolo XVIII: Malahì accoen (1700–1771) (Livorno: Arnaldo Forni, 1909). 43.  Isaiah Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004), 27. 44.  This porosity makes sense if one accepts the close connection between Safed and North Africa that Moshe Idel posits in “Jewish Mysticism among the Jews of Arab/Moslem Lands,” Journal for the Study of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jewry 1, no. 1 (February 2007): 24.

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45.  Catalogue of books from the rabbi and author known as “the Jewish Plato,” Elia Benamozegh of Livorno, Italy (New York: Hirsch, 1900). 46.  MJMC, 5. 47.  Elia Benamozegh, “Sopra Spinoza e la Teosofia: Lettera al direttore del Vessillo,” Il Vessillo Israelitico 28 (1880): 333–36, 365–67. 48.  A distinction exists between a rabbi who is also a darshan (preacher) and a maggid (leader). A darshan connotes a more scholarly figure. 49.  Benamozegh, “Sopra Spinoza e la Teosofia,” 333–36, 365–67. 50.  Even within the enlightened faction of Moroccan Jewry, the defiance was such that people like Rabbi Yisrael Abuhatzeira (the Baba Sali) saw rationalism as yetser ha-ra (the evil inclination). See Dan Manor, Exile and Redemption in Moroccan Jewish Philosophy (Lod, Israel: Haberman, 1998). 51.  Elia Benamozegh, Nir le David (Livorno: Benamozegh, 1858). Guetta, in Philosophy and Kabbalah, 220, views the introduction as a parody of the genre of apology by which the author “confesses his youthful transgressions and asks forgiveness for them.” 52. Benamozegh, Lettere dirette a S. D. Luzzatto, 6. 53. Benamozegh, 53. 54. Idel, Kabbalah in Italy, esp. 1–19. 55. Pallière, Unknown Sanctuary, 130. 56. Pallière, 131.

Chapter 2

1.  Such was the long-dominant narrative of a liberal revolution as advanced by the famous historian Croce. See Benedetto Croce, A History of Italy: 1871–1915 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1929); Nick Carter, “Rethinking the Italian Liberal State,” Bulletin of Italian Politics 3, no. 2 (2011): 225–45. 2.  Federico Chabod, L’idea di nazione, ed. Armando Saitta and Ernesto Sestan (Bari: Laterza, 1961). The context is important: the book was composed in 1943–44; it sought to pit a benevolent, Italian concept of nation against an aggressive, racist German model. 3.  Antonio Gramsci, Opere, vol. 2, Il Risorgimento (Turin: Einaudi, 1949), 106–8. 4.  Alberto Mario Banti, La Nazione del Risorgimento (Turin: Einaudi, 2000), 150. See also Alberto Banti and P. Ginsborg, “Per una nuova storia del Risorgimento,” in Storia d’Italia: Annali 22. Il Risorgimento, ed. Alberto Mario Banti and Paul Ginsborg (Turin: Einaudi, 2007), xxviii–xxxiv. 5.  On Jewish emancipation in perspective, see Pierre Birnbaum and Ira Katznelson, eds., Paths of Emancipation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Frankel and Zipperstein, Assimilation and Community. On the first emancipation, see Marina Caffiero, “Tra Stato e Chiesa: Gli Ebrei italiani dell’età dei Lumi agli anni della



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Rivoluzione,” in Storia d’Italia, Annali 11. Gli Ebrei in Italia, vol. 2, Dall’emancipazione a oggi, ed. Corrado Vivanti (Torino: Einaudi, 1997), 1123–24. 6.  Archivio di Stato di Livorno, Santuario di Montenero, and Museo famiglia Sgarallino, Livorno ribelle: Dalle riforme liberali all’estrema difesa della città (1848–49), Atti del Seminario e Catalogo della Mostra, 10 maggio–6 giugno 1999 (Livorno: Comune di Livorno, 2000); Paolo I. Bernardini, “Rabbini intellettuali, rabbini come intellettuali nel’Italia del XVIII secolo,” Annali di storia moderna e contemporanea 4 (1998): 503–19; Bruno di Porto, “L’approdo al crogiuolo risorgimentale,” in Atti del convegno internazionale di studi Livorno e la nazione ebrea, special issue of La Rassegna mensile di Israel 50 (1984): 803–62. 7.  Victor Morpurgo, Vincenzo Gioberti: Notice nécrologique (Paris: Serrière, 1852), 7–9. 8.  See Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti, La “Nazione Ebrea” di Livorno: Dai Privilegi all’emancizipazione 1815–1860 (Florence: Le Monnier, 2007); Sisa Lopez, “Livorno ebraica al tempo dei Granduchi (1750–1848) nei ricordi della Mia Nonna,” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 36, no. 7/9 (1970): 233–43; Alfredo S. Toaff, “Cenni storici sulla comunità ebraica e sulla sinagoga di Livorno,” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 21, no. 9 (1955): 355–68. 9.  Elia Benamozegh, “Discorso pronunciato nel Tempio di Livorno, Il dì 8 settembre 1847 nel rendimento di Grasi per la conceduta Guardia Cittadina,” B.331, Biblioteca Labronica, Livorno, 6. This speech is analyzed in Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti, “La questione dell’emancipazione ebraica nel biennio 1847–1848: Note sul caso livornese,” Zakhor: Rivista di storia degli ebrei d’Italia 4 (2003): 67–91. See also Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti, Making Italian Jews (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); Bruno di Porto, “Elia Benamozegh, un maestro dell’ebraismo nella nuova Italia,” in Rassegna mensile di Israel 50 (1984): 157–81; Guetta, Philosophy and Kabbalah, 66; Stefania Dazzetti, L’autonomia delle comunità ebraiche italiane nel Novecento: Leggi, intese, statuti, regolamenti (Turin: Giappichelli Editore, 2008), 3–13. 10.  I have chosen to translate the Italian word Israelite as Israelites and not Jews since the word used is Israelite and not Ebrei. 11.  Benamozegh, “Discorso pronunciato nel Tempio di Livorno,” 6. 12. Benamozegh, 8. 13.  In his Aesthetics, Hegel declared The Divine Comedy “the artistic epic proper to the Christian Catholic Middle Ages” (“das eigenthliche Kunstepos”) as it reconciled the pagan and Christian worlds. G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthethics: Lecture on Fine Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), vol. 2, 1103. Dante’s poem was arguably also the representative epic for both the Risorgimento and Italian Jewish emancipation discourse, as their narratives turned Dante’s life and experience into the epitome of exile. Asher Salah argues that the reception of The Divine Comedy among Italian Jews signals two distinct moments of Italian Jewish history: before the eighteenth century, it was used as a marker for

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differentiation from the majority culture; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it signaled an identification with this culture. See Asher Salah, “A Matter of Quotation: Dante and the Literary Identity of the Jews in Italy,” Italia Judaica Jubilee Conference, ed. Shlomo Simonsohn and Joseph Shatzmiller (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 167–97. 14.  Elia Benamozegh to Isacco Artom, June 18, 1876, Isacco Artom Archives, correspondance XII, as quoted in Sophie Nezri-Dufour, “Risorgimento e emancipazione ebraica: Ebrei e unità d’Italia,” in Isacco Artom e gli ebrei dai Risorgimenti al fascismo, ed. Aldo Mola (Foggia: Bastogi, 2002), 47–58. 15.  Scott Lerner, “Massimo d’Azeglio and the New Italy in the Jewish Mirror,” in The New Italy and the Jews: From Massimo d’Azeglio to Primo Levi, ed. Jonathan Druker and Scott Lerner, Annali d’Italianistica 36 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018): 19–20. 16. On the polemics and on Gioberti’s response, see Vincenzo Gioberti, Considerazioni sopra le dottrine religiose di Vittorio Cousin (Brussels: Hayez, 1840). 17. This rhetorical tendency was harshly criticized by Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile. See Giovanni Gentile, I profeti del Risorgimento italiano (Florence: Le Lettere, 2004); Albert Russell Ascoli and Krystyna von Henneberg, eds., Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento (Oxford: Berg, 2001). On France, see Paul Bénichou, Romantismes français: Le Temps des prophètes, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 2004). 18. Guetta, Philosophy and Kabbalah, 18–21. 19. Banti, La Nazione del Risorgimento. 20.  His friend Cesare Castelli received the news upon a meeting with the Extraordinary Envoy to the City of Livorno, Ronchivecchi, in 1850. Benamozegh recalls “the memory of that day of 1850 when, in the presence of the Extraordinary Delegates, you were summoned to receive the names of the masters no longer allowed to exercise their profession and upon hearing my name among the names of those excluded for being guilty of Italian patriotism, in these times of suspicious truce, in your capacity as great Israelite representative, you did not shy away from telling the commissar of the Grand Duke: ‘And yet Benamozegh’s ideas are also my own!’  ” “Sulla salma di Cesare Castelli,” May 25, 1873, in Scritti scelti. 21.  When he asked for permission to print Ha-Mevasser in 1857, he received the visit of an official who noted his enthusiasm for the reform. Archivio di Stato di Livorno, b.558. 22. Elia Benamozegh, ’Em la-Miqra’: Il Pentateuco con commenti, ricerche e lunghe note di scienza, di critica e di filologia (Livorno: Benamozegh, 1862), Deuteronomy, 69–73, esp. 71b where he uses Latin characters to refer to despotism (misspelled as dispotisme). 23.  There is a copious literature on the question of the antiquity of the Zohar. See Gershom Scholem, Zohar: The Book of Splendor; Basic Readings from the Kabbalah (New York: Knopf, 2011); Michael L. Satlow, Creating Judaism: History, Tradition,



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Practice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 235–36. A key aspect of the controversy was the presence of te‘amim (cantillation marks for musical recitation) in the Zohar, which Samuel David Luzzatto and Isaac Samuel Reggio cited as evidence that the manuscript could not be dated to the second century CE. It could not have been written by Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai in the second century because the earliest evidence of te‘amim can be found in the Masoretic text (the authoritative Hebrew text of the Pentateuch for rabbinic Judaism), which is dated to the ninth century CE. 24.  See Yaacob Dweck, The Scandal of Kabbalah (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), esp. chap. 7 on ’Ari Nohem’s reception in the nineteenth century and 222–227 on Benamozegh. 25.  I borrow this expression from Georges Vajda, “La dialectique du Talmud et de la Kabbale,” Diogène 59 (1967): 69–87. 26.  Elia Benamozegh, “Dei Ta‘amim,” Il Vessillo Israelitico 32 (1884): 65–66, 103–5, 179–82, 221–23; quotation on 222. 27.  Manuel Borutta, “Anti-Catholicism and the Culture War in Risorgimento Italy,” in The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy, ed. Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 191–208. 28.  Frank J. Coppa, “Pio Nono and the Jews: From ‘Reform’ to ‘Reaction,’ 1846– 1878,” Catholic Historical Review 89, no. 4 (2003): 671–95. 29.  “Judaism is a humanitarian duty that requires its followers to promote justice in the world, especially among nations.” Elia Benamozegh, letter to the Prefetto Cornero, 1881, quoted in Guglielmo Lattes, Vita e Opere di Elia Benamozegh: Cenni, Considerazioni, Note con ritratto dell’illustre Rabbino (Livorno: Belforte, 1901), 31. Emphasis mine. 30.  Lerner, “Massimo d’Azeglio and the New Italy,” 19–20. 31.  Gadi Luzzatto Voghera, Il prezzo dell’eguaglianza: Il dibattito sull’emancipazione degli Ebrei in Italia (Milan: Franco Angeli, 1997), 137; Francesca Sofia, “La Nazione degli Ebrei Risorgimentali,” La Rassegna Mensile di Israel 76, nos. 1–2 (2010): 95–112; Druker and Lerner, The New Italy and the Jews. 32.  The cosignatories of the July 1863 letter include Isaac Milul, David Vivante, Rabbi d’Ancona, Josef Sinigaglia, Salmone Leone, Davide Ottolenghi, D. J. Maroni (chief rabbi of Florence), Samuel Cabibbe (chief rabbi of Siena), and Benamozegh himself. The letter is reprinted in Benamozegh, Lettere dirette a S. D. Luzzatto, 45. 33. Benamozegh, 45. 34.  Marco Mortara, “Della convenenzia e competenza di un Congresso Rabbinico,” Il Corriere Israelitico 5 (1866): 72. 35.  Elia Benamozegh, “Del Congresso Rabbinico proposto dal Rev Rabbino Mortara,” L’Israelita (1863). 36.  Yosef Colombo, “Il Congresso di Ferrara del 1863,” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 36, nos. 7–9 (1970).

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37.  Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 164. 38.  Letter of Raffaello Ascoli to Sabato Morais, Sabato Morais collection, May 25, 1879, Box 8, Folder 1. Quoted in Liana Elda Funaro, “Il ruolo degli Ebrei livornesi: due percorsi individuali su uno sfondo mediterraneo,” in I laboratori toscani della democrazia e del Risorgimento, ed. Laura Dinelli and Luciano Bernardini (Pisa: Edizioni ETS, 2004), 79–98. 39. Tullia Catalan, “Italian Jews and the 1848–49 Revolutions: Patriotism and Multiple Identities,” in The Risorgimento Revisited, ed. Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 216. 40.  Elia Benamozegh, Storia degli Esseni, ed. Marco Morselli (Milan: Marietti, 2007). Originally published as Benamozegh, Storia degli Esseni (Florence: Lemonnier, 1867). All subsequent references are to the 2007 edition unless otherwise noted. 41.  Elia Benamozegh, “Federico II e le dottrine rabbiniche,” Rivista bolognese di scienzi, lettere, arti e scuole, 1, vol. 2 (1867): 101–13; reprinted in Scritti scelti, 282. 42. Benamozegh, Storia degli Esseni, 4. 43.  Sabato Morais, Italian Hebrew Literature (New York: Hermon Press, 1926), 215. 44.  Letter to S. D. Luzzatto, dated 1865, quoted in Liana Funaro, “‘Lettere sacre e profane’: Angelo Paggi, un maestro della cultura ebraica nella Toscana del primo Ottocento,” Zakhor 9 (2006): 136. 45.  See the dispute in Castelli’s review of Benamozegh’s Teologia in Rivista Europea, 8 (1877): 169–81, as well as Benamozegh’s reply, Una critica criticabile (Livorno: Vigo, 1878). The discussion is also analyzed by Cristiana Facchini and David Castelli, Ebraismo e scienze delle regioni tra Otto e Novecento (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2000), 112–15.

Chapter 3

1.  Magne Saebø, ed., Hebrew Bible / Old Testament: From Modernism to Post-Modernism, vol. 3, part 1, The Nineteenth Century: A Century of Modernism and Historicism (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), 295–96. 2.  Guy Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 3.  Moshe Pelli, Haskalah and Beyond: The Reception of the Hebrew Enlightenment and the Emergence of Haskalah Judaism (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010), 135–62; Lewis Glinert, The Story of Hebrew (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 172. 4.  Giambattista Vico, New Science, trans. Dave Marsh (New York: Penguin Classics, 2000), 98, 112, 130; Marcel Danesi, Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Benamozegh—like Vico—insisted on etymological analysis. See Nancy S. Struever, “Rhetoric and Philosophy in Vichian



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Inquiry,” New Vico Studies 3 (1985): 131–45; David del Bello, “Forgotten Paths: The Making of Vico’s Etymologies,” Semiotica 113, nos. 1–2 (1997): 171–88. 5.  Elia Benamozegh, La Verità svelata ai miei giudici: Intorno le tre lettere, prodotte dalla querela Tubiana davanti l’ill. mo sig. Pretore del Terziere di S. Leopoldo in Livorno (Livorno: Typ. La Minerva, 1861), esp. 4–19. 6. Benamozegh, La Verità svelata. 7.  For the list of people who quoted him freely, including students of the Maharal of Prague and Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin (the Netziv), head of the conservative Volozhin yeshiva, see Leopold Zunz, “Toledot R. ‘Azaryah min ha’Adumim,” Keren Chemed 5 (1841): 130. 8.  See Annio da Viterbo, A Historical Treatise of the Travels of Noah into Europe, Containing the First Inhabitation and Peopling Thereof (London: Adam Islip, 1601). See also Claudine Poulouin, “La bibliothèque antédiluvienne ou les métamorphoses de la mémoire,”Littératures classiques 2, no. 66 (2008): 179–95. 9. Benamozegh, ’Em la-Miqra’, Bereshit. 10.  The conservatism of this community has been studied by Zvi Zohar, Rabbinic Creativity in the Modern Middle East (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 93–128. 11.  See Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot ‘ Yesodei ha-Torah 6:8. 12.  Yaron Harel, “Ha‘alaat ’Em la-Miqra’ ‘al ha-Moked: Aleppo, 1865” (The Edict to Destroy ’Em la-Miqra’: Aleppo, 1865), Hebrew Union College Annual 64 (1993): 27– 36. On the tensions in Aleppo and Damascus, see Yaron Harel, Syrian Jewry in Transition, 1840–1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. 80–94. 13.  Elia Benamozegh, “Tsori Gil‘ad,” Ha-Levanon 14 (December 13, 1871): 111; 15 (December 20, 1871): 119; 16 (December 27, 1871): 127; 17 ( January 3, 1872): 135; 18 ( January 10, 1871): 143; 19 ( January 17, 1871): 151; 20 ( January 24, 1871): 159; 23 (February 14, 1872): 183–84; 24 (February 21, 1872): 192; 32 (April 16, 1872): 255; 36 (May 15, 1872): 287; 42 ( June 26, 1872): 339; 43 ( July 2, 1872): 347. 14.  The tone of Yehiel Brill in the introduction to Benamozegh’s defense is nothing short of outraged: “And in the fire of their zealotry, they burned [the book] together with the Torah that was printed with it!” “Tsori Gil‘ad,” Kavod ha-Levanon (December 13, 1871): 111. Kavod ha-Levanon, the supplement to Ha-Levanon, published first in Jerusalem, then in Paris and Mainz, printed news from the Yishuv and from Orthodox Jewish communities throughout the world. Benamozegh’s choice of this newspaper to publish his self-defense demonstrates his desire to speak to those who had criticized him and with whom he nevertheless had affinities. 15.  His most prominent and unequivocal advocate was Hayim Palache, the illustrious rabbi of Izmir in the Ottoman Empire, whose open letter Benamozegh published as part of his defense in Ha-Levanon in 1872. Benamozegh, “Tsori Gil‘ad,” Ha-Levanon 43 ( July 2, 1872): 347. 16. Hazan, Zikhron Yerushalayim, 7–8.

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17.  Yaron Harel, Sifrei ’Erets ( Jerusalem: Ben Zvi Institute,1997), 20–25; Abraham Yaari, “Ha-Defus ha‘Ivri be’Aram Tsovah,” Kiryat Sefer 10 (1933): 100–118, particularly 100–105; Zvi Zohar, “Militant Conservatism: On the Socio-Religious Policy of Rabbis in Aleppo in Modern Times” [in Hebrew], Pe‘amim 55 (1993): 57–78. 18. A rare exception would be his discussion of cremation in Ya‘aneh ba’Esh (Livorno, Benamozegh, 1886). 19.  See, for instance, Benamozegh’s preface to Hazan, Zikhron Yerushalayim, 1–8 and Hazan’s treatment of the French administration’s interference in prenuptial agreements, 80–87. 20.  The picture of Benamozegh’s publishing is based on the inventory of the Valmadonna Trust Library (a collection of thirteen thousand printed Hebrew books and manuscripts), cross-referenced with The Bibliography of the Hebrew Book. This combination yields 163 books printed by Benamozegh and his associates and sons over the fifty-year period from the establishment of his printing press in 1852 to his death in 1900. To estimate the comparative scale of his press, one needs to revert to the widely accepted estimates in Yeshayahu Vinograd’s ’Otsar ha-Sefer ha‘Ivri [Thesaurus of the Hebrew Book] ( Jerusalem: Ha-Makhon le-Bibliyografyah Memuh.shevet, 1993–95) and Brad Sabin Hill’s A Catalogue of Hebrew Printers (London: British Library, 1995), which place the number of Hebrew books produced in Livorno from the establishment of the Gabbai printing press in 1649 until 1939 at approximately 1,500 volumes. According to this estimate—bearing in mind that the inventory might not be fully comprehensive—the Benamozegh publishing house produced about one-tenth of the Hebrew books published in Livorno between 1649 and 1939, excluding a few publications in Italian and French such as Benamozegh’s Shavuot: Cinque conferenze sulla Pentecoste (1885), Introduction (1885), and Bibliothèque de l’Hébraïsme (1897). I thank Michael Terry for obtaining the Sotheby’s inventory of the Valmadonna Trust Library. Part of the collection was purchased on behalf of the National Library of Israel in 2017. Mif‘al ha-Bibliyografiyah ha‘Ivrit is available online through the National Library of Israel, http://aleph.nli.org.il:80/F/?func=direct&dorc_number=002488716&local _base=NNL01. On nineteenth-century publishing in Livorno, see Clémence Boulouque, “Elia Benamozegh’s Printing Presses: Livornese Crossroads and the New Margins of Italian Jewish History,” in Italian Jewish Networks from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Francesca Bregoli, Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti, and Guri Schwartz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 59–79. 21.  The liturgical books included mahzorim (holiday prayer books], siddurim, tehilim (psalms), editions of Shir ha-Shirim (the Song of Songs), hakafot (processions on Simhat Torah), and haggadot. 22.  Samama certainly helped defray the costs of Benamozegh’s publication of books by Uziel Alheich (also spelled Lhaik) and Abraham ha-Cohen Itzhaki. See



NOTES TO CHAP TERS 3 AND 4

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Robert Attal, Le Caïd Nessim Samama de Tunis, Mécène du livre hébraïque ( Jerusalem: R. Attal, 1995). 23.  Elisheva Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 11. 24. Hazan, Zikhron Yerushalayim, 7. 25.  Benamozegh tones down the opposition in his preface; see Hazan, 5. 26.  On the impetus for modernization through newspaper circulation in the Ottoman and Russian empires, see Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Making the Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). 27.  The bulletin, entitled simply Bulletin of the Alliance, was the official newsletter of the institution from 1860 until 1913. With one to four issues a year, it became a trusted source of information for news organizations as it covered in detail the events that impacted Jewish communities across the world, relying on diplomatic material, minutes from local Alliance branches, and other exchanges between communities. On the Alliance, see Michael Graetz, The Jews in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 249–88; Lisa Moses Leff, Sacred Bonds of Solidarity: The Rise of Jewish Internationalism in Nineteenth-Century France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 157–99. 28.  Jonatan Meir, “‘The Origins of Hevrat Mekize Nirdamim in Eastern Europe,’ From the Depths of the Archive to the Bookshelf: 150th Anniversary of Mekitzei Nirdamim Publishers” [in Hebrew] ( Jerusalem: n.p., 2013), 33–45, posted on www.academia.edu. 29.  Elia Benamozegh, Le missioni di Terra Santa: Brevi cenni (Livorno: La Minerva, 1863), 15. 30.  C. A. Bayly and Eugenio F. Biagini, eds., Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism, 1830–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Giuseppe Mazzini, A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and International Relations, ed. Stefano Recchia and Nadai Urbinati (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). 31. Ms, 534.

Chapter 4

1.  MJMC was promptly translated as Jewish and Christian Ethics in 1873 (San Francisco: Blochman, 1873). 2.  Introduction, ii. 3.  The Alliance soon observed that such prize competitions did not attract much attention from scholars and that the society’s activity should focus on lending financial support to learned works of interest to Jews.

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4.  Perrine Simon-Nahum, La Cité investie: La science du judaïsme français et la République (Paris: Cerf, 1992). 5.  Robert Priest, The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 6. Benamozegh, ’Em la-Miqra’, Bereshit, 52, 73, 94, 101, 239. 7.  A key work in this Jewish counter-history of Christianity was Abraham Geiger’s Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte ( Judaism and Its History) (Breslau: Skutsch, 1864), which presented Jesus as a Pharisee who said nothing new about Judaism. See Susannah Heschel, Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 8.  David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu: kritisch bearbeitet (Tübingen: C. F. Osiander, 1837); Matthew Hoffman, From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 9.  Joël Sebban, “Une controverse judéo-chrétienne dans la France du XIXe siècle: L’oeuvre scandaleuse de Joseph Salvador,” Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle, no. 43 (2011): 117–33. 10.  Joseph Salvador, Histoire des Institutions de Moïse et du peuple hébreu (Paris: Ponthieu, 1828). 11.  Sebban, “Une controverse judéo-chrétienne.” 12.  Marco Morselli, “Il manoscritto impubblicabile: ‘De l’Origine des Dogmes Chrétiens,’  ” in Guetta, Per Elia Benamozegh, 153–63. 13. Benamozegh, Lettere dirette a S. D. Luzzatto, 51. 14.  See Morselli’s introduction to the edited version of the text published in 2011: Elia Benamozegh, La Kabbale et l’origine des dogmes chrétiens, ed. Marco Morselli (Paris: Éditions In Press, 2011), 9–13. 15.  On the Ligue internationale et permanente de la Paix, see Michele Sarfatti, La nascita del moderno pacifismo democratico e il Congrès international de la paix di Ginevra nel 1867 (Milano: Ed. Comune di Milan, 1983). The pacifist circles featured intellectuals such as Jules Simon, Édouard Laboulaye, and Frederic Passy (the latter of whom was the first corecipient of the Nobel Prize for Peace with Henry Dunant in 1901). The institution was supported by such prominent religious figures as the great Rabbi Lazare Isidore and Hyacinthe Loyson. 16.  The minutes can be found in Funaro, Un tempio nuovo per una fede antica, 63. 17.  Benamozegh’s outline, though jumbled, highlights the following elements: “Intuition of humanitarian unity. Human unity through universal monarchy. Through the domination of public opinion [....] Those who may be its leader. Teachers, historians, poets, artists, women, philosophers, journalists.” Benamozegh, "Le crime de la guerre dénoncé à l’humanité," in Pratique et institutions hébraïques, (Benamozegh: Livorno, 1898), 3, 6. 18.  “It is unquestionably a distinguished work, the work of a man of extensive scholarship, of a truly elevated mind and of a perfect nobility of sentiments. In addition, it is a remarkable literary work and the style, even though language mistakes are not infrequent,



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possesses an eloquence and an amplitude likely to arouse the envy of many Frenchmen. But this eloquence is too little contained, and above all relentless; and the oratory form leads the author to demonstrate, truly excessively, all the nuances of a seemingly inexhaustible range of expressions. Chapitre VII, on the progress accomplished, shows what the argument could have gained from a less bombastic and tighter style. The length of the work (404 pages in folios) and the developments devoted to the religious part—we might even say the theological part—which occupies no less than 130 of these pages are, for the goal intended, also glaringly flawed. This is why we can only, and regretfully so, give a simple distinction to this work, although remarkable in so many respects. The author is Mr. Elie Benamozegh, a theology professor at the Israelite Seminary of Livorno, who penned a book awarded by the Universal Israelite Alliance and who is one of our most devoted correspondents in Italy.” Cited in Funaro, Un tempio nuovo per una fede antica, 63. 19. Christophe Charle, Birth of the Intellectuals, 1880–1900 (New York: Polity, 2015), 11–47; Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (London: Clarendon, 1993). 20.  On Renan’s visit, see Augusto Segre, Memories of Jewish Life: From Italy to Jerusalem (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 177–78. 21.  Steven C. Soper, Building a Civil Society: Associations, Public Life, and the Origins of Modern Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 52–77. 22.  MJMC, 5. 23.  This was an episode in which a young Italian Jewish child was kidnapped and baptized by a servant and the Pope refused his parents’ pleas for his return, sparking outrage across Jewish communities in Italy and Europe. See David I. Kertzer, The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara (London: Picador, 1997). 24.  Regarding the February Revolution of 1848 in France, he wrote: “An authority on the subject has recently written, ‘For my part I believe that accidental crimes are ten times more worthy of clemency than professional misconduct. It has been calculated that, when all is accounted for, it is the latter that harms society the most. On this subject, moreover, as on so many others, the law is not in agreement with common decency. The February Revolution [of 1848] demanded the abolition of the death penalty for murderers, yet plastered public walls with the slogan “death to thieves.” I find deep meaning and special eloquence in this contradiction.’  ” Ms, 1867. 25.  “This system is not unknown to the economic philosophy of our own era. Mr. Thiers, among others, made himself its representative in a timely little book published when the social question was being debated after the February Revolution [of 1848].” Ms, 1868. The pamphlet he refers to must be Thiers’s Du communisme (Paris: Paulin et Lheureux, 1849). On Thiers and the “social question,” see Robert Castel, Métamorphoses de la question sociale (Paris: Fayard, 1995), 310–12; Castel, From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1978).

