Reform Judaism and Darwin: How Engaging with Evolutionary Theory Shaped American Jewish Religion 3110659131, 9783110659139

Table of contents :
Contents
I. Introduction
II. Evolution ‘in the air’: Scientific, Philosophical and Christian Influences on Reform Jewish Engagement with Evolutionary Theory
III. Isaac Mayer Wise: The Cosmic God and an Evolving Cosmos
IV. Aaron Hahn: The Divine Design Principle of the Universe
V. Kaufmann Kohler: The Unfolding of Divine Life
VI. Emil G. Hirsch: The Divine Soul of an Evolving Universe
VII. Joseph Krauskopf: The Divine Natural Law of Evolution
VIII. Conclusion
Appendix: Evolution and Progressive Judaism in Britain
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Daniel R. Langton Reform Judaism and Darwin

Studia Judaica

Forschungen zur Wissenschaft des Judentums Begründet von Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Herausgegeben von Günter Stemberger, Charlotte Fonrobert, Elisabeth Hollender, Alexander Samely und Irene Zwiep

Band 111

Daniel R. Langton

Reform Judaism and Darwin How Engaging with Evolutionary Theory Shaped American Jewish Religion



ISBN 978-3-11-065913-9 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-066411-9 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-066122-4 ISSN 0585-5306 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019944065 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents I

Introduction

II

Evolution ‘in the air’: Scientific, Philosophical and Christian Influences on Reform Jewish Engagement with Evolutionary 12 Theory

III

Isaac Mayer Wise: The Cosmic God and an Evolving Cosmos 28 29 Critique of Evolutionary Science The Cosmic God and Evolution 33 The Development of Self-consciousness 42 46 History, the Will, and the Problem of Evil and Suffering A New Philosophy as an Alternative to Science or Religion? 49 50 Summary

IV

Aaron Hahn: The Divine Design Principle of the Universe 52 53 Evolutionary Theory as a Reasonable Hypothesis Universal Evolution, a Reconceived Divinity, and Eugenics 56 58 Summary

V

Kaufmann Kohler: The Unfolding of Divine Life 60 61 Religion and Science Judaism, Biblical Criticism and Morality 65 69 A Systematic Evolutionary Theology Summary 75

VI

Emil G. Hirsch: The Divine Soul of an Evolving Universe 76 77 A Paradigm for the History of Religion Defending Evolution from a Theistic Perspective 79 A Panentheistic Account of the Moral Purpose of Evolution to 81 Confound the Materialists Summary 87

VII

Joseph Krauskopf: The Divine Natural Law of Evolution Science and Judaism 92 A Panentheistic Account of Evolution 94 Evolutionary Foundations for Morality 98

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VI

Contents

Evolutionary Progress and its Consequences for Biblical Authority 101 103 Summary VIII

Conclusion

105

Appendix: Evolution and Progressive Judaism in Britain Claude Montefiore 114 118 Morris Joseph Bibliography Index

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I Introduction Among historians of Reform Judaism, which emerged in Germany in the 1810s, which divided British religious Jews from the 1840s, and which came to dominate North American Jewry by the 1880s, there is a general absence of interest in Darwin’s theory of evolution. The idea of evolution more generally had been used by scholars of religion – and by leading Jewish reformers – to describe mankind’s religious progression from well before Darwin’s day. The father of German Reform Judaism, Abraham Geiger, presented the emergence of the modern forms of Judaism as an inevitable, evolutionary development from the 1830s; according to his view, history revealed how each generation of Jews had given fresh meaning to the traditional liturgy and practices that had sought to express the core ethical-monotheistic aspects of Judaism, leading to a perpetual state of organic change as the Jewish religion adapted itself to local circumstances and cultures. And similar arguments have been repeated ever since by progressive Jewish thinkers. But whereas Geiger made his argument without reference to biological evolution (in fact, he rejected not only Darwin’s theory natural selection but even the phenomenon of the transmutation of species itself),¹ many other Reform Jews preferred to make an explicit connection to biological evolution, especially in the U.S. While the language of evolutionism has not gone unnoticed by historians of Reform Judaism, the tendency has been to focus on the political ambitions of assimilationist lay Jews, the theological concerns of the religious leaders and intellectual pioneers of Reform, and the critique and emulation of the surrounding Christian societies in terms of theology and practices, all at the expense of the reformers’ actual engagement with evolutionary science. The standard work on the history of Reform Judaism, Response to Modernity

 In a study of the historical development of Judaism, Geiger stated that ‘Nature presents herself in a great variety of beings, according to classes and species, which, while distinct from each other, work together, and for each other, but are not transformed one into the other… The same Power which at the beginning created them as is asserted [by Modern Natural Philosophy], one out of the other, should necessarily continue the same process, should even this day create an animal from a plant and continuously perfect it to its higher organism. But the present world presents no such process; on the contrary, every species remains within its fixed limits, it continually begets individual beings of its own kind, but is not changed into another. Hence it is not a promoting, but ordering power that creates and preserves every kind in its individuality; not one that is blindly rushing forward without stopping, but which preserves nature as a whole, composed of different parts, so that it is unchangeable both as a whole and in its variety.’ Abraham Geiger, Judaism and Its History, trans. Maurice Mayer (London: Trübner & Co, 1866), 8 – 9. German original: Das Judenthum und seine Geschichte (Breslau: Schletter, 1864). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664119-001

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(1988) by Michael Meyer, is typical in that it barely refers to the subject.² Even when the question of the influence of Darwin on U.S. Reform ideology have been addressed, the consensus has been that it remains peripheral to the development of the movement. Thus, according to Marc Swetlitz, Reform Jewish theology remained essentially untouched because evolutionary theory was primarily used to justify already existing views, and, according to Michael Shai Cherry, any apparent theological innovations could traced back to older Jewish traditions and might not therefore be regarded as innovative.³ From these perspectives, evolutionary theory mainly functioned as an analogy, providing credibility and authority for the radical Reform agenda, but did not in itself contribute significantly to the generation of Reform thought. This study will argue that, contrary to such claims, the passionate engagement with evolutionary theory found in many progressive Jewish writings after the publication of The Origin of Species (1859) is suggestive of a much more important role within North American Reform ideology. At least in the case of the progressives and radicals, it will be argued that evolutionary theory was utilized as the key explanatory framework. Within the U.S. Reform Jewish movement, the first to respond and stake out their position were the opponents of evolution, writing in the 1860s.⁴ Supporters of the theory tended to express their views only from the early 1870s, with a highpoint in the second half of the 1880s and general acceptance reached by the 1890s, and with positive engagement with evolution continuing on into the twen-

 Meyer devotes one page to the subject in a chapter on ‘Classical Reform Judaism’; his index includes only four references to ‘Darwinism’ and four for ‘evolution, religious and spiritual’. Michael A. Meyer, Response to Modernity: A History of the Reform Movement in Judaism, Studies in Jewish History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 274.  We will return to the arguments of Swetlitz and Cherry in the Conclusion. Their works include: Marc Swetlitz, “Responses of American Reform Rabbis to Evolutionary Theory, 1864– 1888,” in The Interaction of Scientific and Jewish Cultures in Modern Times, ed. Yakov M. Rabkin and Ira Robinson (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), Marc Swetlitz, “ American Jewish Responses to Darwin and Evolutionary Theory, 1860 – 1890,” in Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender, ed. Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), Marc Swetlitz, “Responses to Evolution by Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Rabbis in Twentieth-Century America,” in Jewish Tradition and the Challenge of Darwinism, ed. Geoffrey N. Cantor and Marc Swetlitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), Michael Shai Cherry, “Creation, Evolution and Jewish Thought” (Doctoral thesis, Brandeis University, 2001), and Shai Cherry, “Three Twentieth-Century Jewish Responses to Evolutionary Theory,” Aleph 3 (2003).  For an overview of early Reform opponents, including Abraham Geiger (1810 – 1874), David Einhorn (1809 – 1879), Adolph Kessler (1833 – 1915) and Adolph Kohut (1842– 1894), see Swetlitz, “Responses of American Reform Rabbis to Evolutionary Theory, 1864– 1888,” 104.

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tieth-century.⁵ Four or five Reform thinkers can be presented as central to the story, namely, Isaac Mayer Wise, Kaufmann Kohler, Emil G. Hirsch and Joseph Krauskopf, along with the less influential Aaron Hahn. The moderate reformer, Wise, was a special case, for while he offered an evolutionary account and engaged seriously with vital post-Darwinian questions about the relationship between human and animal minds, the origins of conscience, and the moral and teleological implications, nevertheless he was extremely hostile to the Darwinian mechanism of natural selection itself. The other more radical reformers tended to downplay their differences with Darwin and to augment or adapt Darwinian theory in their theological constructions, rather than to oppose it outright with an alternative evolutionary theory. In what follows, a close reading of the works of Wise, Hahn, Kohler, Hirsch, and Krauskopf will be offered to challenge the view that evolution can be safely discounted in the intellectual history of the development of classical Reform Judaism in North America. Reproducing the views of these religious leaders at length is, rhetorically at least, the surest

 For example, many published and unpublished Reform Jewish sermons on the subject of evolution, with several written as responses to the Scopes Trial of 1925, are located at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, including those by Maurice Harris (1859 – 1930), David Philipson (1862– 1949), J. Leonard Levy (1865 – 1917), Samuel Goldenson (1878 – 1962), Samuel Cohon (1888 – 1959), Israel Bettan (1889 – 1957), Ferdinand Isserman (1898 – 1972), and Levi Olan (1903 – 1984). A selection of the sermon titles include: Maurice Harris, Evolution and Religion: A New Year Discourse Preached at Temple Israel, New York (New York: Private publisher, 1925), David Philipson, “The Biblical Story of Creation,” (American Jewish Archive, n. d.), David Philipson, “Evolution and Religion,” (American Jewish Archive, n. d.), David Philipson, “Religion and Evolution,” (American Jewish Archive, n. d.), David Philipson, “The Biblical Story of Creation and the Theory of Evolution,” (American Jewish Archive, n. d.), J. Leonard Levy, Evolution or Revolution: A Sunday Lecture, vol. 10 (Pittsburgh, PA: B. Callomon, 1910), Samuel Goldenson, Evolution and Religion: A Sermon (Pittsburgh, PA: Rodef Shalom Congregation, 1922), Samuel Cohon, “Evolution and the Divine Evolver,” (American Jewish Archives, n. d.), Samuel Cohon, “Evolution in Judaism,” (American Jewish Archives, n. d.), Israel Bettan, “Can We Still Believe in Progress?,” (American Jewish Archives, n. d.), Israel Bettan, “Evolution and God,” (American Jewish Archives, n. d.), Israel Bettan, “Is Evolution True?,” (American Jewish Archives, n. d.), Israel Bettan, “Nature as Teacher,” (American Jewish Archives, n. d.), Israel Bettan, “War and Human Nature,” (American Jewish Archives, n. d.), Ferdinand Isserman, “Evolution and Religion,” (American Jewish Archives, 1923), Ferdinand Isserman, “Evolution in the Pulpit “ (American Jewish Archives, 1925), Ferdinand Isserman, “Biblical Science,” (American Jewish Archives, 1930) Ferdinand Isserman, “Genesis and Evolution,” (American Jewish Archives, 1932), Ferdinand Isserman, “Oh Lord, What Is Man?,” (American Jewish Archives, 1932), Ferdinand Isserman, “Genesis Teaches Faith, Not Science,” (American Jewish Archives, n. d.), Levi Olan, “Charles Darwin: Evolution the New History,” (American Jewish Archives, 1967), Levi Olan, “Charles Darwin: The Man Who Challenged Genesis,” (American Jewish Archives, n. d.), Levi Olan, “The Nature of Man,” (American Jewish Archives, n. d.).

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way to convince the reader of the central importance of evolutionary theory to them, even if it makes for a somewhat inelegant presentation. It is not a simple argument to make, however, and it is seriously complicated by the challenges of any attempt to untangle the ways in which various scientific, philosophical and Christian ideas and theologies influenced Jewish thought at that particular time and place. Such an attempt raises some general questions of methodology, since the demonstration of the influence of any idea is often a real challenge for the historian working with ideas. How far can one speak of causality, that is, of an idea having a determinate effect? Does an idea function in a different way, or find its significance altered, having moved from one individual’s conceptual world to another’s? Can one say with any degree of certainty who is actually influencing or inspiring whom? Is it a question of plagiarism, adaption, reinterpretation, misinterpretation, or rejection? A related difficulty is the question of origin. Should one view the idea as a logical consequence of previous ideas that make its emergence almost inevitable, or are its origins, in effect, mysterious? What exactly is meant by saying that an idea was already ‘in the air’, or that it can take root or transform over time? How does one weigh the importance of different streams or multiple sources of influence? In particular, how does one avoid the sin of parallelomania, that is, the mistake of misconstruing apparent similarities and erroneously constructing parallels and analogies without adequate justification? Broadly speaking, three areas of historiographical methodology have emerged that, while overlapping, feature distinct emphases in approaching the kinds of questions raised by such a topic of study as this one. The History of Science approach assumes that science is an activity like other human activities and that an idea can be best understood as a product of the surrounding society and culture and of the structural forces at work in those environments; for our purposes, this means understanding the place of evolutionary theory in the wider cultural discourse and in the context of the wider Religion-Science debate in particular, assessing the impact of the emergence and development of Reform Jewish institutions, and identifying the cultural and personal channels of influence between different thinkers, whether Jewish, Christian or scientific. The History of Ideas approach is characterized by an attempt to abstract an idea or doctrine and to trace its morphology through time by such means as reducing the idea into its constituent parts, assessing how it relates to other ideas, and exploring issues such as coherence; for our purposes, this means attempting to relate a cluster of evolutionary-inspired ideas in Reform Jewish theology to each other and tracing the shifting forms of the widespread belief in a law of universal evolution. Intellectual History tends to focus on the interior world of the individuals

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whose ideas are under examination and on the meanings that they create for themselves; for our purposes, this means taking seriously the ways in which the radical reformers articulated their own and others’ theologies, attempting to represent accurately how they themselves understood evolutionary theory and its significance, and to give due weight to how their views changed over time. But whichever approach is adopted, the case for the influence of an idea is made by painting an impressionistic picture or presenting a plausible story built up from what is often circumstantial or indirect historical evidence, and by drawing upon contextual knowledge and previous scholarship on the subject. The result rests heavily on the historian’s own prejudices; it rarely offers a strong degree of certainty and is hardly ever falsifiable. What follows is no different, and must be read with these caveats in mind. Let us consider these three approaches in turn. In terms of the contemporary social and cultural contexts, a number of important trends or movements are worth highlighting. Interestingly, the familiar cultural and political phenomena of anti-Semitism and Zionism appear irrelevant in the main. Much more significant was the perceived threat from the widespread popularity of materialistic, anti-religious, atheistic philosophies, a malaise which all of the Reform rabbis tended to explain not only in terms of the pernicious influence of prominent sceptics like ‘the Great Agnostic’ Robert Ingersoll but also in relation to Darwin, or, at least, to a misreading of Darwin.⁶ The first wave of appreciative Reform writings on evolution occurred at around the same time that some of the key institutions of Reform Judaism were being established, including the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1873 and the Reform rabbinical training college Hebrew Union College (HUC) in 1876. Not long after the 1881 pogroms of Russia initiated a period of mass immigration of Eastern European Jews, the Pittsburgh Platform of 1885 attempted to set out those beliefs that defined Reform Judaism in North America and distinguished it from other Jewish denominations and experiences. Convened at the urging of Krauskopf among others, and proceeding under Wise’s presidency and Kohler’s Chairmanship, the Platform declaration famously declared that We hold that the modern discoveries of scientific researches in the domain of nature and history are not antagonistic to the doctrines of Judaism, the Bible reflecting the primitive

 Robert Ingersoll (1833 – 1899) was a trained lawyer, a gifted orator, and perhaps the most high profile critic of religion in nineteenth-century North America. Christians and Jews concerned to defend their faith against materialistic philosophies tended to regard him as the epitome of the worldly-wise, anti-religious atheist; Wise, Hahn, Kohler, Hirsch, and Krauskopf each explicitly criticized Ingersoll or ‘Ingersoll-ism’ at some point.

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ideas of its own age, and at times clothing its conception of divine Providence and Justice dealing with men in miraculous narratives.⁷

This founding document of classical Reform Judaism focused minds and coincided with the second wave of writings on evolution. In many ways it was a time of religious optimism among progressives of all denominations who championed liberation from irrational superstition by use of biblical- and historical-critical approaches to religious texts and traditions and who found solace in the shared humanity of the unifying vision of spirituality that resulted from the new scientific disciplines of comparative religion and anthropology. There was considerable curiosity about the ways in which other faiths engaged with the wider world. Hirsch was one of the organizers of the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the first meeting of which in Chicago in 1893 heralded the birth of the interfaith movement, and both Wise and Kohler also contributed to its proceedings. Reform attitudes to Christianity were complicated, perhaps best described as ambiguous.⁸ Despite a concern to distinguish themselves sharply from traditional Christian doctrines, there was also a strong desire to express their solidarity with their Christian brethren as fellow Americans. Krauskopf was one of many whose preaching found favour with non-Jews; his Sunday services in Philadelphia attracted as many as one thousand participants, large numbers of whom were reportedly not Jewish. There was also considerable interest in and emulation of liberal Protestant thought. All would have kept up with developments in Christian theology and, as we shall see, they often cited Christian authors in their own works. Reform Jewish leaders were quick to associate with congenial Christian causes and movements whenever possible; for example, Hirsch was particularly sympathetic to the Social Gospel movement, which was concerned with issues of social injustice including, among other things, the damaging effects of industrialization and social Darwinism. Another important aspect of the sociocultural context is the fact that the rabbis included in this study all came from European backgrounds: Wise and Hahn both hailed from Bohemia, Kohler was Bavarian, Krauskopf was Prussian (al-

 For the text of the Platform and a series of contextual essays, see Walter Jacob, ed. The Changing World of Reform Judaism: The Pittsburgh Platform in Retrospect (Pittsburgh: Rodef Shalom Congregation, 1985).  Many studies of the influence of Christian thought and practice upon the Reform and Liberal Jewish movements have been written. See, for example, Michael Hilton, The Christian Effect on Jewish Life (London: SCM, 1994) and Daniel R. Langton, “A Question of Backbone: Comparing Christian Influences Upon the Origins of Reform and Liberal Judaism in England,” Melilah, no. 3 (2004).

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though American-educated), and Hirsch was from Luxembourg. Reform congregants themselves tended to be largely German or Central European in origin and the language and culture was heavily Germanized, although this was the generation whose leaders transformed the German-language temples into English language houses of worship. Meyer suggests that Kohler and Hirsch, representatives of the ‘classical’ Reform Judaism of this period, were not original Jewish thinkers but effectively translated the ideas of Geiger and other Germans into the popular thought of American Reform. But this is over-stating the case: he himself admits that there were ‘new foci’ as a result of their greater exposure to Christian theology and secular philosophies, leading to their shared interest in higher biblical criticism, comparative religion, Darwinism, and social relevance.⁹ As we shall see, however, the influence of the Continental European background to U.S. Reform does show itself in their many allusions to German philosophy and familiarity with German biological science. In terms of approaching the idea of evolution as an idea per se, Jewish evolutionary theists, like their Christian counterparts, could draw upon a variety of evolutionary theories when writing about biological transmutation in the late nineteenth century. Despite the fact that Darwin’s name was effectively synonymous with evolutionary theory at that time among religious commentators, the particular versions of evolution that they found most attractive tended to be non-Darwinian theories that emphasized aspects which could be more readily reconciled with the harmonious, purposeful Creator of natural theology, that is, theories that emphasized intelligent design and were teleological in nature.¹⁰ Under the rubric of Darwinism were therefore included ideas of, among others, the heritability of acquired characteristics (Lamarckian evolution), internallydriven linear lines of development (orthogenetic evolution), non-chemico-physical forces that animated life and directed its evolution (vital force theory), evolution directed by divine providence, either directly or by proxy through natural laws of evolution (theistic evolution), and schema of a gradual development of the universe from subatomic particles to human society (universal evolution).¹¹

 Meyer, Response to Modernity, 272.  This synonymization of Darwinism and evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century was more of a popular phenomenon than a scientific one. The period from the 1880s into the first decades of the twentieth century has often been described by historians of science as the time of the ‘eclipse of Darwinism’ when the theory of natural selection fell out of favour among many scientific evolutionists.  Vital force theory is usually associated with Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) and universal evolution with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon Of Man (1955), but similar ideas were ‘in the air’ long before, as even this study of Jewish evolutionary theists shows.

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In fact, it would be more accurate to speak of Jewish Darwinisticism rather than Darwinism, where Darwinisticism refers to a combination of ‘Darwinian theory with metaphysics of providence and progress which, by supplanting causal-mechanical explanations, could secure a teleology and a theodicy on an evolutionary basis.’¹² For some, it was a relief to be able to set aside the more troubling Darwinian mechanisms of natural selection and sexual selection, while for others Darwinian insights could be retained but softened by reference to such alternative theories of evolution. Into this mix could be found justifications and criticisms of eugenics and social Darwinism. The application of evolutionary theory to race and culture provoked heated debates about ethics in the new Darwinian era, with many regarding morality itself as the result of an evolutionary development rather than of traditional accounts of revelation. Such ideas were not new, of course: an evolutionary conception of the development of religion and human thought more generally had been an established axiom in Western thought since the hegemonic triumph of Hegel, Schopenhauer and German idealist philosophy. Arguably, the story of Reform Judaism’s engagement with Darwin is the story of the shift from idealist to naturalistic conceptions of evolution. In this account, the evolutionary discourse can be seen to move from an idealist philosophical framework exemplified by the moderate Isaac Mayer Wise, who was hostile to Darwinism, to the more science-orientated progressives and radicals Kohler, Hirsch and Krauskopf, whose theology was more heavily influenced by scientific naturalism and who tended to minimize their differences with Darwinism. Furthermore, while biblical criticism was associated with evolution by all parties, the radicals differed from Wise in their fervent commitment to it and its revisionist implications for the scholarly understanding of Jewish tradition,¹³ and over time came to proffer increasingly naturalistic conceptions of religion. Complicating the picture is the fact that none of the thinkers considered were entirely con-

 James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America 1870 – 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 15. The term was originally coined by Peckham in Morse Peckham, “Darwin and Darwinisticism,” Victorian Studies 3, no. 1 (1959). The label is useful even if not all of those who might be categorized as such were concerned with theodicy, that is, with the justification of God in the face of the problem of evil and suffering. Two twentieth-century adherents of Darwinisticism who were interested in theodicy, however, included Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, and Hans Jonas, the German-born philosopher of technology. See Daniel R. Langton, “Jewish Religious Thought, the Holocaust, and Darwinism: A Comparison of Hans Jonas and Mordecai Kaplan,” Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 13, no. 2 (2013).  For a useful overview of this phenomenon, see Naomi W. Cohen, “The Challenges of Darwinism and Biblical Criticism to American Judaism,” Modern Judaism 4, no. 2 (1984).

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sistent or systematic in their work, partly because of the constraints of the media in which they wrote, usually sermons and newspaper articles published sporadically over long periods of time, partly because of the rapid pace of change in evolutionary science and the consequent flux in religious reflections, and partly due to the idiosyncratic intellectual worldviews of the thinkers themselves, as we shall see. Darwinian evolutionary theory was understood to challenge a number of theological ideas by many of the religious commentators. Some of these ideas were regarded as more vulnerable than others, including young-earth, biblicalliteral accounts of a six-day creation, teachings about which Jewish tradition had been less than adamant down through the ages.¹⁴ Among Reform Jews, the challenge to natural theology was less serious than it was for many Christians and especially Protestants.¹⁵ The attempt to describe God and His attributes by reference to the Book of Nature rather than to the Book of Revelation, the Bible, boasted a long and venerable tradition within Protestant thought and partly explains the widespread commitment to tropes such as Paley’s argument from design,¹⁶ which famously so captivated the young Darwin, but which had not generally attracted much Jewish attention before their engagement with evolution. Other religious issues appeared to be positively illuminated by the new understanding of evolution, such as the problem of evil, which was addressed explicitly by Wise and Kohler in terms of predation, disease and extinction. More interesting still was the use of mystical language and images found in the writings of Wise, Hahn and Krauskopf, since, following Geiger, Reform Judaism had projected itself as an essentially rational religion and had tended to eschew its mystical traditions. Closely related to this was the vital question of divine immanence, that is, the question of how God’s presence was made manifest in the natural world. It will be argued that, in contrast to the majority of their Christian contemporaries, and despite their frequent protestations against the closely related concept of pantheism (which equates God and nature), both moderate and radical Reform Jewish thinkers in the U.S. tended towards panentheism, projecting an image of a divine element woven into the fabric of the cosmos, while

 For a brief historical overview of the way these issues have been treated in Jewish tradition, see Shalom Paul, Louis Rabinowitz, and Seymour Feldman, “Creation and Cosmology,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Cecil Roth and Geoffrey Wigoder (Jerusalem: KTAV, 1971– 72).  For a rare example of a nineteenth-century Jewish proponent of natural theology, see Daniel R. Langton, “The Gracious Ambiguity of Grace Aguilar (1816 – 47): Anglo-Jewish Theologian, Novelist, Poet, and Pioneer of Interfaith Relations,” Melilah 8 (2011).  William Paley, Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearances of Nature (Philadelphia: John Morgan, 1802).