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26.  Elia Benamozegh, Histoire et littérature (Livorno: Belforte, 1897), 8. 27.  “You displayed signs and marvels in the land of Egypt with lasting effect, and won renown in Israel and among mankind to this very day” ( Jeremiah 32:20). 28. Benamozegh, Shavuot: Cinque Conferenze sulla Pentecosta (Livorno: Belforte, 2009 [1885]), 113. 29. Benamozegh, 113–14. 30. Benamozegh, preface to Hazan, Zikhron Yerushalayim (Livorno: Benamozegh, 1874), 3.

Chapter 5

1. Pallière, Unknown Sanctuary, 181–87. 2. Pallière, 66–67. 3. Pallière, 161. 4.  Aimé Pallière, “Due Lettere di Pallière a Benamozegh,” in Gli Ebrei di Toscana dal Medioevo al Risorgimento: Fatti e Monenti, ed. Bruno di Porto (Florence: Olschki, 1980), 49–63. 5. Pallière, 49–63. 6.  “If you wish to undertake a new edition, you will need a French copyist to revise the text. I would gladly use my spare time and it would be a true pleasure for me to render you this service.” Pallière, 62–63. 7. Pallière, 180. 8. Pallière, 179. 9.  Founded in 1844, the L’Univers israélite was a monthly journal dedicated to “the conservative principles of Judaism” and was the most influential periodical in intellectual Jewish circles. It became a weekly in 1896 and remained one until its final issue in 1940. Aimé Pallière [under the pseudonym “Loetmol”], “Elia Benamozegh et la solution de la crise chrétienne,” L’Univers israélite 48 (August 15, 1902): 691–95; 49 (August 22, 1902): 724–27; 50 (August 29, 1902): 752–56; 51 (September 5, 1902): 778–82; 52 (September 12, 1902): 813–18. To explain the pseudonym: the name Pallière sounds remotely like pas-hier, “not yesterday,” of which Loetmol is another loose rendering in Hebrew and vaguely sounds like a French name from Brittany. 10.  Catherine Poujol, Aimé Pallière (1868–1949): Un Chrétien dans le Judaïsme (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2003), 175. On the beginnings of the Reform movement, see Poujol, “Les débuts de l’Union libérale israélite (1895–1939): Le pari de moderniser le judaïsme français,” Archives Juives 40, no. 2 (2007): 65–81. 11. Samuele Colombo (1868–1923) had studied under Benamozegh. He was elected to the rabbinical commission in Livorno and appointed chief rabbi of the city in 1900. Colombo’s lectures and writings bear the imprint of his mentor (especially his “Il pensiero religioso di Giuseppe Mazzini” [The Religious Thought of Giuseppe Mazzini]) and he often taught about Israel and Humanity and Jewish and Christian



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Ethics. See Samuele Colombo, “Il pensiero religioso di Giuseppe Mazzini,” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 38, no. 10 (1972): 469–76; Yosef Colombo, “Cinquant’anni dalla scomparsa di Samuele Colombo,” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 34, no. 9 (1973): 483–511; Amedeo Tagliacozzo, “Samuele Colombo,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, vol. 27 (Rome: Treccani, 1982). On Loyson, see Albert Houtin’s two-volume biography, Le Père Hyacinthe dans l’Église romaine (1827–1869) (Paris: Nourry, 1920); Le Père Hyacinthe, réformateur catholique (1869–1893) (Paris: Nourry, 1922). Loyson was a Carmelite priest who was famous for his sermons and known for his progressive ideas and his severity toward the Vatican. He broke very publicly with the church in 1869. In one speech delivered to the Ligue de la Paix (which would award a distinction to Benamozegh the following year), he addressed the civilizing activity of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Judaism. After a few years in Switzerland, he founded l’Église Gallicane (1879–93). A Dreyfusard, he was also an interlocutor of the Zionist Max Nordau. See “Chez le Père Hyacinthe,” L’Univers israélite 11 (December 16, 1898); “Un sermon du père Hyacinthe Loyson,” L’Univers israélite 6 (October 25, 1901). Pallière reached out to him and from 1903 until Loyson’s death they maintained a deep friendship. See Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste. 12.  Yosef Colombo, “Lettere inedite del P. Hyacinthe Loyson,” Nuova antologia (Rome) 273, no. 1403 (September 1, 1930): 57 (letter from Loyson to Colombo dated September 1, 1907). 13.  Emmanuel Benamozegh wrote the acknowledgments, which featured quite distinguished people: “M. le Baron Edmond de Rothschild, de Paris; M. Raffaello Ottolenghi, d’Acqui; M. Raffaello Rosselli, de Livourne; M. Salvatore Disegni, de Livourne; M. M. Angiolo et Ugo Levi, de Venise; M. Giuseppe Archivolti, de Livourne; M. Cesare Tedesco, de Livourne; M. Emmanuel Pardo Roques, de Pise; M. Eugène Mirtil, de Paris; la communauté israélite de Livourne et celles de Gènes, de Vercelli et de Venise.” 14.  IH, preface, xxiv. 15.  In his French 1950 edition of The Unknown Sanctuary, Pallière judges the 1885 introduction to be “unfortunately in such bad French that it made for rather difficult reading” and “written in such a convoluted French that, just like the introduction, it needed to be completely rewritten.” 16. Poujol, Aimé Pallière. Elia Benamozegh’s son Emanuele made the following comments on the interior cover page: “There is, in addition, a thick original notebook with handwritten notes that was used in order to complete the work of the author in French—three volumes gifted by the author’s son in 1914 to the Israelite Seminary of Livorno. Revised, reorganized and completed, while salvaging the substance of the author’s thought, we shaped and published, fourteen years after the death of the author, the book entitled Israel and Humanity, released by Leroux in 1914.” 17.  Eliyahu Rachamim Zini, introduction to Morale juive et morale chrétienne, in Oeuvres complètes du rabbin Elie Benamozegh, vol. 1, ed. Zini ( Jerusalem: Editions Erez,

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2002), 8. To the best of my knowledge, Eliyahu Zini has not, to this day, produced any evidence for his claim to possess such a manuscript. 18.  Mopsik attributed the following lines to this manuscript: “Freedom is only freedom when it interrupts the chain of natural causes and effects, disrupting its continuity [ . . . ] freedom is a constant miracle or it is nothing.” This indeed corresponds to page 1088 of the manuscript I accessed in the Livorno archives. Charles Mopsik, “Le Réseau des âmes dans la cabale,” in Chemins de la cabale: Vingt-cinq études sur la mystique juive (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2004), 158 and 160n22. 19.  “Partiamo anzi tutto dal dogma e domandiamo.” Benamozegh, Shavuot, 82. 20.  IH, 37–38. 21.  Meir Seidler, “A Nineteenth-Century Jewish Attempt at Integrativeness: Rabbi Eliahu Benamozegh’s Multicultural Approach to Polytheism,” in Yosef Da‘at: Studies in Modern History in Honor of Yosef Salmon, ed. Yossi Goldstein (Beer Sheva, Israel: BenGurion University of the Negev Press, 2010), 11–23. 22.  Cyril Aslanov, “Elia Benamozegh scrittore trilingue: Il fattore della lingua nelle sue opere,” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 63, no. 3 (1997): 29–41. See also Yoav Wechsler, “Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh: The Idea of a Universal Religion” [in Hebrew], Da‘at 84 (2017): 283–300. 23.  Eugène Fleischmann, Le Christianisme “mis à nu”: La critique juive du christianisme (Paris: Plon, 1970), 160. 24.  Seidler, “Nineteenth-Century Jewish Attempt,” 13. “The doubts concerning Pallière’s Jewish erudition seem justified. His edits contain several citation errors which would not have occurred in the work of someone acquainted with the central texts of the Jewish tradition. On p. 142, Pallière cites the Talmudic tractate Avodah Zarah 357b. All Talmud tractates have less then [sic] 200 pages. He also repeatedly cites (on pp. 542 and 627) a tractate Zebachini or Zebehini, which does not exist (he means Zevahim).” As for the accusations of changing the title of the tractate, if indeed in the notes to page 542 of the 1914 edition it reads Zebachini, it is worth pointing out that it is spelled Zebahim in the notes to page 546 and that there is no citation of this tractate in the manuscript. A more benevolent and likely explanation would be the flawed deciphering by the French publisher of a handwritten edit in a finalized copyedited manuscript, in which the lowercase cursive letters n and i look like m. Moreover, Zebachim (or Zebahim) is the standard Italian rendering of the Hebrew Zevahim (traces of which can be found in Benamozegh’s other printed texts) in which v is systematically written with a b, even when its pronunciation, as a weak consonant, is v. Countless similar examples can be found in the manuscript. For instance, the tractate Avot is rendered as Abot, and zeba asciamaim is tzeva hashamayim (Ms, 543). The basis for these and other criticisms of the manuscript is a transcript of pages 1185 to 1270 posted on the website of the Journal des Études de la Kabbale. Yet, while the page numbers are the same as the Livorno manuscript, the text advertised as the authentic manuscript has been significantly edited.



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25.  See, for instance, Teologia, 17, where Lamennais is spelled Lamennais and Lammenais five lines later, and Feuerbach on p. 30 becomes Fuerbach on p. 33. 26.  Cyril Aslanov’s main argument is that Pallière distorted the essence of Benamozegh’s thought: “Thus Israël et l’Humanité, in its edited and abridged version, no longer reflects either the original intention of the author or the dialectical method, full of repetitions and apparent contradictions.” Aslanov, “Elia Benamozegh scrittore trilingue.” Although I disagree with this claim regarding Pallière’s betrayal in general, he certainly did not render all of Benamozegh’s convolutions and repetitions. Yet the question of whether it is even possible to do so remains open. 27.  “Samuel Colombo, the Chief Rabbi of Livorno, a disciple of the illustrious Benamozegh and heir to his knowledge and his piety in the holy ministry, who agreed to read my work and from whose advice I benefited many times.” AP, xxv. 28.  “I certainly do not flatter myself that I have clarified every unintelligible passage. Apart from those that are due, perhaps, to my editorial conscience or to my personal failings, there are others that have to do with the causes I indicated when I spoke of the author’s character and methods.” AP, preface. 29.  Aimé Pallière, “Le Verbe chrétien et ses types kabbalistiques,” L’Univers israélite 59 (1904): 457–67, 488–92, 524–26, 553–57, 585–88. 30.  IH, 1. Unlike MJMC, the English edition of which came out six years after its 1867 publication, IH was not translated until 1995. 31.  For a depiction of Pallière against the backdrop of the 1900 French Catholic milieu, with its antimodernity agenda and its reformers, as well as a well-researched profile of Loyson, see Poujol, Aimé Pallière, 105–71. On the disciple’s theological quest and the Christian–Jewish commonalities and tensions in Pallière’s work, see Raniero Fontana, Aimé Pallière: Un “cristiano” a servizio di Israele (Milan: Ancora, 2001). 32.  See Poujol, Aimé Pallière, 359–97. 33.  Eliyahu Zini’s political views are markedly on the far right of the political spectrum. He was one of the seventy contributors to the memorial book Barukh haGever honoring the American Israeli settler member of the far-right Kach movement who perpetrated the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre in Hebron on February 25, 1994. Opening fire in the Ibrahimi Mosque, Baruch Goldstein killed twenty-nine Palestinians and wounded 125 before being beaten to death by the survivors. See Mikhael BenHorin, ed., Baruch Ha-Gever: Sefer Zikaron L-Kadosh Dr. Baruch Goldstein ( Jerusalem: Golan, 1995). 34.  “The work of the Rav, Israel and Humanity, which so attracts our generation and which was published in an extremely unfaithful manner by Aimé Pallière—little does it matter here the exact motives, conscious or unconscious, voluntary or involuntary— only accessible today in a version from which everything relating to Jewish mysticism had been removed, is greatly appreciated, precisely because the whole way in which it most deeply expressed the Hebraic tradition had been taken out. The education of Aimé

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Pallière, along with the interruption of the manuscript at the death of the Rav, permitted this slide toward a universalism sadly insufficiently faithful to the author’s thought, and this is not about trying to distort the thought of the author, as Charles Mopsik accused me of doing without even having heard me, without even having read me on the subject, on the basis of a low-level researcher who intentionally neglected to spell out to him that my assertion in this regard resulted from the comparison of Pallière’s text with the Rav’s manuscript in my possession.” Zini, introduction to Morale juive et morale chrétienne, 8. Zini’s claim to possess a Benamozegh manuscript remains uncorroborated. 35.  Charles Mopsik, “Les formes multiples de la cabale en France au XXe siècle,” in Réceptions de la cabale, ed. Pierre Gisel and Lucie Kaennel (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2007), 270. 36. AP, 20–21.

Part II

1.  See Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Gianni Paganini, “De Jean Bodin à John Selden: le modèle noachique de la République des Lettres,” in Les Premiers siècles de la République européenne des Lettres, ed. Marc Fumaroli (Paris: Alain Baudry, 2005), 197–234; Lea Campos Boralevi, “Mitzvoth Beneh Noah: Il diritto noaico nel dibattito seicentesco sulla tolleranza,” in La Formazione storica della alterità: Studi di storia della tolleranza nell’età moderna offerti a Antonio Rotondò, vol. 2, ed. Henry Méchoulan and Richard H. Popkin (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2001), 473–94. 2.  Hugo Grotius’s De Veritate religionis christianae (The Truth about the Christian Religion), for instance, which focused on relations between Christians and non-Christians, had been preceded by the brief tractate Meletius, focused on finding what he called “a consensus” within Christianity. Jan Paul Herring, “Grotius and De Veritate Religionis Christianae,” in Henk J. M. Nellen and Edwin Rabbie, eds., Hugo Grotius, Theologian: Essays in Honour of G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes (Leiden: Brill, 1994); Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The Jewish Roots of Western Freedom,” Azure 13 (2002): 88–132. 3.  Benamozegh cites Grotius’s Droit de la guerre et de la paix (vol. 3, chap. 9) in his brief observations in Critique, Exegèse et Philologie biblique (Livorno: Benamozegh, 1897), 32, as well as in the manuscript (Ms, 866) where he discusses angels in the Jewish tradition who represent the essence of each nation and would foreshadow the status of nations in international law. The lost manuscript of Benamozegh’s entry to the Ligue de la Paix essay competition and his proposition to outlaw war (see chapter 4) would most likely have evinced his familiarity with the philosophy and religiously based concept of international law propounded by the Dutch thinker. 4. Habermas, Philosophical Discourse, 7.



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Chapter 6

1.  Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 9. 2.  His reading was strategic in this case, but also strategic in investigating Spinoza’s use of Kabbalah: in 1864 Benamozegh dedicated a series of articles in L’Univers israélite to the Dutch philosopher in order to establish the kabbalistic sources of his work and to identify the misunderstanding on his part that led to his supposed pantheism. 3.  IH, 256. 4.  IH, 256. Benamozegh refers, without citing it, to Spinoza’s preface. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 9. 5. Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, chap. 14, 179. 6. AP, 495 (IH, 256 translates the French culte special [specific worship] as “special religion”). 7. AP, 495–496. 8. Maimonides, Hilkhot Melakhim (The Laws Concerning Kings), 8:10–11. 9.  David Lemler, “Noachisme et philosophie: Destin d’un thème talmudique de Maïmonide à Cohen en passant par Spinoza,” Archives de Philosophie 74, no. 4 (2011): 629–46. 10.  The text reads: “Whoever accepts the seven commandments, and is careful to follow them, is of the righteous of the nations of the world and has a share in the world to come. This is so if he accepts them and follows them because God commanded them in the Torah and made it known to us through Moses, our teacher, that Noah had previously been commanded [to observe] them. However, if he observes them out of his own rational considerations, he is not a resident alien among the righteous of the nations of the world, nor among their wise men [velo me-hakhmehem].” The word velo (nor) was in fact ’ela (but) and thus the passage should have read: “However, if he observes them out of his own rational considerations, he is not a resident alien among the righteous of the nations of the world, but among their wise men.” See Eugene Korn, “Gentiles, the World to Come, and Judaism: The Odyssey of a Rabbinic Text,” Modern Judaism 14, no. 3 (October 1994): 265–87. 11.  IH, 260. 12.  IH, 262. 13.  Benamozegh uses the term Israelites rather than Jews, as in “le statut national des israélites,” AP, 496. 14.  Henry Moureau, “Catholicité,” in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, vol. 2 (Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1909), 2000–2012. 15.  MJMC, 9. 16.  In his Meditationes, Theses, Dubia philosophico-theologica (1719). On the radical aspect of Lau’s system, see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jan

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Assmann, Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 3. 17.  Benamozegh discusses Warburton in his Teologia, 233, in IH, and at even greater length in the unpublished part of his manuscript (Ms, 100). 18.  Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 1983), 97. 19.  Moses Mendelssohn, “ Letter to Caspar Lavater [1769],” in Frank Talmage, ed., Disputation and Dialogue: Readings in Jewish-Christian Encounter (New York: Ktav, 1975), 268. 20.  While Mendelssohn ostensibly refuted the Maimonidean restriction, he privately inquired about its authoritativeness in a letter to Rabbi Jacob Emden (1697–1776), one of the leading Torah scholars of his time. See Moses Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften – Jubiläumsausgabe, vol. 1, letter 154, pp. 178–79, quoted in Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Montgomery: University of Alabama Press, 1973), 217–18. Emden advanced several arguments for the correctness of Maimonides’s claim, but none of them constituted a discovery of an authoritative Talmudic source. See Steven Schwarzschild, “Do Noahites Have to Believe in Revelation?” Jewish Quarterly Review 52 (1962): 38; Korn, “Gentiles, the World to Come”; Jacob Dienstag, “Natural Law in Maimonidean Thought and Scholarship,” Jewish Law Annual 6 (1987): 72–74. 21.  IH, 316. 22. Benamozegh, Lettere dirette a S. D. Luzzatto, 2. 23.  Moses Mendelssohn, Schriften über Religion und Aufklärung (Berlin: Union Verlag, 1989), 415. 24.  IH, 259. 25.  Leora Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 26.  IH, 41. The French version reads: “adoration et culte de l’Absolu.” AP, 5. 27.  Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (New York: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998), 543–44. 28.  Teologia, 2. 29.  Here he was operating in a medieval framework. See Menachem Kellner, “Dogma,” in 20th Century Jewish Religious Thought: Original Essays on Critical Concepts, Movements, and Beliefs, ed. Arthur Allen Cohen and Paul Mendes-Flohr (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2004), 141–45. 30.  Solomon Schechter, “The Dogmas of Judaism,” Jewish Quarterly Review 1, no. 1 (1888): 48. 31.  Immanuel Kant, An Answer to the Question: “What Is Enlightenment?” (New York: Penguin, 2009), 1–11. 32.  Immanuel Kant, Correspondence, ed. Arnulf Zweig (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 204.



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33.  Florence Salvetti, Judaïsme et christianisme chez Kant: Du respect de la loi à son accomplissement dans l’amour (Paris: Cerf, 2016). 34.  Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Hackett, 1993), 30. 35.  Sidney Axinn, “Kant on Judaism,” Jewish Quarterly Review 59, no. 1 (1968): 9–23; R. W. Munk, “Mendelssohn and Kant on Judaism,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 13 (2006): 215–22. 36.  Teologia, 207–9. Benamozegh mentions the ‘  “anonymous author of the Sefer ha-Brit, who wrote in Germany after Kant,” which means that he only had access to the first edition of the book, since the later ones did feature Hurwitz’s name. 37.  On the history of this book, see David B. Ruderman, A Best-Selling Hebrew Book of the Modern Era: The Book of Covenant of Pinchas Hurwitz and Its Remarkable Legacy (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014). 38.  The deliberation process is what Benamozegh means by human elaboration and its stages. In his assessment of the Testament of the Caid Samama, he stated that the Talmud, “viaticum of the Exile [ . . . ] represents, far from its material subtleties, its human elaboration.” Benamozegh, Delle Fonti del diritto ebraico e del testamento del fu Conte Caid Nissim Samama: considerato rispetto a ciascuna di esse (Livorno: A. B. Zecchini, 1882), 85–86. 39.  Shmuel Feiner, The Origins of Jewish Secularism in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 346–49. For a discussion of Hurwitz’s Orthodoxy, see Ruderman, Best-Selling Hebrew Book, 57–58. 40.  Pinchas Hurwitz, Sefer ha-Brit (Vilna: Menachem Man, 1818), 346, quoted in Feiner, 349. 41. AP, 382–83, Benamozegh references Alfred Espinas who, in turn, quotes Paul Janet and deems him an “eminent thinker” in the Revue politique et littéraire (1878): 178. Alfred Espinas (1844–1922) was a noted sociologist whose organicism influenced Durkheim. 42.  Teologia, 107, 207. 43.  Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (New York: Hackett, 2009), 169–71. 44.  Teologia, 268–70. 45.  Benamozegh argued that the creation narrative in the Bible must be read together with Talmudic and kabbalistic exegesis whereby each day is a thousand days or more and thus the creation amounts to thousands of years. Thus, in ’Em la-Miqra’, Bereshit, 5b: “This is a sign and proof that the Torah should not be understood without the [oral] tradition, for without it we would not be able to see the connection to the wisdom and natural discoveries of our day.” See Raphael Shuchat, “Attitudes toward Cosmogony and Evolution in Rabbinic Thinkers in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries: The Resurgence of the Doctrine of the Sabbatical Years,” Torah-u-Maddah Journal 13 (2005): 28.

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46.  MJMC, 181. 47. AP, 29. 48.   Göle, “Snapshots of Islamic Modernity.” 49.  Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 40. 50.  IH, 41. 51.  IH, 49. 52.  IH, 43. 53.  The term originates from Albert Schweitzer’s 1906 work Geschichte des Lebens Jesu Forschung (literally “History of the Research on the Life of Jesus” but translated as The Quest of the Historical Jesus), which considered dozens of Jesus narratives from the late eighteenth century onward. See Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1960). 54.  Teologia, 225. This one mention deals with an almost anecdotal aspect: some philological works of Geiger’s in a volume of the short-lived Hebrew annual Ozar Nehmad. 55.  Elia Benamozegh, “Fra Profeti e Dottori,” Rivista bolognese di scienzi, lettere, arti e scuole, 1, vol. 1 (1867): 575, and “Critica Biblica,” in Rivista bolognese di scienzi, lettere, arti e scuole, 1, vol. 2 (1867): 311. 56. Abraham Geiger, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (Bonn, 1833). 57.  John of Damascus, The Heresy of the Ishmaelites (Leiden: Brill, 1972). 58.  Paul Fenton holds that the sources used by Benamozegh, and his translation of Al-Ghazali, betray his lack of command of Arabic. Yet his correspondence with Luzzatto in 1859 about Maimonides’s commentary on the last chapter of the tractate Menahot adds nuances to this claim: “I wrote to Munk in Paris in order to get some clarification on the Arabic text, especially regarding the vocabulary in the discourse, but I would need to hear what you think about this proposition” (Lettere dirette a S. D. Luzzatto, February 1859, 9.) “I understand Arabic a bit, but if you know the real meaning of the word ALMUFAZIN [in Hebrew characters], I would appreciate if you would communicate it to me” (Lettere dirette a S. D. Luzzatto, March 12, 1859, 21). Benamozegh’s claim to “understand Arabic a bit” should not be taken at face value, since his correspondence with Luzzatto, at least in its early stages, is a constant display of humility. In the 1880s, his counsel on the testament of Caid Nissim Samama provides further evidence that Benamozegh had some command of Arabic; his correspondence reveals the fatigue induced by his work as a translator of the wills (in Arabic) of the Caid. 59.  MJMC, 336. At the time of publication (1863), this list would have included, beyond Geiger: Gustav Weil, Biblische Legenden der Muselmänner (Frankfurt, 1845). 60.  Other nineteenth-century work on the role of Judaism in the origins of Islam includes Isaac Gastfreund’s Mohammad nach Talmud und Midrasch (Berlin, 1875) and



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Hartwig Hirschfeld’s Jüdische Elemente im Koran (Berlin, 1878). On Benamozegh’s appreciation of Islam, see Paul Fenton, “Rabbi Elie Benamozegh’s Attitude to Other Religions: The Case of Islam,” in Guetta, Per Elia Benamozegh, 113. 61. Guy Stroumsa, “Judéo-christianisme et origines de l’Islam,” in Religions d’Abraham: Regards croisés (Genève: Labor et Fides, 2015), chap. 8. 62.  Abraham Geiger, Judaism and Its History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), 211; Max Wiener, ed., Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1962), 178. 63. Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus; Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 64.  Harvey Hill, “The Science of Reform: Abraham Geiger and the Wissenschaft des Judentum,” Modern Judaism 27, no. 3 (2007): 329–49. 65. AP, 37. 66.  G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 518. 67.  Jewish and Christian Ethics, 13–14 (for the French, see MJMC, 43–45). 68.  MJMC,44. 69.  On monolingualism, see José Faur, “Monolingualism and Judaism,” Cardozo Law Review 14 (1993): 1713–44; Faur, Golden Dove with Silver Dots: Semiotics and Textuality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Benamozegh mocked the “reformists of Padua” in Ta‘am Leshad by calling them “censors.” His biting phrase alludes to the rabbinical college of Padua and to the first page of the eighteenth-century rabbi Lampronti’s encyclopedia Pahad Itzhak: on their stamp of approval, the censors referred to themselves as “reformers.” 70.  Lettere dirette a S. D. Luzzatto, March 12, 1859, 18. This trope became a staple in the description of Reform Judaism, as analyzed in Jakob J. Petuchowski, “Karaite Tendencies in an Early Reform Haggadah: A Study in Comparative Liturgy,” Hebrew Union College Annual 31 (1960): 223–49. For its meaning in Italy, see Asher Salah, “Are Karaites Sceptics? The Jewish Perception of Karaism in Nineteenth Century Italy,” in Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies, ed. Bill Rebiger, 231–50 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 231–50. 71.  Paul Bénichou, Romantismes français: Le Temps des prophètes, vol. 1. (Paris: Gallimard, 2005), 621. 72.  Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (New York: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2008), 29. 73.  Teologia, 30. 74.  Teologia, 30. 75.  Teologia, 30. 76.  Teologia, 31. 77.  Teologia, 32. 78.  Henry de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995).

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79. In ’Em la-Miqra’ and Teologia. 80.  On Vico and Benamozegh, see José Faur, “Vico and the Hebrews,” New Vico Studies, no. 13 (1995): 14–32; “Vico, Religious Humanism and the Sephardic Tradition,” Judaism 27, no. 1 (Winter 1978): 63–71. 81.  On Vico’s philosophy as an alternative to Enlightenment, see Isaiah Berlin, Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). On Vico’s influence in Sephardic circles, see Patrick H. Hutton, “The New Science of Giambattista Vico: Historicism in Its Relation to Poetics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30, no. 3 (1972): 359–67. 82. Benamozegh, ’Em la-Miqra’, 109a; Joseph Mali, The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History: From Jules Michelet to Isaiah Berlin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Sandra Rudnick-Luft, Vico’s Uncanny Humanism: Reading the New Science between Modern and Postmodern (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 164–66. 83.  Denis Thouard, “Schleiermacher et le langage religieux: Sentiment, langage et communauté,” Recherches de science religieuse 82, no. 3 (1994): 335–60. 84.  For Schleiermacher, “religion’s essence is neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling.” Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, Second Speech (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996 [1799]), 38. 85.  Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion, 38. 86.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [1781]), 50. 87.  At least one of the journals Benamozegh read around this time published a series of articles on metaphysics in Europe by Paul Janet dealing with the importance of intuition and feelings in religion. See Paul Janet, “La métaphysique en Europe depuis Hegel,” Revue des deux mondes 21 (May–June 1877): 281. 88. AP, 7. 89. AP, 76.

Chapter 7

1. Benamozegh, Shavuot, 79. 2. Benamozegh, 80. 3.  Eliezer Schweid, A History of Modern Religious Jewish Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 2:153–67. 4. Benamozegh, Le Missioni di Terra Santa, 20. 5.  Giambattista Vico, On the Study Methods of Our Time (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 113. 6. Benamozegh, MJMC, 22–3. 7.  Benamozegh did not specify that the concept, the imputation of righteousness, belonged to Reform theology and not to Catholicism. Later he revisited his criticism



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of Christianity and, this time, lambasted the “intolerance of Roman Catholicism, which claims to monopolize truth within a church outside of which there can be no salvation.” AP, 273. 8.  MJMC, 82. 9.  MJMC, 82. 10.  MJMC, 81. 11. Ms, 1119. 12.  IH, 269–70. 13.  IH, 269–70. 14.  Susan Stone, “Sinaitic and Noahide Law: Legal Pluralism in Jewish Law,” Cardozo Law Review 12 (1991): 1157–214, quotation on 1194n49. On the notion of Noahide Laws as a bare minimum, see Nahum Rakover, “Jewish Law and the Noahide Obligation to Preserve Social Order,” Cardozo Law Review, 12 (February–March 1992): 1073–136. 15.  On the sociological reason for these differentiations, see Stone, “Sinaitic and Noahide Law,” 1189. She notes that the Noahide code was modeled on Roman law, hastily created to mirror its procedures. The Sinaitic system was then construed in opposition to show, by contrast, the cruelty of the Roman system, hence the greater leniency regarding imposition of the death penalty. 16.  Teologia, 268–69. 17. The Sefer ’Or Yakar was the first comprehensive running commentary on the Zohar (and included Torah portions and the Sefer Yetzirah), 41:45–46. 18.  Tractate Makot, 23b. Rabbi Hahanya ben Akashia said, “God wished to confer merit on Israel. That’s why God gave them such an abundance of Torah and commandments.” See Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995), 190–91; Judith Frishman, “Good Enough for the Goyim? Samuel Hirsch and Samuel Hondheim on Christianity,” in Interaction between Judaism and Christianity in History, Religion, Art and Literature, ed. Marcel Poorthuis, Joshua Schwartz, and Joseph Turner (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 271–87; John Pawlikowski, “The Search for a New Paradigm for the Christian-Jewish Relationship: A Response to Michael Signer,” in Reinterpreting Revelation and Tradition: Jews and Christians in Conversation, ed. John Pawlikowski and Hayim G. Perelmuter (Franklin, WI: Sheed & Ward, 2000), 25–48. 19.  Aaron Lichtenstein, The Seven Laws of Noah (New York: Rabbi Jacob Joseph School Press, 1986). The discussion of Benamozegh’s framing of the Noahide Laws appears in David Novak’s The Image of the Non-Jew in Judaism, 2nd ed. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 203–5. 20.  Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (Springfield, IL: Behrman House, 1961), 186. See also René Gutman, ed., Les Décisions doctrinales du Grand Sanhedrin réuni sous les auspices

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de Napoléon le Grand (Lagrasse: Verdier, 2007); Bernhard Blumenkranz and Albert Soboul, eds., Le Grand Sanhedrin de Napoleon (Paris: Privat, 1979); Katell Berthelot, “La mise en cause et la défense de la philanthropie des lois juives au premier siècle et au XVIIIème siècle de notre ère,” Revue des études juives 161, nos. 1–2 ( January–June 2002): 41–82. 21.  Jakob Mecklemburg, Ha-Ketav veha-Qabbalah (Leipzig: C. L. Fritzschii, 1839) on Deuteronomy 3, 19; Bruria Hutner David, “The Dual Role of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Chajes: Traditionalist and Maskil” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1971). 22.  See Elliot Wolfson’s analysis in Open Secret. Although he focuses on Schneerson, the conceptual points raised in his study question the ethnocentric basis of the Noahide Laws. Elliot Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 224–40. 23. AP, 621. 24. Pallière, The Unknown Sanctuary, 140. Pallière expressed his reservations to Benamozegh in his correspondence and during his 1898 visit before accepting his mentor’s mission to reform Christianity through a return to its Noachic roots. 25.  David Novak, “Is Natural Law a Border Concept between Christianity and Judaism?” Journal of Religious Ethics 32, no. 2 ( June 2002): 237–54. 26. Benamozegh, Lettere dirette a Luzzatto, 72. 27.  Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 46. 28.  Shmuel Bergman, “Israel and the Oikoumene,” in Studies in Rationalism, Judaism and Universalism: In Memory of Leon Roth, ed. Raphael Loewe (London: R. Loewe, 1966), 57. 29.  Michael Wyschogrod, Abraham’s Promise: Judaism and Jewish-Christian Relations (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 109–10. 30.  Anver E. Emon, “Pluralizing Religion: Islamic Law and the Anxiety of Reasoned Deliberation,” in After Pluralism: Reimagining the Religious Engagement, ed. Courtney Bender and Pamela E. Klassen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 60–64. 31.  This gesture corresponds to Leora Batnitzky’s idea that “modern Jewish thought may be seen as the story of the attempt by Jewish thinkers to fit Judaism into this category [of religion] and the rejection of this effort.” However, the modernity is analyzed from the vantage point of German Judaism in Protestant countries and would benefit from a study of the French, Italian, and Sephardic understanding of modernity in Catholic and/or Muslim environments. Batnitzky, How Judaism Became a Religion, 190.

Chapter 8

1.  Giuseppe Mazzini, “From the Pope to the Council,” 1849, in Selected Writings (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1974), 210.



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2. Mazzini, Cosmopolitanism of Nations, 53–65. 3.  Despite Mazzini’s poor opinion of the cosmopolitanism heralded by the patriotic secret societies of the early 1800s known as the Carbonari, seeing it as too abstract, the pillars of his thinking—especially in the articulation between cosmopolitanism and nationalism—were indebted to their views. See, for instance, Maurizio Isabella, “Mazzini’s Internationalism in Context: From the Cosmopolitan Patriotism of the Italian Carbonari to Mazzini’s Europe of the Nations,” in Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalization of Democratic Nationalism (1830–1920), ed. Christopher A. Bayly and Eugenio F. Biagini (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 37–58. 4.  MJMC, 32. 5.  MJMC, 215. 6. Ms, 1185. 7.  See AP, 403. 8.  This metaphor dates back to Plato. See The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), VIII, 556e, p. 235. 9. AP, 391. 10.  MJMC, 28. 11. AP, 385. 12.  “An echo, carried over into the Christian religion, of beliefs that are the authentic patrimony of Israel.” AP, 351. 13. AP, 396. 14.  Examples of Benamozegh’s use of this term are found in IH, 43, 54, 78, 136, 142, and 244. 15.  IH, 55, 139. 16.  IH, 54. 17.  IH, 103, 328. 18.  This exegesis, unfinished and in Arabic, is mentioned by Maimonides’s son Abraham in his own commentary on Genesis, which only resurfaced in 1958. See Abraham Maimonides: Commentary on Genesis and Exodus, ed. E. Wiesenberg (London: Defus ha-Hinukh, 1958). 19. Sforno, Commentary on the Torah, vol. 1 (Brooklyn, NY: Artscroll, 1987), 339–40. 20.  Lawrence Kaplan. “Maimonides and Mendelssohn on the Origins of Idolatry, the Election of Israel, and the Oral Law,” in Alfred Ivry, ed., Perspectives on Jewish Thought and Mysticism in Memory of Alexander Altmann (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers), 434–36; Arnold Eisen. “Divine Legislation as ‘Ceremonial Script’: Mendelssohn on the Commandments,” AJS Review 15, no. 2 (1990): 239–67. 21.  Samson Raphael Hirsch, The Nineteen Letters ( Jerusalem: Feldheim, 1995), letter 9 (“On Exile”), 128. 22.  The notion of Volksgeist, first developed in Herder’s Poetry of the Hebrews (which

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Benamozegh cites in Ms, 791), had gained currency across Europe. Benamozegh cites Renan to illustrate his point. See Ernest Renan, Dialogues et fragments philosophiques (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1876), 89. 23. IH, 97; Ms, 540. His association of the sarim and Kabbalah derives from his understanding that it is part of merkavah mysticism (see chapter 2) which features “sarim, national spirits, formed organically in the Merkabah, the mystical chariot of the number seventy, a sacramental number in heaven and on Earth. From there, one can already see naturally emerging the idea of a relationship to be maintained among the community of nations.” Ms, 1906; see also 1151. 24.  Thierry Alcoloumbre, “Israël et les nations du monde: D’après le Shaaré Orah de R. Yossef Gekatilia,” Pardès, no. 49 ( January 2011): 97–112. Gikatila also linked it to the expression of tseva’ot, the hosts of God—the cosmic forces, the celestial bodies which are, according to the Zohar, in fact governed by the laws of attraction. This aspect of cosmic forces is developed by the major eighteenth-century kabbalist Moshe David Luzzatto, to whom Benamozegh makes no reference at all. See Jonathan Garb, “The Political Model in Modern Kabbalah: A Study of Ramhal and His Intellectual Surroundings” [in Hebrew], in ‘Al Da‘at ha-Kahal: Religion and Politics in Jewish Thought: Festschrift in Honor of Aviezer Ravitzky, vol. 2, ed. Benjamin Brown, Menachem Lorberbaum, Avinoam Rosenak, and Yedidia Z. Stern ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center and Israel Democracy Institute, 2012), 13–45. 25. AP, 252. The references to the sarim also enable Benamozegh to accommodate a less strict monotheism; see AP, 237. He viewed them as a transition from polytheism to monotheism. 26.  Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose [8:28],” in Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 51. 27. Ms, 728. 28.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat social, Geneva manuscript, in Oeuvres completes, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 287. Benamozegh consistently opposed Rousseau’s worldview and his assumption of the corruptibility of man by society. See, for instance, Ms, 1119, and Teologia, 20, 216, 245. 29.  See, for instance, Georges Goyau, L’idée de patrie et l’humanitarisme: Essai d’histoire française (1866–1901) (Paris: Librairie Academique Perrin, 1902). A prolific writer and advocate of social Catholicism, Goyau pitted Jewish cosmopolitanism, as a cause of France’s defeat to Prussia in 1870, against the church as the only source of genuinely universal values. 30. Ms, 724. 31. Ms, 724. 32.  Introduction, 54. 33.  Erwin Panofsky, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline” (1940), in



NOTES TO CHAP TERS 8 AND 9

231

The Meaning of the Humanities, ed. T. Greene (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), 89–119. 34.  Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 151. 35. Bénichou, Romantismes français: Le Temps des prophètes, vol. 1, 774, 780. 36.  Phyllis Stock-Morton, Moral Education for a Secular Society: The Development of Morale Laique in Nineteenth-Century France (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988). 37. Ms, 1145 and Ms, 1043, respectively.

Chapter 9

1.  MJMC, 291. 2.  Emmanuel Levinas, “A Religion for Adults,” in Difficult Freedom (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 22. 3.  Levinas, “Jewish Thought Today,” in Difficult Freedom, 164. 4.  Emmanuel Levinas, “Secularism and the Thought of Israel,” in Unforeseen History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 113–25. 5.  Levinas, “Israel and Universalism,” in Difficult Freedom, 176. 6. Richard Cohen has written about the parallels between Levinas and Benamozegh and what he called their “concrete” universalism, as opposed to exclusive (Paulinian), abstract (Marxist or Christian) universalism. See his “Singularity: The Universality of Jewish Particularism—Benamozegh and Levinas,” in Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010), 267–73; he also mentions these similar universalisms in “Brit Husserliana: L’Universel dans l’Unique,” Les Nouveaux Cahiers, no. 127 (1997): 10–15. While Cohen seems to assume an influence of Benamozegh on Levinas, he does not specify how the philosopher came to be introduced to Benamozegh’s thought. 7.  On Levinas not mentioning the origins of his references, see David Brézis, Levinas et le tournant sacrificiel (Paris: Hermann, 2012), 177–99. 8.  See Levinas’s tribute to Gordin in Difficult Freedom, 167–72. On Gordin, see Cyril Aslanov, “Jacob Gordin en France: Transfert de savoir ou malentendu culturel?” Archives Juives 38, no. 1 (2005): 43–55; Céline Trautmann-Waller, “Jacob Gordin ou le judaïsme d’un philosophe européen: Saint-Pétersbourg-Berlin-Paris,” Archives Juives 46, no. 2 (2013): 30–58. For a posthumous collection of his writings, see Jacob Gordin, Ecrits: Le renouveau de la pensée juive en France, ed. Marcel Goldmann (Paris: Albin Michel, 1995). 9.  On the affinities between Levinas and Askénazi, see Georges Hansel, De la Bible au Talmud (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2008), 161–74. 10.  In his tribute to the prematurely deceased Gordin, Askénazi said that the encounter between the Russian-born philosopher, trained in Germany, and himself, an Algiers-born son of the chief rabbi of Oran and heir to a prestigious lineage of Sephardi

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rabbis, convinced him of “the unity of the Jewish soul.” See Léon Askénazi, “Jacob Gordin, mon Maître,” preface to Gordin, Ecrits, 9–17. 11.  Askénazi referenced Gordin’s take on Benamozegh and his stated ideal of Judaism as “the unity of values” in Léon Askénazi, La Parole et l’écrit, vol. 2 (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005), 437. 12.  In a recorded lecture, Askénazi uses the exact same examples of the biblical figures of Melchizedek and Jethro that Benamozegh used in IH, 74, 105. The lecture is entitled “Nasso” and is dated 1993. A transcription is available online at http://manitou .over-blog.com/article-nasso-1993–1ere-partie-50361450.html (accessed August 9, 2019). 13.  David Novak, “Universal Moral Law in the Theology of Hermann Cohen,” Modern Judaism 1, no. 1 (1981): 101–17. 14.  On the possibility of Levinas being silently in conversation with Cohen, see Edith Wyschogrod, Crossover Queries: Dwelling with Negatives, Embodying Philosophy’s Others (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 405–22. 15.  Hermann Cohen, Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 115. 16.  Shai Held, “What Zvi Yehuda Kook Wrought: The Theopolitical Radicalization of Religious Zionism,” in Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism, ed. Michael L. Morgand and Steven Weitzman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 229–55. 17.  Léon Askénazi, La Parole et l’écrit, vol. 1 (Paris: Albin Michel, 1999), 459. 18.  On Kook’s life, see Yehudah Mirsky, Rav Kook: Mystic in a Time of Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Yoel Ben-Nun, “Nationalism, Humanity and the Community of Israel” [in Hebrew], in Yovel ’Orot: The Thought of Rabbi Isaac ha-Kohen Kook, ed. Benjamin Ish-Shalom and Shalom Rosenberg ( Jerusalem: Department for Torah Education and Culture in the Diaspora of the World Zionist Organization, 1985), 169–208. 19.  Matthias Schattner, “Israël, ‘lumière pour les nations’? Trois penseurs du judaïsme français à l’épreuve de la guerre des Six Jours,” Esprit 369, no. 11 (2010): 96–129. 20.  Gilles Morali, “Entre cosmopolitisme et universalisme: De Martin Buber à Léon Askénazi,” Pardès 49, no. 1 (2011): 143–53. 21.  These include Uri Cherki, the founder of Brit Olam, the Noahide World Center and Rav Shlomo Aviner. See Pirurum me-Shulkhan Gavoah: Me-Torato shel ha-Rav Yehouda Léon Askénazi Manitou (Bet El: Chava, 1991). 22.  Nekuda was launched in 1979 in what is known as Yesha (an acronym for Judea-Samaria and Gaza), the representative body of the settlements, by an activist of Gush Emunim. See Nadav Gershon Shelef, Evolving Nationalism: Homeland, Identity, and Religion in Israel, 1925–2005 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), 66.



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23.  Yair Sheleg, “In His Vision, the People of Israel Are at the Center of the Abrahamic Commonwealth” [in Hebrew], Haaretz, August 18, 2011. Nekuda has featured articles about Benamozegh penned by Elitzur Segal of Ofra, an educator at the Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea in Tapuach (a settlement and yeshiva affiliated with Rabbi Meir Kahane) and by Rabbi Azriel Ariel, the rabbi of the community of Ateret near Ramallah. 24.  Ilan Greilsammer, “Repenser Israël: Morale et politique de l’État juif,” Revue Autrement, no. 70 (September 1993): 12. 25.  Sharon Weinblum, Security and Defensive Democracy in Israel: A Critical Approach to Political Discourse (New York: Routledge, 2015), 51. 26.  Basic Law: Israel—the Nation-State of the Jewish People, available at https:// knesset.gov.il/laws/special/eng/BasicLawNationState.pdf. See Bernard Avishai, “Israel Passes a Law Stating What’s Jewish about a Jewish and Democratic State,” New Yorker, July 30, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment /israel-passes-a-law-stating-whats-jewish-about-a-jewish-and-democratic-state. 27.  J. David Davis, Finding the God of Noah: The Spiritual Journey of a Baptist Minister from Christianity to the Laws of Noah (New York: Ktav, 1996). 28.  See the transcription of the talk by Léon Askénazi, where he addresses the numerous Noahide communities in the United States and states that the French attempts yielded no results: “Parashat Nasso,” 1993; http://manitou.over-blog.com/article-nasso-1993 –1ere-partie-50361450.html; Kimberly E. Hanke, Turning to Torah: The Emerging Noachide Movement (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson, 1995), 19; Raniero Fontana, “A Noachide Profile,” European Judaism 44, no. 2 (October 2011): 106–15; Fontana, “Noachismo: un’indagine preliminare,” Cahiers Ratisbonne 3 (1997): 80–116. 29.  On the role of the Gentiles in messianic times, see Zechariah 8:23. For a discussion of the question in the context of Chabad’s Noahide Campaign and the thought of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, see Wolfson, Open Secret, 229–31. 30.  Ronald Reagan, Proclamation 4921 of April 3, 1982, https://www.govinfo.gov /content/pkg/STATUTE-96/pdf/STATUTE-96-Pg2721.pdf. 31.  “Sometimes a name, a distinguished name to which elevated ideas have been attached, is used to designate what is rudimentary, imperfect in a given thing, its flawed and defective beginning. These meanings and these contradictory uses make sense when one takes into account the two cycles that constitute the general movement of human beings, by which they come from God and ascend back to him.” AP, 316–17. See also Ms, 969. 32.  Martin Buber, Two Types of Faith (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003), 170, 172.

Part III

1.  The notion of a consciousness “divided within and against itself ” comes from Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 111–38. On modernity and the split between inner

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perception and the outer world, see Suzanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), 12; Milton Scarborough, Myth and Modernity: Postcritical Reflection (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 10. 2.  Eric Jacobson, “The Future of the Kabbalah: On the Dislocation of Past Primacy, the Problem of Evil, and the Future of Illusions,” in Kabbalah and Modernity, ed. Boaz Huss (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 47–75. 3.  IH, 49; AP, 19, quoting Eduard von Hartmann, La Religion de l’Avenir (Paris: Alcan, 1894), 9.

Chapter 10

1.  Lettere dirette a Samuel David Luzzatto, 14. In this letter Benamozegh announced his ambition to change the perception of Kabbalah and to make its significance understood to his contemporaries. 2.  This important aspect, unfortunately, is lost in the otherwise fine English translation of Israel and Humanity, since all the occurrences of theosophy are replaced by mysticism. 3.  Elia Benamozegh, “Spinoza et la Kabbale,” L’Univers israélite 19 (1864): 36–42, 130–38, 181–87, 274–81, 364–74. 4.  Elia Benamozegh to Sabato Morais, January 10, 1877, CAJS Sabato Morais Collection cit SBM X FF 28, Box 1 (11), Library of the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, University of Pennsylvania, as quoted in Funaro, Un tempio nuovo per una fede antica, 76. 5.  Benamozegh, “La nostra teosofia,” Il Corriere Israelitico 7 (1868): 129–33. 6.  Benamozegh explicitly lamented “the superstitions they [the Hasidim] have encouraged” in “Il signore Reynach [sic] e la Cabbalà,” Il Vessillo Israelitico 40 (1892): 323. Although both of the Reinach brothers, each a distinguished scholar, attacked Kabbalah, Benamozegh responded specifically to Théodore Reinach (1860–1928), a historian of religion, who published his critique in Histoire des Israélites depuis la ruine de leur indépendance nationale jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Hachette, 1884), 115–18. On the reception of Kabbalah in French academia, see Paul Fenton, “Qabbalah and Academia: The Critical Study of Jewish Mysticism in France,” Shofar 18, no. 2 (2000): 45–69. 7.  Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 211–29; Helena Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, 2 vols. (New York: Theosophical University Press, 2014); Jean-Louis Siémons, “De l’usage du mot ‘théosophie’ par Mme Blavatsky,” Politica Hermetica 7 (1993): 125–35. 8.  The only mention appears as a dismissive publisher’s note in the 1914 edition of Israel and Humanity. “By theosophy, it is kabbalistic theology that is meant, and not the neo-Buddhism, introduced in the West, under this name by Blavatsky, Olcott, Annie Besant. Editor’s note.” AP, 55.