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maintaining the distinctiveness of the deity. Panentheism can be defined as the idea that all is in God but that God is greater than all, that is, that God’s immanent presence in nature does not adequately delimit the reality of God. It can be contrasted with pantheism, which is the idea that all is God and God is all, that is, that God is to be identified with the totality of nature. In his classic survey of Protestant engagement with evolutionary theory in the U.S. and U.K. in the period 1870 to 1900, Moore found no examples of panentheistic approaches and showed how pantheism featured rarely and was always referred to negatively.¹⁷ The story is very different in the case of U.S. Judaism. Finally, how did the Reform rabbis themselves understand and articulate their own interests in evolution? The distinctive dimension of intellectual history is the question of motivation; in the context of the rise of Reform Judaism, a continuous refrain was the need to align Reform with modernity. In seeking to address the inroads of atheism, to define themselves against Jewish orthodoxy, and to revise the relationship between Judaism with the surrounding Christian culture, the ink flowed freely and many attempts were made to offer coherent in-

 Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies. Accounts of the nineteenth-century emergence of panentheism in Christian thought have tended to emphasize the influence of philosophical currents such as German idealism, leading to a via media between supernaturalism (epitomized by Leibniz) and pantheism (as formulated by Spinoza). According to Gregersen, this was the goal of the German idealist philosopher Karl Krause (1781– 1832), who is usually credited with having originated the term ‘panentheism’. Niels Henrik Gregersen, “Three Varieties of Pantheism,” in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being: Panentheistic Reflections on God’s Presence in a Scientific World, ed. Philip Clayton and Arthur Peacocke (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), 28. Others have viewed panentheism as the logical theological response to science and the Enlightenment, that is, to the necessity of finding a non-interventionist conception of God’s activity in the world vis-à-vis natural scientists’ refusal to invoke non-natural causes. Michael W. Brierley, “Naming a Quiet Revolution: The Pantheistic Turn in Modern Theology,” in In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being, 1– 19. In outlining the possible historical, philosophical and theological origins of the rise of panentheistic Christian theologies, Brierley overlooks the influence of mysticism, despite identifying Dean Inge’s study of mysticism as the earliest Christian work of English theology to refer to ‘panentheism’. William Ralph Inge, Christian Mysticism: Considered in Eight Lectures Delivered Before the University of Oxford, The Bampton Lectures (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1899), cited in Brierley, “Naming a Quiet Revolution: The Pantheistic Turn in Modern Theology,” 2– 3. This is a mistake, at least for Jewish thinkers, since, in addition to the nineteenth-century thinkers Wise, Hahn, and Elijah Benamozegh, one can also point to the twentieth-century philosopher Hans Jonas who similarly adopted a panentheistic stance in relation to evolution and drew upon kabbalah in so doing. See Daniel R. Langton, “Jewish Religious Thought, the Holocaust, and Darwinism: A Comparison of Hans Jonas and Mordecai Kaplan” and Daniel R. 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).

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tellectual Reform Jewish programmes of one sort or another. Their writings reflect a self-conscious sense of their role as pioneers, keen to shape the Reform vision of what in the New World could be said to constitute authentic Judaism. As reflected in prominent Platforms and individual publications alike, the deliberations were on the changing nature of authority, ethics and theology in Judaism. The discussion of authority was conducted in relation to scientific and religious truth claims and involved confrontation with materialist philosophies, biblical criticism, and the historical nature of religion. The discussion of ethics was conducted as an exploration of the proper foundations of morality in a Darwinian world that acknowledged the bestial origins of humankind, which was unclear as to the moral standing of the traditional sources, but which sought an alternative to the moral pessimism of the materialists. The discussion of theology likewise sought to establish acceptable parameters for thinking about the nature of God and His activity in the natural world, and also treated related topics, including the question of immortality. In the course of recounting these debates, we shall see how there was a shift from the moderate Reform Jewish discourse on evolution, which, exemplified by Wise, remained largely shaped by Hegelian and idealist philosophy, to the theology of the progressives and radicals who presented Darwin as an ally and for whom biological evolutionary theory appeared at times as it if were the driving force behind the reforming agenda. In this, several of the radicals chose to emphasize their common cause with like-minded liberal Christian evolutionary theists. As such, the intellectual history of the Reform Jewish engagement with evolution is particularly helpful in terms of understanding the assumption and motivations that lay behind more general ideological shifts within the movement, especially in relation to authority, ethics and theology.

II Evolution ‘in the air’: Scientific, Philosophical and Christian Influences on Reform Jewish Engagement with Evolutionary Theory The complicated issue of how to trace the transmission of ideas in history has already been touched upon. But why should one care about the provenance of an idea, anyway? Among other reasons, the question of where an idea originates becomes a pressing, personal matter if, for example, one wants to use the idea to help make sense of one’s own life and beliefs. It is also the case that because of how we think about priority and authenticity, any value judgment one makes about the idea will be determined to some extent by its perceived origin. We ask: Who thought of it first? Can such a source be regarded as genuinely Jewish? For the history of Jewish thought, a great deal rides on such questions. The claim that the origins of an influential idea lie outside of Jewish tradition can often be controversial. It is particularly problematic if the outside source for an idea, or the conduit through which it came, was Christian. As we shall see, this is precisely the suggestion made here for several of our North American Reform rabbis, who prided themselves on their familiarity with non-Jewish thought and scientific knowledge, although they would have balked at the suggestion that such knowledge could not be incorporated into, or be made to harmonize with, Jewish thought. While it is not possible to outline all the non-Jewish influences relevant to the story, in this section we will set out some of the most likely candidates and will attempt to outline some of the ideas of the non-Jewish authorities who were either explicitly referenced in the Jewish writings or about which a plausible case for influence can be made. Among them are the natural scientists or philosophers Eduard Hartmann, Thomas Huxley, Herbert Spencer and Ernst Haeckel, the philosopher and historian John Fiske, and the theologian and preacher Henry Ward Beecher.¹

 It is worth noting that, while the influences of Huxley and Spencer loomed large in Moore’s survey of influences on Protestant evolutionists, neither Huxley nor Haeckel was as important to Christian theologians as they appeared to be to Kohler, Hirsch and Krauskopf. James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America 1870 – 1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). It is also worth noting that the list offered here is by no means comprehensive, although other wellknown works such as John Tyndall, Address Delivered before the British Association Assembled at Belfast (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1874) and John W. Draper, History of the Conflict between Religion and Science (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1875) appear much less frequently than one might have expected in the rabbis’ references. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664119-002

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Let us begin with the German psychologist and philosopher Eduard Hartmann (1842– 1906) because, while he does not rank as one of the most frequently cited, his Philosophy of the Unconscious (1869) and related writings, which were extremely popular in his own day, present many parallels to ideas contained in the Reform Jewish writings under consideration.² Hartmann is helpful here mainly as an example of one of the many eclectic philosophers contributing to the rich medley of strange and syncretistic evolutionary-infused ideas that were ‘in the air’ in the late nineteenth century. Specifically, Hartmann claimed to reconcile Hegel’s idealism with Schopenhauer’s anti-rationalism by grounding his philosophy in the natural sciences. He was referenced a number of times in the writing of Wise, which, as we shall see, was characterized by a heady mixture of German idealism, naturalism and allusions to Jewish mysticism, and Kohler, too, wrote about Hartmann, albeit to take him to task for his pessimistic conclusions. Arguably, Wise’s student, Hahn, who shared similar interests and language, was also influenced by Hartmann, although he did not refer directly to him.³ In any case, Hartmann presented the unfolding of the Universe as the result of the Will, a familiar term used to describe that which brought reality out of potentiality (although his preferred term was ‘the Unconscious’, which approximated to Schopenhauer’s Will and Hegel’s Absolute). His philosophy was distinguished by its dependence upon, and copious illustrative examples from, the natural sciences, and its promotion of a theory of ascending evolution of organic life, which included the idea (rejected by Wise) that the human was descended from the animal.⁴ He placed a heavy emphasis on the emergence of human consciousness, which allowed the individual to act independently of the Will,⁵ but

 Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophie des Unbewussten (Berlin: Carl Duncker, 1869). Ten editions were published between 1869 and 1890, and although modern commentators tend to downplay its intrinsic worth and emphasize rather its historical significance as providing a bridge or connection between Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the Will and Freud’s psychology of the unconscious, there is no doubt that Hartmann’s works were highly regarded in their own right in his own day.  In this regard it is worth noting that Hartmann was a significant influence in the writings of the Italian rabbi Isaac Benamozegh (1822– 1900), who, like Wise and Hahn, approached Darwinian evolution somewhat suspiciously and whose alternative approach drew heavily on both German idealism and Jewish mysticism. See Langton, “Elijah Benamozegh and Evolutionary Theory.”  ‘The Ascending Evolution of Organic Life on the Earth’ in Eduard von Hartmann, Philosophy of the Unconscious, 3 vols., vol. 2 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co., 1893), 298 – 332.  Hartmann regarded the individual’s capacity to apprehend his relation to the Absolute as a demonstration of the quintessential claim of mysticism. Hartmann, ‘The Unconscious in Mysticism’ in ibid., 1: 354– 72.

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this was the exception to the general rule that the Will acted upon the universe with a design or telos (contra Darwin).⁶ Because all living phenomena within that universe effectively channelled the Will, Hartmann could write of a single underlying force that was everywhere operative and was the ground of all being.⁷ As such, the attraction of his philosophy can be seen in its strong teleological assumptions, which all evolutionary theists shared to some degree, and for its monist and pantheistic tendencies; for while, on the one hand, he propounded a materialist form of monism that saw no substantive difference between matter or mind, on the other he was also capable of writing of the universally embedded Unconscious in terms of the divine (by the time of the sixth edition, at least).⁸ Wise was particularly at home with Hartmann’s approach, but these sort of philosophical reflections on biology were precisely those with which all the Reform rabbis grappled in attempting to relate God to an evolving natural world. While the fearsome reputation of the evolutionary biologist and public intellectual Thomas Huxley (1825 – 1895) as ‘the arch-antagonist of faith’⁹ made him persona non grata among many Christian theologians, his anti-clerical attitude and hostility towards religious traditions and institutions was of less concern among North American Reform rabbis. Krauskopf even presented Christian hostility to Huxley as evidence of the irrationality of Christianity. In 1876 Huxley visited the States for a brief lecture tour on evolution, the lectures being collected and published as American Addresses the following year.¹⁰ They covered the basics of Darwinian theory and scientific debates about the fossil record and related evidence. While he did not refrain from challenging biblical creationism, he diplomatically called it the Miltonic, rather than the biblical, hypothesis, allowing for the fact that the Bible could be read in a non-literal sense; rather, he explained, it was the influential image of special creation over six days found in Milton’s Paradise Lost that primarily concerned him.¹¹ For religious liberals, such an approach was entirely acceptable, as was Huxley’s conception in ‘Gen-

 Hartmann, ‘The Goal of Evolution and the Significance of Consciousness’ in ibid., 3: 120 – 43.  This force for development also helped explain the evolution of such disparate phenomena as language and history. Hartmann, ‘The Unconscious in the Origin of Language’ in ibid., 1: 293 – 301 and Hartmann, ‘The Unconscious in History’ in ibid., 2: 1– 27.  Like Ernst Haeckel, to whom we will return and who provoked more direct engagement from Jewish respondents, Hartmann was convinced that future religion would be monist in character. Hartmann, ‘The Unconscious and the God of Theism’ in Philosophy of the Unconscious, 2, 245 – 76.  Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 68.  Thomas Henry Huxley, American Addresses (London: Macmillan, 1877).  Ibid., 7– 9, 17– 26.

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esis versus Nature’ (1885)¹² and ‘The Evolution of Theology’ (1886) of religion as an historical phenomenon, accruing over the ages many primitive beliefs that reflected the limitations of the human mind and that now needed to be discarded.¹³ Furthermore, those religious thinkers who wished to use Huxley as a scientific authority on evolution would have been encouraged by his conciliatory tone in discussing theology proper, which included the suggestion that symbolic language was used profitably in both science and theology.¹⁴ Even more so, they would have seized upon his hostile condemnation of philosophical materialism as a worldview,¹⁵ even as he championed the materialist assumptions and terminology of the scientific method¹⁶ and his ready acknowledgement that science

 The mistake was to think that religion taught scientific truths: ‘What we are usually pleased to call religion nowadays is, for the most part, Hellenized Judaism… The antagonism of science is not to religion, but to the heathen survivals and the bad philosophy under which religion herself is often well-nigh crushed. And, for my part, I trust that this antagonism will never cease; but that, to the end of time, true science will continue to fulfill one of her most beneficent functions, that of relieving men form the burden of false science which is imposed on them in the name of religion.’ Thomas Henry Huxley, “Genesis Versus Nature (1885),” in Science and the Hebrew Tradition (London: Macmillan, 1893), 162– 63. Originally published in Nineteenth Century (1885).  Religion was a human construct: ‘From my present point of view, theology is regarded as a natural product of the operations of the human mind, under the conditions of its existence, just as any other branch of science, or the arts of architecture, or music or painting are such products. Like them, theology has a history.’ Huxley, “The Evolution of Theology (1886),” in Science and the Hebrew Tradition (London: Macmillan, 1893), 288.  He wrote: ‘I suppose that, so long as the human mind exists, it will not escape its deep-seated instinct to personify its intellectual conceptions… [T]he philosopher who is worthy of the name knows that his personified hypotheses, such as law, and force, and ether, and the like are merely useful symbols, while the ignorant and the careless take them for adequate expressions of reality. So, it may be, that the majority of mankind may find the practice of morality made easier by the use of theological symbols. And unless these are converted from symbols into idols, I do not see that science has anything to say to the practice, except to give an occasional warning of its dangers. But, when such symbols are dealt with as real existences, I think the highest duty which is laid upon men of science is to show that these dogmatic idols have no greater value than the fabrications of men’s hands… which they have replaced.’ Ibid., 372.  This, despite his explanation that ‘I am no materialist, but, on the contrary, believe materialism to be involve grave philosophical error. This union of materialist terminology with the repudiation of materialistic philosophy, I share with some of the most thoughtful men with whom I am acquainted.’ Thomas Henry Huxley, Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews (London: Macmillan, 1870), 152.  He explained ‘In itself it is of little moment whether we express the phenomena of matter in terms of spirit; or the phenomena of spirit, in terms of matter; matter may be regarded as a form of thought, thought may be regarded as a property of matter – each statement has a certain relative truth. But with a view to the progress of science, the materialistic terminology is in every way to be preferred. For it connects thought with the other phenomena of the universe, and suggests inquiry into the nature of those physical conditions, or concomitants of thought, which are

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could not account for the emergence of life itself.¹⁷ Hirsch identified him as a moderate in the science-religion debate, and Krauskopf stressed his opposition to materialist philosophy. Potentially more problematic – although not for our thinkers – was the claim made in Man’s Place in Nature (1863) that man and ape shared a common ancestor and his insistence that evolution could explain humanity as well as any other form of life, but in that famous work he focused primarily on fossil and physiological evidence, and did not wade into the implications for human morality. Later, in Evolution and Ethics (1894), he argued for the evolved nature of practical ethics (dependent upon evolved emotions, intellect and modes of social living) but rejected the idea that one could derive from nature a detailed system of moral philosophy; ethical values should, in his view, be the result of human deliberation.¹⁸ In some ways, it is not surprising that Ernest Haeckel (1834– 1919) featured in the writings of Kohler, Krauskopf and Hirsch, considering their Germanic backgrounds and that he was the most prominent popularizer of Darwin in Germany.¹⁹ Kohler in particular credits him, along with Darwin, of convincing him of the natural laws at work on the development of life. This biologist and philosopher was an unconventional Darwinian, however, in that he attempted to integrate his own cell theory with it, and insomuch as he emphasized that natural selection was significantly constrained by other factors including historical and environmental forces. Of greatest interest here is his espousal of ‘monism’, which influenced Krauskopf and especially Hirsch, and which was first articulat-

more or less accessible to us, and a knowledge of which may, in future, help us to exercise the same kind of control over the world of thought as we already possess in respect of the material world; whereas, the alternative, or spiritualistic, terminology is utterly barren, and leads to nothing but obscurity and confusion of ideas.’ Ibid., 160.  For example, he spoke of an ‘admitted absence of evidence… as to the mode in which the existing forms of life have originated’ in “Biogenesis and Abiogenesis (1870),” in Thomas Henry Huxley, Critiques and Addresses (London: Macmillan, 1873), 256.  He wrote: ‘The propounders of what are called the ‘ethics of evolution’, when the ‘evolution of ethics’ would usually better express the object of their speculations, adduce a number of more or less interesting facts and more or less sound arguments, in favour of the origin of the moral sentiments, in the same way as other natural phenomena, by a process of evolution. I have little doubt, for my part, that they are on the right track… Cosmic evolution may teach us how the good and the evil tendencies of man may have come about; but, in itself, it is incompetent to furnish any better reason why what we call good is preferable to what we call evil than we had before.’ Thomas Henry Huxley, Evolution and Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1894), 79 – 80.  Darwin himself wrote in the preface of The Descent of Man (1871), ‘almost all of the conclusions at which I have arrived I find confirmed by [Haeckel].’ This included the idea of mankind’s common origin with simians. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (London: J. Murray, 1871), I, 4.

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ed in General Morphology (1866).²⁰ As it appeared in this work, monism was a mechanistic view of organic life and physical nature as a unified whole, which included social phenomena and mental processes; as such, life only differed from inorganic nature in the degree to which it was organized. The language of the book carried religious overtones, however, something that Krauskopf emphasized. Spinoza featured prominently in relation to the ‘pantheism’ and ‘natural religion’ espoused, and God was defined as ‘necessity’ and as ‘the total of all force and therefore of all matter’. But bearing in mind his hostility to revealed religion, Haeckel’s claim that ‘God reveals himself in all natural phenomena’ meant something very different from the similar claims of proponents of natural theology. In The History of the Natural Creation (1868),²¹ he argued that monism assumed that no moral order, no absolute morality, existed. Rather, morality had its origins in the social instincts of animals. From the time of an article entitled ‘Cell-souls and Soul-Cells’ (1878),²² the pantheistic aspects of his monism were expanded by his incorporation of hylozoism, that is, the idea that all matter, including the universe as a whole, was in some sense alive or possessed a psychical element; with this he explicitly sought to avoid a ‘depressing’ materialism which would reduce the world to ‘dead matter’. It was in the 1870s that Haeckel developed the famous ‘biogenetic law’ that ontogeny recapitulated phylogeny, that is, the recapitulation law that each particular individual of a species embodied the entire evolution of the species; this theory famously reinforced the dominant belief in progressive character of evolution. In Anthropogeny, or The Evolutionary History of Man (1874)²³ his monism appeared as a synthesis of Darwinism, pantheism, mechanism, and natural religion. The trajectory toward the Monistic Religion, which Haeckel would develop between 1904– 1919, appears obvious in hindsight; certainly, it is worth noting that Haeckel’s pantheistic overtones alienated his more materialistic fellow monists even at the time when the U.S. Reform rabbis would have been reading him.²⁴ Despite accusations of atheism in the 1870 – 80s, the prominent philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820 – 1903) attracted the attention of many Christian evolu-

 Ernst Haeckel, Generelle Morphologie der Organismen (General Morphology of Organisms) (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1866).  Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The Natural History of Creation) (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1868).  “Zellseelen und Seelenzellen (Cell-Souls and Soul-Cells),” Deutsche Rundschau XVI (1878).  Anthropogenie, oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen (Anthropogeny, or the Evolutionary History of Man) (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1874).  For a fuller discussion of the religious dimensions to Haeckel’s monism, see Niles R. Holt, “Ernst Haeckel’s Monistic Religion,” Journal of the History of Ideas 32, no. 2 (1971).

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tionists, and was in turn of considerable interest for Hirsch and Kohler and especially Krauskopf, albeit more often than not in the background. Respected in the UK, he became wildly popular in the U.S.. What explained this vogue?²⁵ In part Spencer’s attraction lay in his articulation of the idea that underlying all of reality was a kind of universal evolution at work, which seemed a much richer vision than Darwin’s claims which were largely limited to biology.²⁶ It was also due to his preference for Lamarckian mechanisms, that is, the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which led him to present a teleological conception of evolution as progressing toward the goal of a final state of equilibrium, contrasting with the open-endedness of Darwinian evolution. Such views resonated with the goal-directedness and lawful purpose found in natural theology and the Victorian culture of Progress more generally. Of even greater appeal, however, was Spencer’s concept of the Unknowable, especially in First Principles of a New Philosophy (1867), upon which it seemed possible to build a theological edifice.²⁷ For Spencer, the human experience of reality was built upon a substratum that was literally inconceivable because it lay beyond the senses and beyond the limits of the mind. And just as God (as an uncaused Cause and as a phenomenon that could not be related to any other thing in a meaningful way) was inscrutable and unthinkable, and yet was believed responsible for the laws of nature, so the Unknowable was the source and origin of a universal law of evolution at work in all realms of reality (whether in cosmology, biology, or in human society and thought).²⁸ Perhaps more than any other, it was this idea of a universal law of evolution that would influence Kohler, Hirsch, and Krauskopf. Insofar as mankind’s ideas of God had evolved over time, Spencer’s conception of the Unknowable, that is, the ground-of-all-being shorn of all anthropomorphism, could be understood as the final stage of religious development,

 Moore has a chapter on ‘The Vogue of Herbert Spencer’ in Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies.  Spencer applied a universalist understanding of the universal law of development to all branches of knowledge, including astronomy, geology, biology, psychology, and sociology. Moore makes the case that while Spencer was mainly deductive in his approach, Darwin combined in a more cautious way inductive, deductive and abductive (hypothesis formation) methods. Ibid., 165.  For an overview of Spencer’s views on the Unknown as related to atheism, pantheism and materialism, see Michael W. Taylor, The Philosophy of Herbert Spencer (London: Continuum, 2007), 135– 43.  The idea of universal or general evolution, as seen in the development of human knowledge and biology, underpinned everything Spencer wrote. See, for example, Herbert Spencer, “General Aspects of the Evolution-Hypothesis,” in Principles in Biology (London: Williams & Norgate, 1864), 346 – 51.

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and as a purification and exaltation of earlier religious and moral speculation. In this sense, Science and Religion were moving towards each other and reconciliation could be envisaged.²⁹ Spencer’s conception of the natural world was not as a collection of separate phenomena held together by some mysterious force; rather it was compound, that is, all phenomena should be regarded as an ensemble, sharing their properties and elements and related intimately to each other.³⁰ Viewed this way, scientific reductionism could legitimately start from atoms and arrive at an appreciation of complex life and even moral thought as the result of processes within that more basic reality, the world being essentially a continuous redistribution of matter and motion. While Spencer might not have conceived of the Unknowable foundation of the universe in pantheistic terms,³¹ others could find support for a religious conception of the immanent presence of God in the world. Likewise, the seeds were sown for a shift in religious perspective away from abstract theology to ethical concerns, justified by evolutionary perspective; Spencer himself would later express this hope that ‘recognizing the mystery of things as insoluble, religious organizations will be devoted to ethical culture.’³² He believed that the basis of the moral faculty lay in desire for pleasure and dislike of pain (much to Kohler’s disgust), but that moral values progressed through the ‘accumulated effects of instinctual or inherited experiences’, and, as such, could not be improved by government, leading to what is often described as a laissez faire ethic and an apparent disregard for social inequality. The significance of John Fiske (1842– 1901) relates to his role as Herbert Spencer’s foremost American interpreter and to his own strongly panentheistic tendencies; he was probably the single most influential authority on evolution for radical Reform Judaism, and echoes of most of the views described here can be heard in the sermons of Kohler, Hirsch and Krauskopf. This prolific author best known for his Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874), regarded Darwinian evolutionary theory as triumphant,³³ but followed Spencer (and thus Lamarckism) in focusing on ‘use-inheritance’ and ‘direct adaptation to the environment’,

 Chapter 5 dealt with the relationship between religion and science and was entitled ‘The Reconciliation’. Herbert Spencer, First Principles, of a New System of Philosophy (London: Williams & Norgate, 1867), 98 – 123.  Herbert Spencer, “Prison Ethics (1860),” in Essays: Scientific, Political, and Speculative (London: Williams & Norgate, 1891), 153.  Spencer equated pantheism with self-creation, which he suggested required the ability to conceive of ‘potential existence passing into actual existence by some inherent necessity; which we cannot.’ Spencer, First Principles, of a New System of Philosophy, 32.  Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography (London: Williams & Norgate, 1904), 468.  John Fiske, “The Triumph of Darwinism,” The North American Review 124, no. 254 (1877).