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9.  Benamozegh has a few bullet-point-style notes: “Agreement rabbis/philosophers – Porphyry, Macrobius, Apuleius.” Ms, 317. 10.  Antoine Faivre, “Le courant théosophique (fin XVIè–XVIIè siècles): Essai de périodisation,” Politica Hermetica 7 (1993): 6–47; Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition: Studies in Western Esotericism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2000), 3. 11.  This is not the only instance of Benamozegh using Christian kabbalistic terminology or imagery without acknowledging its provenance, as I will show in analyzing his treatment of the figure of Adam in the present chapter. 12. The Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Encyclopedia, or a Systematic Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts, and Crafts) was published from 1751 to 1772 with many contributors, but edited by d’Alembert and Diderot. The fact that Diderot picked this entry is significant—all the more so as the Encyclopedia, as part of the Enlightenment project, often challenged religious authority. 13. Faivre, Theosophy, Imagination, Tradition, 43, 106. 14.  Antonio Rosmini-Serbati, Teosofia (Intra: Paolo Bertolotti, 1869); Bernard Reardon, “Gioberti and Rosmini: Italian Ontologism,” in Religion in the Age of Romanticism, ed. Bernard M. G. Reardon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 146–75. 15.  For a discussion on the dispute, see Frederick C. Beiser, The Fate of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 44–126. 16.  Antoine Faivre, Access to Western Esotericism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1994), 32. 17. Faivre, 32. 18.  The word multiverse was coined by William James in 1895 in The Will to Believe, but the concept goes back to antiquity, and namely Anaximander. Benamozegh calls Anaximander “a precursor of Darwin” in IH, 180. For Bruno’s mentions, see IH, 221 and 352, and the account of his talk: “Una conferenza al circolo filologico di Livorno del Rabb[ino] Cav[aliere] E. Benamozegh,” Il Vessillo Israelitico 25 (1877): 49. On Bruno’s On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, see Dorothea Waley Singer, Giordano Bruno: His Life and Thought (New York: Henry Schuman, 1950). 19.  Elliot K. Ginsburg, The Sabbath in the Classical Kabbalah (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 3. 20.  Clémence Boulouque, “An ‘Interior Occident’ and the Case for an Oriental Modernity: The Livornese Printing Press and the Mediterranean Publishing Networks of Elia Benamozegh (1823–1900),” Jewish Social Studies 23, no. 2 (Winter 2018): 86–136. 21. Benamozegh, Storia degli Esseni. See Ms, 153. 22.  Heinrich Graetz, The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays (New York: Ktav, 1975), 106, 161; Raphael Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment: Their

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Confrontation in Galicia and Poland in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985). 23.  Pinchas Giller, Shalom Shar‘abi and the Kabbalists of Beit El (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Jonatan Meir, Kabbalistic Circles in Jerusalem (1896–1948) (Leiden: Brill, 2016). 24. Ms, 987. 25. Benamozegh, La Kabbale, 96. This also enables him to posit a direct filiation between Kabbalah and gnosis (translated as “science” and opposed to pistis, faith). The notion of Kabbalah as science coincided with the advent of Christian Kabbalah in the early sixteenth century. See, for instance, Jean Thénaud, Traicté de la Cabale, ed. Ian R. Christie-Miller and François Roudaut (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007 [1520–21]). 26. Ms, 238. See variant AP, 92. On the phenomenon of oral transmission and secrecy, see Elliot Wolfson in “Beyond the Spoken Word: Oral Tradition and Written Transmission in Medieval Jewish Mysticism,” in Transmitting Jewish Traditions: Orality, Textuality, and Cultural Diffusion, ed. Yaakov Elman and Israel Gershoni (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 175; Giuseppe Veltri, Renaissance Philosophy in Jewish Garb (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 33–34n71–n72. Additionally, see Simone Luzzatto’s definitions at the end of his Discorso circa il stato de l’Hebrei e in particular, dimoranti nell’inclita Citta di Venezia (1629) where he distinguishes cabbala as a watered-down form of magic from its true meaning of Kabbalah as transmission. On this, see François Secret, “Un texte mal connu de Simon Luzzatto sur la kabbale,” Revue des études juives 118 (1959–60): 121–28. 27.  Vincenzo Gioberti, Introduzione allo studio della filosofia (Brussels: Marcello Hayez, 1840), 2:389, 2:393, 2:680. Gioberti insists on the legitimacy of acroamatism and on the necessity of retrieving it in order for Christianity to reclaim its roots (“the elective aristocracy of the ideal science”). Fortuné Palhoriès, Gioberti (Paris: Alcan, 1929), 376. See also Vincenzo Gioberti, Della protologia di Vincenzo Gioberti, ed. Giuseppe Massari (Torino, 1857), 263–64. 28. Benamozegh, Lettere dirette a S. D. Luzzatto, 14. 29.  Boaz Huss, “The Mystification of Kabbalah and the Modern Construction of Jewish Mysticism,” Pe‘amim 110 (2007): 9–30. 30.  Adolph Jellinek, Auswahl Kabbalisticher Mystik, Erstes Heft (Leipzig, 1853), 3–4. 31. Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 51. 32.  Charles C. Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. 8–11. 33.  Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 26ff. 34.  Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 2013), 3–45.



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35. Vico, New Science, Element XLVII, §205, p. 74; Joseph Mali, The Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s “New Science” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), esp. 136–209; Robert Miner, Vico, Genealogist of Modernity (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002); A. J. Grant, “Vico and Bultmann on Myth: The Problem with Demythologizing,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30, no. 4 (2000): 49–82; Max Horkheimer, “Vico and Mythology,” New Vico Studies 5 (1987): 63–76. 36.  Gil Anidjar, Semites (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), esp. 50–81. 37. Benamozegh, Lettere dirette a S. D. Luzzatto, 62. 38.  Benamozegh, “La nostra teosofia,” 130. 39. Benamozegh, La Kabbale, 129–30. 40.  Gershom Scholem, On Jews and Judaism in Crisis (New York: Paul Dry, 2012), 19. 41.  Elliot Wolfson, “Mystical Rationalization of the Commandments in Sefer-haRimmon,” Hebrew Union College Annual 59 (1988): 217–51; Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Morality in Kabbalistic Mysticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 8–16; Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, 1185–213; Morris M. Faierstein, “God’s Need for the Commandments in Medieval Kabbalah,” Conservative Judaism 36 (1982): 45–59; Daniel Matt, “The Mystic and the Mitzvoth,” in Jewish Spirituality from the Bible through the Middle Ages, ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 367–404. 42.  Elia Benamozegh, Teologia, 251, 255–56, 260, 266, 270–71, 276. 43.  See Jean-Philibert Damiron, Essai sur l’Histoire de la Philosophie en France (Paris: Chubart et Heideloff, 1828), 67, 271. A historian, philosopher, and professor of moral sciences, Damiron (1794–1862) was an early influence on Benamozegh, who mentioned his course on psychology in ’Em la-Miqra’, Bereshit, 18b. 44.  Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Jonathan Cape, 1972), 146. 45.  N. Hussain, “The Return of Moral Fictionalism,” Philosophical Perspectives 18 (2004): 149–87; Hussain, “Honest Illusion: Valuing for Nietzsche’s Free Spirits,” in Nietzsche and Morality, ed. B. Leiter and N. Sinhababu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 157–91. 46. Ms, 252–53. 47.  The founder of the documentary hypothesis, the German scholar Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), published his Geschichte Israels (History of Israel) in 1878, followed by a second edition, Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels in 1883. See Paul Michael Kurtz, Kaiser, Christ, and Canaan: The Religion of Israel in Protestant Germany, 1871–1918 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2018). 48.  See Mark Kalderon, ed., Fictionalism in Metaphysics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005); Andrea Varzi, “Fictionalism in Ontology,” in From Fictionalism to Realism, ed. C. Barbero, M. Ferraris, and A. Voltolini (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013).

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49.  Daniel Nolan, Greg Restall, and Caroline West, “Moral Fictionalism versus the Rest,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83, no. 3 (2005): 307–30. 50.  See Charles Kay Ogden, Bentham’s Theory of Fictions (New York: Routledge, 2000). 51.  AP, 284–85. 52.  See for instance, “And this is to signify that the soul of the Torah is the wisdom of the Kabbalah, which is compatible with the beliefs current in that time and place. This alone will silence the critique that claims that the laws of the Torah were copied by us from the laws and customs of Egypt” in Benamozegh, ’Em la-Miqra’, Bamidbar, 11 (trans. Adiel Cohen). See Adiel Cohen, “Kabbalah as a Shield against the ‘Scourge’ of Biblical Criticism: A Comparative Analysis of the Torah Commentaries of Elia Benamozegh and Mordecai Breuer,” in The Believer and the Modern Study of the Bible, ed. Tova Ganzel, Yehudah Brandes, and Chayuta Deutsch (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2019). 53.  Benamozegh cited the “very famous” Guide for the Perplexed of Our Time in the Rivista bolognese 1 (1867): 574 as he dealt with biblical Prophets and the potential existence of books that predated the Scriptures and inspired them, but whose traces were lost or effaced and now barely perceptible at the surface of the “written monuments” of the Jewish tradition. In effect, he describes a sort of a hidden, quasi-mythical origin of the tradition. See Nathan Krochmal, More Nevukhim ha-Zeman (Lemberg, 1863), chapter VIII, 28. 54.  David Biale, “The Kabbala in Nachman Krochmal’s Philosophy of History,” Journal of Jewish Studies 32 (1981): 85–97. See also Yehoyada Amir, “New Paths towards Christianity and Islam in the Thought of Nachman Krochmal and Elijah Benamozegh,” in Die Entdeckung des Christentums in der Wissenschaft des Judentums, ed. Görge Hasselhoff (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 213–38. 55.  Solomon Schechter, “The Charter of the Seminary,” in Seminary Addresses (Cincinnati: Ark Publishing, 1915), 25. 56. Vico, New Science, 338. 57.  Of Michelet’s work, Benamozegh most abundantly quoted from the 1864 La Bible de l’Humanité, a book filled with anti-Jewish views with which he did not engage. On Michelet’s use of Vico, see Joseph Mali, “Jules Michelet,” in The Legacy of Vico in Modern Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 12–70. 58.  According to Jung, the contemporary psyche fails to identify the archetypes that structure it and retrieving them should be part of the analytical process—and in his later work, especially in the Mysterium Coniunctionis in 1955, he holds the Kabbalah to be a repository of such archetypes. See C. G. Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, vol. 14 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). For Jung’s kabbalistic visions after the Second World War, infused with Lurianic images, see C. G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe (New



NOTES TO CHAP TERS 10 AND 11

239

York: Random House, 1961). Sandor Drob’s interpretation of these materials emphasizes Kabbalah over Gnosticism as a decisive influence on Jung’s later work, and he even calls Jung a “kabbalist” (despite recognizing his lack of knowledge of primary sources). See Sandor Drob, Kabbalistic Metaphors (New York: Aronson, 2001), 289–343. For a critique and further engagement with psychology and Kabbalah, see Jonathan Garb, Yearnings of the Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), esp. 13. 59.  Elia Benamozegh, Teologia, 269–71. 60.  Elia Benamozegh, Bibliothèque de l’Hébraïsme, vol. 1, Dio (Livorno: Benamozegh: 1897), 3. 61.   Mordechai Pachter, “Circles and Straightness: A History of an Idea” [in Hebrew], Da‘at 18 (1987): 69–83. 62.  “When [von Hartmann] tells us that the ‘unconscious is the common subject that feels both [pleasure and suffering] since it is at the bottom of all individual consciousnesses,’ shouldn’t we listen to the Bible or the rabbis when they tell us about the joy or the pain that God derives from our actions?” AP, 380, quoting from Hartmann’s Philosophy of the Unconscious in its French edition: La Philosophie de l’inconscient (Paris: Baillière, 1877), 346. 63.  Maurice Vexler, review of Israël et l’Humanité, Revue des études juives 68 (1914): 122–24. 64. Ms, 705–6. 65.  It is from the comparison of “lo-el” with the “lo-ammi” (no people) in Hosea 1:9 that he concluded that this phrasing does not designate something that does not exist but rather something unworthy of that name. 66. Ms, 705–6. 67.  This is true in MJMC, in an 1877 article published in Il Vessillo Israelitico 25 (1877), and in AP. 68. AP, 279–80. 69. AP, 280. 70. AP, 280. 71.  “What the Bible wants us to believe,” Ms, 252–53. 72.  Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile liberté (Paris: Albin Michel, 1976), 217, 230; Levinas, Hors sujet (St. Clément de la Rivière: Fata Morgana, 1987), 91; Levinas, A l’heure des nations (Paris: Minuit, 1988), 168, 176. See also Elisabeth J. Harris, “Syncretism or Inclusivist Subordination? An Exploration into the Dynamics of Inter-Religious Cooperation,” in Theological and Philosophical Responses to Syncretism: Beyond the Mirage of Pure Religion, ed. Patrik Fridlund and Mika Vähäkangas (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 209–25.

Chapter 11

1.  Teologia, 275. 2.  Alison Coudert, Leibniz and the Kabbalah (New York: Springer, 1995); Mogens

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Lærke, “Three Texts on the Kabbalah: More, Wachter, Leibniz, and the Philosophy of the Hebrews,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 25, no. 5 (2017): 1011–30. 3.  Elia Benamozegh, ’Eimat Mafgia‘ ‘al ’Ari (Livorno: Benamozegh, 1855), 15b (translation in Guetta, Philosophy and Kabbalah, 161). 4.  Elia Benamozegh, “La Tradition,” L’Univers israélite 4 (1868): 165. 5.  Teologia, 93, 94. On the notion of self-improvement, see Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 195; Condorcet, Political Writings, ed. Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 6. AP, 162. 7. Benamozegh, La Kabbale, 235. 8. Benamozegh, La Kabbale, 235. 9.  Moshe Idel, “On the Concept of Zimzum in Kabbalah and its Research” [in Hebrew], in Lurianic Kabbalah, ed. Rachel Elior and Yehuda Liebes ( Jerusalem: Magnes, 1992), 59–112. 10.  Haim Vital, Mavo’ She‘arim (Thessaloniki, 1806). 11.  IH, 388. 12.  Luria gets only one mention in the first version of Israel and Humanity and it pertains to a different matter: the lineage between Aaron and Adam (IH, 193). Conversely, in ’Eimat Mafgia‘, Benamozegh calls him “our” and embraces his legacy: “Let my part be with the students of our Rabbi Isaac Luria, who did not consider it a sin to link by links of love Pythagoras and Plato with the Kabbalah.” 13.   Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 22n28 14.  Nathan of Gaza, Drush ha-Taninim, in Gershom Scholem, Be‘Iqvot Mashiah ( Jerusalem: Sifrei Tarshish, 1944), 18. 15. Daniel 12:10: “Many shall purify themselves, and make themselves white and be refined.” 16.  IH, 221. On the notion of imitatio dei, pivotal in Cordovero, see Tikva FrymerKensky who calls Cordovero’s understanding of imitatio dei “the most elaborate Jewish expression of this concept.” See “Religious Anthropology in Judaism and Christianity,” in Christianity in Jewish Terms, ed. Tikva Frymer-Kensky, David Novak, Peter Ochs, David Fox Sandmel, and Michael A. Signer (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 321–37. 17.  There are gnostic and universalist overtones in the rest of the passage: “Thus he comes across, from the inception, as the redeeming God, the Messiah Eon of the gnostic pleroma, the redeemer of the world and of the Church Eon.” AP, 80. 18.  Benamozegh mentioned the occurrence of the Tohu and Bohu among Hebrew writers—Avicebrol (Ibn Gabirol), Leone Modena himself (“who explicated the doctrine of the kabbalists and showed us that it agrees with Plato”), and Judah Halevi, but also Gioberti: “I believe that the Italian philosopher Gioberti understood tohu va



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bohu in Genesis as the debris of a former world (see Protologia). Indeed, we have rightly noted that the linguistic value of this locution brings to mind not a new order but rather the destruction of a previous order or, to be more accurate, of the confusion that precedes the order itself.” Ms, 1031. 19. Ms, 1502. 20.  Teologia, 114 and 146. 21. Ms, 100. 22.  “Human unity is the condition and subjectively the factor of divine unity.” Ms, 1571. Also in AP, 226, he described Kabbalah as “that which turns the union and concord of spirits here below into the means of bringing about the descent and the establishment of the Divine on Earth.” 23.  IH, 350. The 1995 English edition replaces illuy with aliyah, which does not have the same connotations. IH, 188. It also misleadingly transliterates alichah (path— which should start with an h in any case) as ‘aliyah (ascent). The mistake stems from the French 1961 edition which served as a basis for the American translation. 24.  IH, 188. 25.  IH, 188. 26. AP, 351. The English translation (IH, 188) uses “mysticism” instead of “theosophy.” The confusing grammar in this sentence, in which the word Kabbalah is used both as the alternate predicate for the first half of the sentence and the subject of the second half—after Pallière’s edits—gives a sense of Benamozegh’s style. 27.  The occurrences are in a passage of Midrash Tanhuma Bekhukotai (compiled between the fifth and seventh centuries CE) and in Shir Hashirim Rabba (between the seventh and tenth centuries CE). See Marcus Jastrow, A Dictionary of the Targumim, the Talmud Babli and Yerushalmi, and the Midrashic Literature (London: Luzac, 1896), 12:1070. Shir Hashirim Rabba (3:6 and 8:5) lists Israel’s “elevation” among Israel’s various attributes given by God during the wandering in the desert. It is here juxtaposed with silluq, which means to disappear but also to ascend and be transposed into a higher mode. I am grateful to Elliot Wolfson for bringing this aspect to my attention. 28.  The different uses of the term ‘illuy relate to the ascension of the soul (as in Abulafia); the ascension of sefirot, especially of malkhut (as in Tiqunei Zohar, ‘Avodat Kodesh); as well as notions related to gilgul, the transmigration of souls (in Joseph Karo’s diaries). Joseph Karo, Sefer Maggid Mesharim le-Maran Rebbi Yosef Karo (Vilna: Yehudah Lev ben Eliezer Lipman, 1875). 29.  Moshe Idel, Ascensions on High in Judaism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005), 38. The human intellect ascends gradually and will have to be trained “until the particular and personal prophetic [faculty] will turn universal, permanent, and everlasting, similar to the essence of its cause, and he and He will become one entity.” See Abraham Abulafia, Sefer ’Otzar ‘Eden Ganuz, which

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is a commentary on the Sefer Yetzira. “Indeed, each and every one of those mentioned above will transcend his soul in what is in him and will leap from above to above with the addition of the knowledge of the names and all that adds to them will add a great ascent.” On Abulafia, see Elliot Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia: Kabbalist and Prophet (New York: Cherub Press, 2000); Idel, Ascensions on High in Judaism, 38, 40; Eitan Fishbane, As Light before Dawn: The Inner World of a Medieval Kabbalist (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), esp. 181–203. 30.  Menachem da Fano, Yonat ’Elem (Lvov, 1859), 3; Emmanuel Hai Ricci, Mishnat Hasidim (Amsterdam, 1726), 92. 31.  A notable exception is Paul’s ascent to the third heaven in 2 Corinthians 2:12, which Benamozegh references as a way to demonstrate the influence of Kabbalah on early Christianity since, in his view, Paul appropriated a kabbalistic trope in his depiction. See Benamozegh, La Kabbale, 113. 32.  He talks about the Hasidim as “thaumaturgist rabbis from Russia and Poland: the black devil of all the enlightened part of the Judaism of the North.” Ms, 153. 33.  The most famous attempt at such a reconciliation was Pinchas Hurwitz’s bestselling book Sefer ha-Brit, cited by Benamozegh on philosophical questions. On earlier efforts, see David B. Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), chaps. 4 and 12. 34. AP, 162. 35. Ms, 643. 36. Ms, 643. 37.  Pirud, unbridgeable gap, is identified by Benamozegh as a cardinal error, even a perilous act. AP, 160. 38. AP, 162. 39. Ms, 1144. 40. AP, 162. 41. AP, 163. Most of the passages on assimilation were taken out of the 1961 edition in the aftermath of the Holocaust—and thus did not appear in the English edition. 42. AP, 105–106. 43.  This, indeed, brings to mind the definition proposed by Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer in her appreciation of the holy in Rav Kook: “an ability to shape the profane, the capability of observing and understanding how being is the transformation of something else.” Rivka Schatz Uffenheimer, “Utopia and Messianism in the Teachings of Rav Kook” [in Hebrew], Kivunim 1 (November 1978): 23. 44.  Ernest Renan, Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques, 4th ed. (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1863), 503. “In every order, progress for the Indo-European peoples consists in removing themselves as far as possible from the Semitic spirit.” Ernest Renan, De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1862), 28.



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45.  On the coincidence of opposites, see Chaim Wirszurbski, Pico della Mirandola’s Encounter with Jewish Mysticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 103–5, 238. 46.  On the concept of ’ahdut shava, see Amos Goldreich, “The Theology of the Iyyun Circle and a Possible Source of the Term ’Ahdut Shava,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought (1987): 141–56. Azriel of Gerona, Perush ‘Eser Sefirot. For a discussion of the sources of the concept, see Robert K. Forman, The Problem of Pure Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 133; Markus Thiemel, Coincidentia: Begriff, Ideengeschichte und Funktion bei Nikolaus von Kues (Aachen: Shaker, 2000). The ninthcentury Latin Neoplatonist theologian John Scotus Eriugena might have been a source for Azriel of Gerona. The German scholar, humanist, and Hebraist Johann Reuchlin (1455–1522) linked the Christian and Jewish concepts in his De arte cabalistica. See Gershom Scholem, Origins of the Kabbalah (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 314. 47.  ’Em la-Miqra’, Bereshit, 1:1. He supports it with the Keter Torah by Aaron ben Elijah of Nicomedia, a fourteenth-century Karaite theologian. 48.  This impulse to accommodate contradictory forces within the human mind can be found among Hasidic masters, namely Dov Baer, the son of the founder of Chabad, Zalman of Lyady—“The revelation of everything is through its contrary.” See Rachel Elior, The Paradoxical Ascent to God: The Kabbalistic Theosophy of Habad Hasidism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2012), 25–32. This was not part of Benamozegh’s Hasidic library. 49. Benamozegh, Teologia, 144. See Guetta, Philosophy and Kabbalah, 22.

Chapter 12

1. Askénazi, La Parole et l’écrit, vol. 2, 475. See also Yossef Charvit, “From Monologues to Possible Dialogue: Judaism’s Attitude towards Christianity According to the Philosophy of R. Yéhouda Léon Askénazi (Manitou),” in Interaction between Judaism and Christianity in History, Religion, Art, and Literature, ed. Marcel Poorthuis, Joshua Schwartz, and Joseph Turner (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 319–36; Emmanuel Levinas, Difficile liberté (Paris: Livre de poche, 1984), 151; Elisabeth Weber, Questions au judaïsme (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1996), 148–50. 2. Benamozegh, Storia degli Esseni, 289; see also 273–74. 3.  Benamozegh, preface to Hazan, Zikhron Yerushalayim, 5. 4.  Elia Benamozegh, Bibliothèque de l’Hébraïsme (Livorno: Belforte, 1897), 17. 5.  Hannah Arendt, “Jewish History, Revised,” in The Jewish Writings (New York: Schocken, 2008), 303–12. 6.  Roni Weinstein, Kabbalah and Jewish Modernity (New York: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2016). 7.  Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 111; Strauss, “Exoteric Teaching,” in The Rebirth of the Classical Political

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Rationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 63–71; Arthur M. Melzer, Philosophy between the Lines (Chicago: University Press of Chicago, 2014), 368n2. 8. Benamozegh, Bibliothèque de l’Hébraïsme, 17. 9.  Julie Kalman, Orientalizing the Jew (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 2–11; Ivan Kalmar and Derek Penslar, Orientalism and the Jews (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2004), esp. John Efron, “Orientalism and the Jewish Historical Gaze,” 80–93. 10. AP, 659. 11.  Jonathan Hess, “Johann David Michaelis and the Colonial Imaginary: Orientalism and the Emergence of Racial Antisemitism in Eighteenth-Century Germany,” Jewish Social Studies, New Series, 6, no. 2 (2000): 65. 12.  On the use of anello mediano as a link between a people and the divine, and more generally as a conjunctive force, see Gioberti, Del primato morale e civile degli Italiani (Brussels: Meline, Cans e Compagnia, 1845), 140, 424. 13. Benamozegh, La Verità svelata, 5. 14.  He referenced the work of Munk, Salvador, Franck, Graetz, and other major scholars. 15. Benamozegh, Storia degli Esseni, 96. Emphasis in the original. 16.  Compare with Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Theory, India and the Mystic East (London: Routledge, 1999), 7–62. 17. Benamozegh, Storia degli Esseni, 96. 18.  Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 43–44. 19. Benamozegh, Storia degli Esseni, 77. 20.  Zeir Anpin, the lesser countenance, is one of the revealed attributes of God and contains the emotional sefirot (as opposed to the upper, intellectual sefirot, called Arikh Anpin). Ms, 1255. 21.  MJMC, 105. 22.  Malkhut (kingdom) is the lowest sefira of the kabbalistic tree; it designates the worldly. Tiferet (adornment), on the other hand, is the sixth sefira—farther up in the emanations, it integrates the sefirot of chesed (kindness) and gevura (judgment) and is connected to all the sefirot (except malkhut). 23.  Teologia, 9, 45. 24. Benamozegh, Lettere dirette a S. D. Luzzatto, 67. 25.  Proudhon’s work encompasses the religious questions of his time, including early Christianity. See Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Jésus et les origines du christianisme (Paris: G. Havard Fils, 1899). On Proudhon’s interest in the Italian unification, see Pierre Haubtmann, Proudhon: Sa vie et sa pensée (Paris: Beauchesne, 1982). 26.  “Lo tignov” (‫)לא תגנוב‬, “Thou shalt not steal,” is the eighth commandment. Benamozegh, Storia degli Esseni, 289; Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Philosophie Populaire, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 21 (Paris: Librairie internationale, 1870), 271.



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27.  See part 1, chapter 4. 28. AP, 92. 29. Ms, 191. 30.  Yehuda Ashlag, Sefer Talmud ‘Eser Sefirot ( Jerusalem: Yeshivat “K.ol Yehudah” le-limude ha-niglah v.eha-nistar, 2011); David Hansel, “The Origin in the Thought of Rabbi Yehuda Halevy Ashlag: Simsum of God or Simsum of the World?” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 7 (2002): 37–46; Mikhail Krutikov, From Kabbalah to Class Struggle: Expressionism, Marxism, and Yiddish Literature in the Life and Work of Meir Wiener (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 31.  The literature on Benjamin is vast, but on this specific nexus between Kabbalah and Marxism, see James McBride, “Marooned in the Realm of the Profane: Walter Benjamin’s Synthesis of Kabbalah and Communism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 57, no. 2 (1989): 241–66. 32.  Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Open Road Media, 2011), 85. 33. AP, 280. 34.  See Richard H. Popkin, Isaac la Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work and Influence (Leiden: Brill, 1987), esp. chaps. 1, 9, and 10. 35.  David Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), chap. 7. 36.  His rhetorical question—“Would one want to adopt the preadamite hypothesis, according to which the biblical Adam would not be the shared father of all men, but in fact the first ancestor of a particular group?”—answered itself. AP, 100. 37. Ms, 1570. There is no entry for the word polygonisme in either the Littré dictionary, the authority for the French language, or in the Grand Robert. Nor is there any in the Webster or the Oxford English Dictionary. However, polygonism appears in the work of Victor Hugo’s nephew, Leopold (1828–95), whose mathematical theories led to some philosophical-mathematical fantasies. Polygonism describes the properties of geometric shapes that he called “cristalloids,” or contact polygons that enable one to apprehend the finite and the infinite simultaneously. It is a rotating, crystallike figure that is found, for instance, in the dome of the Florence Cathedral. For all of Hugo’s lunacy, his theories raise the question of continuum in mathematics and physics—a question that Benamozegh translated into a religious and methaphysical continuum. Comte Leopold Hugo, Essai de géométrie polyédrique: Théorie des cristalloïdes élémentaires (Paris: Gauthier-Villars, 1867), 16. 38.  The concept of polygonism was reclaimed and transformed by Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944), the neo-Hegelian philosopher who helped shape the intellectual foundations of Italian fascism. See Fabio Farotti, Senso e destino dell’attualismo gentiliano (Lecce: Pensa multimedia, 2000), 160–61 and 288–89. In Gentile’s view, fascism helped realize in this world the metaphysical leap from the I to the We, with the mediation

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of the state. See Katia Colombo, La pedagogia filosofica di Giovanni Gentile (Milano: Franco Angeli, 2004), 191–93. 39. Ms, 534. 40. AP, 231. 41.  IH, 148. 42.  IH, 148. Based on Psalm 139:16, the cosmic Adam also appears in Genesis Rabbah 8:1 (probably written between 300 and 500), of which Benamozegh made no mention, instead ascribing it to the Talmudic narrative in Hagigah 12a. 43. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 78n247; Moshe Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 9–11. Appendix to Israel and Humanity, 394: Idel agrees that the antiquity and unity of religion originates from Renaissance authors. For a link with the millenarist tradition, see also Wolfson, “Beyond the Spoken Word,” 211–12, n51. 44.  See Alexander Altmann, “The Gnostic Background of the Rabbinic Adam Legends,” Essays in Jewish Intellectual History (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1981), 10; Ephraim Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Beliefs ( Jerusalem: Magnes, 1979), 229–32. Niditch contests this interpretation: the gnostic Adam is, for her, an immobile entity, far from the Genesis description in which God breathed life into him. Susan Niditch, “The Cosmic Adam: Man as Mediator in Rabbinic Literature,” Journal of Jewish Studies 34 (1983): 137–46. 45.  IH, 148. 46.  IH, 153. 47.  Haim Vital, Sha‘ar ha-Psuqim ( Jerusalem, 1912), 55b-c. 48.  Elliot Wolfson probed the primordial state of purity and showed how it was “homologized” as Jewish: only through sin do the nations come into existence. “The soul of man is the lamp of the Lord.” Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 113. 49.  David B. Ruderman, “The Mental Image of Two Cherubim in Pinh.as Hurwitz’s Sefer ha-Brit: Some Conjectures,” in Festschrift in Honor of Richard Cohen, ed. Ezra Mendelsohn ( Jerusalem: Shazar, 2016), 289–300. 50.  Elliot Wolfson shows, however, that this aspect, too, maintains differences. Closely examining Gikatila’s Le Secret du mariage de David et Bethsabée, ed. Charles Mopsik (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2003), 45–49, he emphasizes a drive for the masculine to let go of the feminine and regain masculine potency. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 86. 51. Ms, 915. 52. Ms, 915. 53.  Bereshit Rabbah 8, and B. T. Eruvin 18a, Berakhot 61a, and Ketubot 8a. 54.  See Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives, 130; Ze’ev Gries, “From Myth to Ethos” [in Hebrew], in ’Uma ve-Toldoteiah, vol. 2, ed. Shmuel Ettinger ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 1984), 121–22; Lester Grabbe, Etymology in Early Jewish Interpretation:



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The Hebrew Names in Philo (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988); Ginsburg, The Sabbath in the Classical Kabbalah, 289–96. 55.  Moshe Idel, Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism (New York: Continuum, 2005, 233–35). 56.  This is Psalm 58:11. 57. Ms, 617. 58.  Steven Wasserstrom, “  ‘The Great Goal of the Political Will is Leviathan’: Ernst Jünger and the Cabbala of Enmity,” in Huss, Kabbalah and Modernity, 327. 59.  Tessa Satherley, “  ‘ The Simple Jew’: The ‘Price Tag’ Phenomenon, Vigilantism, and Rabbi Yitzhak Ginsburgh’s Political Kabbalah,” Melilah 10 (2013): 57–91. 60. Benamozegh, Shavuot, 113.

Part IV

1.  Benamozegh did address Hinduism and Buddhism, the latter in particular. He examined nonmonotheistic religions mostly through the lens of religions of the ancient Near East. Some of his references are contrived philological comparisons meant to support his thesis of unity of origin, displayed in the semantic proximity of the phonemes meaning God: the Hebrew Shaddai comes from dai, “sufficient,” because God provides for all who believe in him, and from this root derive the Latin deus and even the Chinese dao (path), which, absent the concept of a God in this tradition, is its most direct equivalent. Commentary on Exodus 6:3 in ’Em la-Miqra’, 20a. See Gitit Holzman, Wisdom by the Week (New York: Yeshiva University Press, 2011), 23–33. 2.  IH, 52.

Chapter 13

1.  Philip Cunningham, Seeking Shalom: The Journey to Right Relationship between Catholics and Jews (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2015). 2.  See Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (Stanford, CA: Standford University Press, 2003). To evaluate Benamozegh’s innovativeness, especially among Jewish thinkers, see Daniel Langton, The Apostle Paul in the Jewish Imagination: A Study in Modern Jewish-Christian Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 3.  MJMC, 33. 4.  MJMC, 205. 5.  MJMC, 239. 6.  MJMC, 34. The rest of the verse cited above reads: “they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors.” 7.  A line in Benamozegh’s extant notes about his entry for the essay contest—“Etat de guerre comme état normal des nations”—makes reference to war as a permanent

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state. See Funaro, Un tempio nuovo per una fede antica, 63. An outline of his entry can be found in a pamphlet he printed a couple of years before his death. Benamozegh, Pratique et institutions hébraïques (Livorno: Benamozegh, 1897), 3–5. 8.  Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 214. 9.  Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 28–29; Johannes Schwerdtfeger, Begriffsbildung und Theoriestatus in Friedensforschung (Berlin: Springer, 2013), esp. 100–101. 10. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. For friendship as a political construction, see Jacques Derrida, Politique de l’amitié (Paris: Galilée, 1994); Hubert Faes, “Une amitié sans fraternité,” Transversalités 113, no. 1 (2010): 83–94. 11.  Serge Ruzer, “From ‘Love Your Neighbour’ to ‘Love Your Enemy’: Trajectories in Early Jewish Exegesis,” Revue Biblique 109, no. 3 (2002): 371–89. 12.  Resianne Fontaine, “Love of One’s Neighbor in Pinh. as Hurwitz’s Sefer haBerit,” in Studies in Hebrew Literature and Jewish Culture, Presented to Albert van der Hade on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday, ed. Martin F. J. Baaesten and Reinier Munk, Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Thought 12 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007), 271–95. 13.  “I hate them that regard lying vanities; but I trust in the Lord” (Psalm 31:7); “I hate them [“those that rise against You”] with utmost hatred; I count them mine enemies” (Psalm:139:22). 14. Buber, Two Types of Faith, 72–73. 15.  IH, 136. This passage is from Yevamot 61a (it follows a quotation from Ezekiel 34:31: “My sheep, the sheep of my pasture, are men”). 16. Ms, 718. 17.  IH, 147. 18.  Emmanuel Levinas, Humanism of the Other (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2003). 19.  On this critique of Levinas’s thought, see Raphaël Lellouche, Difficile Levinas (Paris: Éditions de l’Éclat, 2006). 20.  Benamozegh attacked the concept when it was used as an explanation for Jewish ethics and the equality of Jews and non-Jews before the law (“even when one would like to ground them only in the interest of peace or, according to the qualification of modern philosophy, in a principle of morality [that would be] only utilitarian,” AP, 630) and dismissed it as insufficient. See Andrew Filia, “Toleration and Pragmatism,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 16, no. 2 (2002): 103–16. 21.  “Humanity then becomes a true organism by coordinating itself around its natural center. The link meant to connect all the parts of the large social body is created and it is the Jewish priesthood.” AP, 403. 22.  John Locke, Political Essays, ed. Raymond Geuss and Matt Goldie (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xxxvi. 23.  Yechiel M. J. Leicher, John Locke’s Political Philosophy and the Hebrew Bible (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018).



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24. AP, 509. 25.  AP, xvii. 26.  Rolf Gerhard Tiedemann, “Christianity in East Asia,” in The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 7, Enlightenment, Reawakening, ed. Steward Brown (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 463–65. The dispute that raged between Jesuits and Dominicans concerned the possible compatibility of Confucian rituals with Catholic beliefs and led to the intervention of the Holy See, which banned the observance of traditional rites in 1742 and forbade any further debate. The ban was lifted in 1939 and the general principle of the compatibility of autochthonous rituals with the Catholic faith was proclaimed by Vatican II (1962–65). 27.  AP, xvii–xviii. 28. AP, 271. 29.  Quotation from Me’iri, Beit HaBechirah ( Jerusalem: Sofer, 1964), 9, translated in Alon Goshen-Gottstein, Same God, Other God: Judaism, Hinduism, and the Problem of Idolatry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 116 and 233n30. See also Alon Goshen-Gottstein and Eugene Korn, eds., Judaism and World Religions (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2012); Moshe Halbertal, “  ‘One Possessed of Religion’: Religious Tolerance in the Teachings of the Me’iri,” Edah Journal 1, no. 1 (2000): 1–25; David Novak, Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 53–56. 30.  Gideon Freudenthal, No Religion without Idolatry: Mendelssohn’s Jewish Enlightenment (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012). 31.  “Polytheism is negated by explaining it, inserting it, absorbing it into the concept of a single god.” Ms, 578. 32. Ms, 506. 33.  See Gershom Scholem, “The Beginnings of Christian Kabbalah,” in Christian Kabbalah, ed. Joseph Dan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard College Library, 1997), 17–37. 34. Ms, 506. 35. Ms, 706 36. AP, 268-69. 37. AP, 671. 38. Ms, 506. Benamozegh engages here in a polemic with his contemporary Ernest Havet (1813–79), a noted scholar and disciple of Renan. Havet read Benamozegh and cited MJMC in Le Christianisme et ses origines, a multivolume work published in Paris, 1871–85, in a chapter entitled “La conversion des Gentils.” Havet claimed that the notion of a false God appeared only in the prophetic books and the Apocrypha, thus at a later redactional stage, whereas the Pentateuch contained traces of polytheism, as attested by the passage where Moses vents his anger at Israel: “They incensed me with the god of another nation” (Deut. 32:21). Benamozegh contended that Havet’s interpretation was mistaken and misleading since the accurate translation is “They incensed me with what is

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not God” (even in the King James version) and not “the god of another nation.” AP, 85. Indeed, Deuteronomy 32:21 in the Jewish Publication Society translation reads: “They have roused Me to jealousy with a no-god; they have provoked Me with their vanities; and I will rouse them to jealousy with a no-people; I will provoke them with a vile nation.” But Havet incorrectly collapsed the two into “gods of another nation.” 39.  Peter L. Berger, The Many Altars of Modernity (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014). 40.  Alan Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism: Patterns in the Christian Theology of Religion (London: SCM Press, 1983). 41.  John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004); Philip L. Quinn and Kevin Meeker, eds., The Philosophical Challenge of Religious Diversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 42. Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism, 72. 43.  Robert McKim, On Religious Diversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Chapter 14

1. Ms, 652. 2.  Forme can mean “shape,” which involves an external appearance or a geometrical property but also conveys Platonic overtones whereby forms are timeless, absolute, unchangeable ideas—which would make it an even more thought-provoking characterization of Kabbalah. 3.  Martin Heidegger, Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 65. See also the notes on 118–19. 4.  IH, 72. 5. Friedrich Schiller, “Die Sendung Moses,” in Kleinen prosaischen Schriften (Leipzig: Crusius, 1792), 4–5. Scholars have argued that Karl Leonhard Reinhold’s 1787 text “Die Hebräischen Mysterien oder die älteste religiöse Freymaurerey” (The Hebrew Mysteries or the Oldest Form of Freemasonry) was the basis for Schiller’s essay “The Legation of Moses.” See Assmann, Religio Duplex, 94, 228, 243. 6.  The authorship of this work is disputed. Rivka Horwitz argues that a Christian scholar, H. A. Kalb, authored it but that Bernays assisted him. See Horwitz, “On Kabbala and Myth in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Isaac Bernays,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 59 (1993): esp. 139–56. Hans Bach argued that Bernays was the author or at least coauthor in “Der Bibel’sche Orient und sein Verfasser,” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 7, no. 1 (1937): 1–33. 7. Anonymous, Der Bibel’sche Orient: Eine Zeitschrift in zwanglosen Heften (Munich: Fleischmann, 1821). 8. Ms, 1111. A variation on this passage appears in AP, 374. 9. Benamozegh, La Kabbale, 203. 10. AP, 201-2. Ms, 662.



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11.  Beatrice Lawrence, Jethro and the Jews: Jewish Biblical Interpretation and the Question of Identity (Leiden: Brill, 2017). 12.  IH, 74, 105. 13.  Avraham Melamed, “Jethro’s Advice in Medieval and Early Modern Jewish and Christian Political Thought,” Jewish Political Studies Review 2 (1990): 3–41. 14. AP, 62; Michel Attali, “Le sceptre de Moïse ou l’anti-pouvoir,” Pardès 40–41, no. 1 (2006): 101–22. 15.  Courtney Bender and Pamela Klassen, eds., After Pluralism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 14. 16. Ms, 142. 17.  Ironically, this attempt to account for any apparent contradictions in the work of Benamozegh while deflecting the blame to the supposed ignorance of a non-Jewish editor is tantamount to embodying the wounded “national pride” described by Benamozegh in the passage just quoted. Wechsler, “Rabbi Elijah Benamozegh.” 18. Benamozegh, Histoire et littérature, 9; Benamozegh, Shavuot, 111. 19. Benamozegh, Histoire et littérature, 9. 20.  Peter Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 176. 21.  Cornelius Tiele, Manuel de l’histoire des religions: Esquisse d’une histoire de la religion jusqu’au triomphe des religions universalistes (Paris: Leroux, 1895). Tiele had a significant influence on Nietzsche, who credited him for helping him make a distinction between ethical and natural religion and cited the Comparative History of the Ancient Religions of Egypt and the Semitic People as one of the volumes in his ideal library. 22. Benamozegh, Histoire et littérature, 9. 23.  Jeffrey J. Kripal, “Comparative Mystics: Scholars as Gnostic Diplomats,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 3 (Fall 2004): 485–517. 24.  On the characterization of ‘erev rav as converts, see Shaul Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash: Myth, History, and the Interpretation of Scripture in Lurianic Kabbala (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 82–83. 25.  Regarding the term beasts, Elliot Wolfson illustrates the way the claim of the bestial and demonic origins of non-Jews constitutes a central aspect of the Zoharic corpus and of Kabbalah. See Venturing Beyond, 24n39, 27–45, 74–75, 88. On the mention of “mixed multitudes” throughout Jewish history, see Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 269; Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 26.  See Benamozegh, ’Em la-Miqra’, commentary on Exodus 10b, Numbers 11. The trope probably comes from the Talmudic tractate Baba Batra and does not designate the people themselves but their practices. 27. Ms, 102. 28. Ms, 102.

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29. AP, 662. 30. AP, 488–89. See David Joel Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Visions (Heidelberg: Mohr Siebeck, 1988), 176–91. 31. Ms, 104. 32.  Benamozegh’s view of the ‘erev rav is, in fact, aligned with that of the kabbalist Haim Vital. See Shaul Magid, “The Politics of (Un)Conversion: The “Mixed Multitude” (Erev Rav) as Conversos in Rabbi Hayyim Vital’s ’Ets ha-Da‘at Tov,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 4 (2005): 625–66. Expanded in Magid, From Metaphysics to Midrash, 75–110. 33.  “It does not say ‘I [God] took them [the ‘erev rav] out.’ Therefore, the ‘erev rav are called ‘Moses’s people.’  ” Haim Vital, ’Ets ha-Da‘at Tov ( Jerusalem: Ahavat Shalom, 1982), 77, cited in Magid, “Politics of (Un)Conversion,” 639. 34.  Magid, “Politics of (Un)Conversion,” 636–38. For a less favorable depiction, see Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 113, where Israel is “a lily amongst the thorns” (Song of Songs 2:2); the “thorns” refer to the seventy nations of the world. 35.  IH, 74. 36. AP, 271. 37.  Yet there is no variant between the manuscript, the 1914 edition, and other ancillary texts; it is a case of the Livornese rabbi having a change of heart, and not of his disciple’s intervention. 38. Ms, 100. 39. Ms, 100. Benamozegh often referenced Laurent’s multivolume Histoire du droit des gens et des relations internationales in his efforts to demonstrate the universalism of Judaism. 40. Ms, 271.

Chapter 15

1. Race, Christians and Religious Pluralism, 2. 2.  Eugene Korn, “Extra Synagogam Sallus Est? Judaism and the Religious Other,” in Religious Perspectives on Religious Diversity, ed. Robert McKim (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 37–62. 3.  Such is the criticism of Michael Kogan’s Opening the Covenant: A Jewish Theology of Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). See, too, Meir Seidler, “Eliah Benamozegh, Franz Rosenzweig and Their Blueprint of a Jewish Theology of Christianity,” Harvard Theological Review 111, no. 2 (2018): 242–63. 4.  Marc Shapiro, The Limits of Orthodox Theology (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2004); Menachem Kellner, Must a Jew Believe Anything? (Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006). 5.  Authors include Eugene Korn, Alick Isaacs, Yehoyada Amir, and Meir Seidler. 6.  Alick Isaacs, “Benamozegh’s Tone: A Response to Rabbi Steinsaltz,” Common Knowledge 11 (2005): 48–55.



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7.  Reuven Kimelman, “Rabbis Joseph B. Soloveitchik and Abraham Joshua Heschel on Jewish-Christian Relations,” Edah Journal 4 (2004): 2–21; Amir, “New Paths”; Seidler, “Eliah Benamozegh, Franz Rosenzweig.” 8.  Jean Daniélou, Sacramentum futuri: Etudes sur les origines de la typologie biblique (Paris: Beauchesne et Fils, 1950); Leonhard Goppelt, Typos: The Typological Interpretation of the Old Testament in the New (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1982). 9. Pallière, Le sanctuaire inconnu, 164. 10. Pallière, Le sanctuaire inconnu, letter from Benamozegh reproduced in appendix, 244 (translated from the Italian by Pallière). The content of the letter is included in the body of the text in the American edition, The Unknown Sanctuary (New York: Block, 1930), 136. Saying that Noahism is a Christianity disencumbered of the Trinity is noteworthy since disencumbered (débarrassé) is one of the possible translations of berur (see chapter 11). 11.  Jacob Emden, Seder ‘Olam Rabbah Vezuta, appendix, trans. Harvey Falk, Journal of Ecumenical Studies 19, no. 1 (Winter 1982), 105–11. See Harvey Falk, Jesus the Pharisee (New York: Wipf, 1993). 12.  Frishman, “Good Enough for the Goyim?” 13.  IH, 51. 14.  IH, 59. 15.  IH, 59. 16.  “The Growth of Self-Confidence” is the title given by the German historian Heinrich Graetz to one of the sections of his History of the Jews, published beginning in 1857. After having called for self-respect (Selbstachtung), he noted this shift toward self-confidence. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Fin de Siècle Orientalism, Ostjuden and the Aesthetics of Self-Affirmation,” in Divided Passions: Jewish Intellectuals and the Experience of Modernity (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 77–132. See also Dieter Hecht, “Self-Assertion in the Public Sphere: The Jewish Press on the Eve of Legal Emancipation,” Religions 7, no. 8 (2016): 109–19. 17. Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957); Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 18.  Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 19.  See Seidler, “Eliah Benamozegh, Franz Rosenzweig.” Meir Seidler makes this metaphor a critical part of his sound argument regarding Benamozegh’s Jewish theology of Christianity. Benamozegh’s image of Judaism as the sun in relation to its rays is not, however, specific to Christianity. Benamozegh uses this image on multiple occasions for all the nations and faiths as part of his description of the organicity of the world. “God distributed His rays between created intelligences.” AP, 262. All nations are a refraction of certain aspects of that primordial essence, refractions or properties

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which can also be expressed as sarim, angels, as we have seen in chapter 8. See AP, 266, 347, 359. Additionally, in Rosenzweig’s “The New Thinking,” both faiths are only mirrors and thus an indirect reflection. See Philosophical Writings and Theological Writings (New York: Hackett, 1999), 96 and 132. On that mediation, see Benjamin Pollock, Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 282–83. 20.  Dana Hollander, “Buber, Cohen, Rosenzweig, and the Politics of Cultural Affirmation,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 13, no. 1 (2006): 87–103. 21.  David Novak, “Franz Rosenzweig’s Theology of the Christian-Jewish Relationship,” in Jewish-Christian Dialogue, 93–177. 22.  Leora Batnitzky, “Dialogue as Judgment, not as Mutual Affirmation: A New Look at Franz Rosenzweig’s Dialogical Philosophy,” Journal of Religion 79, no. 4 (1999): 523–44; Gerhard E. Spiegler, “Dialogue as Affirmation: Franz Rosenzweig’s Contribution to Christian-Jewish Conversations,” in Religious Issues and Interreligious Dialogues: An Analysis and Sourcebook of Developments since 1945, ed. Charles Wei-hsun Fu and Gerhard E. Spiegler (New York: Greenwood, 1989), 432. 23. Pollock, Rosenzweig and the Systematic Task of Philosophy, 282–83. 24.  Aimé Pallière [under the pseudonym “Loetmol”], “Elie Benamozegh et la solution de la crise chrétienne,” L’Univers israélite 48 (August 15, 1902): 691–95; 49 (August 22, 1902): 724–27; 50 (August 29, 1902): 752–56; 51 (September 5, 1902): 778–82; 52 (September 12, 1902): 813–18. 25.  This detachment from the political has been reassessed by Benjamin Pollock, “From Nation State to World Empire: Franz Rosenzweig’s Redemptive Imperialism,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 11, no. 4 (2004): 332–53; Shmuel Trigano, “Le judaïsme face au christianisme: Questions théologiques et identitaires,” in Judaïsme et christianisme: Entre affrontement et reconnaissance, ed. Shmuel Trigano, Pierre Gisel, and David Banon (Paris: Bayard, 2005), 38–40; Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption (New York: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985), 334. 26.  Rod Cardoza, “New Paths in Muslim-Christian Dialog: Understanding Islam from the Light of Earliest Jewish Christianity,” The Muslim World 103, no. 4 (October 2013), 448–63. 27.  Irving Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth: The New Encounter between Judaism and Christianity (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2004), 212. 28. Benamozegh, Lettere dirette a Samuel David Luzzatto, 14. 29.  On heresy and alienation as a condition of modernity, see Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 3rd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001 [1958]). 30.  Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).



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31.  See Israel Moshe Hazan, Kerakh shel Romi (Livorno, 1876), 4a–b. The most striking instance of his advocacy for positive interactions between Jews and non-Jews was his testimony regarding Smyrna cantors who, he claimed, attended Christian church services in order to learn hymns and later transpose them and use them for the High Holidays prayer service. 32.  Joseph Soloveitchik, “Confrontation,” Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought 6 (1964): 5–29. On Heschel's stance, see Abraham Joshua Heschel, “No Religion is an Island,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review, vol. XXI, n°2/1, 117–134. 33.  The metaphor also raised the question of intellectual encounters between the Jewish and the Greek traditions and their role in the shaping of modern Europe. James L. Kugel, ed., Shem in the Tents of Japhet: Essays on the Encounter of Judaism and Hellenism (Leiden: Brill, 1992). The image of the tents of Shem and of the messianic language is also reflected in the role and status of languages. See Marguerite Harl, La langue de Japhet (Paris: Cerf, 1992). 34. Ms, 205. 35. Ms, 1164. 36. Ms, 1385. 37.  Benamozegh’s manuscript offers a precise semantic study of the words and notions of beginning and end. The word mikeitz can mean “at the beginning.” See the gloss of Rav Avraham Ibn Ezra to Numbers 13:25, Deuteronomy 15:1, 31:10, Psalms 119:96. See also the gloss of the Maharsha to Niddah 58b.9. It can also mean “at the end,” according to Rashi. Similarly, the Zohar speaks of the ketz di-smola, “the left end,” Zohar, vol. 1, 193b; and of the ketz ha-yamin, “the right end,” Zohar, vol. 1, 54a, conclusion on the book of Daniel. Ms, 683. 38.  Elliot Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006); Mordechai Pachter, Roots of Faith and Devequt: Studies in the History of Kabbalistic Ideas (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2004), 131–84. 39. Ms, 1185 (corresponds to AP, 403). 40.  Zohar Bereshit, 1:31a. 41. Ms, 82. Arikh Anpin acts as the soul descending and is identified with the highest sefira, keter, and the divine will. In a parallel and lesser process, Zeir Anpin (the small countenance) channels divine revelation through the lower seven emanations, also called emotional attributes, which gather in the sefira da‘at, knowledge, which is the lower counterpart of keter. This is thus the connection between the earthly and divine principles mentioned by Benamozegh. 42. Benamozegh, Bibliothèque de l’Hébraïsme, 1:3. 43.  Letter to Morais dated January 10, 1877, cited in Funaro, Un tempio nuovo per una fede antica, 76. 44.  Gérard Haddad, L’Enfant illégitime: Sources talmudiques de la psychanalyse; suivi de Lacan et le judaïsme (Paris: Livre de Poche, 2004), 306. See also Haddad, “Judaism in

256

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the Life and Work of Jacques Lacan: A Preliminary Study,” Yale French Studies, no. 85 (1994): 201–16. 45.  Gérard Haddad, Le Jour où Lacan m’a adopté: Mon analyse avec Lacan (Paris: Grasset, 2002), 205. 46.  Marie Olmucci, “Des Noms de Dieu à la chose freudienne,” Mensuel de l’Ecole de Psychanalyse des Forums du Champ Lacanien 49 (February 2010): 74–82; Raul Moncayo, “The Real and Symbolic in Lacan, Zen, and Kabbalah,” International Journal for the Psychology of Religion 8, no. 3 (1998): 179–96.