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which were made possible by an organism’s ‘inherent capacity for adaptive changes’ through the direct and indirect ‘equilibration’ of internal and external forces.³⁴ In particular, he followed Spencer in offering a ‘law of universal evolution’ to which Darwin’s natural selection was subsidiary and which had important implications for the understanding of religion. From the universal law of evolution was derived the influential idea of ‘Universal Life’. Spencer had coined the term in considering the cycles of the universe, in which universal death and universal life followed one another. Fiske interpreted this in terms of an animating principle found throughout Nature: [T]he universe as a whole is thrilling in every fibre with Life, – not , indeed, life in the usual restricted sense, but life in a general sense. The distinction, once deemed absolute, between the living and the not-living is converted into a relative distinction; and Life as manifested in the organism is seen to be only a specialized form of the Universal Life.³⁵

Yet in an important way, Fiske went beyond his master with a programmatic attempt to offer in Outlines and other works an explicitly theistic working out of Spencer’s doctrine of the Unknowable. A series of lectures entitled ‘The Idea of God as Effected by Modern Knowledge’ (1885) resulted in the first public profession of panentheism in the U.S..³⁶ For Fiske, the universe was already conceived of less as a machine that was made, and more as an organism that grew. Now, denuded of any traces of anthropomorphism, Fiske presented God as a POWER, to which no limit in time and space is conceivable, of which all phenomena, as presented in consciousness, are manifestations, but which we can know only through these manifestations… The universe is the manifestation of the Deity, yet is Deity something more than the universe. ³⁷

Commenting on Spencer’s views on the relationship between religion and evolution in 1882, Fiske wrote that all religions, whether rudimentary or highly developed, made two related claims, namely that ‘there is an eternal Power that is not ourselves, and that this Power makes for righteousness.’³⁸ Evolution, he suggest-

 John Fiske, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, vol. 2 (Boston: Houghton, 1874), chapters 10 – 12.  John Fiske, The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge (London: Macmillan & Co., 1885), 149.  Robert C. Whittemore, “The Americanisation of Panentheism,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 7, no. 1 (1969): 26 – 27.  Fiske, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, 2, 414, 15.  Originally a speech given in honour of Herbert Spencer, 9 November 1882, it was published in Fiske, “Evolution and Religion,” in Excursions of an Evolutionist (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and

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ed, taught these same two truths from a scientific perspective for it demonstrated that there was a force or power that was not limited by time and space that compelled the universe in all its material and spiritual manifestations to evolve.³⁹ For example, morality, which was often regarded as religious in origin, was itself a product of evolution over long ages.⁴⁰ In contrast to Spencer, Fiske was passionately concerned to demonstrate that religion and science complemented each other, which found expression in his strong conviction that humankind was the goal of evolution. For while Fiske readily accepted that humans were evolved animals,⁴¹ he maintained a belief in the superiority of humanity over all other forms of life throughout his publications. This claim focused on what he regarded as several related features: the intellect, morality, and immortality. The evolved intellect was ‘the vehicle for the soul’ and the human animal’s distinguishing feature.⁴² Morality was self-evidently a progressive evolutionary Co., 1883), 298. Fiske noted that this two-fold truth was taught ‘not as dogmas handed down to us by priestly tradition, not as mysterious intuitive convictions of which we can render no intelligible account to ourselves, but as scientific truths concerning the innermost constitution of the universe, truths that have been disclosed by observation and reflection, like other scientific truths, and that accordingly harmonize naturally and easily with the whole body of our knowledge.’  He explained: ‘The doctrine of evolution asserts, as the widest and deepest truth which the study of nature can disclose to us, that there exists a Power to which no limit in time or space is conceivable, and that all the phenomena of the universe, whether they be what we call material or what we call spiritual phenomena, are manifestations of this infinite and eternal Power.’ Ibid., 301.  As he put it: ‘What says the doctrine of evolution with regard to the ethical side of this twofold assertion that lies at the bottom of all religion?… Now science began to return a decisively affirmative answer to such questions as these, when it began, with Mr. Spencer, to explain moral beliefs and moral sentiments as products of evolution. For clearly, when you say of a moral belief or a moral sentiment that it is a product of evolution, you imply that it is something which the universe through untold ages has been labouring to bring forth, and you ascribe to it a value proportionate to the enormous effort that it has cost to produce it… [W]e see that, in an ultimate analysis, that is right which tends to enhance fulness of life, and that is wrong which tends to detract from fulness of life we, – then see that the distinction between right and wrong is rooted in the deepest foundations of the universe…’ Ibid., 302– 04.  He wrote: ‘[W]e see that the very same forces, subtle and exquisite and profound, which brought upon the scene the primal germs of life and caused them to unfold, which through countless ages of struggle and death have cherished the life that could live more perfectly and destroyed the life that could only live less perfectly, until Humanity, with all its hopes and fears and aspirations, has come into being as the crown of all this stupendous work.’ Ibid., 301– 04.  He explained: ‘According to Darwinism, the creation of Man is still the goal toward which Nature tended from the beginning… The process of evolution is excessively slow, and its ends are achieved at the cost of enormous waste of life, but for innumerable ages its direction has been toward the goal here pointed out; and the case may be fitly summed up in the statement that whereas in its rude beginnings the psychical life was but an appendage to the body, in fully-

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phenomenon if one considered the range of intellectual behaviours found among Pacific islanders and other ‘savages’, and in gorillas and chimps.⁴³ He was inclined, as was Krauskopf, to highlight the range of behaviours among savages and not just hold them up as lower forms. And as evolutionary forces worked upon the intellect and morality, the result, he conjectured, was what we meant by the soul, or, as he put it: ‘[S]teadily developing ephemeral conscious life may reach a critical point where it suddenly puts on immortality.’ This jump from the mortal to the immortal posed no more difficulty, philosophically speaking, than had the evolutionary transition to upright posture or had the emergence of speech.⁴⁴ It was this suggestion that man had evolved into an immortal being that Krauskopf took and ran with. Henry Ward Beecher (1813 – 87) was a Christian Darwinist and a revivalist clergyman, who has been described as ‘America’s foremost pulpiteer of the later nineteenth-century’.⁴⁵ He wrote a two-volume collection of sermons entitled Evolution and Religion (1885),⁴⁶ and, while neither by Kohler nor Hirsch cited it, Krauskopf referred to it repeatedly in glowing terms in his own study Evolution

developed Humanity the body is but the vehicle for the soul.’ John Fiske, The Destiny of Man Viewed in the Light of His Origins (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1884), 31, 62– 65, 72.  He commented, ‘Man is slowly passing from a primitive social state in which he was little better than a brute, toward an ultimate social state in which his character shall have become so transformed that nothing of the brute can be detected in it.’ Ibid., 80, 99, 103.  Ibid., 115 – 18. He argued: ‘Sometimes we hear this question propounded as a difficulty in the Darwinian theory of man’s origin. How could immortal man have been produced through heredity from an ephemeral brute?… When does the immortal soul of the human individual come into existence? Is it at the moment of conception, or when the new-born babe begins to breathe, or at some moment between, or even perhaps at some era of early childhood when moral responsibility can be said to have begun? Some of the answers to these questions would transform an ephemeral creature into an immortal one in the same person… The maxim that Nature makes no leaps is far from true. Nature’s habit is to make prodigious leaps, but only after long preparation… [S]teadily developing ephemeral conscious life may reach a critical point where it suddenly puts on immortality… In the course of evolution there is no more philosophical difficulty in man’s acquiring immortal life than in his acquiring the erect posture and articulate speech. In my little book “The Destiny of Man” I insisted upon the dramatic tendency or divine purpose indicated in the long cosmic process which has manifestly from the outset aimed at the production and perfection of the higher spiritual attributes of humanity.’ Fiske, Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, 2, 82– 83, 86.  Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies, 220.  Henry Ward Beecher, Evolution and Religion, 2 vols. (New York: Fords, Howard, & Hulbert, 1885). Of greatest interest here is the first volume, entitled ‘Discussing the Bearings of the Evolutionary Philosophy on the Fundamental Doctrines of Evangelical Christianity’. The second volume, entitled ‘Discussing the Application of the Evolutionary Principles and Theories to the Practical Aspects of Religious Life’, was much less explicitly concerned with evolutionary theory.

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and Judaism (1887). It is not difficult to see why, since both were left-leaning liberals whose reformist tendencies were drawn to evolutionary theory as an explanatory framework in their projects to recast religion for the modern age. For Beecher, the religion-science conflict was a false one.⁴⁷ Evolution not only offered an analogy for understanding the progressive development of both religion and human intellectual history,⁴⁸ and as such was inspirational,⁴⁹ it actually offered a key to a revival for ‘true religion’. As such, he focused two chapters on a consideration of fundamental doctrines that were enhanced by the new perspective, including those of divine omnipresence (now understood as the divine foundation for the universal diffusion of force throughout the universe), of original sin (now understood in terms of humanity’s bestial origins), and of spiritual regeneration or rebirth (now understood as part of the evolutionary process, developing from inanimate matter to a lower physical stage to a higher spiritual one).⁵⁰ Throughout, Beecher rarely cited authorities, except for biblical references, which peppered his presentation.⁵¹ Darwin himself was entirely absent. Religion remained vital for him, not least because morality remained the exclusive purview of religion (and in this failure to consider animal antecedents he appeared entirely unaware of Darwin’s Descent of Man). In defining the theory of evolution he offered a somewhat vague, albeit rhetorically powerful account of theistic evolution. Evolution was the ‘great cosmic doctrine’ that described ‘God’s methods in universal creation’.⁵² The world could be viewed as a marvelous machine that had ‘by inherent laws gradually builded itself’. It was a highly teleological vision. Moving ever ‘onward and upward in determinate lines and directions’, the world’s progress was achieved through ‘the mediation of natural laws’, including that of natural selection.⁵³

 Ibid., 48 – 49, 79. He was more concerned about materialism, although this did not feature prominently. Ibid., 125, 155, 251.  Ibid., 15.  Ibid., 156, 351.  Ibid., 75 – 109. For original sin, see also ibid., 58, 77, 86, 91.  Exceptions included Prof. Dana (Yale), Prof. Le Conte (California), President McCosh (Princeton), and Mivart, Wallace and the Duke of Argyll in England. Beecher also contrasted Haeckel and Spencer, as, respectively, proponents of materialist and spiritual philosophies of evolutionary theory. Spencer he actually described ‘the ablest defender of the essential elements of a rightly interpreted Christianity that has arisen… I think that Herbert Spencer will be found to have given to the world more truth in one lifetime than any other man that has lived in the schools of philosophy in this world.’ Ibid., 111, 125.  Ibid., 3, 36 – 37.  Ibid., 113, 115. While he never mentioned explicitly either natural selection or Darwin, Beecher wrote that ‘Death prepares the way for life. Things are adapted thus to their condition, to their

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Beecher’s views resonated strongly with the U.S. Reform rabbis in several ways. They shared a fierce optimism that an evolutionary perspective could free religion from irrational beliefs of the past to ensure a vibrant religion for the future,⁵⁴ not least in terms of revisionist biblical criticism.⁵⁵ Beecher, too, distanced himself from pantheism while coming close to espousing it when presenting the world as emanating from God and life as the product of divine natural laws.⁵⁶ Two ideas appealed to Krauskopf in particular. Beecher’s brief reference to God as ‘the life Universal’⁵⁷ was taken up and developed by Krauskopf into a doctrine of God as ‘the Universal life’, that is, the ubiquitous life force. And while

climate, to their food; or by their power of escape from their adversaries, or their power of establishing themselves and of defending their position, they make it secure. The vast universe, looked at largely, is moving onward and upward in determinate lines and directions, while on the way the weak are perishing. Yet, there is an unfolding process that is carrying creation up to higher planes and upon higher lines, reaching more complicated conditions in structure, in function, in adaptation, with systematic and harmonious results, so that the whole physical creation is organizing itself for a sublime march toward perfectness.’ Ibid., 115. Miracles were not actually disallowed, but represented a special case of God directing ‘the great powers of nature to special results.’ Ibid., 122.  As he put it, ‘Evolution, applied to religion, will influence it [theology] only as the hidden temples are restored, by removing the sands which have drifted in from the arid deserts of scholastic and medieval theologies. It will change theology, but only to bring out the simple temple of God in clearer and more beautiful lines and proportions.’ Ibid., 53. He was unconcerned about the fate of the institutional Church, per se. Ibid., 128, 136.  He claimed that ‘The divine revelation, interpreted by Evolution, will in my judgment free the Sacred Scriptures from fictitious pretensions made by men, from clouds of misconceptions…’ Ibid., 56. In private correspondence in 1883 (and posthumously published) he had written: ‘I am a cordial Christian evolutionist… No one can express the earnestness which I feel that, in the advance of science, which will inevitably sweep away much rubbish from the beliefs of men, a place shall be found for a higher spirituality – for a belief that shall have its roots in science and its top in the sunlight of faith and love.’ Henry Ward Beecher, Congregationalist 27 July 1901, cited in Paxton Hibben, Hentry Ward Beecher: An American Portrait (New York: George H. Duran Co., 1927), 340 – 41.  Beecher, Evolution and Religion, 63, 78, 251, 314– 15.  He argued that ‘God is the life universal; that whatever is force or energy directly or remotely proceeds from the nature of God’s own being. How God infuses himself into mind or matter no one knows… [But there is a] connection that subsists between the developed universe and the ever-presence of the divine Intelligence and the divine Will.’ He went on to assert, however, that ‘This is not Pantheism, which makes the universe, in its totality, God… God is not matter; God is not in matter. That is, we have no reason to say so. Yet all laws, all susceptibilities, issue from him. They are the result of his intelligence and of his will. Their power is the continuous power of God as the life of the world. The universe is a perpetual outgoing from the mind of God; and yet God is separable from this material universe in his existence and methods.’ Ibid., 63.

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his suggestion that mankind had progressed through the processes of evolution from the immaterial, to the material and animalistic, to the spiritual,⁵⁸ was not remarkable in itself, he hinted at a radical conception of the afterlife as part of the evolutionary process, with unfit, or ‘unripe’, souls weeded out of the process and only the moral going on to be replanted and to develop in ‘spheres beyond’.⁵⁹ Such musings seem to have inspired Krauskopf to make the explicit claim that the afterlife was part of the evolutionary process. We have now outlined the views of some of the best-known international contributors to the great Religion-Science debates of the late nineteenth century whose ideas appeared to influence our Jewish thinkers either directly or indirectly. Even at this stage, it is possible to make an important observation in terms of the sources and authorities cited, for we are dealing with two distinct discourses when we contrast the moderate Wise and his student Hahn with the more radical reformers Kohler, Hirsch and Krauskopf. This can be most clearly seen in regard to the common interest in the doctrine of universal evolution and in the shared panentheistic tendency, for which their respective frames of reference were very different. For while the moderates expressed such ideas in relation to idealist philosophies of evolution, such as those of Hartmann and Spencer, the radicals reflected much more strongly the influence of Christian thought, especially that of John Fiske. Arguably, Wise and Hahn can most usefully be compared to the Italian Elijah Benamozegh, another nineteenth-century Jewish panentheist with a profound theological commitment to universal evolution, since he, like them, combined aspects of Jewish mysticism with German idealist philosophy.⁶⁰ But while the others were undoubtedly just as familiar with such philosophical sources, it is surely no coincidence that the panentheist tendency does not appear in the writings on evolution by Kohler and Hirsch before Krauskopf’s 1887 work, which was informed by Fiske’s 1885 article. Bearing in mind the extent of the intellectual intercourse between the three radicals – they knew each other well, two of them having married daughters of the same

 Ibid., 344.  He mused, ‘What has become of the human race dying through such incomputable periods of time? What was done for them in this riotous world but to let them unfold by the slow operation of natural laws, without altar, teacher, priest, or guide, through ages, that they should be plunged at death into an infernal torment? Under the conditions in which the world has unfolded, the only acceptable view would be that the unripe perish. If at death men have gained in moral elements enough for replanting, we can believe that they are preserved in some sphere beyond, growing in a fairer clime and better soil, while those who have escaped the bondage of the flesh and developed into likeness to God have the liberty of the sons of God.’ Ibid., 88.  See Chapter I, fn 17.

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radical Reform rabbi David Einhorn, and they had a track record of writing about shared interests in unconventional subjects such as the apostle Paul⁶¹ – it seems most likely that Kohler and Hirsch were also influenced by Fiske here, either directly or through Krauskopf. This is not to suggest that their evolutionary theology was simply cribbed from Fiske and other Christian thinkers such as Henry Ward Beecher. It is rather to recognize the reality that markers such as panentheism are not reliable indicators of the source of such ideas, at least as it appears from the references cited. Why did Christian thought have such an impact in this context? In attempting to establish a modern foundation for Judaism, the U.S. Reform rabbis were writing in much the same environment and from closely related perspectives. They were all concerned about the influence of materialism and atheism and viewed the primary threat to Jewish continuity to be what they saw as the backward, superstitious and ritualistic worldview of Orthodox Judaism, which was largely hostile to Darwin.⁶² But while Wise was keen to respond to these threats by attempting to present scientific and philosophical knowledge, including evolutionary science, as commensurate with a reformed Judaism, he was hostile to the Darwinian mechanism itself and regarded it as part of the problem; likewise, his student, Hahn, was also hesitant, at least in his earliest responses. Wise’s interest in universal evolution came out of wider evolutionary thought of the Hegelian variety, while his hostility was due in part to the common association of evolutionary theory with biblical criticism, to which he was strongly opposed. Hahn’s initial hesitation stemmed from the influence of his mentor, Wise. In contrast, the radicals (and Hahn, eventually), were less in the thrall of idealistic philosophy and privileged naturalism over it, seeking to downplay any differences with Darwinian theory; they viewed the Religion-Science debate, and the biblical-critical approaches with which it was associated, as the key ideological battleground on which the cause of progressive Judaism would be fought against the stifling tradition of Orthodoxy. In such an environment, liberal Christian theologians who were engaged in a similar battle against the forces of conservatism and tradition, and who also sought to revitalize their religion by building their theological edifices on the work of Darwin, could be embraced as vital intellectual allies. Perhaps this explains why Krauskopf, as we shall see, offered a theology that looks much closer to that of the Christian radical Fiske than it does to  Daniel R. Langton, The Apostle Paul in the Jewish Imagination : A Study in Modern JewishChristian Relations (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 65 – 67, 79 – 81, 98 – 102.  Daniel R. Langton, “Discourses of Doubt: The Place of Atheism, Scepticism and Infidelity in Nineteenth-Century North American Reform Jewish Thought,” Hebrew Union College Annual 88 (2018).

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that of his teacher Wise, the leader of the moderate wing of Reform. The influence of Christian thought lay as much in the inspiration and reassurance it provided to the radical Jewish Reform thinkers, and in the encouragement to trust their instincts in privileging biblical-criticism, rationalism and science, as it did in suggesting specific theological possibilities. We are now in a position to begin a close reading of key texts of the Reform Jewish engagement with Darwin in late nineteenth-century in the United States.

III Isaac Mayer Wise: The Cosmic God and an Evolving Cosmos Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise (1819 – 1900) was born in Bohemia, part of the Austrian empire, and received a traditional education in Prague. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1846, where he became a congregational rabbi, eventually settling down in Cincinnati. He has been described as the father of Reform Judaism in the United States and was in the vanguard of synagogue reform, introducing among other things mixed pews, choral singing and confirmation. He founded in 1854 and edited the English language journal The Israelite, which became the leading organ for Reform Judaism; compiled the standard Reform prayer book, Minhag America in 1857; and was behind the establishment in 1875 of the Reform Jewish rabbinical training college, Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati. On the other hand, he was very much a moderate reformer, refusing to countenance the findings of biblical criticism and seeking always to reconcile the more radical and conservative wings of the emerging movement. It was in Cincinnati in the autumn and winter of 1874– 5 that Wise gave a series of public lectures, excerpts of which were published in The Israelite, and also in Cincinnati daily papers including The Enquirer, which a year later were published as the book The Cosmic God: A Fundamental Philosophy in Popular Lectures (1876). Some have suggested that there is little if anything Jewish about the work.¹ Certainly, while Wise frequently cites the Bible he rarely mentions the rabbinic literature or articulates what could be regarded as an obviously Jewish position.² Wise himself asserted that the minimization of the Jewish aspect was a deliberate tactic,³ but, as we shall see, it is in fact possible to trace the

 Cherry states that ‘Cosmic God lacks a strong Jewish flavor, at least in comparison to the European Jewish responses to Darwin from this period’, with the exception of ‘a trace of the medieval language of the active intellect and influence of Maimonides, especially on the relationship between intelligence and morality.’ Cherry, “Creation, Evolution and Jewish Thought”, 163.  One exception is an allusion to a rabbinic midrash that presents humanity as a partner with God in creation. Isaac Mayer Wise, The Cosmic God: A Fundamental Philosophy in Popular Lectures (Cincinnati: Office American Israelite and Deborah, 1876), 177.  Wise later explained his decision to adopt a scientific rather than a Jewish approach in confronting the ‘babbling atheism in every nook and cranny’ by observing that ‘One cannot enter into battle with people by means of the Bible, Talmud, history, and philosophy: they don’t understand anything of this; and teachers and students will not be convinced with them.’ With his characteristically supreme self-confidence he maintained that his book had thus succeeded in confronting scepticism: ‘The book achieved its goal: from that time on we were no longer plagued by atheism. To the men of science it proved that the theistic worldview is justified.’ https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664119-003

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influence of Jewish mysticism in some of his ideas, or at least in the language he used to present them. Throughout his career, Wise was concerned to encourage the integration of his congregants with the non-Jewish world around them, to reassure them that in the New World there was no need to perpetuate the Old World fears of Christianity. It is not surprising then, to see him engaging with Darwin’s ideas, and, although he was concerned about the implications of Darwinism, his approach was to offer an alternative evolutionary theory that would avoid their unpleasant consequences for theology, rather than to censor them.⁴ His style was formal, dense, quite technical, occasionally bombastic, and very wide-ranging, drawing heavily upon German philosophy (e. g. Kant, Hegel, Hartmann), evolutionary science and philosophy (e. g. Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, Spencer), history (both religious and profane), and biblical literature for countless examples to illustrate his philosophical points. For the most part, Wise offered a good treatment of the scientific literature although there was, as we shall see, a tendency to argue from gaps in contemporary knowledge in order to find a space for his Cosmic God.

Critique of Evolutionary Science Wise was not only one of the earliest Jewish respondents to biological evolutionary theory, but probably one of the best informed, as is clear from the systematic critiques he generated. Darwin’s was the most prominent of several competing theories that he considered and rejected for a variety of reasons. The barrage of criticism he proffered against Darwinism proper fell into three categories: a marshalling of contemporary scientific criticism of the theory, a socio-political argument against its practical consequences for societal morality, and a sustained philosophical critique of its materialist foundations.

Isaac Mayer Wise, The World of My Books, trans. Albert H. Friedlander (Cincinnati: American Jewish Archives, 1954), 33, 35.  Other commentators have suggested that Wise rejected the theory of evolution outright. James G. Heller, Isaac M. Wise: His Life, Work and Thought (New York: The Union of American. Hebrew Congregations, 1965), 510, 515, and Swetlitz, “Responses of American Reform Rabbis to Evolutionary Theory, 1864– 1888,” 114– 19. In addition to the counter evidence amassed in the following presentation, it is worth noting that upon Darwin’s death, Wise wrote ‘German naturalists, historians, and philologians built up that Darwinism, which in its last sequences is nugatory to religion and ethics and even absurd in many instances. Darwin’s own theory of evolution is not incompatible with religion and ethics…’ The American Israelite vol. 28 (28 April 1882), 348.

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Wise’s scientific complaints as can be listed in the first category, reflected well on his understanding of the contemporary scientific literature. He complained of five problematic hypotheses of Darwinism, ‘none of which is supported by facts, and all of which must continually co-operate to produce new species.’⁵ These included the apparently inexplicable emergence of life (the hypothesis of ‘unknown creation of the first type’); the incredible variability of organisms and their ability to adapt themselves to ‘all changes of conditions’ (the hypothesis of ‘unlimited variability’);⁶ the central idea of natural selection that the failure of some organisms to compete successfully against others would result in their destruction or stagnation (the hypothesis of ‘the combat of existence’); the inheritability of beneficial adaptations (the hypothesis of ‘descendency’); and the way in which an adaptation of one or more organs would result in changes and re-adjustments to ensure harmonious function of the whole organism (the hypothesis of ‘the law of correlation’).⁷ Other scientifically-grounded complaints include the lack of evidence of evolution or transmutation in the historical record covering several millennia, in the existing fossil record, and in the study of embryonic development.⁸ He also denied that scientific observation confirmed claims that nature’s bounty was so limited as to provoke a ‘war of nature’, or that there had been a common human ancestor of bestial

 Wise, The Cosmic God, 109.  Wise takes Baumgartner’s germ-theory of evolution, which viewed ‘periodical metamorphosis of germs [or embryos]’ as the mechanism for transmutation, as problematic in a similar way. As in the case of Darwinian theory, Wise argued that it failed to make the case that a mechanism that generated variation within a species could likewise cause speciation as such.  Wise, The Cosmic God, 108 – 09. Wise refers to a number of scientists in support of his criticism, noting ‘Every one of those hypotheses… has been refuted by Naegeli, Baumgartner, Wigand, Lange, von Hartmann, and others’.  Ibid., 111– 12. He drew upon a range of scholars and scientists, including Cuvier and Agassiz, who argued that ‘within the bounds of human knowledge of historic and prehistoric ages, no change of type or species has been noticed.’ The evidence of both living and fossilized lifeforms failed to persuade, ‘Not mere fissures but gaps which, can not be bridged over, separate the [world’s living] species in numerous instances… The same precisely is the case with the fossils…. for there also the transition forms are missing, and no trace of genetic unity is left.’ The evidence of embryos was unconvincing because while ‘it is maintained that the embryo runs through all phases of organisms as it ancestors did in their natural development from species to species’ there was no reason to make the logical jump to suggest that ‘this ideal semblance of those various stages to certain animals [should be] converted into a proof, that the higher organism must have evolved from those lower organisms’.

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origins.⁹ Such arguments would have been familiar to anyone engaged in the scientific debates at that time. The secondary category, namely, the socio-political critique of evolutionary theory, has been viewed by some commentators as the motivation for Wise’s entire study, and that the mechanistic assault on the dignity and sanctity of humanity was the prime factor explaining his rejection of Darwinism.¹⁰ Wise certainly believed that mechanical forms of transmutation of species reduced man to an ape, a hypothesis which he scorned with the label Homo-brutalism. He criticized those scientists who had imposed a hypothesis on science, which reduces man, on the scale of organic beings, to an ape, casually and mechanically improved, or some similar animal, no longer extant as a living organism or dead fossil, i. e. an imagined animal, one constructed by phantasy on the strength of induction, legitimate, or illegitimate, is supposed to have been the ancestor of man, and several kinds of apes. The monkeys not having improved themselves from casual and mechanical causes unknown, are still irredeemable monkeys. Some of them, however, having casually and mechanically gone through a series of improvements and changes, then by laws of inheritance and correlation have become human beings, and with them the history of mankind begins. Permit me to call this main hypothesis HomoBrutalism, as it has hitherto been given no name at all.¹¹

Wise’s condemnation of what he regards as the theory’s hostility to the hardwon Enlightenment values of ‘inalienable and inborn rights, equality, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, even accounting for the theory’s popularity in Europe in that (‘because it props up the aristocracy’), would have resonated well with his North American audience. What was on offer was the amoral, even immoral, vision of social Darwinism:

 Ibid., 50, 52– 53. Here Wise reveals the common contemporary mistake in regarding Darwinian theory, when applied to the human race, in purely hierarchical, progressive terms. Thus he calls on the Darwinists to ‘render it plausible that the monkey changed into an Ethiopian, the Ethiopian into a Mongolian, and he into a Caucasian’, arguing that ‘The unity or diversity of the human family is no settled question in science… In my opinion, the Bible does not teach the unity of the human race,… [T]here are not only the sons of Elohim and the daughters of Adam whose origin is doubtful; but also the Nephilim, Rephaim, Enakim, Horim, Samsumim, Aimim and several other tribes mentioned in the Bible, who were no descendants of either Adam or Noah… There is no doubt in my mind that the author of Genesis knows of the Caucasian race only…’ Wise dedicates a full chapter (lecture VII) to the differing anatomy of apes and men, and another to the distinct psychology of animals and humans (lecture VIII).  Cherry, “Creation, Evolution and Jewish Thought,” 159.  Among those named were Karl Vogt, Ernst Haeckel, Jacob Moleschott, Thomas Huxley, Charles Darwin, and Ludwig Buechner. Wise, The Cosmic God, 47.

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In a moral point of view the Darwinian hypothesis on the descent of man is the most pernicious that could he possibly advanced, not only because it robs man of his dignity and the consciousness of pre-eminence, which is the coffin to all virtue, but chiefly because it presents all nature as a battle-ground, a perpetual warfare of each against all in the combat for existence, and represents the victors as those worthy of existence, and the vanquished ripe for destruction. So might is right, the cardinal sin is to be the weekest [sic] party. If this is nature’s law, and man is an improved beast, then war to the knife, perpetual war of each against all, is also human law, and peace in any shape is illegitimate and unnatural. Therefore in all cases of expulsion, assassination or slaughter, among individuals or nations, the vanquished party was doomed in advance, by a law of nature; and the victors having enforced the laws of nature are neither culpable nor responsible for their deeds.¹²

The third category of complaint included a set of profoundly misguided and mistaken philosophical assumptions, which, crucially, Wise perceived as underlying both the scientific and the socio-political errors. He therefore spent most of his critical attention in the book upon the atheistic assumptions that underlay Darwinian theory. In this context, for example, he mockingly accounts for the theory’s heavy reliance upon chance or ‘blind irrational Fate’ in terms of the materialist urge to usurp God.¹³ He explains the current failure to explain how discrete evolutionary improvements in an organism’s physiology could harmonize with the rest of the organism in terms of the refusal to acknowledge a psychical rather than a mechanistic cause.¹⁴ And he denies that sexual selection, which he understood to be driven by will or choice, can be reconciled with mechanistic assumptions that characterize Darwinism.¹⁵ Darwinism could only be saved, he suggested, once the purely mechanistic and materialist assumptions of many of its proponents were abandoned. If one focused upon Darwin’s theory of sexual selection or his Lamarckian-influenced conception of acquired characteristics through force of will, then the centrality in life of the mental, of the idea, of the will, would be obvious.

 Ibid., 51.  Ibid., 50.  He asked: ‘What is the law of correlation? A principle or force which works a change, physiological and morphic, in the whole body, because the one or the other member thereof has been changed by mechanical Causes. This morphic change, however, depends on the causative force, a force which must be active everywhere and at all times to effect this re-adjustment; without it, the whole theory falls to the ground, and with it, we have before us a psychical principle as the main cause of evolution.’ Ibid., 113.  Ibid., 113, 117.

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[W]ith Mr. Darwin the origin of species depends entirely on the presence of will in every individual of the two kingdoms of organisms. The ornaments and improved songs of the male bird, for instance, are purposely acquired to please and captivate the attention of the female; which demonstrates will. Prehensile organs and defensive appendages grow out of the animal’s body, according to Darwinism, by the repeated exertions of the animal’s will. In fact, the whole system of Darwinian evolution is based upon the principle of teleology, carried into every detail or organism, always tacitly postulating the presence of active will in every organic individual. If we could accept Darwinism as an established fact, teleology and the existence of will would be proved eo ipso [by the thing itself]. Therefore if the Darwinists subscribe not to Schopenhauer’s dogma – i. e., will is the world’s substance – they must anyhow admit its inherent and permanent existence in every organic being.¹⁶

In effect Wise suggested that, properly understood, biological evolution was essentially teleological in nature in that it moved in an intelligible direction according to a recognizable design. Since design denoted the presence of will or mind, then Darwinian theory actually required that the will or mind were to be located either in the individual organisms that evolved or (his own preference, as we shall see) as an embedded feature of the evolving universe itself.

The Cosmic God and Evolution In summary, Wise offered a Jewish panentheistic form of the vital force theory of evolution. According to his particular interpretation of idealism, he believed that the universal or fundamental substance was non-material or ‘psychical’. Ultimately, matter could only be held together by something he called at different times the ‘central force’ or ‘active force’ or ‘vital force’. He understood this vital force to be a function of an intelligent divine will. Thus the act of creation was, in effect, the divine assertion of this force so as to counteract matter’s tendency to dissolve or separate. Wise’s biological theory rested on what he called the two ‘fundamental laws of creation’, namely, differentiation and evolution. As he explained: ‘Differentiation signifies the individuation of beings from and by the universal substance; and evolution in this connection signifies the systematic and rising succession of organisms from the lowest to the highest in the process of individuation.’¹⁷ The story of life was therefore the story of the emergence of a hierarchical order of stable living forms from dead matter, achieved by the work of vital force, which had eventually culminated in with man, defined by, inter

 Ibid., 129.  Ibid., 114.

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alia, self-consciousness and morality.¹⁸ The God that Wise has in mind was, to a degree, to be identified with both vital force and with nature itself. As Wise put it, ‘He is omnipresent, revealed everywhere by the ever-active force of all forces in nature, and every motion of the human intellect. He is omnipresent, for He fills all space and penetrates all atomic matter… He is not in heaven above nor on earth below, for He is everywhere, in all space, in all objects of nature, in every attribute of matter, and in every thought of the mind.’¹⁹ Wise’s Cosmic God, which already hinted at a panentheistic conception, thus offered a theory of the transmutation of species that incorporated a pious teleology. For Wise, a full and adequate theory of evolution had to address certain key characteristics of life, which included (i) that the life force that animated all living things appeared qualitatively different from all other forces known to physics, (ii) that organic life had emerged from inorganic, dead matter, (iii) that life had evolved with a progressive trajectory, resulting in stable species types, (iv) that life had led to the emergence of individuality and self-will of a sort that had culminated in human beings and human history. All this suggested to Wise that there was a cosmic principle that generated and ordered life, and that this was essentially a psychical rather than mechanical phenomenon. Wise began by positing the existence of an animating force of life or ‘vital force’ (a term used in many different ways in the medical and biological studies of the time), which is capable of generating life from lifelessness. This, he suggested, was the only reasonable way to proceed from the evidence. Organic life is a phenomenon entirely different from all others. It is not the complex of the known forces of light, heat, sound, electricity, attraction or mechanical motion, much less of the atomic forces… Life had a beginning on this globe, and all our knowledge testifies that it could appear in organic matter only, in the cell or cells. The cell either made itself, which no naturalist will admit, or there must be vital force… [B]y which force is inorganic matter transformed into organic, the inanimate into animate? The answer would be again vital force.²⁰

 As we shall see, Wise appears to suggest that the emergence of life goes through several stages, including evolutionary processes for all vegetable and animal life but not mammalian forms. This is in contrast to Swetlitz, who sees Wise opposed to all theories of evolution, and Cherry, who suggests that biologically, Wise’s version of the transmutation of species relied on a stasis of ideal types, with variation around the ideal, punctuated by the vital force effecting sudden change in the species. Swetlitz, “Responses of American Reform Rabbis to Evolutionary Theory, 1864– 1888,” 118, Swetlitz, “American Jewish Responses to Darwin and Evolutionary Theory, 1860 – 1890,” 221, and Cherry, “Creation, Evolution and Jewish Thought,” 166.  Wise, The Cosmic God, 163.  Ibid., 97.

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He went on to argue that this vital force not only generates life but, crucially, governs all organic matter and beings. Furthermore, it is an essentially non-material, psychical phenomenon, as could be seen from the results. It is not a conglomeration or complex of forces, because it produces effects, such as assimilation, production, will, consciousness, and emotion, in which none of the known physical forces are detectable. Hence it is a peculiar force. Can any naturalist, scientist, chemist, physicist, or philosopher tell us, why we should not call it vital force?²¹

It was now possible to define life itself in terms of this vital force, as if it were a kind of fragmentation or distillation of energy into many shapes and forms: ‘Life is the differentiation of vital force which produces and develops individual organism and preserves its identity.’²² According to Wise, vital force worked as a kind of organizing or co-ordinating principle for all other forces working upon and within an organism. This, as has already been noted, was achieved by the process of differentiation, that is, the generation of individual organisms that conformed to stable, archetypal species that were perfectly designed to fit a specific niche in the natural environment, and which could be contrasted with the freer, on-going development of species that continuously responded to changes in the environment, as envisaged in Darwinian theory. Evidently we have before us in every living organism a force which governs the others for this specific purpose. Every constant relation of elements or bodies to one another, points to an overruling force in action for this specific purpose. In the organic kingdoms, the immense variety of elementary relations to form and, sustain here a tree, there a shrub, here an herb and there a blade of grass, here a mollusk, there a radiate or articulate, here a reptile, fish, bird, or mammal, and there a man, all made up of the same elements, governed by the same forces, necessitates us to adopt an overruling force which subjects matter and force, in order to assume this shape and no other, to be so large at its birth and grow so far and no farther, have this form, surface and color and, no other, develop and live so long and no longer. All these limitations and modifications point to a special force at work which we call vital force. This vital force bears no similarity to the other natural forces, to electricity, light, heat, sound, or mechanical motion… Every plant and every animal develops its arch type with a certain degree of freedom and variability, which must be the effect of a cause not at work in the inorganic world, for which we have no better name than vital force.²³

 Ibid., 106.  Ibid., 93.  Ibid., 94– 95.

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In this context, Wise was able to draw upon examples from the biological science to make the case for the necessity of vital force. He was sure that an understanding of the intricate mechanisms of the cell and organism would leave the thoughtful observer convinced of the need to account for the order and harmony of the parts, and, since it was unthinkable that such complexity could be self-assembling, the only logical conclusion was that something must act upon them to produce such order. The construction of these tens of thousands of chemically different cells, made of the same elements, to make up the various kinds of vegetable and animal organism, and in each organism the different parts, and the parts of parts, fitted together by the blastema or matrix in the animal, is the fundamental mystery of organic life, for which none of the known forces of nature give us the least account. And yet these cells grow, fill up, divide, live, change perpetually their constituents in the organic body only, and are transformed into inorganic matter as soon as life is defunct. So we have before us unquestionably a series of phenomena most wonderful and intricate, entirely different in kind from all others known to science, and peculiar to themselves only; phenomena which point forcibly to a different agent, for which we have but one name, and this is vital force.²⁴

Likewise, he saw the inability of science to explain the production of protoplasma, the ‘very minute building stones, from which vital force constructs all organisms in the whole system of life’,²⁵ as a failure to recognize the ordering processes of vital force. The protoplasma may have lived ‘thousands of years’ before vital force united some of them to form a cell.²⁶ And after many more thousands of years, during which ‘unaccountable millions of them must have perished’, vital force had increased its control over matter enough to build organisms from cells. These included a distinct set of ‘constant types’.²⁷ Wise saw discontinuities in the panoply of life as evidence for the internal drive of vital force, rather than for the external influence of the environment: ‘That there are leaps and gaps in the system is simply because the species have no genetic relations – they are all ideal, and ideal only. The evolutions were not external, they were internal in nature, with their cause in the vital force.’²⁸

 Ibid., 97.  Ibid., 115.  He wrote: ‘The cells are the building material for the vital force. They do not give character to the organism, nor can they produce any; the organism, gives character to each of them in the various beings and the various members of each.’ Ibid. This was contrary to Wigand’s germtheory, which contained the character of the organism.  Ibid., 117.  Ibid., 116.

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In fact, it is important to note that Wise did not rule out natural selection or any particular mechanism as possibly playing a role in the development of life on earth. But he felt that only vital force could explain the emergence of life in the first place and also the trajectory that found its end in humankind: [T]he cause of evolution is in the internality and not in the externality of nature, in the vital force itself… Nature, or rather its central force, may have employed all those means, combat for existence, natural selection, variability, descendency, correlation, heterogeneous generation, metamorphosis of germs, and a hundred other means, psychological or mechanical, under different states, circumstances and combinations of influences, external or internal, to reach its object and to realize itself, although neither or all of these auxiliary means account for the origin of species, and the appearance of man on earth as the complex of the whole organism [while the vital force can account for such phenomena].²⁹

Having said this, Darwin’s conception of nature at war with itself was problematic for Wise. Not only was it clear that vital force had prepared adequate resources for organic beings ahead of their appearance (how otherwise could they have survived to reproduce?)³⁰ but it flew in the face of the facts concerning nature’s bounty more generally, as he saw them. Mr. Darwin appears to imagine this earth, land and ocean, as rather a small patch, overstocked from the beginning by a vast number of living beings, with scanty provisions of food made for them, so that the combat for subsistence was perpetual. On our real earth, however, after so many thousand years of increase in the animal kingdom, the soil still offers plenty for the support of all, and not one half of it can be used yet. There it an affluence and superabundance in nature, which Mr. Darwin evidently did not take into fair consideration, or else he could not possibly have laid so much stress on the combat for subsistence.³¹

It is worth looking more carefully at the argument that Wise made for his pious teleology, that is, his primary argument for a divine guiding hand in evolution. In discussing the question of evolution’s goal or aim, Wise began with the questions: ‘Do all things exist merely to be, to change, and to disappear, or must they fulfill another destiny, serve other purposes, and reach other ends and aims? Does all nature exist to and for itself, because it must, or is purpose in its existence?’³² For Wise, teleology was what gave meaning or purpose to the cosmos.  Ibid., 116 – 17.  The divine plan is apparent from the fact that organic beings developed with ‘organic food preceding them in time, as it were, to prove design and premeditation.’ Ibid., 116.  Ibid., 117.  Ibid., 119.

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Wise was well aware that there would be suspicion of the idea of evolution having a goal or aim since this is precisely what the Darwinians rejected, and devoted some time discussing the potential problems in positing teleology. He accepted that in the past teleology had ‘proved damaging to the progress of the natural sciences’, and he readily acknowledged that, for Spinoza and later rationalists, God and Nature had no ends or aims in views and that all could be explained in efficient (secondary) causes.³³ He argued, however, that the failure of such teleological speculations was explained by the fact that, historically, they had been ‘pressed too far and in too much in the detail, so that they become ridiculous and nugatory to science.’³⁴ He scorned examples such as the idea that the divine purpose of negroes was slavery, that colour in nature was for human appreciation, and that birds’ grasping claws was for the purpose of roosting beyond the reach of predators.³⁵ Another problem was the historical tendency to anthropomorphize God, and in particular to conceptualize Him as wise and as one who organizes His realm with care according to human standards; this proved problematic when science showed [t]here is, however, in nature an incalculable waste and perpetual destruction of life. – There is, in the realm of nature, pain, suffering, misery, destruction, and death, as well as joy, pleasure, happiness, and goodness, and pessimism is entitled to the philosopher’s most earnest reflection.³⁶

However, Wise went on to assert that the lesson to be learnt was not that teleology was wrong, but rather that our conceptions of God had to change. Still, all of this entitles none to the conclusion, that there is no plan, no design, no grand object, no final cause or causes in nature. It rather suggests to every reasoner that, in order to construct a satisfactory teleology, the anthropomorphous conceptions of God and nature must be dropped. God is no man and nature no dame, and the household of nature must be measured objectively, by the facts which it presents, and not by our feelings, wishes, hopes, desires, or prejudices.³⁷

In addition to the rejection of the personal God, there was one other issue concerning teleology that Wise wanted to settle and that was the influential philosophical assertion of atheistic materialism that there were

    

Ibid. Ibid., 120. Ibid. Ibid., 121. Ibid.

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no final causes, no ends, aims, designs or purposes in nature; because they [the materialists] want a dead universe, a lifeless, loveless, and thoughtless piece of mechanism, a selfmoving, self-sustaining, and self-adjusting automaton…³⁸

Such a vision had come about in large part due to the atheists’ refusal to ‘admit the existence of anything not perceived and not perceivable by our senses.’ In response, Wise drew heavily upon Job 28:12– 28, and especially the verse ‘It is hidden from the eyes of all living’ to demonstrate the reality of things not sensed directly, including the divine foundation of existence. Just as a force or an intellect cannot be perceived directly by the natural senses, so it is the case with the divine intellect or vital force. As he paraphrased Job, ‘I see intelligence everywhere, but I can not understand the essence of this powerful medium underlying, regulating and governing all things.’³⁹ Just because it was unseen, did not mean it was illusionary. Having now dismissed the simplistic teleologies of the past and the unwarranted assumptions of contemporary materialist atheists, Wise was ready to make his own case for teleology. This case, he assured his readers, was based on the facts, which pointed to the otherwise profoundly harmonious nature of the natural world, whether it be on the scale of the very universe itself, or the organism, or even an organ within the organism: [T]he universe, as far as we know, is one in order and harmony, [and therefore] the forces of nature must either converge to the one single purpose of sustaining permanently this order and harmony, or one superior force must control all of them, or else there must be continual conflicts in nature among elements and forces, which we know not to be the case. Consequently there is co-operation, co-ordination, and sub-ordination in nature, which is its law of laws, or force of forces… If the heart of a human being be too large, or his stomach too small relatively, according to the law governing his whole organism, then the order and harmony thereof is destroyed…. And if you then rise from the individual objects to the universe as a unit, you have before you always the same teleology, the same end, aim, purpose, and design of preserving the whole intact as a harmonious unit. There is the same final cause in the grand totality of nature as in every minute object thereof.⁴⁰

Wise was uninterested in whether the objectives of harmonization and unification were achieved by means of the converging nature of all natural forces to meet at ‘teleological centers’ (that is, the individual organisms which were the product of such natural forces), or whether one superior divine force governed

 Ibid.  Ibid., 122.  Ibid., 125.

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the others and directed them to this end.⁴¹ As far as he was concerned, the recognition that there was a unifying harmonization of countless competing forces was a recognition of a telos or aim or end; in the teleological nature of reality could be found the indisputable evidence of a grand harmonious design. And since it was inconceivable to him that the appearance of design could be achieved without will or intellect, he felt no compunction in describing the organizing principle, or intellect, that lay behind such a designed reality as God.⁴² As part of his argument, Wise attempted to blur the distinction between secondary, efficient, or natural causes and primary, final, or divine causes. An effectively deterministic view of the world, and of one development leading inextricably to the next, led Wise to suggest: Every stage of the earth’s formation, every individual object of nature, and every period of man’s history… is a teleological center, the end, aim, and object of a design and purpose, a logical sequence of prior causes, back to the first cause. In every stage of the earth’s formation and every period of history, as in every individual object of nature, as a necessary part of the cosmos, there is again the germ and efficient cause to the next following ones, and so on from the first impulse imparted to the elementary parallels, to the present stage of the earth and period of history… The fact is, while one ascertains the efficient causes of one stage or period, he exposes the final causes of the prior stages or periods. Whatever is efficient cause in any higher stage, was final cause in the lower one. This is the unmistakable architecture of nature and history.⁴³

This reference to history was not accidental or incidental, since Wise believed he could explain history by analogy to biology. We may set down as a general principle: Every continuous chain of cause and effect in nature is teleological, resulting continually in teleological centers, which every individual being is… What is true in nature must also be true in history. The same chain of cause and effect must also be teleological; and each state of society, every day, every hour, and at every place, must be a teleological center. Analogy is certainly in my favor, and logic no less. For every state of society, being demonstrably the result of preceding efficient causes, is the ultimatum in the logical chain of legitimate conclusions, always the only logical result of all preceding links, and contained in them. So, the very last effect at any given time, is the very aim and object, or final cause, of all preceding causes and effects, down to the primary cause, and must be contained, therein potentially and intentionally, because logical in each and all. This is certainly premeditated teleology in the strictest sense of the term. Each state of society, in its turn, becomes again the cause of the succeeding

 Ibid., 126.  Ibid.  Ibid., 159.

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one, and so on to the supposed end of history; hence the whole chain is logical and teleological.⁴⁴

At this stage, Wise set out his own deterministic account of the creation myth, with seven stages that (loosely) correlated with the seven days of the Genesis account. As a biological scheme, it appeared to assert that all vegetable and animal life, excepting mammals which were categorized as ‘the constant types’, emerged and moved through transitory forms and thus developed through an evolutionary process. The stages he described as (i) an almighty impulse that compressed and united the elementary particles to generate (ii) a radiating fireball looked like the sun, which slew off material that became the planet earth. This cooled down and was covered with liquid water, allowing (iii) the emergence of organic life. Inanimate matter became alive in the form of ‘organic beings’. In time, there was further transformation, the ‘lower forms of vegetable and animal life, rising gradually in the scale of evolution to huge monsters’⁴⁵ so that primitive life evolved to become (iv) conscious animals. Thus unconscious vegetable life became conscious animal life. With this stage it was possible to say that ‘the force captivated in matter attempts its liberation, after it had overcome inert matter to that extent that organic formation had become possible.’⁴⁶ (v) The earth fell into its proper orbit, and the gloomy carbon atmosphere cleared to reveal the celestial lights. It was now covered with rich vegetation, its land and ocean populated with radiates, mollusks, and articulates, fish, amphibians, and birds. One might say that ‘[t]he primary force materialized in the earth is reunited with the cosmic light.’ (vi) ‘Constant types’ or fixed species were now established, that is, mammals emerged. These ‘creatures of light’ were to be distinguished from the ‘transitory forms’ of both the unconscious vegetable and conscious animal kingdoms, with the eventual emergence of the self-conscious human. With this, ‘The primary force becomes self-conscious itself again, in the self-conscious man.’ (vii) Human history began. And with human history, the work of the divine vital force can, in a sense, rest, because humans take over and continue its work. It is the Creator’s Sabbath. The work of liberation from matter and the triumph over it, begins in man, by him, and for him. He works on to accomplish the subjugation of matter, the resurrection of self-conscious spirit, the triumph of life over death, of light over darkness, of self-conscious intelligence over blind and inexorable powers of darkness; of freedom, love,

 Ibid., 134.  Ibid., 160.  Ibid.