Chapter 16

1.  Noting a certain reluctance to acknowledge their very existence, as they do not sit well with a lachrymose history of European Jews, Daniel Jütte has reexamined interfaith encounters in early modern Europe. See Daniel Jütte, “Interfaith Encounters between Jews and Christians in the Early Modern Period and Beyond: Toward a Framework,” American Historical Review 118, no. 2 (Apr. 2013): 378–400. 2.  Sophie Lamine, La cohabitation des dieux (Paris: PUF, 2015). Some of the circles, such as the ones in Lyon, where Pallière was active in France, were Dreyfusard and modernist. See Poujol, Aimé Pallière, 125–44. 3. Benamozegh, La Kabbale, 58. 4. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 86–101. 5.  Emil Hirsch’s final assessment might have been more Judeocentric, as he expressed it in “After the Parliament, What?” Reform Advocate, February 3, 1894, 398– 400, and “The Spiritual Results of the World’s Fair,” Reform Advocate, November 11, 1893, 202–5. The Sephardi Rabbi Henry Mendes opposed Hirsch’s view and called for a preservation of Jewish separatism. Naomi Cohen, What the Rabbis Said (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 177–93. Rabbi Kaufmann Kohler, also a Germanborn Reform rabbi, struck a different tone, closer to Benamozegh’s stance, in the paper which he read during a preliminary meeting to the Jewish Denominational Congress on August 27, 1893. See Kaufmann Kohler, “Synagogue and Church in Their Mutual Relations, Particularly in Reference to the Ethical Teachings,” in Studies, Addresses and Personal Papers (New York, 1931), 251–65. 6.  Jody Myers, Kabbalah and the Spiritual Quest: The Kabbalah Centre in America (New York: Praeger, 2007); Boaz Huss, ed., Contemporary Kabbalah and Spiritual Revival (Beer Sheva, Israel: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev Press, 2008); Garb, The Chosen Will Become Herds; Boaz Huss, “All You Need Is LAV: Madonna and Postmodern Kabbalah,” Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 611–24; Wouter J. Hanegraaff, New Age Religion: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1997). 7.  Jules Isaac, the historian and future author of the epoch-making The Teaching of



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Contempt on the Christian roots of anti-Semitism, was convinced that friendship (amitié) should be the starting point on which Jews and Christians could build and correct together certain theological interpretations. Norman C. Tobias, The Jewish Conscience of the Church: Jules Isaac and the Second Vatican Council (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). On the importance of the individual level to foster real dialogue, see Edward Kessler, An Introduction to Jewish-Christian Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 185–86. 8.  For a description of these encounters, see Jéhan de Bonnefoy [pseudonym of Abbé Brugerette], Vers l’unité de croyance (Paris: Emile Nourry, 1907), 17–21, 36. He describes Pallière’s impassionate teachings, depicts him as an ascetic character, and refers to him as “Elie Loëtmol.” See Poujol, Aimé Pallière, 140. The newspapers were Le Rayon (linked to the ULIF, Union Libérale Israélite de France) and Demain. See Louis-Pierre Sardella, Demain: Une revue catholique d’avant-garde (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2011). 9.  Pallière [Loetmol], “Elie Benamozegh et la solution de la crise chrétienne.” 10. Pallière, Unknown Sanctuary, 182. 11.  Alfred Loisy, L’Evangile et l’Eglise (Paris: Loisy, 1902). 12. Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste, 359. 13.  Catherine Poujol, “Quelle religion pour l’avenir? La recherche de quelques Juifs et Chrétiens à la faveur de la crise moderniste,” in Un Modèle d’intégration: Juifs et israélites en France et en Europe, XIX–XXè siècles, ed. Patrick Cabanel and Chantal BordesBenayoun (Paris: Berg, 2004), 103–15. 14.  Françoise Jacquin, “L’Abbé Monchanin, précurseur du dialogue judéo-chrétien,” Revue d’histoire de l’Eglise de France, no. 204 (1994): 85–101; Pierre Pierrard, Juifs et catholiques français, de Drumont à Jules Isaac (1886–1945) (Paris: Fayard, 1970), 43. 15.  Ralph Schor, L’antisémitisme en France dans l’entre-deux guerres (Brussels: Complexe, 2005), 235–56, esp. 246; Brenna Moore, “Philosemitism under a Darkening Sky: Judaism in the French Catholic Revival,” Catholic Historical Review 99 (2013): 262–97; John Connelly, From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Madeleine Comte, Sauvetages et baptêmes: Les religieuses de Notre-Dame de Sion face à la persécution des Juifs en France (1940–1944) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001), 48–49; Paule Berger Marx, Les relations entre les juifs et les catholiques dans la France de l’après-guerre 1945–1965 (Paris: Éditions Parole et Silence, 2009), 459–60. 16.  On Benamozegh’s place in French Jewish thought, see Jacques Eladan, Penseurs juifs de langue française (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995), 76–77. Benamozegh is counted among French-speaking thinkers because of his influence on significant figures of French Judaism. On Pallière’s influence, see Nadia Malinovich, French and Jewish (Portland, OR: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2008), 138, 227–28, 230; and on his specific role in interfaith movement, 73, 151.

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17.  Unlike in 1908, when he turned down an offer from the ULIF, Pallière was not asked to become a rabbi and took on the role of preacher. See Poujol, Aimé Pallière. 18.  Lionel Benguigui, “Le rôle des Eclaireurs israélites dans l’émergence de la pensée juive de France,” Pardès 59, no. 2 (2016): 49–56. 19.  Nadia Malinovich, “Une expression du réveil juif des années vingt: La revue Menorah,” Archives juives 37, no. 1 (2004): 86–96. 20.  Christian Rutishauser, “The Seelisberg Conference: The Foundation of the Jewish-Christian Dialogue,” Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 2, no. 2 (2007): 34–53. 21.  Jules Isaac, The Teaching of Contempt: The Christian Roots of Anti-Semitism (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964). On the influence of Jules Isaac, see Norman Tobias, Jewish Conscience of the Church: Jules Isaac and the Second Vatican Council (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 22.  See Edward Idriss Cassidy, Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue: Unitatis Redintegratio, Nostra Aetate (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005), 164–222. 23.  Rutishauser, “Seelisberg Conference,” 34–53. 24.  Josué Jéhouda’s publications include La Terre promise (Paris: Rieder, 1925); Revue juive de Genève, 1936–37; Les Cinq étapes du judaïsme émancipé (Genève: Éditions Synthésis, 1946); preface to Benamozegh, Morale juive et morale chrétienne (Genève: Baconnière, 1946); La Vocation d’Israël (Paris: Zeluck, 1947); Le Monothéisme, doctrine de l’unité (Genève: Synthésis, 1952); L’Antisémitisme, miroir du monde (Genève: Synthésis, 1958). 25. Alexandre Safran and Esther Safran-Starobinski, La Cabale (Paris: Payot, 1960). For his account of the Seelisberg conference, see Alexandre Safran, David Banon, and Jean-Louis Bruguès, eds., Judaïsme, anti-judaïsme et christianisme: Colloque de l’Université de Fribourg (Saint-Maurice: Saint-Augustin Éditions, 2000), 13–22. 26.  Pierre Grémion, Jacques Nantet: La Plume et la Tribune (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 170, 173. Nantet mentions MJMC with admiration. 27.  Paule Berger Marx, Les relations entre les juifs et les catholiques dans la France de l’après-guerre 1945–1965 (Paris: Éditions Parole et Silence, 2009), 47–77; Connelly, From Enemy to Brother; Moore, “Philosemitism under a Darkening Sky,” 262–97. 28.  Jean Toulat, Juifs mes frères (Paris: G. Victor, 1962), 86–89. 29.  Robert Aron, Où souffle l’esprit (Paris: Plon, 1979), 104. 30.  Robert Aron, Lettre ouverte à l’Eglise de France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1975), 179, 184, 190. 31.  Fred Morgan, “Jewish Perspectives on Jewish-Christian Dialogue over Five Decades,” European Judaism 48, nos. 2–3 (September 22, 2015): 3–22. 32.  James Loughran and Leon Klenicki, “The Thought and Life of Elijah Benamozegh: A Dialogue on a Pioneer of Christian-Jewish Understanding,” CCAR Journal 4 (1999): 7–11. See also Celia M. Deutsch, Eugene J. Fischer, and James Rudin, Toward



NOTES TO CHAP TER 16 AND EPILOGUE

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the Future: Essays on Catholic-Jewish Relations in Memory of Rabbi Leon Klenicki (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2013). 33. The declaration was ultimately adopted by a vote of 2,221 in favor and 88 against. For Léon de Poncins’s worldview and particularly on Vatican II, see Léon de Poncins, Judaism and the Vatican: An Attempt at Spiritual Subversion (London: Britons, 1967); Poncins, https://archive.org/stream/FreemasonryAndJudaism/freemasonry-and -judaism#page/n1/mode/2up (Palmdale, CA: Omni/Christian Book Club, 1996). 34. Pallière’s Unknown Sanctuary, now in the public domain, is available in an annotated edition on a revisionist website. 35.  The text is accessible online. The website promotes alt-right theories. The pamphlet attacks Josué Jéhouda and his indebtedness to Benamozegh. 36.  Soloveitchik, “Confrontation.” Yet Irving Greenberg, acknowledging his disappointment with Soloveitchik, claims that this stance might have been a case of dissimulation—a “marrano” dialogue, in his own words—before actually engaging in interfaith dialogue based on theology. Such is also the stance of Jon Levenson, “Must We Accept the Other’s Self-Understanding?” review of Jewish-Christian Dialogue: A Jewish Justification by David Novak, Journal of Religion 71, no. 4 (Oct. 1991): 563; Greenberg, For the Sake of Heaven and Earth, 13. 37.  Zini, introduction to Morale juive et morale chrétienne, 9. 38. Ms, 76. 39.  Edward Kaplan, Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America, 1940–1972 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 235–76; Harold Kasimow and Byron L. Sherwin, eds., No Religion Is an Island: Abraham Joshua Heschel and Interreligious Dialogue (Ossining, NY: Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 1991), 9.

Epilogue

1.  Review of Israël et l’Humanité by Elia Benamozegh, Revue des études juives 68 (1914): 122-24. Born Meyer Volff in Romania in 1887, Vexler died at the front on December 7, 1914. 2.  IH, 40. 3. Eisenstadt, Comparative Civilizations and Multiple Modernities. 4.  Shammai and Hillel were the two main Jewish sages in first-century Palestine who established two opposing schools of law and Jewish thought. The famous disputes between these schools regarding rituals and ethics are well recorded, with the school of Shammai favoring a stricter approach to the law and the school of Hillel more tolerant in its interpretation and inclined to take into account people’s needs and shortcomings. 5.  Ha-Levanon, July 3, 1872, 352.

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B I B LI O G R A P H Y

Works of Elia Benamozegh

Articles

“Dei Ta‘amim.” Il Vessillo Israelitico 32 (1884): 65–66, 103–5, 179–82, 221–23. “Del Congresso Rabbinico proposto dal Rev Rabbino Mortara,” L’Israelita, 1863. “Discorso pronunciato nel Tempio di Livorno, Il dì 8 settembre 1847 nel rendimento di Grasi per la conceduta Guardia Cittadina.” B.331, Biblioteca Labronica, Livorno, 6. “Il signore Reynach [sic] e la Cabbalà.” Il Vessillo Israelitico 40 (1892): 323. “La nostra teosofia.” Il Corriere Israelitico 7 (1868): 129–33. Letter to the Prefetto Cornero, 1881, quoted by Guglielmo Lattes, Vita e Opere di Elia Benamozegh: Cenni, Considerazioni, Note con ritratto dell’illustre Rabbino. Livorno: Belforte, 1901, 31. Preface to Zikhron Yerushalayim. Livorno: Benamozegh, 1874. “Sopra Spinoza e la Teosofia: Lettera al direttore del Vessillo.” Il Vessillo Israelitico 28 (1880): 333–36, 365–67. “Spinoza et la Kabbale.” L’Univers israélite 19 (1864): 36–42, 130–38, 181–87, 274–81, 364–74. “Sunto della V conferenza dell’ Ecc[ellentissim].mo Rab[bino]. Benamozegh.” Il Vessillo Israelitico 42 (1894): 10–14. “Tsori Gil‘ad.” Ha-Levanon 14 (December 13, 1871): 111; 15 (December 20, 1871): 119; 16 (December 27, 1871): 127; 17 ( January 3, 1872): 135; 18 ( January 10, 1871): 143; 19 ( January 17, 1871): 151; 20 ( January 24, 1871): 261

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159; 23 (February 14, 1872): 183–84; 24 (February 21, 1872): 192; 32 (April 16, 1872): 255; 36 (May 15, 1872): 287; 42 ( June 26, 1872): 339; 43 ( July 2, 1872): 347. “Una conferenza al circolo filologico di Livorno del Rabb[ino] Cav[aliere] E. Benamozegh.” Il Vessillo Israelitico, 25, 1877, 49.

Books

Bibliothèque de l’Hébraïsme. Vol. 1, Dio. Livorno: Benamozegh, 1897. Delle Fonti del diritto ebraico. 1882. ’Eimat Mafgia‘ ‘al ’Ari. Livorno: Benamozegh, 1855. ’Em la-Miqra’:Il Pentateuco con commenti, ricerche e lunghe note di scienza, di critica e di filologia. Livorno: Benamozegh, 1862. Histoire et littérature. Livorno: Belforte, 1897. Israël et Humanité: Démonstration du cosmopolitisme dans les dogmes, les lois, le culte, la vocation, l’histoire et l’idéal de l’Hébraïsme. Introduction. Livorno: Benamozegh, 1885. Israel and Humanity. Translated, edited, with an introduction by Maxwell Luria. Preface and appendix on “Kabbalah in Elijah Benamozegh’s Thought” by Moshe Idel. New York: Paulist Press, 1995. La Kabbale et l’origine des dogmes chrétiens. Edited by Marco Morselli. Paris: Éditions In Press, 2011. La Verità svelata ai miei giudici: Intorno le tre lettere, prodotte dalla querela Tubiana davanti l’ill. mo sig. Pretore del Terziere di S. Leopoldo in Livorno. Livorno: La Minerva, 1861. Le Missioni di Terra Santa: Brevi cenni. Livorno: La Minerva, 1863. Lettere dirette a S. D. Luzzatto da Elia Benamozegh. Livorno: Benamozegh, 1890. Morale juive et morale chrétienne. Paris: Kaufmann, 1867. Translated as Jewish and Christian Ethics. San Francisco: Blochman, 1873. Nir le David. Livorno: Benamozegh, 1858. Oeuvres complètes du rabbin Elie Benamozegh. Vol. 1, Morale juive et morale chrétienne, edited by Eliyahu Rachamim Zini. Jerusalem: Editions Erez, 2002. Pratique et institutions hébraïques. Livorno: Benamozegh, 1897. Scritti scelti. La Rassegna mensile di Israel, 20, no. 3 (1954). Shavuot: Cinque Conferenze sulla Pentecosta. Livorno: Belforte, 2009 [1885]. Storia degli Esseni. Florence: Lemonnier, 1865. Republished as Storia degli Esseni. Edited by Marco Morselli. Milan: Marietti, 2007. Teologia dogmatica e apologetica. Livorno, 1877. Théosophie. Livorno, 1897.Una critica criticabile. Livorno, 1878. Ya‘aneh ba’Esh. Livorno, 1886.



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All Other Sources

Catalogue of Books from the Rabbi and Author Known as “the Jewish Plato,” Elia Benamozegh of Livorno, Italy. New York: Hirsch, 1900. “La Tradition.” L’Univers israélite, 165. Abrevaya Stein, Sarah. Making the Jews Modern: The Yiddish and Ladino Press in the Russian and Ottoman Empires. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. Alcoloumbre, Thierry. “Israël et les nations du monde: D’après le Shaaré Orah de R. Yossef Gekatilia.” Pardès, no. 49 ( January 2011): 97–112. Altmann, Alexander. Essays in Jewish Intellectual History. Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press, 1981. Altmann, Alexander. Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study. Montgomery: University of Alabama Press, 1973; New York: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1998. Amir, Yehoyada. “New Paths towards Christianity and Islam in the Thought of Nachman Krochmal and Elijah Benamozegh.” In Die Entdeckung des Christentums in der Wissenschaft des Judentums, edited by Görge Hasselhoff, 213–38. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010. Anidjar, Gil. Semites. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. Anonymous. Der Bibel’sche Orient: Eine Zeitschrift in zwanglosen Heften. Munich: Fleischmann, 1821. Archivio di Stato di Livorno, Santuario di Montenero, Museo famiglia Sgarallino. Livorno ribelle: dalle riforme liberali all’estrema difesa della città (1848–49): Atti del Seminario e Catalogo della Mostra, 10 maggio–6 giugno 1999. Livorno: Comune di Livorno, 2000. Arendt, Hannah. The Jewish Writings. New York: Schocken, 2008. Aron, Robert. Les Années obscures de Jésus. Paris: Grasset, 1960. Aron, Robert. Lettre ouverte à l’Eglise de France. Paris: Albin Michel, 1975. Aron, Robert. Où souffle l’esprit. Paris: Plon, 1979. Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Ascoli, Albert Russell and Krystyna von Henneberg, eds. Making and Remaking Italy: The Cultivation of National Identity around the Risorgimento. Oxford: Berg, 2001. Ashlag, Yehuda. Sefer Talmud ‘Eser Sefirot. Jerusalem: Yeshivat “K . ol Yehudah” le-limude ha-niglah v.eha-nistar, 2011. Askénazi, Léon. La Parole et l’écrit. Vol. 2, edited by Marcel Goldmann. Paris: Albin Michel, 2005. Aslanov, Cyril. “Elia Benamozegh scrittore trilingue: Il fattore della lingua nelle sue opere.” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 63, no. 3 (1997): 29–41. Aslanov, Cyril. “Jacob Gordin en France: transfert de savoir ou malentendu culturel ?” Archives Juives 38, no. 1 (2005): 43–55.

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Assmann, Jan. Religio Duplex: How the Enlightenment Reinvented Egyptian Religion. Cambridge: Polity, 2015. Attal, Robert. Le Caïd Nessim Samama de Tunis, Mécène du livre hébraïque. Jerusalem: R. Attal, 1995. Attali, Michel. “Le sceptre de Moïse ou l’anti-pouvoir.” Pardès 40–41, no. 1 (2006): 101–22. Avishai, Bernard. “Israel Passes a Law Stating What’s Jewish about a Jewish and Democratic State.” New Yorker, July 30, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/ israel-passes-a-law-stating-whats-jewish-about-a-jewish-and-democratic-state Axinn, Sidney. “Kant on Judaism.” Jewish Quarterly Review 59, no. 1 (1968): 9–23. Bach, Hans. “Der Bibel’sche Orient und sein Verfasser.” Zeitschrift für die Geschichte der Juden in Deutschland 7, no. 1 (1937): 1–33. Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003. Baer, Isaac. “The Qabbalistic Doctrine in the Christological Teachings of Abner of Burgos” [in Hebrew]. Tarbiz 27 (1958): 278–89. Banti, Alberto Mario. La Nazione del Risorgimento. Turin: Einaudi, 2000. Banti, Alberto Mario and Paul Ginsborg. “Per una nuova storia del Risorgimento.” In Storia d’Italia: Annali 22. Il Risorgimento, edited by Alberto Mario Banti and Paul Ginsborg. Turin: Einaudi, 2007. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. London: Jonathan Cape, 1972. Basnage, Jacques. L’Histoire et la religion des juifs, depuis Jésus-Christ jusqu’à présent, pour servir de supplément et de continuation à l’histoire de Joseph. 2nd ed. Vols. 1 and 9. La Haye: Chez Henri Scheurleer, 1726. Bataille, Georges and Roger Caillois. “Sacred Sociology and the Relationships between ‘Society,’ ‘Organism,’ and ‘Being’  ” In The College of Sociology, edited by Denis Hollier, 73–84. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. Batnitzky, Leora. “Dialogue as Judgment, not as Mutual Affirmation: A New Look at Franz Rosenzweig’s Dialogical Philosophy.” Journal of Religion 79, no. 4 (1999): 523–44. Batnitzky, Leora. How Judaism Became a Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life (1863). In Selected Writings on Art and Literature. Translated by Patrice Edouard Charvet. New York: Penguin, 1995. Bayly, C. A. and Eugenio F. Biagini, eds., Giuseppe Mazzini and the Globalisation of Democratic Nationalism, 1830–1920. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.



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Ben-Horin, Mikhael, ed. Baruch Ha-Gever: Sefer Zikaron le-Kadosh Dr. Baruch Goldstein. Jerusalem: Golan, 1995. Ben-Nun, Yoel. “Nationalism, Humanity and the Community of Israel” [in Hebrew]. In Yovel ’Orot: The Thought of Rabbi Isaac ha-Kohen Kook, edited by Benjamin Ish-Shalom and Shalom Rosenberg, 169–208. Jerusalem: Department for Torah Education and Culture in the Diaspora of the World Zionist Organization, 1985. Benayahu, Meir. “The Controversy between Halakhah and Kabbalah” [in Hebrew]. Da‘at 5 (1981): 61–115. Benbassa, Esther and Aron Rodrigue. Sephardi Jewry: A History of the Judeo-Spanish Community, 14th–20th Centuries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Bender, Courtney and Pamela Klassen, eds. After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagement. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. Benguigui, Lionel. “Le rôle des Eclaireurs israélites dans l’émergence de la pensée juive de France.” Pardès 59, no. 2 (2016): 49–56. Benichou Gottreich, Emily and Daniel J. Schroeter, eds. Jewish Culture and Society in North Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. Bénichou, Paul. Romantismes français: Le Temps des prophètes. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 2005. Berger, Michael. Rabbinic Authority: The Authority of the Talmudic Sages. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Berger, Peter L. The Many Altars of Modernity. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014.Berger, Peter L. The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion. New York: Open Road Media, 2011. Bergman, Shmuel. “Israel and the Oikoumene.” In Studies in Rationalism, Judaism and Universalism: In Memory of Leon Roth, edited by Raphael Loewe, 56–67. London: R. Loewe, 1966. Berlin, Isaiah. “The Counter-Enlightenment.” In The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000: 243–66. Berlin, Isaiah. Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. Bernardini, Paolo I. “Rabbini intellettuali, rabbini come intellettuali nel’Italia del XVIII secolo.” Annali di storia moderna e contemporanea 4 (1998): 503–19. Berthelot, Katell. “La mise en cause et la défense de la philanthropie des lois juives au premier siècle et au XVIIIème siècle de notre ère.” Revue des études juives 161, no. 1–2 ( January–June 2002): 41–82. Biale, David. Kabbalah and Counter-History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. Biale, David. “The Kabbala in Nachman Krochmal’s Philosophy of History.” Journal of Jewish Studies 32 (1981): 85–97.

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Birnbaum, Pierre and Ira Katznelson, eds. Paths of Emancipation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016. Blavatsky, Helena. The Secret Doctrine. 2 vols. New York: Theosophical University Press, 2014. Blumenberg, Hans. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985. Blumenkranz, Bernhard and Albert Soboul, eds. Le Grand Sanhedrin de Napoléon. Paris: Privat, 1979. Bonnefoy, Jehan de [pseudonym of Abbé Brugerette]. Vers l’unité des croyances. Paris: Emile Nourry, 1907. Borutta, Manuel. “Anti-Catholicism and the Culture War in Risorgimento Italy.” In The Risorgimento Revisited: Nationalism and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Italy, edited by Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall, 191–208. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Boulouque, Clémence. “An ‘Interior Orient’ and the Case for an Oriental Modernity: The Livornese Printing Press and the Mediterranean Publishing Networks of Elia Benamozegh (1823–1900).” Jewish Social Studies 23, no. 2 (Winter 2018): 86–136. Boulouque, Clémence. “Elia Benamozegh’s Printing Presses: Livornese Crossroads and the New Margins of Italian Jewish History.” In Italian Jewish Networks from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, edited by Francesca Bregoli, Carlotta Ferrara degli Uberti, and Guri Schwartz, 59–79. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Boyarin, Daniel. A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Boyarin, Daniel. Socrates and the Fat Rabbis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Bregoli, Francesca. Mediterranean Enlightenment: Livornese Jews, Tuscan Culture, and Eighteenth-Century Reform. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Brézis, David. Levinas et le tournant sacrificiel. Paris: Hermann, 2012. Buber, Martin. Two Types of Faith. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003. Burnouf, Émile. La Science des religions. Paris: Maisonneuve & Cie, 1872. Caffiero, Marina. “Tra Stato e Chiesa: Gli Ebrei italiani dell’età dei Lumi agli anni della Rivoluzione.” In Storia d’Italia, Annali 11. Gli Ebrei in Italia. Vol. 2, Dall’emancipazione a oggi, edited by Corrado Vivanti, 1091–1134. Torino: Einaudi, 1997. Campos Boralevi, Lea. “Mitzvoth Beneh Noah: Il diritto noaico nel dibattito seicentesco sulla tolleranza.” In La Formazione storica della alterità: Studi di storia della tolleranza nell’età moderna offerti a Antonio Rotondò. Vol. 2, edited by Henry



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Méchoulan, Richard H. Popkin, Giuseppe Ricuperati, and Luisa Simonutti, 473– 94. Florence: Olschki, 2001. Cardoza, Rod. “New Paths in Muslim-Christian Dialog: Understanding Islam from the Light of Earliest Jewish Christianity.” The Muslim World 103, no. 4 (October 2013): 448–63. Carlebach, Elisheva. The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Carlebach, Elisheva. Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Carter, Nick. “Rethinking the Italian Liberal State,” Bulletin of Italian Politics 3, no. 2 (2011): 225–45. Cassidy, Edward Idriss. Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue: Unitatis Redintegratio, Nostra Aetate. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2005. Cassuto, Umberto. Universal Jewish Encyclopedia. (New York: Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Inc.), 1939. Castel, Robert. From Manual Workers to Wage Laborers: Transformation of the Social Question. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1978. Castel, Robert. Métamorphoses de la question sociale. Paris: Fayard, 1995. Catalan, Tullia. “Italian Jews and the 1848–49 Revolutions: Patriotism and Multiple Identities.” In The Risorgimento Revisited, edited by Silvana Patriarca and Lucy Riall, 214–31. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Chabod, Federico. L’idea di nazione. Edited by Armando Saitta and Ernesto Sestan. Bari: Laterza, 1961. Chadwick, Owen. The Secularization of the European Mind. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Charle, Christophe. Birth of the Intellectuals, 1880–1900. New York: Polity, 2015. Charvit, Yossef. “From Monologues to Possible Dialogue: Judaism’s Attitude towards Christianity According to the Philosophy of R. Yéhouda Léon Askénazi (Manitou).” In Interaction Between Judaism and Christianity in History, Religion, Art, and Literature, edited by Marcel Poorthuis, Joshua Schwartz, and Joseph Turner, 319–36. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Chateaubriand, François-René. Mémoires d’outre-tombe. Paris: Gallimard, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1976. Cohen, Hermann. Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Cohen, Martin Samuel. The Shi‘ur Qomah Liturgy and Theurgy in Pre-Kabbalistic Jewish Mysticism. New York: University Press of America, 1983. Cohen, Naomi. What the Rabbis Said. New York: New York University Press, 2008. Cohen, Richard. “Brit Husserliana: l’Universel dans l’Unique.” Les Nouveaux Cahiers, no. 127 (1997): 10–15.