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and happiness over cold and barren necessity. This is the creation of history, the progress of the primary force to self-conscious existence in the human family…⁴⁷

The Development of Self-consciousness It is the fact that Wise could see the same teleological force in geology, biology and human history that convinced him that he was dealing with a truly cosmic force. And having established that the cosmos moves in a direction, Wise was also clear about where it is headed: from dead matter to life, from unconscious to conscious life, and from conscious to self-conscious life. For Wise, natural history represented the account of how the divine vital force animated and awakened matter, and then guided organic life along the inevitable path that would lead to man, that is, to the self-conscious individual capable of free moral judgment; and at that moment, the psychical cosmic force could be seen to have liberated itself from its material constraints. Vital force, which is also [divine] will and intellect, is the central force of this and every other planet… It overcomes inert matter, prevents its dissolution in heterogeneous elements, and stands in perpetual relation to and in harmony with itself in all planets and suns, according to its own eternal laws. It is perpetually and continuously at work to govern matter, and to liberate itself from matter, to become itself again, i. e., conscious and selfconscious, in individualized lives.⁴⁸

This account resonates with another scholarly interest of Wise’s, namely Jewish mysticism.⁴⁹ In Lurianic Kabbalism, a fragmented and broken godhead is dispersed throughout creation. The divine sparks animate the creaturely vessels or kelipot in which they find themselves and remain there until a mystical reun-

 Ibid., 161. Wise does not attempt to match up exactly his seven stages to the seven days of biblical creation, but the parallels are clear. According to Genesis 1, God created light on the first day, divided the water from the waters on the second day, generated vegetation on the third day, revealed the celestial lights on the fourth day, generated animal life in the water and air on the fifth day, generated animal life on the land, including man, on the sixth day, and rested on the seventh day.  Ibid., 114.  Wise’s interest in mysticism is reflected in much of his scholarship, often in unexpected ways. For example, Jewish mysticism is the primary category of analysis for understanding the Apostle Paul, presented anachronistically as a first-century kabbalist in Isaac Mayer Wise, “Paul and the Mystics,” in Three Lectures on the Origin of Christianity (Cincinnati: Bloch & Co., 1883).

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ion takes place, when the godhead is restored to itself.⁵⁰ Likewise, the divine vital force, which is woven throughout the natural world, but not of it, overcomes and metamorphozes matter gradually and systematically prepares organic buds on the tree of life, unfolds them to blossoms of consciousness, and ripens them to fruits of self-consciousness. Conscious centers are produced by the same force which created the material substance, preserves and governs it, and individuates itself therein. It is the psychical force becoming itself again. It is its victory over matter.⁵¹

Thus Wise sees mankind as the culmination of the long history of the work of vital force, and, as such, the culmination of the evolutionary process. All of evolution ‘centers on man’, and all evolutionary developments have been perfected in him.⁵² His understanding of the uniqueness of human nature is central to his whole argument, and we will therefore consider it in a little more depth, now. For Wise, humans appeared anatomically distinct from all other creatures, in particular in regard to man’s erect posture and bi-pedal walk, larynx allowing language, and hands for instruments.⁵³ But even if they were not, the human mind certainly represented a qualitative difference for him. Man possessed an ‘entirely anomalous structure of chemical and morphotic peculiarity’ in that he was bipedal and erect, could speak, and possessed hands, eyes, and an external appearance that were entirely different from all other animals. Yet, he went on, if there were no structural dissemblances between man and ape, if man were completely ape-like in his body, [then] his mind, his intelligence, his moral feelings and his works would fully distinguish him and entitle him to the consciousness that man is a man for all that, and nothing can be compared to him. We have no confreres among the animals. They can not think with us, hence they can not feel with us.⁵⁴

 The mystic Isaac Luria (1534– 1572) developed his system from the classic medieval work, the Zohar, which he studied and taught in Safed in Palestine. Lurianic kabbalism was characterized by its interest in the origins of creation and its cosmic rectification, and, following the mystical renaissance in sixteenth-century Safed, it became the dominant form of Jewish mysticism among early modern Jewish scholars in both Palestine and Europe.  Wise, The Cosmic God, 171.  Wise makes a brief aside to point out that Jewish authorities were wrong to think of winged angels as superior. ‘When the fathers imagined a higher order of beings, viz.: the angels with wings, because man is debarred of these organs of the bird, they did not take into consideration that human hands controlled by human mind are far superior to wings.’ Ibid., 116.  Ibid., 59 – 60.  Ibid., 61.

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In addition to moral feeling, language was the other key characteristic which demonstrated man’s uniqueness, and one about which science and bible concurred. [I]t is certainly an error to speak of the language of animals. Still, in this connection, it could make no difference to us if animals had language. It would merely prove that animals must possess mind; and the superiority of human language would be the evidence of the superiority of the human mind… If we ask, how did language originate? The reply is simple and given correctly in the Bible. When Adam saw the various animals, his mind was necessitated to form ideas of them, which became images in his imagination and words in his intelligence. So language originated, man named objects, actions, relations, feelings, and thoughts; and it is of divine origin only as far as man’s mind is. The languages and dialects have their origin in the geographical separation of the various tribes. Also in this point the Bible advances the correct idea.⁵⁵

Throughout, Wise emphasized the biological direction towards increased individuality and independence, culminating in the human, who was characterized by self-consciousness, and especially emotional life and will. He readily accepted that ‘Mr. Darwin’s theories of natural and sexual selections, if there is any truth in them, fully demonstrate will and individuality in every man, animal and plant’ in terms of the individual acting out the instincts of the species. The phenomena of human and animal consciousness reinforced this idea, since physical forces failed to account for the simplest sensation or consciousness or ‘the necessary reflection, I am conscious, hence I am an individual.’ And the same was true of the influence of emotions, since no-one knew how differently emotions effected different persons and different animals. For Wise, it followed that ‘vital force is not only one and universal but also individual…’⁵⁶ Such observations allowed him to view the development of self-consciousness (via the vital force) on several levels, that is, on the level of the individual, the society, and the historical, cultural collective. All of these were subsumed within the divine, and together expressed (in Idealist terms) the telos of creation and of history. While any generation or individual makes mankind’s knowledge and experience his own, he unites himself with all the personalities of the past. While he lives and co-operates with the generation in which he lives, he makes its knowledge and experience his own, and unites himself with all the personalities of his age. So the work of perpetual re-union of all personalities, of all ages, goes on continually, elevating the self-consciousness and moral principle of mankind and re-acting perpetually on each individual. As the self-conscious-

 Ibid., 34.  Ibid., 105 – 06.

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ness of humanity in its totality is an attribute of the eternal Deity, so the personal self-consciousness, the personality, is a self-conscious idea in the Deity, hence immortal as such. This is the fundamental idea to a philosophy of history. The growth of the self-consciousness of mankind and the proportional growth of the individual are always and continually the final cause of creation and history. To establish the efficient causes which produced this final cause is the main work of a philosophy of history.⁵⁷

The story of the emergence of freewill and morality is part of the story of the development of self-consciousness in biology. For Wise, this pointed to two theological conclusions. Firstly, the triumph of the self-conscious over mechanical nature and of the mind over matter justified ‘the doctrine of the soul’s immortality’, when ‘man and mankind are elevated to immortality, i. e., to an attribute and self-conscious idea in the Deity’.⁵⁸ Secondly, it required a moral first cause, which he believed allowed him to offer a new biological argument for God. Thus morality was the goal of the process of organic evolution, which was part of a cosmic process of development driven by vital force. This vital force must be a psychical, non-material phenomenon to make any sense of the fact that it is self-consciousness that is the end-product of the process. And if the self-consciousness was a moral self-consciousness, then it suggested that the ultimate cause must be moral, too. From there, it was a short step to identify this first cause with Wise’s Cosmic God. There may be, and I have no doubt there are, moral traits in all living beings, as Mr. Darwin and other biologists maintain, since the nature of the first cause is universally the same; there may be, and I have no doubt there are, moral traits in all human beings, however degraded or savage; but morality in the proper sense of the term depends on self-consciousness. One can be moral knowingly and wittingly only when he obeys the laws of his own nature as a free agent… Where and how do consciousness, self-consciousness, and moral conscience awake in the living being, and what is the nature of that anomaly? They are not in the materialist’s matter, in atoms, and atomic forces; hence the materialist replies, I do not know… [T]he first cause is self-conscious and moral; its derivative forces are uncon-

 Ibid., 179.  Wise argument is somewhat convoluted: ‘The highest law for man is to advance himself and others in self-consciousness, morality, and dominion over mechanical nature, the triumph and mastery of the conscious over the unconscious, of mind over matter. So man fulfills his destiny in society, and elevates himself to an immortal personality. Here is the fundamental idea in philosophy for the doctrine of the soul’s immortality… [Man] is capacitated and prompted by natural impulses to co-operate with the Deity in bringing about the triumphs of mind over matter, of the conscious over the unconscious, in the steady progressions of mankind’s self-consciousness, morality and freedom, and its reaction on the individual personalities, by which man and mankind are elevated to immortality, i. e., to an attribute and self-conscious idea in the Deity.’ Ibid., 178 – 79.

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scious in their materialization in nature, to break through matter, and by the gradual process of evolution make it fit of becoming organisms for self-conscious manifestations of intelligence; and in them the first cause becomes itself again in the differentiated state which is its victory over matter, while all the time the conscious and unconscious, the moral and immoral, are present in the self-consciousness and morality of the first cause which is God for ever.⁵⁹

History, the Will, and the Problem of Evil and Suffering The Cosmic God posited by Wise was not the God of (Jewish) tradition, nor quite the first cause of the philosophers. It represented rather a kind of Jewish panentheistic god, worked out in both natural and human history, although the Jewish element was usually played down. One of the key problems in presenting a theistic evolutionary theory is the problem of evil, that is, accounting for the wastage and suffering that evolution appears to entail. Here it is possible to trace the influence of Jewish thought upon Wise in relation to Jewish mystical concepts once again. In this case, Wise appeared to draw upon the Luranic kabbalistic concept of tsimtsum, that is, the idea that in creating the world, God withdrew or contracted Himself so as to make the space for the world, which is other from Himself. In kabbalism, this contraction functions to produce a conceptual space in which freewill is possible and which accounts for the hidden nature of God. For Wise, divine contraction was likewise part of the fabric of the universe, although its function was different in that, when complemented by expansion, it acted as a signature for the action of vital force in biology and history. The contraction or compression, we have noticed as the continuous activity of the primary [vital] force, of the impulse imparted originally to inert matter. Expansion, is the inherent tendency of matter, to dissolve into its primary elements, to fall apart and become cosmic… We observe the same fundamental action in the cell or even protoplasm, contraction and expansion, and by it accretion and secretion, internal motion and external limitation. This is the fundamental function of all organic life. Then it re-appears in animal instinct, in man’s selfishness and social nature, as well as his struggle for personal freedom and patriotism, to be at the same time an independent individual and a dependent citizen of a large, populous, and powerful community, which is the primary cause of all history, with its two similar elements of conservatism and progressionism. It is always the same fundamental principle of contraction and expansion, only that a variety of new functions of the same cause become phenomenal under new circumstances.⁶⁰

 Ibid., 175 – 76.  Ibid., 157– 58.

History, the Will, and the Problem of Evil and Suffering

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But if biology and history were both guided by the vital force, and if, at some level, the vital force is to be identified with the divine, then how does one reconcile what we know about God’s goodness with what we know about the enormous suffering in nature and in human history, both of which Wise indexed at considerable length?⁶¹ Before seeing how Wise approached the problem of evil in these two contexts it would be useful to look a little more closely at the way Wise understood the relation between biology and history. The first thing to say is that Wise viewed biology and historical culture as different stages of creation. As he puts it, ‘With man’s appearance on earth, physical creation closed and mental creation began; the pedestal was finished and the statuary was placed upon it.’⁶² We have already considered the idea of teleology in biology, and hinted that Wise saw the same developmental force at work in history. In the historical context, however, the same force could be called by another name: the Logos of History. The law of history is progressive, and man not only remains in quality always the same, but the vast majority is conservative and opposed to every progressive step. – Yet history preserves all that is good, true, and useful, continually increases its stock, spreads, utilizes and promulgates it, contrary to the will of the masses, and in spite of all egotism and prevailing stupidity… Who designs this grand and marvelous drama of history, chooses the actors, shifts the scenes and conducts its execution, if man does not do, not will, not contemplate it? [T]he Logos of History does it in its invisible, silent and ever efficient power… And now human reason turns upon gross materialism and says: ‘Here is teleology in history, to deny it is madness. Here is end, aim, design, purpose, and proper execution, not by one or all men, but independent of all.[’]… It [the Logos] is identical in its laws with the extra-organic will and intellect in nature [the vital force], hence both, are one and the same spiritual force.⁶³

Having established that, from the perspective of the divine vital force, history was simply an extension of biology into the human realm, it is remarkable, then, that Wise did not regard the problem of evil or suffering as analogous in the two contexts. In the first case, that of suffering and waste of life in nature, he did hazard a kind of greater-good rationale, namely, that death was a necessary part of the lengthy process of evolution. He suggested that, Every plant or animal that dies adds to the bulk of organic matter, and renders higher conditions of organism possible. Therefore after a sufficient bulk of animal matter had been

 For examples of suffering in nature and in history, see ibid., 121, 142– 43.  Ibid., 159. He insisted, however, that despite the progress of biology and of history, human nature did not evolve or change. Ibid., 137.  Ibid., 147– 48.

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laid up in the household of nature, and vital force, as the formal principle, had advanced to the organization of the perfect cell, that force could now bring forth everywhere, as the state of the ocean, land and atmosphere admitted, organisms adapted to each age and condition of the earth and its various parts.⁶⁴

But his preferred approach, which he repeated many times, was to argue fiercely for a reconsideration of an antiquated, anthropomorphic conception of the God of the Bible and Jewish tradition. This was entirely in keeping with Wise’s place as one of the founding fathers of U.S. Reform Judaism, although his particular conception of the Cosmic God, whose ways are truly not our ways, while by no means a classic illustration of Reform Jewish theology, had little direct influence on his congregation or students. On the other hand, when it came to explaining evil and suffering in human history (and for this he included examples from biblical history and the modern histories of Germany, France, and the USA), Wise suggested that suffering on a national, although not an individual, scale may well be the result of the Logos rewarding morality and punishing immorality: It is not as clearly manifested in the life of the individual, and may not be enforced as rigidly; but nations, history and consciousness agree, live, grow, and flourish on their virtues; suffer, decline, or perish of their vices, and all that by agencies perfectly natural, though controlled by super-human causes.⁶⁵

In this way, Wise could have his cake and eat it. The awful loss of life and suffering that characterized the natural world and the historical lives of many individual humans pointed to the need for a reformed Judaism with a radically revised conception of God, which was the only way to escape the traditional paradox of a good God creating a world filled with evil. At the same time, the enormous waste of life in the natural world and the suffering of nations could both be used to support the idea of a moral deity. After all, death on a massive scale was an inevitable part of the evolutionary process that had led to the greater good of a being capable of free moral choice, and the fates of nations pointed to a just God of History who appeared to reward and punish them according to an recognizable standard of morality. Wise did not seem to notice this tension in his treatment of the problem of evil.

 Ibid., 115.  Ibid., 141.

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A New Philosophy as an Alternative to Science or Religion? As should be obvious, Wise was profoundly influenced by German idealism, although he preferred to call himself an adherent of ‘spiritualism’. In materialism, matter is the substance, and the forces inherent in matter create, preserve and govern all which is in this universe mechanically and automatically. In spiritualism, spirit or mind is the substance, and the forces which create, preserve and govern all things in this universe, are manifestations of the will of that spirit, mind or intelligence.⁶⁶

He insisted that one should not confuse the method of natural sciences, which was laudable, with materialism as a philosophy, which was not. As such, his book was as much a polemical critique of materialism as it was an exploration of theistic evolutionary theory. He focused the worst of his ire on the inadequacy of materialist atheists to account for thought and self-consciousness,⁶⁷ and to solve the mind-body problem.⁶⁸ Of course, Darwin’s attempt in The Descent of Man ‘to place man into the background of all animals’ was an illustrative example of widespread influence of ‘the school of modern materialism’.⁶⁹ Never one to hide his light under a bushel, Wise suggested that his work was ‘a fundamental philosophy, from which the various philosophical disciplines can be derived.’ Keenly aware that he was writing at a time of conflict between science and religion,⁷⁰ he offered a corrective to both materialistic or atheistic science and naive theology, arguing that it would only be when the discrepancies between the sensual (which formed the basis of materialistic science) and the mental (by which he meant both philosophy and theology) were resolved, that truthful knowledge could be attained.⁷¹ His was convinced that the truth of reality was to be sought, and could be uncovered, in the reconciliation of different approaches. Harmony in the elements of our knowledge is the criterion for truth… As long as science and philosophy contradict one another in any point or points, their disharmony proves inaccuracy or incompleteness of cognition on the one side or the other, and the necessity of correction. Their harmony is the only criterion of truth in our possession.⁷²

      

Ibid., 71. Ibid., 12, 13, 22. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 83. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 10, 14.

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Specifically, Wise’s philosophy offers a new conception of God, which was ‘not the God of vulgar theology nor is it the God of Spinoza or Locke’, that is, it was not the God of Jewish tradition, nor of pantheism, nor of the first cause. In contrast, he believed that his argument for what he calls the Cosmic God had the power to undermine the inroads of atheism unlike previous attempts to philosophize God. At the heart of his theory, as has been alluded to before, is a panentheistic conception of the divine as an eternal cosmic animating or ordering force, which interpenetrates every part of nature even as it extends beyond it. The universe, with the exception of matter, which is a very small fraction thereof, appearing to me synonymous with Deity so that the present volume is in the main a new evidence of the existence of Deity, I have called it The Cosmic God, in whom and by whom there is the one grand harmonious system of things, in whom and by whom nature is a cosmos and no chaos.⁷³

What he achieved was less systematic or persuasive than he had hoped. But Wise is important to us as one of the earliest Jewish interlocutors with Darwinism, and in many ways can be said to have established in his collection of sermons the basic parameters of the Jewish discourse on evolution.

Summary What was distinctive about Isaac Mayer Wise’s pioneering theological treatment of evolution? His panentheistic conception of a Cosmic God represented a radical revision of Jewish tradition away from an anthropological image of God who acted in history, towards a divine process or principle that actively governed nature but which was also expressed in history through human agency. At times Wise suggested that God could be identified with, but not limited to, both the natural world and the vital force that ordered it, while at other times he identified the divine with the non-material dimensions of the universe. Prepared to dismiss the simplistic teleologies of both natural theology and atheistic, materialistic philosophy, Wise was nonetheless convinced that evolution did reflect a greater design in its movement towards ever-greater harmony and the phenomenon of self-consciousness. These and related theological ideas such as the doctrine of immortality, were characteristically expressed in a combination of scientific, philosophical and kabbalistic language.

 Ibid., 6.

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One would imagine that such a theology could not but have implications for how to approach morality, but Wise was reluctant to offer a revision of the traditional understanding of ethics in the face of the atheistic threat to society. His solution was to offer an abstraction and a new language rather than explicitly counter traditional teachings. His ‘vital force’ was understood to push in the direction of the evolution of self-conscious, ethical beings who would become partners with God. In practice, human partnership with God was achieved by ensuring ongoing moral progress in the realm of history and the unfolding story of civilization, thereby complementing the divine vital force’s work in the biological realm. The eons old development of a moral conscience in the world reflected the reality of a moral First Cause; as such it represented biological evidence for the existence of God. With regard to the problem of evil, Wise’s somewhat inconsistent approach was again couched in unfamiliar language, for God was to be described in terms of a non-personal process even as he attempted to account for suffering in nature and in history in such a way as to retain a sense of divine morality. God was presented both as an impersonal force that ordered the cosmos, and in this way escaped moral judgment, and as a moral entity whose integrity could be defended if one took into account the greater good of the emergence of moral beings which was only possible through the suffering and wastage of evolution, and if one recognized historically the punishment of wicked nations for their crimes and misdemeanors. Potentially, the new theology also had profound implications for re-thinking the nature of religious authority, too. Wise was convinced that the religion-science debate had left Jewish tradition and its ethical teachings enriched by the insights offered from evolutionary theory (although this was clearly evolution as viewed from an Idealist perspective rather than a Darwinian one), and that new ways had to be found to express the relationship between theology and science. For the author of The Cosmic God, this reconciliation of the best of both worlds is best achieved, in practice, by stripping science of what he saw as its materialist tendency to ignore teleology, and by removing much of anthropological imagery of Jewish tradition.

IV Aaron Hahn: The Divine Design Principle of the Universe Aaron Hahn (1846 – 1932)¹ received a yeshivah education in his native Bohemia and studied Hebraic and Oriental studies in Germany before establishing himself as a rabbi in the U.S. He took up his first position in 1869 at the Orthodox Rodef Sholom synagogue in New York and moved to the Reform congregation of Tifereth Israel in Cleveland in 1874, where he gained a reputation as a radical and as an exciting speaker on religious and secular or scientific matters. He completed a doctorate under Isaac Mayer Wise’s supervision at HUC and attended the reforming Pittsburgh conference in 1885, going on to introduce a number of innovations including the reading of prayers in English and German as well as Hebrew, organ music, and offering Sunday morning lectures to supplement Saturday services in 1888. He resigned as rabbi in the face of his congregation’s hostility to his uncompromising, heavy-handed style in 1892.² Some local admirers set up the Sunday Lecture Society of Cleveland that year as an alternative public forum, which espoused an ethical culture ethos,³ but it was a shortlived affair and he went on to have a successful career as a lawyer. Although Hahn was initially somewhat doubtful about Darwinism, he returned to the topic many times during a writing career that spanned the mid 1870s until the mid 1890s and, following his resignation as a rabbi, he was keen to advance the idea of human evolution and even a eugenicist agenda. The fact that he was a proponent of theistic evolution and an admirer of the Christian botanist  No biography of Hahn has been written, but his role as communal rabbi has been described in Lloyd P. Gartner, History of the Jews of Cleveland (Cleveland: Western Reserve Historical Society, 1978).  Reported clashes included the public scandal when Hahn refused to cover his head at the dedication of a local synagogue, and he appears to have led a campaign to force a congregational vote that enforced bare-headed worship during services. It is indicative of his uncompromising nature that, in an address he made to the Central Conference of American Rabbis in 1890, Hahn suggested that ‘If a rabbi is disliked it may be because he is too dutiful, too conscientious, too anxious to see his fold living and doing right. It is not always a shame to have enemies.’ Ibid., 148 – 51.  The Ethical Culture movement was a socio-ethical movement that espoused the priority of moral action over religious thought or practice, and which promoted the idea that a practical ethical system could be derived independently from religious tradition. Ethical Culture was closely associated with Felix Adler (1851– 1933) who was frequently denounced in his own day as an atheist by his Jewish detractors, despite his training as a reform rabbi in Germany. In addition to a prominent career as a social reformer, Adler was professor of Hebrew and Oriental literature at Cornell and later professor of political and social ethics at Columbia. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664119-004

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Asa Gray of Harvard did not reduce his alarm at the use made of Darwinism by sceptics and materialists; he criticized the mechanistic explanations of Huxley and the monism of Haeckel, for example.⁴ In his writings he made no mention of contemporary Jewish authorities but it is probably not coincidental that his theological musings reflected a panentheistic tendency and that he even suggested, like Wise and others, that evolutionary theory hinted at the reality of life after death.

Evolutionary Theory as a Reasonable Hypothesis Early on, in his catechetical work The Rational Judaism (1876), Hahn offered a cautious acceptance of evolution as he set out to answer simple questions about a variety of doctrines and theories concerning the nature of God, in accordance with ‘the testimony of the talmudical writings, believed and supposed by the rabbis of old’. The answers he offered included confirmation that the deity was ‘the source of all might and forces’ and that the universe was ‘God’s work’. In addition, he appeared to accept that the created world had evolved according to natural laws: Judaism teaches that the first matter was created by an absolute decree, and a special act of God, but then the world proceeded without any special interposition of God to evolve according to God’s plan, by inherent forces from the chaos up to man as the crown of creation.⁵

In support of an old earth theory, he cited several rabbinic sources, including, Rabbi Abuha teaches in Midrash Rabba: there were worlds before the present one was created; it is God’s pleasure to destroy worlds, to reproduce them in a more accomplished form… Rabbi Josua ben Levi, teaches in the Talmud tractate Sabbat: there lived hundreds and hundreds of generations, before the world attained its present formation.⁶

 In this context, it is worth noting two lectures in particular: Aaron Hahn, “The Philosophy of Scepticism,” Progress: Sunday Lectures before the Sunday Lecture Society 4:4 (1894) and Aaron Hahn, “The Mission of Skeptics,” Progress: Sunday Lectures before the Sunday Lecture Society 4:10 (1894).  Aaron Hahn, The Rational Judaism in Queries and Answers (Cleveland, Ohio: Kultchar and Hartley, 1876), 8 – 9.  Ibid., 10.