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Cohen, Richard. “The Universal in Jewish Particularism.” In Religious Experience and the End of Metaphysics, edited by Jeffrey Bloechl, 135–52. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Cohen, Richard. “Singularity: The Universality of Jewish Particularism—Benamozegh and Levinas.” In Levinasian Meditations: Ethics, Philosophy, and Religion. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2010, 267–73. Cohen-Albert, Phyllis. “Israelite and Jew: How Did Nineteenth-Century French Jews Understand Assimilation?” In Assimilation and Community: The Jews in NineteenthCentury Europe, edited by Jonathan Frankel and Steven Zipperstein. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992: 88–109. Colin, Pierre. L’Audace et le soupçon: La crise du modernisme dans le catholicisme français (1893–1914). Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1997. Collini, Stefan. Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850– 1930. London: Clarendon, 1993. Colombo, Katia. La pedagogia filosofica di Giovanni Gentile. Milano: Franco Angeli, 2004. Colombo, Samuele. “Il pensiero religioso di Giuseppe Mazzini.” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 33, no. 10 (1972): 469–76. Colombo, Yoseph. “Lettere inedite del P. Hyacinthe Loyson.” Nuova antologia (Rome) 273, no. 1403 (September 1, 1930): 57. Colombo, Yoseph. “La Polemica col Benamozegh.” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 32, nos. 9–10 (1966): 179–204. Colombo, Yoseph. “Una lettera inedita di Elia Benamozegh ad Amadio Momigliano.” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 55 (October 1969): 440–47. Colombo, Yoseph. “Il Congresso di Ferrara del 1863.” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 36, nos. 7–9 (1970). Colombo, Yoseph. “Cinquant’anni dalla scomparsa di Samuele Colombo.” La Rassegna mensile di Israel 34, no. 9 (1973): 483–511. Comte, Madeleine. Sauvetages et baptêmes: Les religieuses de Notre-Dame de Sion face à la persécution des Juifs en France (1940–1944). Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001. Condorcet, Nicolas de. Political Writings. Edited by Steven Lukes and Nadia Urbinati. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Connelly, John. From Enemy to Brother: The Revolution in Catholic Teaching on the Jews, 1933–1965. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. Coppa, Frank J. “Pio Nono and the Jews: From ‘Reform’ to ‘Reaction,’ 1846–1878.” Catholic Historical Review 89, no. 4 (2003): 671–95. Corcos, Sidney. “Coriat Family.” In Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. Vol. 1, edited by Norman A. Stillman, 680–81. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Coriat, Avraham. Zekhut ’Avot. Pisa, 1812. Coriat, Avraham. Berit ’Avot. Livorno: Benamozegh, 1862.



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Coudert, Alison. Leibniz and the Kabbalah. New York: Springer, 1995. Croce, Benedetto. A History of Italy: 1871–1915. Oxford: Clarendon, 1929. Cunningham, Philip. Seeking Shalom: The Journey to Right Relationship between Catholics and Jews. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 2015. Da Fano, Menachem. Yonat ’Elem. Lvov, 1859. Da Viterbo, Annio. A Historical Treatise of the Travels of Noah into Europe, Containing the First Inhabitation and Peopling Thereof. London: Adam Islip, 1601. Daggers, Jenny. Postcolonial Theology of Religions: Particularity and Pluralism in World Christianity. New York: Routledge, 2013. Damiron, Jean-Philibert. Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie en France. Paris: Chubart et Heideloff, 1828. Danesi, Marcel. Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Daniélou, Jean. Sacramentum futuri: Etudes sur les origines de la typologie biblique. Paris: Beauchesne et Fils, 1950. David, Bruria Hutner. “The Dual Role of Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Chajes: Traditionalist and Maskil.” PhD diss., Columbia University, 1971. Davis, J. David. Finding the God of Noah: The Spiritual Journey of a Baptist Minister from Christianity to the Laws of Noah. New York: Ktav, 1996. Dazzetti, Stefania. L’autonomia delle comunità ebraiche italiane nel Novecento: Leggi, intese, statuti, regolamenti. Turin: Giappichelli Editore, 2008. De Lubac, Henri. The Drama of Atheist Humanism. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1995. Del Bello, David. “Forgotten Paths: The Making of Vico’s Etymologies.” Semiotica 113, no. 1–2 (1997): 171–88. Derrida, Jacques. Politique de l’amitié. Paris: Galilée, 1994. Deutsch, Celia M., Eugene J. Fischer, and James Rudin. Toward the Future: Essays on Catholic-Jewish Relations in Memory of Rabbi Leon Klenicki. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2013. Di Porto, Bruno. “Benamozegh, Elia: Un maestro dell’ebraismo nella nuova Italia.” In La Rassegna mensile di Israel 50 (1984): 157–81. Di Porto, Bruno. “L’approdo al crogiuolo risorgimentale.” In Atti del convegno internazionale di studi Livorno e la nazione ebrea. Special issue of La Rassegna mensile di Israel, 50 (1984): 803–62. Dienstag, Jacob. “Natural Law in Maimonidean Thought and Scholarship.” Jewish Law Annual 6 (1987): 72–74. Donaldson, T. L. Paul and the Gentiles: Remapping the Apostle’s Convictional World. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997. Druker, Jonathan and Scott Lerner, eds. The New Italy and the Jews: From Massimo d’Azeglio to Primo Levi, ed. Annali d’Italianistica 36. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018.

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I N D EX

Aboab, Isaac, 23 Abrahamism, 7, 199n20 acroamatism, 58, 109, 112–113, 164, 236n27 Adadi, Rabbi Mordechai, 40 Adam: in Christianity, 95; cosmic Adam, 143–144, 246n42, 246n44; meaning of the Fall, 138–139; as myth, 116, 120–121, 141–142, 144; polygonism and, 141–142, 245n37, 245–246n38; staff of, passed to Moses, 165–167 “An Address to the Churches” (Seelisberg Conference, 1947), 187 Addresses on Religion (Schleiermacher), 81 Aesthetics (Hegel), 207–208n13 ’ahdut shava, 131, 243nn47–48 Alashqar, 24 Aleppo rabbinate, censure of Benamozegh by, 39–41, 43 alienation: in abstract universalism, 193; in Kant’s philosophy, 73; modernity and, 5, 80, 113, 140 ‘aliyah, 127, 241n23 Alliance Israélite Universelle, 44, 48–49, 213n3, 213n27 alloying, in crucible metaphor, 171–172

Altmann, Alexander, 70 Anaximander, 111, 235n18 anello mediano, 136, 244n12, 255n41 anti-Semitism, 50, 54, 141, 183, 186–189, 256n1 Arendt, Hannah, 134 Aron, Robert, 188 Asad, Talal, 114 Ascoli, Raffaello, 34 Ashlag, Yehuda, 133, 140, 185 Askénazi, Léon (Manitou), 102–105, 133, 231–232n10, 232nn11–12 assimilation: Benamozegh on, 43, 166– 167; as elevation, 128–131, 242n44; Exodus narrative and, 169; Jewish misanthropy and, 167; polytheism and, 157–158 Assmann, Jan, 68 atheism, 80, 122 atomism, 122–123 Atticism, 199n20 d’Azeglio, Massimo, 33 Azulai, Haim Yosef David (Chida), 19, 20, 201n5, 203n14 Baeck, Leo, 59

296 I N D E X

Baer, Dov, 243 Balm of Gilead (Tsori Gil‘ad; Benamozegh), 40, 41 Balzac, Honoré de, 4 Banti, Mario, 27–28 Barthes, Roland, 116 Barukh ha-Gever (Barukh the Man/ Blessed Is the Man; Ginsburg), 146, 219n33 Basilides, 124 Batnitzky, Leora, 176, 228n31 Baudelaire, Charles, 4, 197–198n5 begegnen (middle voice), 163 Ben Amozegh, Jehoshuah, 20–21 Benamozegh, Avraham (father), 21 Benamozegh, Clara Coriat (mother), 22 Benamozegh, Elia: Aleppo rabbinate censure of, 39–42; childhood and family, 1–2, 15, 20–22, 201n5, 204n23, 204n28; criticism of scholarship and tone of, 35–36, 38, 49–50, 51–52; early life and training, 22–26; herem on ’Em la-Miqra’, 39–42; impact of Livorno on, 17–20; Italian patriotism of, 27, 29–31, 33–34, 61, 208n20; legacy of, 2–3, 190–191; Pallière as disciple of, 53–57; Pallière as editor of, 57–61; philosophers on, 23–25; progressive politics and orthodox Judaism, 133–134; publishing in French, 45, 46–52, 215nn23–25; publishing in Hebrew, 37–41, 203n14; in publishing networks, 41–45, 212n20; selfdepiction, 195. See also Benamozegh, Elia, writings of Benamozegh, Elia, writings of: autobiography, 15, 201n1, 201nn4–5; Bibliothèque de l’Hébraïsm, 134, 135, 212n20; “Le crime de guerre dénoncé à l’humanité,” 48–49, 133, 152–153, 214n17, 220n3, 247– 248n7; Critique, Exégèse et Philologie

biblique, 220n3; Delle Fonti del diritto ebraico, 36; ’Eimat Mafgia‘ ‘al’Ari, 31, 123, 240n12; ’Em la-Miqra’, 31, 37–39, 47, 118, 166, 171, 223n45; “An Examination of the Dogmas of Islamism,” 76; “Frederic II and the Rabbinic Doctrines,” 34–35; Ha-Mevasser, 208n21; Hebrew newspaper publication (1857), 43–44; Histoire et littérature, 50, 56; Introduction to Israel and Humanity, 5, 50, 54–56, 60, 100, 156, 198n9; La Kabbale et l’origine des dogmes chrétiens, 48, 59, 115, 124, 164, 184; “La Kabbale ou la tradition théosophique,” 109; in newspapers, 31; Nir le-David, 25, 206n51; “Our Theosophy,” 109–110; Storia degli Esseni, 34, 35, 136, 139–140; Ta‘am le-Shad, 31–32, 225n69; La verità svelata ai miei giudici, 38. See also Israel and Humanity; Jewish and Christian Ethics; Teologia dogmatica e apologetica Benamozegh, Emanuele (son), 55–57, 58–59, 217n16 Benamozegh, Rachele Coriat (wife), 25 Benamozegh, Yehudah (uncle), 22 Benjamin, Walter, 140, 245n31 Bentham, Jeremy, 117 Berger, Peter, 140, 160 Bergman, Shmuel Hugo, 91 Berit ’Avot (Coriat), 204n28, 205n32 Berliner, Avraham, 18 Bernays, Isaac, 163, 250n6 Berosus, 38 berur, 124–126, 127, 128–131, 169, 253n10 La Bible de l’Humanité (Michelet), 238n57 Bibliothèque de l’Hébraïsme (Library of Hebraism; Benamozegh), 134, 135, 212n20



I N D E X 297

Blavatsky, Madame, 110 Blumenberg, Hans, 14, 113, 175–176 Boehme, Jacob, 110–111 Book of the Covenant (Sefer ha-Brit; Hurwitz), 73, 144, 223n36 Book of the Precious Light (Sefer ’Or Yakar; Cordovero), 89, 227n17 Boyarin, Daniel, 11–12, 200n42 Brill, Yehiel, 40, 211n14 Brucker, Jakob, 110 Bruno, Giordano, 111 Buber, Martin, 106, 153–154 Buddhism, 149, 247n1 Bush, George H. W., 105

Le Christianisme mis à nu (Christianity Unveiled; Fleischmann), 57 Christianity: Adam in, 95; as assisting Judaism in its mission, 175; criticism of Jewish literalness, 114–116; dogma and, 6, 138, 185–186; on enemies, 152–154; humanism and, 140; Jewish roots of, 46–49, 75–77, 124, 154–155; Jewish theology of, 149–150, 173–175, 253n10; lack of heteronomy in, 86; modernist crisis, 32–33, 185–186; Noahide Laws and, 54, 105, 174–175, 253n10; as part of Judaism, 188; Pauline, as abstract universalism, 103, 106, 151–152; reason and emotion in, 77–82; supersessionism in, 84–85; theosophy and, 110–112, 235n11, 236n25. See also Catholic Church; Gnosticism; Protestantism Cohen, Hermann, 103 Cohen, Richard, 231n6 coincidence of opposites, 14, 131–132, 136, 194 Colombo, Samuele, 55, 59, 216–217n11, 219n27 communism and Marxism, 50, 139–140 Comte, Auguste, 126 “Confrontation” (Soloveitchik), 179, 189, 259n36 Confucian rituals, 249n26 consciousness of consciousness, 119, 182 Cordovero, Moses, 24, 89, 128, 182, 240n16 Coriat, Avraham (cousin), 204n28 Coriat, Avraham (great-grandfather), 21 Coriat, Avraham Refael (grandfather), 21–22, 203n20 Coriat, Itzhak (grandfather’s brother), 21 Coriat, Yehudah, 22, 204n27, 205n32 Il Corriere Israelitico, 31, 109 cosmic man, 142, 143–144, 151 cosmopolitanism: awareness of inter-

Candelabrum of Light (Menorat haMe’or; Aboab), 23 Carbonari, 229n3 Carlebach, Elisheva, 42 Caro, Yosef, 69 Castelli, Cesare, 208n20 Castelli, David, 35–36 Catholic Church: Benamozegh and, 27, 55, 58, 71, 97, 226–227n7; Confucian rituals and, 249n26; humanity and, 100; Jews and, 187, 189; modernist crisis in, 6, 54, 166, 186, 198n12; Pallière and, 54, 59, 105; under Pope Pius IX, 5, 28–29, 32, 71, 198n12; rites controversy in, 156. See also Christianity Cave of the Patriarchs massacre, 146, 219n33 celestial man, 142, 143–144, 151 Chabad, 105 Chajes, Tsvi, 89 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 5, 198n8 “The Cheese and the Sermons” (Boyarin), 11–12 cherubim, 143, 144–145 Chida (Haim Yosef David Azulai), 19, 20, 201n5, 203n14

298 I N D E X

dependence and, 155; celestial man and, 144; Goyau on, 230n29; Mazzini on, 94, 229n3; nations and, 98–101, 229n3; “port Jews” and, 18; tents of Shem and, 180–181; universalism and, 93, 98–101, 102, 230n29 Cousin, Victor, 30 creation narrative: berur and, 126; cosmic Adam and, 143–144, 246n42; Gioberti on, 58; Kabbalah and, 118, 223n45; property and, 140; Ricci on, 128; Viterbo on, 38 “Le crime de guerre dénoncé à l’humanité” (The Crime of War Denounced to Humankind; Benamozegh), 48–49, 133, 152–153, 214n17, 220n3, 247–248n7 Critique, Exégèse et Philologie biblique (Benamozegh), 220n3 Damiron, Jean-Philibert, 116, 237n43 Dante Alighieri, 30, 34, 84, 207–208n13 darshan, 206n48 Dayan, Avraham, 40 de León, Moses, 22–23 de Rossi, Azariah, 38 “Declaration on the Relation of the Church with Non-Christian Religions” (Second Vatican Council of 1965), 187 deism, 114, 170–171 Delle Fonti del diritto ebraico (On the Sources of Jewish Law; Benamozegh), 36 Diderot, 110–111, 235n12 The Divine Comedy (Dante), 30, 207– 208n13 Divine Legation Demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist (Warburton), 68 Divine Legation of Moses (Warburton), 170–171 documentary hypothesis, 117, 237n47

dogma: Benamozegh on, 46, 48, 76–77, 86; Christianity and, 6, 48, 138, 185–186; in Islam, 76; Mendelssohn on, 70–71; Pallière on, 54; revelation and, 70, 74, 80, 83–84, 110; in theosophy, 110. See also Teologia dogmatica e apologetica (Benamozegh) Dogma (Luzzatto), 70–71 Dogmatic and Apologetic Theology (Benamozegh). See Teologia dogmatica e apologetica (Benamozegh) Drob, Sandor, 238–239n58 Drush ha-Taninim (Homily on the Dragons [or Sea Monsters]; Nathan of Gaza), 125–126 Durkheim, Emile, 91, 223n41 Ecole de Paris, 186 Egypt: influence of Jethro on Moses, 164–167; as the iron crucible of Judaism, 162, 169–172, 252n37; Judaism on non-Jews in, 167–169, 251nn25–26; newspaper printed by Benamozegh for, 43–44; religious mysteries in, 163–164 ’Eimat Mafgia‘ ‘al’Ari (The Lion Dreads the Gnat; Benamozegh), 31, 123, 240n12 Ein Israel (Israel’s Spring; Ibn Habib), 23, 205n38 ein sof, 131 Eisenstadt, Shmuel Noah, 8, 45 Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim), 91 “Elements of Universal Religion” (Hirsch), 185 Eleventh Homily (Nissim of Gerona), 88 ’Em la-Miqra’ (Benamozegh): biblical commentary in, 37–38, 47, 118, 166; on despotism, 31; on Egypt, 171; as heresy, 39; on the oral tradition, 223n45 Emden, Jacob, 174–175, 222n20



I N D E X 299

’emunah, 106 ‘En Ya‘aqov ( Jacob’s Spring; Ibn Habib), 23, 205n38 Encyclopedia (Diderot), 110–111, 235n12 ‘erev rav (mixed multitude), 167–169, 252nn32–33 Ergas, Joseph, 23 Eriugena, John Scotus, 243n46 The Essence of Christianity (Feuerbach), 79–80 ethnocentrism: in assimilation, 131, 242n44; Hasidism and, 112; in hierarchy of nations, 88, 104, 194; in Judaism, 154, 181, 190; in laws for Jews, 90; primal Adam and, 144, 146; in role of Israel, 14, 51, 88, 96–97, 157; in sources and followers, 60–61, 125, 131, 132, 146 Euchel, Isaac, 18, 202n6 Eusebius, of Caesarea, Bishop of Caesarea, 7, 199n24 L’Évangile et l’Église (The Gospel and the Church; Loisy), 186 “An Examination of the Dogmas of Islamism” (Benamozegh), 76 exclusivism, Jewish, 89, 104–106, 130, 160, 169 Faivre, Antoine, 111 Fano, Menachem da, 128 February Revolution of 1848, 50, 215nn24–25 Fenton, Paul, 224n58 Ferrara Congress (1863), 34 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 79–80 fictionalism, 114, 116–121, 238n53, 238–239n58, 239n65 Fleischmann, Eugène, 57–58 Frederic II (Holy Roman emperor), 34–35 “Frederic II and the Rabbinic Doctrines” (Benamozegh), 34–35 freedom of conscience, 20, 68–70

French Jewish identity, 186, 257n16 Gautier, Theophile, 4–5, 197–198n5 Geiger, Abraham, 7, 76–77, 214n7 Gentile, Giovanni, 245–246n38 ge’onim (geniuses), 204n25 Gibbon, Edward, 202n10 Gikatila, Joseph ben Abraham, 98, 158, 230n24, 246n50 Ginsburg, Rabbi Yitzhak, 146 Ginzburg, Carlo, 11 Gioberti, Vincenzo: on acroamatism, 112, 236n27; Catholic Church liberalization and, 28, 57–58; on Hebraism as a “middle link,” 135, 137; influence of, on Benamozegh, 58, 80; on original sin, 138–139; on prophecy and Italy, 30; on Tohu and Bohu, 240–241n18 Gnosticism: Christian traditions and, 177–178; creation and, 240–241n17; gnostic Adam, 144, 246n44; Jewish origins of, 124; Jung and, 238– 239n58 golden calf episode, 168 Gordin, Jacob, 102–103, 231–232n10, 232n11 The Gospel and the Church (L’Évangile et l’Église; Loisy), 186 Goyau, Georges, 230n29 Graetz, Heinrich, 115, 175, 253n16 Greenberg, Irving, 177, 259n36 Grotius, Hugo, 64, 220nn2–3 Gubernatis, Angelo de, 19 Guetta, Alessandro, 3, 206n51 Guide for the Perplexed of Our Time, 238n52 Gush Emunim, 104, 232n22 Habermas, Jürgen, 9–10, 64, 83–85 ha-Cohen, Malachi, 23, 212–213n22 Ha-Levanon, 40, 211nn14–15 Ham, descendants of, 180

300 I N D E X

Ha-Mevasser (Benamozegh), 208n21 Hartmann, Eduard von, 107–108, 116, 119, 239n62 Hasidism, 110–112, 128, 234n6, 242n32, 243n48 haskamots, 42 Havet, Ernest, 249–250n38 Hazan, Eliyahu, 43, 51, 199n22 Hazan, Israel, 40, 43 Hazan, Israel Moshe, 178, 255n31 Hebraism: Adam in, 121; assimilation and, 130, 167, 169; Christian, 174–175; as inclusion, 6–8; meaning of term, 7, 199n20; as middle link (anello mediano), 135–137, 244n12; in modernity, 79–80, 82; nations in, 95–96, 100; polygonism and, 142; redemption as internal in, 86; science and scholarship in, 112, 236n25; sense of belonging and, 90–91, 94 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 77, 131–132, 207–208n13, 233–234n1 Heidegger, Martin, 163 Heine, Heinrich, 4, 197–198n5 Hellenism, 199n20 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 179, 190 Hesiod, 114 Hillel, 195, 295n4 Hinduism, 149, 247n1 Hirsch, Emil, 185, 256n5 Hirsch, Samson Raphael, 97 Histoire et littérature (Benamozegh), 50, 56 Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (Renan), 131 Historia critica Philosophiae (Brucker), 110 historicism, 66, 113–114, 117–118 History of the Essenes (Storia degli Esseni; Benamozegh), 34, 35, 136, 139–140 Hobsbawm, Eric, 9–10 Homily on the Dragons [or Sea

Monsters] (Drush ha-Taninim, Nathan of Gaza), 125–126 Hugo, Leopold, 245n37 Humanisme de l’autre homme (Humanism of the Other; Levinas), 155 humanity: Adam and, 141–146; Christianity and, 74, 94, 100–101; interdependence of, 144; linked to God, 80; myth and, 119; nations and, 95–96, 98–101; Noahism and, 83; of non-Jews, 168; as organism, 153, 171, 248n21; as quasi-covenant, 154–155; in the title of Israel and Humanity, 50–51, 145–146, 216n27 Hurwitz, Pinchas, 73, 144, 153, 223n36 Huss, Boaz, 113 I veri Italiani (The True Italians), 28 Ibn Habib, Jacob, 23, 205n38 Ibn Malka, Rabbi Khalifa, 112 Idea for a Universal History (Kant), 98 Idel, Moshe, 125, 205n44, 241–242n29, 246n43 iggulim, 119 ’Igrot Meshulam (Euchel), 18, 202n6 ‘illuy, 127–128, 166, 241n23, 241nn27– 28, 241–242n29 imitatio dei, 126, 158, 240nn16–17 inclusivism, 6–8, 89–90, 130, 157–159, 160–161, 169 Institutions of Moses (Salvador), 47 International Emergency Conference on Anti-Semitism (Seelisberg Conference), 187 interreligious dialogue: as delusion, 179; ecumenical and interfaith compared with, 201n45; on faith versus science, 189–190; Judaism as mother of two religions, 179; margins of tradition in, 177–178; non-rational laws in, 178; Pallière on, 186–187; Second Vatican Council of 1965 on, 187; Smyrna cantors and, 255n31; as



I N D E X 301

stage in religious interactions, 184; tents of Shem metaphor in, 179– 181, 255n33; unequal, 176–177, 178 interreligious interactions: anti-Semitism in, 50, 54, 141, 183, 186–189, 256n1; encounters and dialogue, 162–163, 183–185, 256n1, 256n5, 256–257n7; interdependence, 155–159, 174–175, 248n21, 249n26, 249n31, 249n38; neutralizing enmity, 151–155, 248n13 Introduction to Israel and Humanity (Benamozegh): on humanity, 100; as introduction to longer work, 5, 50, 198n9; Pallière on, 54–55, 60; on religious tolerance, 156 invented tradition, 9–10 Isaac, Jules, 187, 256–257n7 Islam: Jewish anti-Islam discourse, 156; roots in Judaism, 76–77, 194; as world religion, 167, 190 Israel: legal status of resident aliens in, 104–105; as nation after exodus, 170–172; ring metaphor of, 181– 182, 255n41; role of, in universalism, 14, 51, 88, 96–97, 157; standing for divine presence in the world, 98 Israel and Humanity (Benamozegh): on assimilation, 129; on berur, 124–126, 128–131, 169; on common origin, 154–155; conservative reaction to, 45; on faith and reason, 5–6, 10, 198nn11–12; on the Gospel in the Talmudic narrative, 175; on Hebraism as a middle link, 135–137, 244n12; on history and metaphysics distinction, 119–120; Idel and, 125; on ‘illuy, 127–128, 241n23; on Jethro’s significance, 166–167; Livorno manuscript of, 57–61; meaning of title, 50–51, 145–146, 216n27; on Noahide system and inclusiveness, 89–90, 160, 169; on

Spinoza, 66, 221n2; on truth in falsehoods, 158. See also Israel and Humanity (Benamozegh), revisions to manuscript by Pallière Israel and Humanity (Benamozegh), revisions to manuscript by Pallière: acroamatism in, 112; biology references, 95; citation errors, 218n24; Colombo as advisor in, 219n27; comparison with manuscript, 57–61; controversies in edits, 2, 56–57; cosmopolitanism in, 99, 180–181; criticism of, as deflection, 251n17; dialectical method and, 219n26; editing process, 55–56; on false gods, 120; on fictionalism, 116–117; on mysticism, 58, 219–220n34; on property, 140; on role of non-Jews, 166 Israelite, meaning of, 7, 199n22, 207n10 Israel’s Spring (Ein Israel; Ibn Habib), 23, 205n38 Italy, national identity in, 28, 30, 33–34 Jacob’s Spring (‘En Ya‘aqov; Ibn Habib), 23, 205n38 Jacobson, Eric, 107 James, William, 235 Janet, Paul, 226n87 Japheth, descendants of, 180 Jéhouda, Josué, 187, 259n35 Jellinek, Adolph, 113 Jerusalem (Mendelssohn), 68–70 Jesus: Adam and, 144; ethics of, 154; as human, 100; Jewish environment of, 75–76; Kabbalah teachings and, 46–47; New Covenant of, 74, 84; as prefigured in Jewish Scriptures, 174; redemption in, 86, 106, 152 Jésus Christ et sa doctrine (Salvador), 47 Jethro, influence of, on Moses, 164–167, 232n12, 251n17 Jewish and Christian Ethics (Benamozegh): Benamozegh on

302 I N D E X

his intellectual formation, 24–25; Christianity dissolving nations, 94–96; on enmity, 152; on Hebrew origins of Christian ethics, 154–155; on interreligious enmity, 152–153; on Islam, 76; on Kantian philosophy, 73–74; publication of, 46–49, 213n3; on reason and sentiments in religion, 78; on redemption, 86; tone in, 60 Jewish exclusivism, 89, 104–106, 130, 160, 169 Jewish particularism, 93–98. See also particularism Jews in Livorno, 28–30, 34 Judaism: alternative designations for, 7–8; assimilation in, 128–131, 157– 158, 167, 169, 242n44; Christian roots in, 46–48, 50–52, 75–76, 124, 154–155; dogma in, 70–71, 74, 80; Egypt as crucible for, 162, 169–172, 252n37; exclusivism in, 89, 104–106, 130, 160, 169; Hasidism, 110–112, 234n6, 242n32, 243n48; as humanitarian duty, 209n29; interdependence with Christianity, 174–175, 253n10; Kant’s critique of, 72; Karaism and, 79; mission theory of, 96; not included in world religions, 167; as origin of monotheistic universalism, 75–77; pagan influence on, 39, 60, 130, 159, 164–167; pluralism and inclusiveness in, 131–132, 157–159, 160–161; rationalism and, 70, 74, 206n50; Reform communities, 55; theology of other religions in, 149– 150, 173–175, 253n10 Les Juifs et les Nations (Nantet), 188 Juifs mes frères (My Brothers, the Jews; Toulat), 188 Jung, Carl, 119, 238–239n58 Kabbalah: as corrective to idealism and materialism, 138–140; deflecting

accusations of literalism, 114–116; dissemination to larger audiences, 134–135; idealism and materialism in, 138–140, 244n12; kabbalistic hermeneutics, 123–132, 240n12, 240nn16–17, 240–241n18, 241n22; modernity and, 13–14, 107–108, 123–124, 147, 178; myth and, 10, 12, 109, 114–116, 119, 147; Orient and, 135–138; origins of Christianity in, 46–49, 75–77, 124; in political engagement, 133–134; on property and ownership, 139–140; as a public discourse, 3, 10, 140; racial supremacy and, 146, 224n58; as revelation, 119, 122, 138; as science, 112, 236n25; as soul of the Torah, 238n52; as theosophy not mysticism, 109–113, 158, 234nn1–2, 234n6, 234n8, 241n26; on universal psyche, 119 Kabbalah Centre, 185 La Kabbale et l’origine des dogmes chrétiens (Kabbalah and the Origin of the Christian Dogmas; Benamozegh), 48, 59, 115, 124, 164, 184 “La Kabbale ou la tradition théosophique” (Kabbalah, or the Theosophical Tradition; Benamozegh), 109 kabbalistic hermeneutics, 123–132; assimilation theory, 128–131; berur, 124–126, 127, 128–129, 169; coincidence of opposites, 131–132; ‘illuy, 127–128, 241n23, 241nn27–28, 241–242n29; imitatio dei and, 126, 158, 240nn16–17; in interpreting tradition, 123–124; Luria and, 124–125, 240n12; Tohu and Bohu, 126, 240–241n18 Kahane, Meir, 105 Kant, Immanuel, 65, 72–75, 98 Karaism, 79 Karp, Jonathan, 18



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Katz, Jacob, 9, 89 Kavod ha-Levanon, 211n14 Klenicki, Rabbi Leon, 188 Kohler, Rabbi Kaufmann, 256n5 Kook, Abraham, 104 Kook, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda, 104 Kook, Rav, 130, 146, 242n43 Korn, Eugene, 173, 221n10 Krochmal, Nathan, 118 La Peyrère, Isaac, 141 Lacan, Jacques, 11, 182 Lattes, Dante, 201n4 Lau, Theodore Ludwig, 68 Laurent, François, 171, 252n39 Lavater, Caspar, 69 “The Legation of Moses” (“Die Sendung Moses”; Schiller), 163 Leopold II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 28, 29 Leroux, Pierre, 79, 100, 139 Levene, Nancy, 11 Levinas, Emmanuel, 102–103, 121, 155, 231n6 Library of Hebraism (Benamozegh), 134, 135, 212n20 Life of Jesus (Renan), 47 Life of Jesus (Strauss), 47 Ligue internationale et permanente de la paix (Permanent International League for Peace), 48–49, 152–153, 214n15, 220n3, 247–248n7 The Lion Dreads the Gnat (’Eimat Mafgia‘ ‘al’Ari; Benamozegh), 31, 123, 240n12 Liqqutei Torah (Vital), 144 Livornine Charters, 17 Livorno, Italy: Austrian occupation of, 29–31; culture of, 17–18; influence on Benamozegh, 17–20; under Pope Pius IX, 28–29; religious freedom in, 17–18, 20, 28, 32; religious tolerance in, 155, 202nn10–11. See also Risorgimento

Locke, John, 155–156 Loisy, Alfred, 186 Löwith, Karl, 176 Loyson, Hyacinthe, 55, 57–58, 178, 185, 214n15, 216–217n11 The Luminary and the Sun (Ma’or vaShemesh), 205n36 Luria, Isaac, 87, 124–125, 240n12 Luzzatto, Moshe, 23, 230n24 Luzzatto, Samuel David: on Abrahamism, 7, 199n20; on Benamozegh, 204n26; Benamozegh’s correspondence with, 19, 22–23, 25, 69, 90–91, 224n58; Benamozegh’s critique of, 31–32; on cabbala as magic, 236n26; on dogma, 70–71; on the Zohar, 208–209n23, 230n24 Magid, Shaul, 169 Maimonidean restriction, 67–68, 69, 222n20 Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon), 39, 67, 69–71, 87–89, 96–97, 174 Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Scholem), 111, 134 malkhut, 139, 143, 145, 244n22 mamlachat kohanim (kingdom of priests), 96–97 Mannheim, Karl, 9 Ma’or va-Shemesh (The Luminary and the Sun), 205n36 Mavo She‘arim (Luria), 125 Mazzini, Giuseppe, 93–94, 229n3 McKim, Robert, 160 Meaning in History (Löwith), 176 The Measures of the Body [of God] (Shiur Komah; Cordovero), 89 Mecklenburg, Jacob, 89 Meir, Jonatan, 9 Melchizedek, 164, 232n12 Meldola, Rafaël, 201n5 melitzah writing style, 38

304 I N D E X

Memoirs from Beyond the Grave (Chateaubriand), 5, 198n8 Mendelssohn, Moses, 65, 68–71, 72, 97, 157, 222n20 Mendes-Flohr, Paul, 175 Menorat ha-Me’or (Candelabrum of Light; Aboab), 23 Me’or ‘Einayim (de Rossi), 38 Mesilat Yesharim (The Path of the Just; Luzzatto), 23 Meyer, Michel, 34 Michaelis, Johann David, 135–136 Michelet, Jules, 118, 238n57 microhistory, 11–12, 200nn41–42 mikeitz, 255n37 Mikra Kodesh (Adadi), 40 Modena, Rabbi Leone, 31, 240n18 modernity: alienation and, 5, 80, 113, 140; ban on Benamozegh and, 39–40, 42, 45, 61; Catholic Church and, 27, 32–33, 36, 198n12, 228n31; in the Christian margins, 177–178; dogma and continual revelation, 70, 74, 80, 83–84, 110; dualism in, 11, 13, 194–195; Hebraism in, 79–80, 82; Kabbalah and, 13–14, 107–108, 123–124, 147, 178; myth in, 113–116; Noahide Laws and, 63–64, 68, 90–92; nonsecular, 8–9, 10, 45; Oriental path to, 42–43, 61, 135–138; particularism and, 11, 104, 106; pluralism and inclusivism in, 159, 160–161; self-assertion in, 14, 175–177, 193, 253n16; tradition and, 8–10, 79, 93, 173, 225n69; universalism and, 63, 70, 74, 80, 82–83, 106; uses of term, 4–5 Mogador, 203n20, 204nn28–29, 205n32 Moïse, David, 53–54 Montefiore, Emanuele, 28 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 18, 156 Mopsik, Charles, 56, 60, 218n18, 219– 220n34

Morais, Sabato, 175 Morale juive et morale chrétienne (Benamozegh). See Jewish and Christian Ethics (Benamozegh) Morgenthau, Henry, Sr., 59 Mortara, Marco, 34 Mosaic Law: Benamozegh on, 7, 65, 69, 84–85; cosmic effect of, 87; on criminal system, 88; Mendelssohn on, 69; need for spirit in, 115; Noahide Laws and, 51, 84–85, 88, 90–91; as revelation, 87–88; Sermon on the Mount and, 152–154 Moses, influence of Jethro on, 164–167 Mother of Scriptures (Benamozegh). See ’Em la-Miqra’ (Benamozegh) multiverse, 111, 235n18 My Brothers, the Jews (Juifs mes frères; Toulat), 188 Mysterium Coniunctionis ( Jung), 238– 239n58 mysticism: Benamozegh on Kabbalah and, 14, 98, 109–113, 230n23, 241n26; Benamozegh’s avoidance of, 113, 127; as engagement with the world, 137; national, 104; Orient and, 136–137; Pallière’s edits and, 58, 219–220n34, 234n2; theosophy and, 109–113, 158, 234nn1–2, 234n6, 234n8, 241n26; Zohar and, 22–24. See also Kabbalah myth: Adam as, 116, 119–120, 141–142, 144; definition of, 116; fictionalism and, 114, 116–121, 238n53, 238– 239n58, 239n65; Jethro’s influence on Moses and, 165–167; Kabbalah and, 10, 12, 109, 114–116, 119, 147; in modernity, 113–116; as syncretism, 129–130; uses of, 3, 113–114 Nantet, Jacques, 188 Nathan of Gaza, 125–126 nations: Adam and, 144; in Christianity,



I N D E X 305

151–153; as collective belonging, 93–96; cosmopolitanism and, 98–101, 229n3; danger of abolishing, 103–104; gods of other, 159, 160, 220n3, 221n10, 249–250n38, 253–254n19; hierarchy among, 88, 94, 104, 190; individuals and, 94–98, 229n3; interdependence of, 152, 155; invented tradition and, 9–10; Israel as, after exodus, 170–172; Jewish communities and formation of, 41; Jewish particularism and, 93–98; modernity and, 4, 8, 106; national identity, 27–28, 33–34, 167, 186, 206n2; priestly nations, 96–98, 130; religious right wing on, 104–106; sarim of, 97–98, 230n23, 230n25, 253–254n19; Zionism, 13, 44, 50, 103–106, 186 Nekuda, 104, 232n22, 233n23 The Network of Souls in Kabbalah (“Le Réseau des âmes dans la cabale”; Mopsik), 56 New Science (Vico), 118 Niditch, Susan, 246n44 Nineteen Letters (Hirsch), 97 Nir le-David (Benamozegh), 25, 206n51 Nissim of Gerona, 88 “No Religion Is an Island” (Heschel), 179, 190 Noahide Laws: absence of belonging and, 90–92; basis of, 2, 64; berur and, 169, 253n10; Christianity and, 54, 105, 174–175, 253n10; civil status from, 103; covenantal pluralism and, 160; inclusion and, 89–90, 160, 169; in Jewish universalism, 63–64, 67–68, 88–90, 194; Mendelssohn on, 69; modernity and, 63–64, 68, 90–92; Mosaic Laws and, 51, 84–85, 88, 90–91; normativity and, 83, 90–92; pragmatic coexistence based on, 103; reason in, 86–87; religious

right wing and, 104–106; religious tolerance from, 156; Spinoza and, 66–68, 221n2, 221n10 Noahide movement, 103–106 Noah’s sons, 180 Novak, David, 90, 227n19 Numa (Roman statesman), 156 On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultural Despisers (Schleiermacher), 81 On the Sources of Jewish Law (Delle Fonti del diritto ebraico; Benamozegh), 36 Ontology (Heidegger), 163 Open Letter to the Church of France (Aron), 188 Orient: Benamozegh as publisher in, 42–45, 61; Benamozegh on, 2–3; contemplative life in, 136–138; in dualism critique, 8–9; Kabbalah in the, 135–138; writing style of, 38 original sin, 138–139 Ottolenghi, Giuseppe, 28 “Our Theosophy” (Benamozegh), 109–110 paganism, Judaism and, 39, 60, 130, 159, 164–167 Palache, Hayim, 211n15 Pallière, Aimé: anti-Semitism and, 186, 189; Benamozegh visit, 55; Christianity and, 54, 105, 185–187; description of, 257n8; in interreligious groups, 185; on Introduction to Israel and Humanity, 54–55; on lack of belonging, 91; memoirs of, 59; on self-reformation of other faiths, 176–177, 178; training of, 23, 53–54; as Union Libérale Israélite preacher, 186, 258n17; L’Univers israélite articles by, 55, 59, 216n9. See also Israel and Humanity (Benamozegh), revisions to manuscript by Pallière

306 I N D E X

particularism: Benamozegh on, 11, 13, 93–98, 121, 190, 193–194; Italian, 30; Kook, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda, on, 104– 105; Levinas on, 102–103; meaning of Jewish, 93–98; universalism and, 3, 11, 13, 99–100, 102–103, 106 Pascendis, 54 The Path of the Just (Mesilat Yesharim; Luzzatto), 23 patriotism: of Benamozegh, 27, 29–31, 33–34, 61, 208n20; cosmopolitanism as, 99–100, 229n3; Kabbalah and, 13; universalism and, 27–28, 36, 61 Paul (apostle), 47, 242n31 Pentateuch: documentary hypothesis of, 117, 237n43; Karaism and, 79; polytheism and, 249–250n38; Zohar and, 22. See also ’Em la-Miqra’ (Benamozegh) Persian Letters (Montesquieu), 18 Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel), 77–78, 233–234n1 Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Habermas), 9 Philosophy and Kabbalah (Guetta), 3 Philosophy of Revelation (Gioberti), 137 Philosophy of the Unconscious (Hartmann), 107, 119, 239n62 pistis, 106 Pius IX, Pope, 5, 28–29, 32, 71, 198n12 Plato, 80 polygonism, 141–142, 245n37, 245– 246n38 polytheism, inner monotheism in, 157, 164, 249n31 Poncins, Léon de, 189, 259nn33–35 Porphyry, 110 “port Jews,” 18, 202n8 Powers of Distinction (Levene), 11 pre-Adamism and racial supremacy, 141 Preparation for the Gospel (Eusebius), 7, 199n24 pre-supersession, 84

priestly nations, 96–98, 130 The Problem with the Jews (pamphlet), 189 Prometheus Unbound (Shelley), 185, 256n5 property and ownership, 139–140 Protestantism: Catholicism on, 79; Kant on, 72; Karaism as, 79; Mendelssohn and, 70; mysticism and, 113; Noahide communities in, 105; Pauline Christianity and, 74; Schleiermacher on, 81 Protologia (Gioberti), 80, 138–139 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 50, 133, 139, 244n25 Quanta Cura (Pius IX), 32 racial theories of Noah’s sons, 180 Ranger, Terrence, 9–10 rapprochement, 105, 184, 188, 189–190, 193–194 Rashi (Shlomo Yitzchaki), 96, 167 Reagan, Ronald, 105 reciprocal action, 126 “Reflections upon the Roman Commonwealth” (Locke), 156 Reform Judaism, 7, 36, 79, 133, 225n70 Reggio, Isaac Samuel, 208–209n23 The Religion of the Future (Hartmann), 107–108 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (Kant), 72 religious diversity: interdependence in, 155–159, 174–175, 248n21, 249n26, 249n31, 249n38; necessity of, 155–159; neutralizing religious enmity, 151–155, 248n13; places of encounter, 162–163 religious freedom, 17–18, 20, 28, 32 Renan, Ernest: berur and, 131; influence on Benamozegh, 47, 49, 136, 180, 229–230n22; on Semites,



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115, 131, 242n44; Volksgeist and, 229–230n22 “Le Réseau des âmes dans la cabale” (The Network of Souls in Kabbalah; Mopsik), 56 Reuchlin, Johann, 243n46 revelation: acroamatism and, 112; dogma and, 70, 74, 80, 83–84, 110; as intuition, 123; Jethro and, 166– 167; Kabbalah as, 119, 122, 138; Kant and, 74; Mendelssohn and, 68–69, 71; of Noahide Laws, 13, 88–89; progressive, 9, 32, 43, 119, 122–124; purpose of, 128; reason and, 71, 78, 80, 85–87; sefira and, 255n41; theosophy and, 109–111; universalism and, 65, 74–75, 169, 176 Revelation According to the Doctrine of Judaism (Steinheim), 85 Ricci, Emmanuel Hai, 128 Riccio, Paolo, 158 ring metaphor of Israel, 181–182, 255n41 Risorgimento: Jews and culture of, 27–28; national identity in, 28, 30, 33–34; pulpit rhetoric in, 29–31 Rosenzweig, Franz, 176–177, 253– 254n19 Rosmini, Antonio, 57, 111 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 99 Safran, Alexandre, 188 Salvador, Joseph, 47–48 Samama, Caid, 42, 212–213n22 Sanhedrin, 64, 89, 180 sarim, 97–98, 230n23, 230n25, 253– 254n19 Sasson, Eliyahu, 41 Schechter, Solomon, 70, 71, 118 Schiller, Friedrich, 163 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 81 Schmitt, Carl, 153

Schneerson, Rav Menachem, 105, 228n22 Scholem, Gershom, 6–7, 111, 115, 134 La science du Judaïsme, 47 Seelisberg Conference (1947), 187, 189 Sefer ha-Brit (Book of the Covenant; Hurwitz), 73, 144, 223n36 Sefer ’Or Yakar (Book of the Precious Light; Cordovero), 89, 227n17 Sefer Zikaron le-Sofrei Yisrael ha-Hayim Itanu Kayom (Sokolow, ed.), 201n1 sefirot, 119, 132, 145, 241n28, 244n20, 244n22 Segal, Elitzur, 233n23 Seidler, Meir, 218n24, 253–254n19 Selden, John, 64 self-assertion, modernity and, 14, 175– 177, 193, 253n16 “Die Sendung Moses” (“The Legation of Moses”; Schiller), 163 sentiment, religious, 77–78, 81, 92, 214–215n18 Sermon on the Mount, 153 Seven Commandments of the Sons of Noah, 175 Sforno, Ovadia, 97 Sha‘ar ha-Pesuqim (Vital), 170 Sha‘arei ‘Orah (Gikatila), 98, 158 Sha‘arei Tzadiq (Cordovero), 128 Shammai, 195, 295n4 shechina, 98 Sheleg, Yair, 104 Shem, descendants of, 180 Shir Hashirim Rabba, 241n27 Shiur Komah (The Measures of the Body [of God]; Cordovero), 89 Sinaitic system, 84, 88–89, 227n15 Social Contract (Rousseau), 99 Sokolow, Nahum, 15, 201n1 Soloveitchik, Joseph, 174, 179, 189, 259n36 Spinoza, Baruch, 39, 65, 66–68, 221n2, 221n10

308 I N D E X

Steinheim, Salomon Ludwig, 85 Storia degli Esseni (History of the Essenes; Benamozegh), 34, 35, 136, 139–140 Strauss, David, 47 supersession, 74, 84, 136 Syllabus of Errors (Pius IX), 5, 32, 198n12 syncretism, 121, 129–130 Ta‘am le-Shad (Benamozegh), 31–32, 225n69 ta‘amei ha-mitzvot, 87, 116 Taylor, Charles, 114 The Teaching of Contempt (Isaac), 187 te’amim, 208–209n23 “tents of Shem” text, 179–181, 255n33 Teologia dogmatica e apologetica (Benamozegh): consciousness of consciousness in, 119, 182; controversial etymologies in, 35; Feuerbach in, 79–80; on Geiger, 76; on Gioberti, 58; on idealism and materialism, 139; on Kant, 72, 73; on Leroux, 139; Mazzini in, 93–94; role of dogma in modernity, 71; on science, 122–123, 198n11; on spiritualization of matter, 128 Teosofia (Rosmini), 111 Testament of Caid Nissim Samama, 42, 223n38, 224n58 The Bibliography of the Hebrew Book, 212n20 Theological–Political Treatise (Spinoza), 66 theology of religion, 14, 173–175, 253n10 Theosophical Society, 110 theosophy: acroamatism as, 109, 112– 113; in Israel and Humanity translation, 234n2, 241n26; Kabbalah as, 109–113, 158, 234nn1–2, 234n6, 234n8; meaning of term, 110–111, 162, 234n8

Tiele, Cornelis, 167, 251n21 tiferet, 139, 142, 143, 145, 244n22 Time and Being (Heidegger), 163 Tohu and Bohu, 126, 240–241n18 Toland, John, 18 Toulat, Jean, 188 tradition: Christian, 58, 76, 156, 177– 178, 187–188; Confucian rituals and the Catholic Church, 249n26; in Guide for the Perplexed of Our Time, 238n53; as inclusion, 6–8, 36; in interreligious dialogue, 186–187; in Israel and Humanity, 219–220n34; meaning of, 194–195; modernity and, 8–10, 79, 93, 173, 225n69; nations and invented, 9–10; of the Orient, 38, 42–43, 178; plurality of truths and, 160–161; as progressive revelation, 32, 123–124; reason and, 73, 106; Torah and, 223n45. See also Kabbalah A Treatise on the Laws of Marital Life (Meldola), 201n5 Tsori Gil‘ad (Balm of Gilead; Benamozegh), 40, 41 Two Types of Faith (Buber), 106, 154 Uffenheimer, Rivka Schatz, 242n43 D’une religion naturelle (Leroux), 100 L’Univers israélite, 55, 59, 216n9, 221n2 universal man, 142, 143–144, 151 universal soul, 128 universalism, 65–82; Abrahamism as, 7, 199n20; absence of belonging and, 90–92, 193; abstract, 103, 106, 151– 152; Adam and, 141–147; bringing the margins toward the center, 177–179, 255n31; Christianity and, 135, 149, 151, 156, 240n17; “concrete,” 231n6; cosmopolitanism, 93, 98–101, 102, 230n29; on the divine in foreign gods, 159; duality of Adam and Eve and, 145–146; France and,



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46; influence of Jethro on Moses and, 164–167; interreligious encounters, 184–185, 186; Israel and, 14, 51, 88, 96–97, 157; Jewish theology of other religions in, 173–177, 253n10; Kant and, 65, 72–75; Mendelssohn and, 68–71; modernity and, 63, 70, 74, 80, 82–83, 106; nations and, 36, 93–96, 229n3; Noahide Laws and, 63–64, 67–68, 88–90, 194; Orientalism and, 135–136; origin of Christianity and Islam and, 75–77; in Pallière’s revisions, 57–61, 119–120n34; particularism and, 3, 11, 13, 99–100, 102–103, 106; patriotism and, 27–28, 36, 61; political agenda of, 121, 214n17; priestly nations, 96–98, 130; reason and emotions in, 77–82; revelation and, 65, 74–75, 169, 176; ring metaphor of Israel, 181–182, 255n41; Spinoza and, 65, 66–68, 221n2, 221n10; universal soul, 128 The Unknown Sanctuary (Pallière), 53–54, 217n15, 228n24, 253n10 Va-Yosef’ Avraham (Dayan), 40–41 La verità svelata ai miei giudici (Benamozegh), 38 Vexler, Maurice, 119–120, 193, 259n1 Vico, Giambattista, 38, 80–81, 85, 114, 117–118 Vikkuah ‘al ha-Kabbalah (Luzzatto), 31–32 Vital, Haim, 124–125, 144, 169, 170, 252n32 Viterbo, Annio da, 38 Volksgeist, 97, 229–230n22 war, Benamozegh on, 48–49, 152, 247–248n7

Warburton, William, 68, 170–171 Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenommen? (What Did Mohammed Borrow from Judaism?; Geiger), 76 Wellhausen, Julius, 237n47 What Is Property? (Proudhon), 50, 139 Williams, Raymond, 100 Wogue, Lazare, 47 Wolfson, Elliot, 246n48, 246n50, 251n25 Works and Days (Hesiod), 114 World Parliament of Religions (1893), 184–185 Wyschogrod, Michael, 91 Yevamot 61a, 154–155 Yochai, Rabbi Shimon bar (Rashbi), 22, 208–209n23 Zara, Avoda, 90 Zeir Anpin, 138, 181, 244n20, 255n41 Zikhron Yerushalayim (Hazan), 7, 43, 199n22 Zini, Rabbi Eliyahu Rachamim, 56, 59–60, 189, 217–218n17, 219n33 Zionism: Benamozegh and, 44, 50; Ecole de Paris on, 186; Noahism and religious right wing in, 13, 103–106; Pallière on, 186 Zohar: Benamozegh on, 22–23, 31, 208–209n23; Christians and Zoharic literature, 157; concepts of beginning and end in, 255n37; on cosmic forces, 230n24; date written, 208–209n23; in Morocco, 23–24; on non-Jews of Egypt, 168–169, 170, 251nn25–26; rings in, 181 Zohar Bereshit, 181

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Stanford Studies in Jewish History and Culture David Biale and Sarah Abrevaya Stein, Editors This series features novel approaches to examining the Jewish past in the form of innovative work that brings the field into productive dialogue with the newest scholarly concepts and methods. Open to a range of disiplinary and interdisciplinary approaches from history to cultural studies, this series publishes exceptional scholarship balanced by an accessible tone that illustrates histories of difference and addresses issues of current urgency. Books in this list push the boundaries of Jewish Studies and speak compellingly to a wide audience of scholars and students. For a complete listing of titles in this series, visit the Stanford University Press website, www.sup.org.

Marc Volovici, German as a Jewish Problem: The Language Politics of Jewish Nationalism 2020 Dalia Kandiyoti, The Converso’s Return: Conversion and Sephardi History in Contemporary Literature and Culture 2020 Dina Danon, The Jews of Ottoman Izmir: A Modern History 2019 Omri Asscher, Reading Israel, Reading America: The Politics of Translation Between Jews 2019 Yael Zerubavel, Desert in the Promised Land 2018

Sunny S. Yudkoff, Tubercular Capital: Illness and the Conditions of Modern Jewish Writing 2018 Sarah Wobick-Segev, Homes Away from Home: Jewish Belonging in Twentieth-Century Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg 2018 Eddy Portnoy, Bad Rabbi: And Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press 2017 Jeffrey Shandler, Holocaust Memory in the Digital Age: Survivors’ Stories and New Media Practices 2017 Joshua Schreier, The Merchants of Oran: A Jewish Port at the Dawn of Empire 2017 Alan Mintz, Ancestral Tales: Reading the Buczacz Stories of S. Y. Agnon 2017 Ellie R. Schainker, Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817–1906 2016 Devin E. Naar, Jewish Salonica: Between the Ottoman Empire and Modern Greece 2016