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As for the idea of the variation of species, he suggested that it posed no theological problem for the rabbis who had long before discussed the possibility of transmutation, albeit in terms of a number of obscure species. Judaism, whose integrate principle is knowledge, will admit of the theory of the variation of species, as soon as it is proved a universal factum. The Talmud itself teaches… the variation of species: the Zabua [‫צבוע‬, hyena] varies into the Atalef [‫עטלף‬, bat], the Atalef into the Arpad [‫ערפד‬, another species of bat], the Arpad into the Kimosh [‫קימוש‬, nettle], the Kimosh into the Choch [‫חוח‬, thorn], and the Choch into the Schad [‫שד‬, demon].⁷

Hahn admitted that the emergence of matter was ‘so mysterious and impenetrable’, and that the philosophical and etymological interpretations given to the Hebrew word for the act of creation ‘bara’ (‫ )ברא‬were so diverging, that no theory of creation of matter, or of its eternity, could be beyond dispute and objection. Perhaps the most interesting teaching Hahn offered in this work, which hints at a kind of panentheism, came as a result of the question: ‘Is it proper to speak of Nature as the author of all things?’ To which he replied in slightly awkward English: It is not objectionable in the eyes of Judaism to speak in the name of Nature when we designate thereby an intelligence which manifests itself in the nature as its soul. Thus used, the word Nature becomes an attribute of God, as many other words, which express any of his qualities. But it is a real atheism, a denouncement and abdication of Judaism, to deny a universal wisdom in the nature, and to ascribe all effects to the coincidence and concurrence of the atoms or elements, bodies or to the chance.⁸

His earliest work had been published in German in 1869 and had sought to reconcile rabbinic and mystical thought with theosophy; the book had presented the idea of God as the world-soul both as Jewish and in harmony with the classic

 Ibid. Hahn incorrectly cites Baba Kama 17; the passage is actually BT Bava Qamma 16a and a parallel can be found in YT Shabbat I 3b. It is presented as a Tannaitic tradition, from the period of the Mishnah. The precise identification of the animals and plants is uncertain, although that hardly matters for Hahn’s purposes; nor is the original purpose of the passage clear.  Ibid., 11. Hahn cited as his sources: Cosri I, 76, 77 and Chacham Zewi, Respons 18. The impersonal impression of the divine was reinforced in his discussion of providence and in particular in his description of the role of society ‘as God’s agent’ and in response to the question ‘Does God take care of the world and its contents?’ As he put it in his answer, ‘The established inflexibility of natural laws, and the plan of the universe, are God’s provision for the world at large.’ Ibid.

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Western thought of Spinoza and other philosophers.⁹ It is therefore not entirely surprising to see a similar idea being raised again, now in relation to a materialistic conception of evolution. Hahn’s concern about the inroads of atheism and Darwin’s role in it continued with a 1885 publication entitled The History of Arguments for the Existence of God, in which he set out a variety of arguments from a variety of sources.¹⁰ The main references to Darwinism and evolution appeared in the chapters on the teleological argument and the moral argument for God’s existence. Here, Darwinism was presented as a hypothesis used by materialists against religion, but Hahn argued that even if it could be demonstrated to be true, there would be no reason to see it as atheistic or as evidence in support of a materialistic worldview.¹¹ Citing Asa Gray and Darwin himself, Hahn argued that Darwinism, as ‘a system of principles’, implied a method, a plan, and consequently a design, such that the question of design and a designer remained open.¹² Hahn questioned the objectivity of ‘modern monists’ like Haeckel who ‘tortured their minds in devising new terms for a principle which is to substitute the old design terminology.’¹³ And he also criticized Huxley’s critique of Paley’s argument of design in relation to the clock, ostensibly because Huxley ignored what Hahn saw as self-evident, namely, a primary cause and ‘the evolutionary principle working from within’ the organism. In other words, Huxley failed because his mechanistic explanation was not a theistic evolutionary theory that posited a divine designer and an orthogenetic impulse that directed development in certain directions.¹⁴

 Aaron Hahn, Die Gottesbergriffe des Talmud und Sühar sowie der Vorzüglichsten Theosophischen Systeme [the Conception of God in the Talmud and Zohar and in the Principles of Theosophical Systems] (Leipzig: 1869).  Aaron Hahn, History of the Arguments for the Existence of God: Primary Source Edition (Cincinnati: Bloch, 1885). The chapters were ordered by type of argument, thus: Cosmological, Teleological, Ontological, moral, and historical, and also included chapters that considered argumentation from three specific sources, namely, Jewish Theosophy, the Christian Church, and Mohammedans. This work was based on his doctoral dissertation, completed under the supervision of Isaac Mayer Wise.  Hahn likened the sense of lawful design in history to that found in nature, at one point, and approvingly cited at length Isaac Mayer Wise’s similar arguments in The Cosmic God, which similarly attacked ‘the materialistic, pessimistic and atheistic systems of the day’. Ibid., 127, 75 – 79.  Gray: ‘Darwinian evolution is neither theistical nor non-theistical… There is no way that we know of by which the alternative may be excluded.’ (Gray, Darwiniana, 379). Darwin: ‘I see no good reason why the views given in this volume should shock the religious feelings of anyone…’ and even noted ‘that grand sequence of events [in evolutionary history] which our minds refuse to accept as the result of blind chance.’ (Darwin, Origin of Species, 421). Ibid., 61– 62.  Ibid., 63.  Ibid., 67.

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IV Aaron Hahn: The Divine Design Principle of the Universe

When it came to morality, Hahn was primarily concerned to show the limits of the Darwinian ‘struggle for existence’, which he admitted was a reality and even a social reality which could be ‘witnessed daily and everywhere’. What profoundly limited its effect was altruism in a variety of guises, including parental love, society’s protection of the weak, the championing of human rights and liberties, and individual acts of disinterestedness and self-sacrifice.¹⁵

Universal Evolution, a Reconceived Divinity, and Eugenics In the early 1890s, following his resignation as a communal rabbi, Hahn returned a number of times to the subject in a series of talks he gave for the Sunday Lecture Society. In ‘The Great Science of Evolution’ (1892) he noted that Darwin had been pre-empted by Lamarck and Goethe amongst others, that the cosmos itself appeared to follow an evolutionary trajectory, and readily admitted that attempts to harmonize the genesis account of creation with science had failed to account for pre-solar light, or to explain why the earth was apparently created before its sun, or why the seventh day was so short if each day stood for a long geological epoch.¹⁶ He reaffirmed that ‘Evolution does not do away with God. Evolution is merely a method by which God created the world.’¹⁷ He discussed the great age of the earth and the uniformitarian conception of gradual but continual change over millennia that shaped it. He was convinced that the mystery of the origins of life from dead inorganic matter remained, and claimed not to believe all that evolutionists taught to be true, but wrote in support and sympathy of Darwin’s theory not only in the context of plant and animal life but in regard to human development, too, such that ‘man was not made of mud’ but that he was the product of a process of transformation, variation and evolution and thus ‘man is a descendent of a lower species’.¹⁸ He did not claim to know whether the specific claim that ‘man descended from apes’ was true but he himself saw it neither as a ‘degradation of man, nor a shame’, and asked the rhetorical question: ‘Suppose our ancestors were apes: is on that account our morality and conscience and humanity and dignity less respectable?’ Furthermore, he mused as to whether evolution might be used in support of Judaism’s teaching on life after death.  Ibid., 101– 02.  Aaron Hahn, “The Great Science of Evolution,” Progress: A Course of Lectures under the auspices of the Sunday Lecture Society 1:6 (1892): 5.  Ibid.  Ibid., 10.

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Even the belief in the immortality of the soul must not suffer from evolution; on the contrary, if everything tends to higher evolution and higher life, why not the human soul, too?¹⁹

A year later, in ‘The Signs of Our Times and What They Foreshadow’ (1893), he discussed, among other things, the alleged conflict between science and religion, which he felt could be resolved in part if religion focused less on science and more on the nature of ‘that great supreme and infinite Being which I call God, though others may call it design, or nature, or law, or first cause, or destiny, or the principle of the universe.’²⁰ And in ‘The Prehistoric Man’ (1894) Hahn returned to the controversial issue of human development. Following an impressive survey of the scientific findings concerning human pre-history in Europe and North America, Hahn questioned ‘Is it possible that all these geographical revolutions, climatical changes, and progressive steps can have taken place within an era of not quite one thousand years, as the Bible teaches?’²¹ As a proponent of Reform, he recognized that just as humans had evolved, so too had religion and that, furthermore, evolution supported the idea that ‘man’s golden age or paradise was not in the past, but can be found in the present, and is sure to come in the future.’²² Hahn’s final discussion concerning evolution was focused on eugenics. In ‘Heredity Met by Education’ (1894) he considered several different contexts and drew several different conclusions. With regard to physical heredity, he suggested that marriage should not be made a means of new hereditary evils, but rather instrumental in their prevention, reduction and cure. And this will only be the case when people will in the choice of life companion have learned to respect also those laws of selection to which so much importance is attached in horticulture and in farming.²³

Generally speaking, there was a Lamarckian flavour to his conception of heredity, such that one might deliberately shape one’s character and constitution. With regard to morality, he dismissed the Christian teaching of original sin, but he admitted that the history of human nature showed both individuals and nations  Ibid.  Aaron Hahn, “The Signs of the Times and What They Foreshadow,” Progress: A Course of Lectures under the auspices of the Sunday Lecture Society 3:1 (1893): 6.  Aaron Hahn, “The Prehistoric Man,” Progress: Sunday Lectures before the Sunday Lecture Society 3:13 (1894): 4.  Ibid., 7– 8.  Aaron Hahn, “Heredity Met by Education,” Progress: Sunday Lectures before the Sunday Lecture Society 4:3 (1894): 3.

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to possess moral failings, and that only education could hope to cure such ‘hereditary evils’.²⁴ In terms of intellect, Hahn recognized the work of eugenicists like the Englishman Francis Galton and the Italian Cesare Lambroso who had demonstrated that certain behavioral traits could be followed down through the generations, and he extrapolated from individual families to suggest that this was also true for national cultural characteristics. But he insisted that education was vital for the intellectual, cultural development of a people, arguing that what was needed was an educational programme that encouraged suspicion of the empty, sensationalist rhetoric of lecturers, preachers and newspapers, that undermined class and national prejudices, and that inculcated a rejection of ‘the dogma of the creeds’ and ‘petrified theories’ of orthodox religion.²⁵

Summary Aaron Hahn was not as significant or influential a Reform thinker as the other thinkers considered in this study, but, at least in his later thought, he was as profoundly influenced by evolutionary science. While he was not as deep a student or prolific a champion of theistic evolutionism as were Hirsch or Krauskopf, his discussions of Darwinism led him to describe the development of the cosmos, of the human animal, and of religion in strictly evolutionary terms and provided a context for him to distance himself from the six thousand year historical framework of Orthodox tradition. In terms of his discussions about the nature of God, there was a familiar sense of a universal law of evolution at work that could be identified with the divine. At times Hahn could, like Wise, express panentheistic tendencies. Sharing much of his philosophical worldview with Wise, he can nonetheless be regarded as a transitional figure. If he had been drawn to Darwinism by a concern to confront scepticism and materialistic philosophy, he ended up using it as the basis for a reconfigured religion that, on the one hand, claimed to be free of any conflict with the finding of modern science and, on the other, could suggest that immortality was a possible consequence of the phenomenon of evolution. In contrast to the other radical Reform rabbis, however, he showed no interest in approaching morality from an evolutionary perspective but regarded the cruel realities of a Darwinian existence as some-

 Ibid., 3 – 5.  Ibid., 5 – 7.

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thing that needed to be countered by altruism. His eventual commitment to eugenics was another difference, at least at that time.²⁶

 Later on, other U.S. Jewish Reform rabbis would espouse eugenic ideas, including J. Leonard Levy, David de Sola Pool, Joseph Silverman, and Louis Mann. Famously, Stephen Wise sponsored series of lectures on eugenics and mental hygiene in November 1913. Perhaps the best known example of a published justification was Max Reichler, “Jewish Eugenics,” in Jewish Eugenics and Other Essays: Three Papers Read before the New York Board of Jewish Ministers 1915, ed. Max Reichler, Joel Blau, and D. de Sola Pool (New York: Bloch Publishing Company, 1916).

V Kaufmann Kohler: The Unfolding of Divine Life Kaufmann Kohler (1843 – 1926)¹ was born in Bavaria and brought up in an Orthodox home, becoming a protégé of the champion of neo-Orthodoxy, Samson Raphael Hirsch. University studies at Munich and Berlin under the Jewish philologist and philosopher Hermann Steinthal and the Protestant biblical scholars and orientalists Hermann Strack and Franz Delitzsch, among others, ignited an interest in historical approaches to Judaism, which Kohler came to see as lacking in Orthodoxy, until, despite himself, he was drawn to the leading light in German Reform Judaism, Abraham Geiger, who, like Hirsch, was based in Frankfurt. Kohler’s biblical-critical doctoral thesis at Erlangen, which espoused an evolutionary conception of Judaism, was too liberal to allow him to lead a congregation in Germany, and Geiger encouraged Kohler to pursue an academic career (he went on to Leipzig to study Arabic and Persian), before assisting in finding him a position as a Reform Rabbi in the U.S. in Detroit from 1869, from where he went to Chicago in 1871, finally settling in New York in 1879. A frequent contributor to the Jewish press, he is credited with being the first U.S. rabbi to publicly accept evolutionary theory.² He married the daughter of the radical reformer David Einhorn, and became father-in-law to his fellow reformer Emil G. Hirsch. In 1903 he took over from Isaac Mayer Wise as president of Hebrew Union College. As a scholar, his lifelong specialism was Hellenistic Judaism and the history of the harmonization of ostensibly non-Jewish thought with Judaism. As the leading progressive Jewish theologian of his day, albeit one who preferred to stress historical continuity rather than rupture vis-à-vis Orthodoxy, he believed that Judaism’s survival depended upon full acceptance of modern historical and scientific knowledge, including evolutionary theory. Kohler’s interest in evolution is most clearly articulated in three distinct phases. There is an early discussion in the context of the Science-Religion debate in the 1870s, in which evolution features in terms of the fossil record (against the idea of special creation), as a natural law (against the idea of miraculous divine intervention), and as the context for understanding both mankind’s biological origins and the developmental nature of religion and morality. Then, in the au-

 For a short biographical account, drawing on Kohler’s own biographical comments, see Max Kohler, “Biographical Sketch of Dr. K. Kohler,” in Studies in Jewish Literature (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1913). This work also includes an assessment of Kohler as a leader and thinker in what Kohler himself preferred to call Progressive Judaism: David Philipson, “Kaufmann Kohler as Reformer,” Ibid.  Kohler, “Biographical Sketch of Dr. K. Kohler,” Ibid., 7. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664119-005

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tumn of 1887, he offered three sermons on Judaism, biblical criticism and morality, which he approached in relation to evolutionary theory; here he argued that nature was a more authentic form of revelation than scripture, which was historically constrained, and the idea that biology and human conceptions of religion and morality, and consciousness itself, were all expressions of a universal law of evolution that underpinned reality, which might even be regarded as a kind of manifestation of an immanent God. Finally, in his great work Jewish Theology (1918), we find his mature view, which reiterated most of these ideas and which hinted at a panentheistic conception of the Universe. Generally, Kohler did not tend to reference scientific sources (an exception was Haeckel, whose Anthropogeny or natural history of mankind was published in 1874) or to mention Christian sources, although the publication of Fiske’s Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874) and Huxley’s U.S. lecture tour in 1876 might well have given impetus to his first tranche of writings, and Huxley’s influential writings on Genesis and on the evolution of theology in the mid 1880s coincided with his second phase. While there are many positive references to Darwin, they tend to be vague; another source he cited was Spencer, of whose moral philosophy he disapproved. In a section on Creation in his book Jewish Theology, he mentions in passing such figures as Lyell³ and Darwin, and also Henri Bergson,⁴ but he was much more familiar with, and much more likely to cite, biblical scholars.

Religion and Science Kohler’s earliest contribution on the subject of evolution came in a German sermon in 1874, translated for The Jewish Times, entitled ‘Science and Religion’. In it

 Charles Lyell (1797– 1875) was the British geologist whose Principles of Geology 3 vols. (1830 – 33) inspired Darwin to identify a gradualist, naturalistic mechanism for evolution as a complementary example of the uniformitarian forces at work in the rest of natural world. Kohler refers to Lyall (sic) as one of those who had brought about the modern view of ‘a world immeasurable in terms of either space or time, a world where evolution works through eons of time and an infinite number of stages.’ Kaufmann Kohler, Jewish Theology: Systematically and Historically Considered (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1918), 154.  Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941) was a French Jewish philosopher whose Creative Evolution, which had sought to challenge Spencer’s mechanistic interpretation of evolution and had popularized the idea of the élan vital or vital force, was published in French in 1907 and English in 1911. Kohler commented ‘The philosophy of Bergson, which eliminates design and purpose from the cosmos and places Deity itself into the process as the vital urgent of it all, and thus sees God forever in the making, is pantheistic and un-Jewish, and therefore cannot be considered in a theology of Judaism.’ Ibid., 71.

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are many of the key themes that would come to predominate in Jewish engagement with evolution, including the view of science and religion as complementary expressions of truth; an articulation of the mythical nature of the Genesis accounts and scorn of supernaturalism in religion; a tendency to utilize a universal, non-Darwinian conception of evolution; and an attempt to justify Reform Judaism as the outcome of historical evolutionary processes.⁵ In particular, Kohler was concerned to convince the reader that the apparent threat to religion posed by science was much exaggerated and that, in fact, science, and especially evolutionary theory, could be regarded as complementary to Judaism. He began with a parable about the sun and moon having once been as bright as each other, until the moon’s jealous concern to subordinate the sun resulted in the heavenly judgment that she would be the lesser light. Similarly, he suggested, Religion often watches science with jealousy, and fears [that] the brilliant diurnal splendor of her sister will obscure her own light, and thus it often appears as if the silvery radiance of the one would fade away entirely before the conquering king of the day. But envy and jealousy alone have darkened her light. It is the mission of both to illumine the sphere of human life… Religion and science must illumine one another, and must harmonize with one another.⁶

He went on to assert that ‘Science and religion need not antagonize one another’ since they are two complementary sides of the same coin of revelation, one working through the emotions ‘which feel The One in All’ and one through the reason ‘which, investigating, recognizes the unit in the whole’. Astronomy, geology, and chemistry, claim that they ‘see infinite worlds coming and going, but no ruler of heaven, no God’, and biology, too, follows the traces of developing life from the lowest form in the bosom of the sea up to the highest oak, and from the cell of the embryo to the completest animal organism, and says, ‘We can discover, neither in the heights nor in the depths, that God whom religion teaches; force and matter we see ruling everywhere; we can perceive no free conscious creator.’⁷

 Swetlitz first noted these pioneering aspects of Kohler’s work. Swetlitz, “American Jewish Responses to Darwin and Evolutionary Theory, 1860 – 1890,” 217– 18.  Kaufmann Kohler, “Science and Religion,” The Jewish Times, 20 February 1874, 820. Later, Kohler would suggest that ‘[t]he whole conflict between science and religion, portrayed so vividly by two Americans, John W. Draper and Andrew D. White, has no place within Judaism, where reason and faith are called twin-sisters, both daughters of the Divine Wisdom.’ Furthermore, he cited with approval the German philosopher F.A. Lange’s claim that Jewish monotheism ‘gave the world its scientific basis, the idea of the Empire of Law.’ Kaufmann Kohler, “What Is Judaism?,” Temple Beth-El Lectures, 23 October 1887, 6.  Kohler, “Science and Religion,” 820.

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Yet, science could not do without religion and vice versa. On the one hand, there was still much that science could not explain. In particular, he questioned whether the nineteenth-century scientist could ‘unriddle’ how inanimate matter became living matter. Nor could science satisfy mankind, emotionally: only religion could counter ‘the gloomy melancholy trait of resignation, of the “worldsorrow”’ that was characteristic of cultivated circles of society and which was the strange and significant result of the development of natural science and of the ‘low materialism’ that often attended it.⁸ On the other hand, unreflective theology had ‘built barricades against the progress of free investigation’ such as the idea of a six-day creation, or that the Bible was the infallible word of God, or that the earth was only six-thousand years old. With an eye to his Christian contemporaries as much as to his Jewish congregants, Kohler opined that ‘Thus [are] all thinkers are driven out of the Church; out of the religious community.’⁹ For Kohler, the scientific evidence certainly meant that some aspects of traditional religion now needed to be set aside. So the fossil animals and plants found in the bosom of the earth, the petrified relics of olden and perished worlds, can hardly be brought into accord with the Biblical system of creation, or with the assumption of a complete covering of the earth by a deluge.¹⁰

But just as past Jewish philosophers in Alexandria, Arabia and Spain had rejected the ‘supernatural wonders’ and ‘miraculous stories’ of the Bible, that is, just as the ‘Judaism of old united and harmonized its new knowledge with its old faith’, so Kohler could not see any danger in Judaism from the modern science, the findings of which amounted to the declaration that the world was not made in one moment, but has developed itself, and that man was not created complete, but has developed himself: for this is essentially the new Darwinian doctrine, the foundation and capstone of the modern science of nature… All which Darwinism declares is that creation is not to be explained through a miracle, but through the natural law of progressive development of life under favorable circumstances. Thus, from the simplest forms of life, under varying influences, the manifold forms of existence have developed themselves.¹¹

 Ibid. Specifically, Kohler referred to the pessimism of the German philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, who was also of interest to Benamozegh. See Chapter I, fn 17.  Ibid., 821.  Ibid.  Ibid.

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And just as one did not deny God when one no longer claimed that He sent rain directly down through the gates of heaven, or that He daily led the sun out from its tabernacle, so one did not deny God when one was obliged, as instructed by science, to ‘deny every immediate interference of God with the eternal order of the world and question every miracle.’ Kohler’s conception of God was of a profoundly immanent divinity. In language that hinted at an equivalence between natural laws and divine will, he confessed that My idea of the wisdom of the Eternal is too great to allow me to believe that He is from time to time patching up and improving His own works. The eternal laws of nature are His eternal wisdom, His unchangeable will. Were He ever to change His will, He would not to me be the Eternal.¹²

Scientists such as Darwin and Haeckel had convinced Kohler of the explanatory power of natural laws at work in biological evolution, and he accepted that common descent applied to mankind (‘What man is, that he has become through the conditions which creative Omnipotence planted at the beginning in his developing nature.’)¹³ But humans remained for him a special case, for he regarded them as having ‘reached the highest round on the ladder of creation.’ As he explained, distinguishing between the external and internal evolutionary processes at work in man, [A]fter the [human] organism was completed externally, the spiritual powers developed internally… The animal remains where nature set it first. With it the creative power accomplished its purpose when the animal began its existence. Man does not remain stationary. The creative motive power presses him further and further and further away from his original point – away from his primitive condition up to the higher and the infinite… Does this not prove that there dwells in him more of the creative power and the creative spirit than in any of his associates in the realm of creation?’¹⁴

In particular, Kohler had the evolution of morality in mind. Morality and religion had not ‘come down from heaven perfect and complete, but have developed themselves from crude forms’.¹⁵ He suggested that morality did not itself change over time but the degree to which men had articulated it certainly had progressed and improved over time. From there it was a small step to suggest that all this was entirely in harmony with the worldview of Reform Judaism.

   

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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Does not this view of life perfectly harmonize with our religion, whose history is one of internal progress, and whose aim is the highest future ideal of humanity? Does it not harmonize perfectly with our comprehension of religion, which we do not recognize in form, but in reform, which has its living power in the internal remodelling of Judaism and its Messianic mission in progress toward completed humanity?¹⁶

After all, Kohler concluded, in contrast to the Catholic Church and those Protestants who had condemned as sinful the Copernican teaching of the heliocentric solar system, Reform Judaism did not ‘deify the Bible’ nor did it ‘tremble and fear for our old faith, which has changed its form so often’, but rather it allowed ‘our spirit to be enlightened by the science of this later day.’¹⁷

Judaism, Biblical Criticism and Morality Five years later, in a sermon entitled ‘Adam: or Man in Creation’, Kohler addressed with greater focus the crucial issue of how to think about the Genesis story, and, specifically, how to think about man’s place in creation, in light of evolutionary theory. The point of the Genesis account, he insisted, was to remind us of the unique nature of man which was characterized by god-like moral freedom. But the evolutionist’s account was just as inspiring in tracing the development of man from ‘the slimy creature that cleaves to the bottom of the sea’ to ‘the mocking face of the ape’ to the Laplander and Hottentot and finally to ‘our pedigree’. He also noted that the biblical account offered an evolutionary theory of its own, ‘where the grand Architect is seen building up the universe in successive stages… until in man the towering cupola and crown of creation is reached.’ He

 Ibid.  Ibid. Kohler would return to this theme of the evolutionary nature of Judaism in his important proclamation of his principles in 1880. In this essay, ‘Old and Modern Judaism’, he drew upon biological and evolutionary imagery several times. Thus just as the human embryo was hardly discernable at two months from any other animal, so the characteristics of the embryonic Hebrew religion bore striking resemblances with ‘all heathen religions’, including the circumcision of Africans and Polynesians and the Sabbath of the Chaldeans. And if ‘evolution is the key offered by our age for the solution of the great problems of growth in the world of matter or mind’ then, he suggested, why should it not be accepted by the religious; after all, was it really any less religious to behold God as active to-day in the constant changes of suns and planets as He was in the six Biblical days of creation? ‘What’ he asked, ‘has Judaism to fear of the progress of science or of the emancipation from the yoke of all dogmatism and ceremonialism, proclaimed by our age?’ Kaufmann Kohler, “Old and Modern Judaism,” Hebrew Review 1880 – 1881, 99 – 101, 110.

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concluded that ‘it is the same God here and there, in nature, and in the Bible, its beautiful commentary.’¹⁸ This link between evolution and biblical criticism reoccurred in several sermons that Kohler gave in the autumn of 1887. He was sanguine about the risks, asking: ‘What matters it if the Bible be divested of its supernatural character and Evolution take the place of Creation and Revelation?’¹⁹ and he readily admitted that modern science ‘seems to do away with Revelation and put Evolution in its stead.’²⁰ A new historical understanding of religion was inevitable in the light of modern research, he explained. A new era of research dawned, the century of Darwin. People commenced to re-read the world’s history… And once examined like any other human writing, the Bible under the microscope of critical analysis turned out not be a book dictated by God to Moses and David and Solomon and the few known prophets, but the slow and steady growth of a nation’s intellectual life-work, the outcome of toiling centuries.²¹

But Kohler reminded his readers that Jewish authorities from the past of the calibre of Maimonides, Ibn Ezra, and Gersonides had not believed in supernatural revelation and had discarded the miraculous stories in the Bible, and he argued that Judaism had nothing to fear from modern scholarship and science in the nineteenth-century, either, even if ‘the orthodox of both the Church and the Synagogue denounced [it] as an awful heresy.’²² Like Isaac Mayer Wise, Kohler realized that for many the real reason for the fear lying behind the rise of evolution and biblical-criticism was the potential for the undermining of morality in society. In his sermon ‘Evolution and morality’ given only a few weeks later, he addressed this concern head on, asking the rhetorical question: If honesty is recommended only as being the best policy, and virtue as leading to the finest pleasure, as Herbert Spencer tells; if love for our fellow-man is only affection of the brute for its kin transherited, according to Darwin – what is there godly in morality and noble in virtue?²³

 Kaufmann Kohler, “Adam: Or Man in Creation,” The Jewish Messenger, 24 October 1879, 5.  Kohler, “What Is Judaism?,” 7.  Kaufmann Kohler, “The Bible in the Light of Modern Research,” Temple Beth-El Lectures, 15 November 1887, 5.  Ibid., 4.  Ibid., 5.  Kaufmann Kohler, “Evolution and Morality,” Temple Beth-El Lectures, 4 December 1887, 3.

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In seeking a more godly, noble alternative to ‘materialism and skepticism’,²⁴ it would be vital, he suggested, to draw upon evolutionary theory rather than to reject it out of hand. One could not pretend that, after Darwin, it was business as usual; after all, ‘[p]eople have broken away from the old landmarks of belief, because they found them to be in conflict with reason and science, and the old hell-fire to have lost its terror.’²⁵ But, he continued, morality and religion itself could be understood in terms of a universal conception of evolution that went well beyond the realms of organic biology. What is Evolution? To put it in fewest and plainest words: The things around us and the ideas within us have not as was the belief hitherto, been created and fixed by a single creative act of God, but have all along been and are still growing and developing from lower to ever higher and more complicated forms. Not only suns and stars, planet and animal life of all shape and size, but the speech, the conscience and reason we possess, and the religion we own, have been and are in a constant process of growth, ever changing, moving, shifting.²⁶

An evolutionary perspective on morality ‘accounts better for all our errors and failings, for the shortcomings of our moral and religious life, for the very evils that surround us within or from without.’²⁷ In the first place, it helped explain the development over time of biblical ethical teaching and acknowledged its shortcomings in the light of modern sensitivities. Neither the Decalogue nor the Bible presents a complete code of ethics… The warning against sin and vice in one age leads to the practice of virtue in the next. Conditional toleration of polygamy, slavery and retaliation by the Mosaic law points to the recognition of the higher dignity of man and woman, of the sanctity of human life arrived at by later Judaism and Christianity… Judaism, the Bible, all the given religions are but evolutions of morality.²⁸

By no means did Kohler seek to suggest that morality was purely a cultural construct or an invention of mankind (on the contrary, he asserted that ‘[m]orality,

 Ibid., 2.  Ibid.  Ibid., 3. Kohler refused to accept that an acceptance of evolution theory entailed the favouring of chance over a ‘Master-Mind’ or intelligent designer. In support of this he offered an account of Darwin having lost his belief in God needlessly as a result of materialist assumptions; the insistent search for purely mechanical forces in nature meant that he ‘lost sight of the ‘Leader of Hosts’ who marshalled all those forces.’ Ibid., 4.  Ibid., 6.  Ibid.

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as a principle, is eternal like truth’),²⁹ but mankind’s understanding and appreciation certainly did evolve in his view. Thus the evolution of society was in effect the story of the evolution of morality. As he put it, ‘The entire life of nations, past or present, is but one unbroken unfolding of morality. For what is society but morality organized? And what is a nation’s literature, art, and science but morality expressed in words, in symbols, in axioms?’³⁰ One significant consequence of the evolutionary approach was to find, at last, an effective theodicy or solution to ‘the great problem of evil’: Thorns and stings, while protecting, pains and hardships, while steeling life, work beneficially in the economy of nature, according to the unhesitating verdict of Evolution. Death itself is only the sacrifice of the individual in the interest of larger or higher life. And, when applied to man, must not this rule case new light on life’s clouded pathway, sweetening adversity, robbing death of its pallor, and the grave of its sting? Does not, indeed, Evolution brighten up with new lustre the first chapter of the Bible, holding out the lesson: ‘All that God made, behold, it is good’? What is virtue but manhood won in battle? Sympathy, but born of suffering? Love, but humanity’s sweetest seeds fertilized by tears?³¹

Kohler’s theistic evolutionism viewed the natural phenomenon of evolution, including the resulting conscious animal, man, as the immanent work of the deity in the material world. In his suggestion that the divine life was made manifest in matter and mind through evolutionary processes, Kohler came as near as he ever would to articulating a panentheistic conception of God. Instead of alienating us from God, it [evolution] brings us right face to face with God; for we see Him steadily at work fashioning worlds and lives without number here and ever carving out new destinies for all beings there. In fact, evolution, as I conceive it, is the unfolding of the divine life, the unbroken revelation of God first in endless varieties of matter, then in marvellous productions of conscious mind. And since both matter and mind emanate from the same God, why should the lines not merge?… The entire creation, from crystal and protoplasm to ape and horse, in their gradual rise towards beauty and emotion, foreshadows the coming of upward-striving man.³²

The evolution of the universe and of life was, it seemed, the unfolding or evolution of God in His material and psychical emanations. Appealing to this grand theological vision, Kohler asked his audience what kind of conception of God would they prefer? A God who created man from clay and then allowed him

   

Ibid., 5. Ibid., 7. Ibid. Ibid., 4.

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‘to fall so low in intellect and manners as to become next-door neighbor to the orang-outang?’ Or to see the divine handiwork in the long process of evolution so that ‘man at last emerges with the conscious longing after a better state of things’? The answer was obvious to Kohler: ‘Yes, man is made in the image of God; only that it is dimly felt or seen at the base, and grows ever brighter and grander the nearer it reaches the top.’³³ The idea that story of human morality was a story of uncertain progress was, in his view, inspirational. He concluded, ‘Endless as life is, endless as God is, so is the life, the hope, the future of God’s co-workers, man.’³⁴

A Systematic Evolutionary Theology In Kohler’s great work, Jewish Theology: Systematically and Historically Considered (1918), the conception of universal evolutionary theory reoccurs in a number of familiar contexts. For example, in a chapter on ‘God’s Knowledge and Wisdom’ there was a deliberate attempt to integrate science with the wisdom of religious literature. Thus, Kohler set the insights of the books of Proverbs and Job directly alongside those of modern scientific knowledge. After all, [W]ith its deeper insight into nature, [science] enables us to follow the interaction of the primal chemical and organic forces, and to follow the course of evolution from star-dust and cell to the structure of the human eye or the thought-centers of the brain.³⁵

Judaism itself is again presented as the product of evolutionary processes. As Kohler observed, [Judaism] is by no means the petrifaction of the Mosaic law and the prophetic teachings, as we are so often told, but a continuous process of unfolding and regeneration of its great religious truth… True enough, traditional or orthodox Judaism does not share this view. The idea of gradual development is precluded by its conception of divine revelation, by its doctrine that both the oral and the written Torah were given at Sinai complete and unchangeable for all time…³⁶

 Ibid., 5 – 6.  Ibid., 7– 8.  Kaufmann Kohler, Jewish Theology: Systematically and Historically Considered (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1918), 139.  Ibid., 11.

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And yet the secret to the survival of Judaism as a religion is credited to its ability to transform. Judaism endured due to its repeated successful adaptations to the changing cultural environments in which it found itself. As he explained, Judaism manifested its wondrous power of assimilation by renewing itself to meet the demands of the time, first under the influence of the ancient civilizations, Babylonia and Persia, then of Greece and Rome, finally of the Occidental powers, molding its religious truths and customs in ever new forms, but all in consonance with its own genius… The divine revelation in Israel was by no means a single act, but a process of development, and its various stages correspond to the degrees of culture of the people…³⁷

It was, of course, biblical-criticism that had revealed the reality of the evolutionary stages of the development of the Jewish religion. Modern critical and historical research had made it possible to distinguish between the writings of different periods and between different stages of development in the Biblical and rabbinic sources, and therefore ‘compels us to reject the idea of a uniform origin of the Law, and also of an uninterrupted chain of tradition reaching back to Moses on Sinai.’ It was unavoidable, then, to acknowledge the reality of the process of transformation which Judaism had undergone through the centuries.³⁸ In dismissing the biblical account of creation, Kohler made it clear that an alternative to special creation was one of the most serious challenges facing modern theology (which, in a work of systematic Jewish theology, was saying something). He himself offered a theistic account of evolution which saw God’s hand at work in the simple natural laws that, over vast periods of time, had generated gradually the world and its life-forms. [W]e cannot accept literally the Biblical account of the creation. The modern world has been lifted bodily out of the Babylonian and so-called Ptolemaic world, with its narrow horizon, through the labors of such men as Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Lyall [sic], and Darwin. We live in a world immeasurable in terms of either space or time, a world where evolution works through eons of time and an infinite number of stages. Such a world gives rise to concepts of the working of God in nature totally different from those of the seers and sages of former generations, ideas of which those thinkers could not even dream… How is this evolutionist view to be reconciled with the belief in a divine act of creation? This is the problem which modern theology has set itself, perhaps the greatest which it must solve.³⁹

 Ibid., 12, 36.  Ibid., 12.  Ibid., 153 – 54. Kohler went on: ‘Ultimately, however, the problem is no more difficult now than it was to the first man who pondered over the beginnings of life in the childhood of the world. The same answer fits both modes of thought, with only a different process of reasoning. Whether we count the world’s creation by days or by millions of years, the truth of the first verse

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Kohler’s most sustained discussions concerning the evidence of a Designer in nature occurred in a chapter on ‘The Existence of God’, where he argued that ‘[t]he wondrous order, harmony, and signs of design in nature, as well as the impulse of the reason to search for the unity of all things, corroborate this innate belief in God’.⁴⁰ He attempted to root such natural theology in the Jewish tradition via Philo of Alexandria, who was ‘the first who tried to refute the “atheistic” views of materialists and pantheists by adducing proofs of God’s existence from nature and the human intellect.’⁴¹ While he was careful not to risk Judaism’s integrity by claiming a kind of equivalence with modern science in the manner of Krauskopf and Hirsch, he certainly suggested that the discovery of a universalist law of evolution was in harmony with the core teachings of the Jewish religion about creation and revelation. The same method must apply also to modern thought and research, which substituted historical methods for metaphysics in both the physical and intellectual world, and which endeavors to trace the origin and growth of both objects and ideas in accordance with fixed laws. The process of evolution, our modern key with which to unlock the secrets of nature, points most significantly to a Supreme Power and Energy. But this energy, entering into the cosmic process at its outset, causing its motion and its growth, implies also an end, and thus again we have the Supreme Intelligence reached through a new type of teleology. But all these conceptions, however they may be in harmony with the Jewish belief in creation and revelation, can at best supplement it, but can certainly neither supplant nor be identified with it.⁴²

Later, he offered a model for how the religious truths of the Bible could complement modern natural science. He explained that while the scientist’s ‘nature’ (the cosmic life in its eternal process of growth and reproduction) was called by another name by the religious Jew (‘divine creation’), yet nevertheless, the Jewish use of the Bible was not intended to depreciate or supersede the facts of natural science, but simply to articulate certain religious truths. These truths, Kohler maintained, were contained in three doctrines: The first was that nature, in all its immeasurable power, grandeur, beauty and harmony, was not independent of God but rather ‘is the work, the workshop, and the working force of the of Genesis remains: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In our theories the whole complicated world-process is but the working out of simple laws…’ In the context of discussing deep time, he cited Bergson to remark: ‘We who are the products of time cannot help applying the relation of time to the work of the Creator; time is so interwoven with our being that a modern evolutionist, Bergson, considers it the fundamental element of reality.’ Ibid., 154– 55.  Ibid., 70.  Ibid., 67.  Ibid., 71.

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great Master.’⁴³ As the active power, it was necessary to conceive of God as ‘the designing and creating intellect of the universe, infinitely transcending its complex mechanism, whose will is expressed involuntarily by each of the created beings.’⁴⁴ The second doctrine was that all the beings and forces in the universe comprised a unity, ‘working according to one plan, subserving a common purpose, and pursuing in their development and interaction the aim which God’s wisdom assigned them from the beginning.’⁴⁵ The apparent ‘struggle for existence’, the competition and hostility between life-forms, did not negate the fact that there was an resulting equilibrium, so that one could say that ‘the struggle of nature’s forces ends in harmony and peace’.⁴⁶ Natural science confirmed it, and this was suggestive of the principle of the divine Unity: The researches of science are ever tending toward the knowledge of universal laws of growth, culminating in a scheme of universal evolution. Hence this supports and confirms Jewish monotheism, which knows no power of evil antagonistic to God.⁴⁷

The third doctrine was that the world is good, since its Creator and His final aim are good. ‘True enough’, he admitted, ‘nature, bent with “tooth and claw” upon annihilating one or another form of existence, is quite indifferent to man’s sense of compassion and justice.’⁴⁸ But all the suffering and the apparent injustice of the natural world was for a greater good, namely, that the lower forms of life served the higher forms: the mineral provided food for the vegetable, the vegetable for the animal, and the lower types of animals for the higher. The divine purpose was that each species was a means of vitality for a higher species. It could, he suggested, be compared to ‘the continuous upward striving of man’ which transforms the lower passions, with their evil tendencies, to work more and more toward the triumph of the good. In this transformative movement upwards, man demonstrated his God-likeness.⁴⁹ In this the most systematic and comprehensive of his works, Kohler’s interest in God’s action in relation to evolution is set out a little more clearly. Having several decades earlier asserted the equivalence of divine will and natural law and having expressed evolution as the unfolding of divine life, Kohler now ex-

      

Ibid., 148. Ibid., 149. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 150. Ibid. Ibid.

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plicitly distanced himself from pantheism. Thus he rejected the ancient heathen conceptions that deified nature and which taught that ‘the deity constitutes a part of the world, or the world a part of the deity, and philosophic speculation can at best blend the two into a pantheistic system which has no place for a self-conscious, creative mind and will.’⁵⁰ And he warned against it as a potentially dangerous consequence of misunderstanding of evolutionary science, since a pantheistic conception of God-Nature robbed the deity of mind. [T]he modern view of evolution in place of creation has the grave danger of leading to pantheism, to a conception of the cosmos which sees in God only an eternal energy (or substance) devoid of free volition and self-conscious action. We can evade the difficulty only by assuming God’s transcendence, and this can be done in such a way as not to exclude His immanence, or – what is the same thing – His omnipresence.⁵¹

And yet in a chapter on ‘The Essence of God’ Kohler can be seen struggling to articulate God’s action in nature so that it avoided the extremes of either absolute transcendence or immanence and yet remained recognisably Jewish. It is worth citing at length. The doctrine that God is above and beyond the universe, transcending all created things, as well as time and space, might lead logically to the view of the deist that He stands outside of the world, and does not work from within. But this inference has never been made even by the boldest of Jewish thinkers… The interweaving of the ideas of God’s immanence and transcendency is shown especially in two poems embodied in the songs of the Synagogue, Ibn Gabirol’s ‘Crown of Royalty’ and the ‘Songs of Unity’ for each day of the week… Here occur such sentences as these: ‘All is in God and God is in all’; ‘Sufficient unto Himself and self-determining, He is the ever-living and self-conscious Mind, the all-permeating, all-impelling, and all-accomplishing Will’; ‘The universe is the emanation of the plenitude of God, each part the light of His infinite light, flame of His eternal empyrean’; ‘The universe is the garment, the covering of God, and He the all-penetrating Soul.’ All these ideas were borrowed from neo-Platonism, and found a conspicuous place in Ibn Gabirol’s philosophy, later influencing the Cabbalah. Similarly the appellation, Makom, ‘Space,’ is explained by both Philo and the rabbis as denoting ‘Him who encompasses the world, but whom the world cannot encompass.’ An utterance such as this, well-nigh pantheistic in tone, leads directly to theories like those of Spinoza or of David Nieto, the well-known London Rabbi, who was largely under Spinozistic influence and who still was in accord with Jewish thought. Certainly, as long as Jewish monotheism conceives of God as self-conscious Intellect and freely acting Will, it can easily accept the principle of divine immanence.⁵²

 Ibid., 147.  Ibid., 100.  Ibid., 79 – 80.

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Kohler did not have the vocabulary, but his attraction to such ‘well-nigh pantheistic’ utterances that were ‘still in accord with Jewish thought’, his attempt to find a balance between transcendence and immanence, and his conception of God as the creative mind that designed the world (and thus made Him distinct from it), were suggestive of what would later be described as panentheism. The other great danger Kohler sought to address in his book was the consequences for morality as a result of how mankind conceived of itself in the light of the new science. He did not shy away from the bestial origin of humanity but insisted that the human possessed a privileged place in creation with freedom of moral choice. He observed that with modern science the teachings of bodysoul duality had lost credibility while ancient beliefs about the close connection of the human to the animal worlds had been strengthened. This was reminiscent of the medieval Jewish idea, adapted from Plato and Aristotle, that there was a substance of souls (nefesh hahiyonith) which formed the basic life-force of men and animals. Similarly, physiology and psychology revealed the close interaction and interdependence of the body and the soul or mind for both animals and man. Thus he had no doubt that ‘[t]he beginnings of the human mind must be sought once for all in the animal, just as the origin of the animal reaches back into the plant world.’ And just as motion and sensibility differentiated animal life from plant life, so self-consciousness and self-determination were the distinctive markers of humanity. While this could be described in a naturalistic terminology, it also hinted at something more profound. Human freedom was essentially moral in character. As such man’s unique freedom lifts him into a realm of free action under higher motives, transcending nature’s law of necessity, and therefore not falling within the domain of natural science. Dust-born man, notwithstanding his earthly limitations, in spite of his kinship to mollusk and mammal, enters the realm of the divine spirit. In the Midrash the rabbis remark that man shares the nature of both animals and angels. Admitting this, we feel that he is tied neither to heaven nor to the earth, but free to lift himself above all creatures or sink below them all.⁵³

 Ibid., 215 – 16. As such, mankind was the goal of the whole evolutionary process. ‘The world of God, which is the world of morality, and which leads to man, the image of God, must be based upon the free, purposive creative act of God. Whether such an act was performed once for all or is everlastingly renewed, is a quite secondary matter for religion, however important it may be to philosophy, or however fundamental to science. In our daily morning prayers, which refer to the daily awakening to a life seemingly new, God is proclaimed as “He who reneweth daily the work of creation.”’ Ibid., 155.

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Summary What were Kohler’s distinctive views? In contrast to Wise and Hahn, the influence of philosophical Idealism in his writings on evolution was much less obvious than was biology. With regard to religious authority, he viewed scientific and religious truths, properly defined, as necessarily complementary aspects of a greater truth. Concerned to counter the rise of atheism, materialism and scepticism, he championed scientific and historical knowledge over traditional Orthodox Jewish and Christian commitments to revelation, and identified with trends within Jewish historical tradition that he regarded as suspicious of superstition. A belief in a kind of cosmic law, ‘a scheme of universal evolution’ as he put it, pervaded his work. A firm biblical-critical stance was the logical consequence of the recognition that Jewish religion had evolved over time, and freed one from offensive superstitious traditions and beliefs. Along with Jewish religion, ethical teachings more generally were understood to have evolved over time, or, at least, human understanding and appreciation of them had. This god-like moral freedom was the true teaching of the myth of Genesis and remained true after Darwin; accepting the limitations of the biblical code of ethics and thus human responsibility for the development of morality would prevent any threat of societal collapse under the burden of the knowledge of humankind’s animal origins, even as it explained human ethical failings; as such, mankind had in a real sense freed itself from the workings of evolution. The centrality of evolutionary theory to Kohler’s thought is reflected in his claim that the greatest challenge for modern Jewish theology was how to comprehend the nature of God’s role in an evolved creation. At times, despite his explicit rejection of pantheism, his investigations in evolutionary biology led him to espouse a panentheistic account of the evolution of matter and mind as the unfolding of divine life, for which drew upon elements from Jewish tradition.

VI Emil G. Hirsch: The Divine Soul of an Evolving Universe Emil G. Hirsch (1851– 1923)¹ was one of the most influential proponents of radical Reform Judaism in the States from the 1880s until the 1920s; in fact he preferred the term ‘Reformed Judaism’ as a way of signaling the complete break with the past. Born in Luxemburg, he was the son of a prominent Reform rabbi, and married the daughter of another, David Einhorn; he received a broad education at the University of Pennsylvania, at Leipzig and at the Hochschule in Berlin, where he came into contact with Geiger, Lazarus and Steinthal. In addition to his role as a communal rabbi in Chicago, where he eventually settled, he established the Reform Advocate in 1891, which he edited until his death, and he was professor of Rabbinic Literature and Philosophy at the University of Chicago from 1892. Hirsch’s liberal religious perspective was characterized by an optimism concerning social progress and the perfectibility of humankind, and by a lifelong interest in comparative religion. In Kantian fashion he regarded ethics rather than theology as primary to religion and he was highly sympathetic to the contemporary Social Gospel movement that regarded religion as a tool for the improvement of societal inequality. His theology was eclectic to the extent that it might be described as inconsistent; as one commentator observed, at different times Hirsch espoused radical humanism, personalistic theism, and pantheism.² Hirsch wrote about evolution throughout his career, with early articles in the Jewish press in the early 1880s leading to a very public clash with Orthodox Jewish critics, but his key works were published sermons. In the first, Darwin and Darwinism, published as a pamphlet in 1883, he set out the theological rationale for theistic evolutionism. The second, entitled ‘The Doctrine of Evolution and Judaism’, was published in a collection of sermons in 1903 and, among other things, offered a panentheistic articulation of the moral purpose behind the evolutionary process. Among the many scientific, philosophical and literary authorities Hirsch cited with approval in his writings were Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley; in particular, he engaged with Haeckel’s monism, which he criticized for its amoral, non-spiritual perspective, and his work shared striking similarities with

 For a useful overview of Hirsch’s life, see Gerson B. Levi, “Biographical Introduction,” in My Religion, ed. Emil G. Hirsch (New York: Macmillan, 1925).  Bernard Martin, “The Religious Philosophy of Emil G. Hirsch,” in Critical Studies in American Jewish History, ed. Jacob R. Marcus (Cincinnati, OH: KTAV, 1952), 190. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664119-006

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Fiske’s panentheism and focus on moral and religious evolution, although, strictly speaking, he made no direct references to either.³

A Paradigm for the History of Religion Hirsch’s initial interest in Darwinism was in its utility as a paradigm for understanding the historical evolution of religion in general and Judaism in particular, a view that frequently found its way into the newspapers. In a sermon to his congregation in May 1881, later reproduced The Jewish Advocate as ‘Religion in Evolution’, he set out the wide and varied impact of Darwinism before complaining: One sphere alone seems disinclined to apply the idea of evolution. In religion the spirit of former days seems, as yet, to loiter… Can, however, the central idea of our age not be made profitable in this field as well? Religion is often thought to be a Pallas Athene, the daughter of divine parentage, springing fully armoured from the head of its progenitor… The researches of modern time have, however, proven that religion itself, in the form in which we have it, is the outcome of a long process of evolution.⁴

He went on to discuss naturalistic explanations of religion (including fetishism, animism, polytheism, henotheism, the pantheism of Aryans, and the ethical monotheism of the Prophets) and maintained that ‘traces’ of the various stages of religion ‘have been found in the fossils, linguistic and institutional, imbedded [sic] in the soil of biblical literature.’ He argued that in historical times the process of religious evolution had continued. Christianity and Islam, the Reformation, the Sunna and the Shiites, Talmudism, and Reform Judaism, were all are phases of religious development. He asked his readers what could be learnt from this long-term perspective of religious development, and provided the answer that Reformers could see themselves working in harmony with the laws of evolutionary history. As he explained, It may give us courage to persevere in our work… We may learn that Reform is not arbitrary. Evolution follows an inherent law. Only such reforms will stand, as are in keeping with the tendency of the historical channel. It is true, we cannot, if religion is the outgrowth of religion, presume to build a permanent sanctuary. [As the Israelites in the desert] so do we worship in a tabernacle, ready to move forward from station to station. Yet the ark of the covenant, the consciousness of our historical mission, must be shielded by our shrine.⁵

 Martin also sees a connection to Fiske in relation to the belief in human progress that was intrinsic to a cosmic process of evolution. Ibid., 194– 95.  Emil G. Hirsch, “Evolution in Religion,” The Jewish Advance, 6 May 1881, 5.  Ibid.

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Such views provoked condemnations from more conservative Jews. Less than a year later, an editorial entitled ‘Evolution in Religion’ in the American Hebrew not only disagreed with Hirsch’s religious agenda but criticized his understanding of evolutionary theorists such as Spencer. Here it was argued that evolution occurred with conformity and in unity with regard to structures, functions, and conduct, in contrast to the radicals who had misunderstood the nature of evolution by threatening too radical a break; without concord between different congregations, the whole would be unable to evolve properly. Furthermore, the editor confounded Hirsch’s claim that ‘Reform knows no religion of ceremonial’ (that is, his attempt to rid Judaism of religious ceremony) by citing directly from Spencer, who had suggested that the ‘abolition of religious constraint’ would only entail the ‘increase of misconduct’.⁶ The disagreement was not over Hirsch’s use of biological evolution as a model for understanding contemporary religious developments, but over the proper understanding of what the model actually showed to be natural, healthy development. Three years later, Hirsch returned to the comparison of biological evolution and historical development. Now keen to avoid any criticism of radicalism, he called rather for a steady, gradual development of Judaism. At the same time he argued that loyalty to past traditions did not mean clinging on to tradition for the sake of tradition. Evolutionary forces transformed organisms so that over time certain features became obsolete and were lost to the species. Likewise, Judaism would inevitably lose traditions and practices over time, and critics of Reform should recognise this as part of the natural, gradual, evolutionary process. For him, the true evolutionist would never deny the absolute necessity of founding the present upon the past. Reflecting a gradualist conception of evolution he observed that ‘Development is not by fits and starts. It is a steady purpose, sometimes arrested, at times turned back, but for all that steady.’ While it was true, Hirsch said, that there existed a hierarchy of life-forms, from the rudimentary to the complex, he was much more interested in the nature of adaptation over time, which required the modification of existing forms rather than their annihilation. As he explained, We have organized life of a lower order and of a higher, the latter virtually comprising all the former, but actually often dropping this or that tool which the earlier life needed. Man’s arm is akin to the bird’s wing, the fish’s instrument of locomotion, and yet is not the same. So it is with Judaism. It is an organism, which from the rudimentary grew into the more complex, but which in this growth does merely virtually hold all that ever belonged to

 Editorial, “Evolution in Religion,” The American Hebrew, 10 March 1882, 38. Also Emil G. Hirsch, “Radicalism,” The American Hebrew, 27 January 1882.

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any of the stages of the process, without actually repeating at every stage all the antecedent forms and formations. This characteristic of the historical is frequently overlooked.⁷

Defending Evolution from a Theistic Perspective Hirsch came to believe that opposition to his views stemmed from a poor understanding of evolutionary theory. Specifically, he felt that he needed to reassure Jews who felt that the theory threatened to destroy Jewish religion. In 1883, Hirsch offered a longer sermon entitled ‘Darwin and Darwinism’ that moved on from evolution as a paradigm for historical Judaism and focused instead directly on natural selection. The first issue was to establish that the earth was much older than the six thousand years of Jewish traditional teaching. The discoveries of Geologists were the forerunners of the theories of the Biologists… The Science of our Earth located the beginnings of the process of growth, of the things that are at almost inconceivably distant periods… The tongue of the black diamond has been made to disclose the secrets of mother earth to the young science. ‘Not six thousands years ago’ says it, ‘have I been imbedded [sic] and encompassed in solar fire.’⁸

In offering an overview of Darwinian theory, Hirsch sought to assuage the fears of those who viewed it as inimical to religion. In fact, it was one of the clearest articulations of some of the most difficult aspects of the theory offered by a Reform rabbi in the late nineteenth century. His solution was, firstly, to question whether Darwinism actually denied a Creator per se and to suggest instead that it threw light on His method.⁹ Secondly, Hirsch sought to deny a materialist interpretation of the theory.

 Emil G. Hirsch, “Historical Judaism,” Jewish Reformer, 5 March 1886, 8. There is an allusion here to Haeckel’s recapitulation theory. In the same essay, he reinforced his argument by alluding to military advances over time, which made certain weapons obsolete, and by reference to the organism, commenting ‘The infant Judaism is identical with the Judaism of manhood; and yet not the same.’  Emil G. Hirsch, Darwin and Darwinism: A Discourse Delivered before the Chicago Sinai Congregation (Chicago: Occident, 1883), 4.  Strictly speaking, he did not explicitly view fitness in terms of fitness to environment, so much as fitness in terms of competition. ‘One primary form was father to all succeeding ones, all species and formations sprung from the first one in sequence of the of the operation of natural laws. The struggle for existence is the mighty lever, natural selection the means for the propagation. The stronger survives in battle, the weaker has to succumb. The abilities of the strong become permanent, and are transmitted from generation to generation, thus changing the type, and become fixed in new variations, and from small changes in individuals, in the progression of time

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With the letters of the biblical Genesis it [evolution] cannot be harmonized; but in the spirit it may. One idea is certainly positive in said first chapter: That there is a creator and his constructive and guiding hand is universally apparent in the great machinery of nature, and Darwin does not in any wise deny this… Does he [the observer of nature], however, deny the master, who weaves at this invisible loom, whose never ceasing shuttle flies to and fro? [To the chagrin of the ‘mire philosophers’ who deport themselves as though they owned exclusively all science:] Certainly not! [D]espite the clamor and noise of materialists we must not conceive the evolution process as one purely mechanical… The process of nature consummates itself through innermost force, and working outwardly. It is a dynamic and spiritual procedure. Where then is the abyss that lies between Darwin and religion?¹⁰

In contrast to Kohler, Hirsch acknowledged that certain aspects of the theory challenged the familiar teachings of natural theology. The natural world was not as harmonious a place as previously assumed and its design pointed to a creator whose nature went well beyond our understanding. Furthermore, Hirsch drew out from the evolutionary experience a familiar lesson, a greater-good theodicy of sorts, about the need for humility on the part of the individual with regard to the outcomes of the universal evolution process. [T]he new theory has rendered it impossible for us… to look into the hidden plans of God. Nor should we grumble at that! No greater abuse was practiced than with the world ‘design.’ They forgot the old prophetic admonition ‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, my ways are not your ways.’… Darwinism successfully supplants this arrogance. If it was taught heretofore that the eye was created for the sun, now the reverse is taught, that the sun creates the eye. If it were heretofore believed that an all wise creator gave swiftness to the Roe so that he might outrun his enemies, we know today that thousands perished in the ‘struggle for existence’ beset on all sides with fear and danger until that species acquired the ability to baffle, in being hunted down, its ravenous enemies. There can therefore be no ‘design’ thought of. Yet in a higher sense it may be!… A thousand generations must perish, so that another may be enabled to exist! Where do we find the divine harmony [of natural theology?], demands the low charlatan?… This is the divine in the ‘world’ process, the law, that the single and the individual are present to serve the whole; that Life means self-denial, that it exacts selfless devotion to the interests, the aims of the ‘All.’ To suffer, battle and deny one’s self is the price of our existence, its reward the thought that the totality of man advances, elevates itself, and acquires ‘healing through our wounds.’¹¹

rises a new species through natural selection and heredity. This, then, briefly is the ground and network of what now is known as Darwinism – is this antagonistic to religion?’ Ibid., 5.  Ibid., 6.  Ibid., 7.

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Even at this early stage in his thinking Hirsch suggested that, while the forces of evolution remained at work, mankind had actually freed itself from its dominance, and continued to develop in a cultural or spiritual realm that was distinct from the natural realm. The creation of tools marked the boundary line between instinct and reason/spirit, such that simple ‘corporeal evolution’ ceased at that point, as the path of spiritual advancement began.¹² As a result, he could disabuse his audience of many of the social implications, including unfettered capitalism and racism, that some took from Darwinism, and could instead reinforce the need for the self-restraint and morality that religion taught. The struggle for existence, the conquering of the strongest, selection and heredity, have become household words; but even now wrong deductions are drawn from them. Is it brute force which conquers? Such is the belief of thousands [of social Darwinians] who rise today to upset the old regulations of society!… Others again assert that morality, moral freedom, and responsibility are nursery tales… And beside the husky voice of class hatred today, the screech owls cry of race hatred is heard despite Darwin… [A]ll these despite their common descendency [sic] from the prehistoric ‘Ape.’… Oh! Those that speak thus, little understand the deep import of Darwinism… [M]an’s freedom consists of this, that he above his surrounding may elevate himself; to subdue his inborn impulses, and subordinate himself in his freewill to divine laws, which without our aid regulates the course of worlds!¹³

As if in response to the previous year’s editorial in the American Hebrew, Hirsch concluded with an acknowledgment that, just as for social Darwinians, those who called for new Darwinian-inspired religions were mistaken if they thought evolutionary theory implied religious revolution, rather than gradual change.¹⁴

A Panentheistic Account of the Moral Purpose of Evolution to Confound the Materialists In 1903 Hirsch published his longest and most interesting statement on evolution, entitled ‘The Doctrine of Evolution and Judaism’, in a pamphlet series for

 Ibid., 8, 9.  Ibid., 9, 10.  For those who call for a new religion, he wrote, ‘has Darwin uselessly written. Evolution, not new forms is the material law… Religion is the tree of life; the higher this tree is to thrive, the deeper his roots must sink into the soil. The treasure which we have inherited, we should enrich… then may we be within the bounds of the great work of evolution.’ Ibid., 10.

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which he was the editor.¹⁵ (The same year, he wrote the entries on ‘Evolution’ and ‘Ethics in relation to Evolution’ in the Jewish Encyclopedia, which were derived from this study.)¹⁶ Here he covered previous ground including the evolutionary development of religion, the analogy of Darwinism and Reform Judaism, and the necessary implications for Genesis. He also sounded a note of caution, for the first time, concerning the remaining challenges that evolutionary theory faced, including missing links in the fossil record.¹⁷ But most striking was his attempt to shift the discussion of evolutionary biology and the development of religion to a more wide-ranging discussion about cosmic order and purpose. According to Hirsch, evolution was ‘the open sesame’ for ‘the doors guarding the secrets of nature’s methods and the mysteries of thought’. The theory was ‘a unifying principle’, which alone could explain the history and development of language, of religion, of civilizations and empires, and even of morality.¹⁸ In this work he also hinted at a panentheistic theology and suggested that the telos of evolution had something to do with the emergence of morality and even of religion. Along with other Reform rabbis, Hirsch was condemnatory of philosophical materialists (‘beer and cheese materialists’) who failed to explain the beginnings of existence, or the nature of matter and energy.¹⁹ Darwin, among others,²⁰ had readily admitted that ‘the beginning of all things is not accounted for by the theory of evolution’, and Hirsch reminded his listeners of the author of Origins’ famous concluding statement ‘that life may have been breathed by the Creator into few forms or one.’²¹ Furthermore, materialistic science had failed to reveal the secrets behind the progression from the inorganic to organic, and from the unconscious to

 Emil G. Hirsch, “The Doctrine of Evolution and Judaism,” in Some Modern Problems and Their Bearing on Judaism, Reform Advocate Library (Chicago: Bloch & Newman, 1903). The three problems were closely related: Judaism and the higher criticism, the doctrine of evolution and Judaism, and Judaism and modern religion.  Emil G. Hirsch, “Evolution,” in Jewish Encyclopedia, ed. Isadore Singer (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1901– 1906). Also “Ethics, Biblical and Modern,” in Jewish Encyclopedia, ed. Isadore Singer (New York: Funk and Wagnalls Company, 1901– 1906), 257.  Hirsch, “The Doctrine of Evolution and Judaism,” 6 – 7.  Ibid., 1– 2, 9 – 10.  Ibid., 5 – 6.  Hirsch here listed a number of authorities including Thomas Huxley, the Irish physicist John Tyndall, the German philosopher Friedrich Paulsen, the German physiologist Emil Dubois-Reymond, and the German biologist and anthropologist Rudolf Virchow, who were ‘more modest’ than Haeckel, with whose conclusions he strongly disagreed.  Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (London: Murray, 1859), 270.

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conscious. Thus, ‘mystery still calls for faith’, Hirsch maintained, and that ‘there is a need and room for the introduction of an energy which religious faith and reasoning philosophy have always posited.’²² In attempting to articulate the precise form of his ‘faith’ and ‘reasoning philosophy’, Hirsch took Haeckel’s materialistic monism and interwove it with Spinoza’s equivalence of God and nature, to offer a spiritual version of monism, with a strongly panentheistic flavour. In notes clearer than were ever intoned by human tongue does the philosophy of evolution confirm the essential verity of Judaism’s insistent protest and proclamation that God is one. This theory reads unity in all that is and has being. Stars and stones, planets and pebbles, sun and sod, rock and river, leave and lichen, are spun of the same thread. Thus the universe is one soul, One spelled large. If throughout all visible form one energy is manifest and in all material shape one substance is apparent, the conclusion is all the better assured which holds this essentially one world of life to be the thought of one all embracing and all underlying creative directive mind… I, for my part, believe to be justified in my assurance that Judaism rightly apprehended posits God not, as often it is said to do, as an absolutely transcendental One. Our God is the soul of the Universe… Spinozism and Judaism are by no means at opposite poles.²³

This conception of God’s immanence to the world was panentheistic in that God was explicitly identified with the universe while, at the same time, the natural world, in which energy and matter were unified, was regarded as the product of the divine mind and distinct from it. Consideration of evolutionary biology led one to conclude that, insofar as mind was a developmental stage of life, then mind must have been ‘already infolded in the first germ. Thus, from the very beginning, mind was enwrapped in the world process’ since ‘the sum must include all that the component factors possess’.²⁴ He went on to suggest that the spiritual, idealistic form of monism corresponded to the central teachings of Judaism.²⁵ At least, he argued, the idea of ‘creation through mind’ was in harmony with Jewish tradition. They who are acquainted with the positions taken in their own peculiar way by the Rabbinical interpreters of the story of creation will remember that the pre-existence of the Torah is assumed as God’s instrument of creation. Platonic idealism was in this manner cloaked in

 Hirsch, “The Doctrine of Evolution and Judaism,” 7.  Ibid., 10 – 11. Hirsch singled out Spinoza as a system-building precursor to Darwin. Ibid., 2.  Ibid., 11– 12.  As he saw it, ‘Monism as generally understood [in Haeckel] may perhaps wear the appearance of denying mind. Yet spiritual monism which regards matter as an expression of mind and the visible world as the symbol of underlying mentality has had its exponents whose main theses coincide indeed with the conceptions of Judaism as I find it understood by its own masterthinkers.’ Ibid., 11.

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the vocabulary of Jewish theology. The distance between this attitude and that suggested by the more modern reasoning on the basis of evolution is not very great… These profound reasoners found no difficulty in harmonizing their assumptions of the eternity of matter with their belief in the God of their religious consciousness. We have the good right to follow the precedent thus set… That Creation is revelation of purposed power of mind is the cardinal tenet of the Jewish faith. This, evolution has not obscured. The new philosophy has merely substituted another theory for a less comprehensive mechanical one [of the Genesis account]… Read by the light of the modern doctrine the heavens still declare the glory of God.²⁶

It is worth noting that this Spinoza-influenced panentheistic conception had appeared earlier in an article from 1897 in which he had made no reference to evolution. There Hirsch had written, Nature and God for the Christian are antithetical, never so with the Jew… Spinoza’s doctrine is Jewish to the core. Nature and God, from the Jewish point of view, are not antithetical. They are not antipodal. They are different modes of one, what? Of one energy that spans the all. Nature is God. God is nature. But mind in man is also in nature. Mind in man being personal, mind in its development through the human taking on the personal, we have the right to urge that in nature is personality.²⁷

As such, Darwinism did not generate new ideas so much as allow him to find additional support for existing beliefs (although it is possible, even likely, that Krauskopf’s panentheistic theology of 1887 alerted him to this theological possibility). The same could be said for other aspects of his religious worldview, including his enthusiasm for human progress, a concern to de-anthropomorphize religion, and his articulation of religion primarily in ethical terms, as we shall see shortly. If, he continued in the 1903 study, evolution was indeed the method by which the living world was created by an immanent God who was the ‘soul of the Universe’, then one should not be surprised to discover traces of lawful, progressive purpose, as was indeed the case. Firstly, theology and evolutionary theory confirmed each other’s findings that there was order to the cosmos.²⁸ Secondly, the impersonal mechanism of evolution ‘puts an end to the imputation of humanlike design [of creation] to the Deity, [and] strikes a note in harmony with the central apprehension of Jewish theology’, namely, that God’s nature was unknowable and His ways were beyond our ways.²⁹ Thirdly, purpose appeared in-

   

Ibid., 12– 13. Emil G. Hirsch, “Where Does God Dwell?,” The Reform Advocate 1897. Hirsch, “The Doctrine of Evolution and Judaism,” 7– 8. Ibid., 9.

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trinsic to life as a result of its inter-connectedness, and this purpose was revealed by the direction of the development of life. As he explained, Evolution reveals that life runs on through a process of interdependence. Whatever lives, lives through another and for another. Thus a new and deeper teleology or theory of purpose is suggested. There is in this long succession of evolving and enlarging life nothing but has an influence upon another. This truth may be formulated as follows: there is nothing that lives but serves and ulterior purpose. Moreover as through this interaction of one upon the other be it through natural selection or otherwise, the sum of life has even steadily increased and the quality of life has even so invariably been rendered more profound…³⁰

With the emergence of mankind, this interrelatedness took on a moral dimension, for, ‘placed as he is in this world, [the individual] is charged with obligations.’³¹ Hirsch insisted that human morality was not just an emergent feature of the evolutionary process but was its telos, and he criticized those who argued that the new knowledge of mankind’s bestial origins somehow implied the end of such morality. The key was to understand the centrality of social interdependence for the evolution of mankind, past, present and future. As Hirsch explained, no individual could flourish alone, and to succeed within human society and within its web of relationships required the development of both intelligence and ethics. Despite being an evolved phenomenon, then, the moral conscience remained profoundly meaningful for humanity. Thus, with the advent of man, a new order of life was inaugurated, foreshadowed only dimly in preceding forms of life. As he put it, ‘The struggle for existence in his case became the contest for moral existence’, since evolution itself demonstrated that the fittest among men was the morally strongest, so that ‘Brute force yields to mental sagacity.’³² That the human conscience itself was the result of an evolutionary process did not detract from its cosmic significance. The slow accretion of the experience of humankind over millennia suggested that human life was predisposed to adapt itself to an absolute moral law. As part of a cosmic law, the moral law was the condition under which alone the human could survive and flourish. It had led to the realization that moral responsibility has assumed ‘a new sacramental value by the impressive realization of the truth that the now living affect the unborn generations for good or evil.’³³ Hirsch’s justification for the transcendental meaning of morality, which fell foul of the naturalistic fallacy, was an at-

   

Ibid., 9 – 10. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 15 – 16. Ibid., 16.

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tempt to confound the materialist critics while accepting their assumption that morality was a naturally evolved phenomenon. If conscience and morality are exponents of the social nature of man, and its sanctions are rooted in the social consciousness, the sanctities of the moral life are, for all that, not removed. Why is it that this social interdependence is a concomitant of the human life? Simply because human life implies a wider range of relations than those covered by egotism. To be human one must be moral and the stronger one’s morality the deeper one’s humanity. Whatever evolution evolves must be considered as involved in the plan of life. As evolution has culminated in man who, to be man, must live his life under the moral law, the moral law must be the highest expression of the reality of life. Thus morality and all it implies rests on the securest foundation spread for its solemn upholding by the very theory said by superficial minds to undermine it.³⁴

If evolution could be said to account for and yet not debase morality, might it be possible to claim that evolution had similarly ‘renewed the credentials of religion’, Hirsch wondered? Since religion was, like language, a universally human phenomenon (‘Wherever men have been, there altars have arisen’), then it surely, too, had an evolutionary function. Hirsch recognized that the different faiths offered different benefits, and that not all were equally profitable, just as languages had differing strengths and weaknesses. But Hirsch identified two key functions of religious thinkers that were vital for human evolution: firstly, they offered a deeper insight into the relations of the individual to society and of humanity to the meaning of the universe, and, secondly, they contributed to the more general stock of human and humanizing ideas that improved the fitness of the species.³⁵ The connection with social ethics was no coincidence. Judaism, with its ethical monotheism of the Prophets, illustrated the survival benefits of religion precisely in these terms. The universalist Mission of Israel was in effect a proclamation of the dignity and the divinity of human life for the benefit of ‘the whole of the human family’;³⁶ it was ‘commissioned to protest against all that makes for the brutalizing of man and the desecration of life.’³⁷ Evolutionary law dictated that ‘only the fittest survives’ and the fact that Israel had survived in a hostile environment down through the centuries testified to the ‘force in its religion’ that ‘fostered energetic morality’³⁸ which had led to increased fitness and

    

Ibid., 15 – 16. Ibid., 17– 18. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 18 – 19.

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which ensured that there would always be a Jewish remnant.³⁹ Jewish religion was indeed subject to evolutionary forces, but would survive insofar as its teachings corresponded with the moral constraints of human evolution. As he concluded triumphantly, In the experiments that God carries on His laboratory, commonly described as history, selection is indeed the dominant force. But by clinching this theory of the remnant, to which its own experience is a telling commentary, Judaism once more protests that the method of human selection is not hinging on brutal power, but on moral force. In this… Judaism is in real accord with the tenable discoveries and contentions of the philosophy of evolution.⁴⁰

Summary What were the key characteristics of Hirsch’s work? Hirsch was less concerned than other Reform rabbis about the science versus religion debate as such, and focused more strictly on evolutionary theory, defined largely in terms of Darwinian natural selection. In attacking materialist philosophy, for example, he aimed to challenge mechanical interpretations with his own brand of theistic evolutionism, and not make sweeping statements about the nature of science. A confirmed biblical critic, he was nevertheless less antagonistic towards biblical authority than Kohler and certainly Krauskopf, and believed that the spirit, if not the letter, of the Genesis accounts of Creation could be harmonized with the evolutionary science. He was particularly concerned to use Darwinism as a paradigm for a naturalistic account of the evolution of religion, which was a universal cultural phenomenon because of the functional advantages it bestowed on society, and to justify a reformist approach to Jewish tradition and ritual which saw Judaism’s survival as evidence of the law of survival of the (morally) fittest. He was a harsh critic of social Darwinism, rather viewing human group life and social interconnectedness as the key to recognizing morality as perhaps the goal of the evolutionary process. As such, it lay beyond evolution and was the one realm in which mankind moved free of evolutionary pressures, a view that Kohler also expressed in his later writings. Hirsch’s theology was eclectic, ever-shifting and ephemeral, but in the context of evolution it was presented as emerging from reflections on biology rather than the influence of Idealist philosophy. It also evidenced a strongly panentheistic character as a ‘spiritual monism’ that sought to integrate Spinoza and

 Ibid., 21.  Ibid.

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Haeckel and that explicitly identified nature with (an unknowable) God, whilst seeing all of an evolving creation as the product of the divine mind.

VII Joseph Krauskopf: The Divine Natural Law of Evolution Joseph Krauskopf (1858 – 1923),¹ who was born in Ostrowo, Prussian-Posen, and emigrated to the U.S. in 1872, was a graduate of the first class of candidates for the rabbinate at Hebrew Union College in 1883 when he was ordained by Isaac Mayer Wise, and received a doctoral degree in 1885.² He became one of the most influential communal rabbis of his day, co-founding in 1888 the inter-denominational Jewish publishing house known as the Jewish Publication Society, serving two terms as president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, and eventually being offered the presidency of HUC but rejecting it due to his other commitments relating to labour and environmental issues. In terms of his religious worldview, Krauskopf was very much a radical; even among Reform Jews at that time, he was unusually explicit about his hope for a reconciliation of Jew and Christian in a shared religion of the future, for example.³ He was vice-president and chairman of the committee for the radical Pittsburgh Platform in 1885 and, as rabbi of Temple Keneseth Israel in Philadelphia (from 1887), he almost immediately initiated its reforms, including Sunday services. Throughout his life, Krauskopf was interested in teasing out the implications of modern science for religious thought. Krauskopf’s series of sermons on Evolution and Judaism, given in the winter of 1886 and collated and published in 1887, has been described accurately as an  For a useful biography, see William W. Blood, Apostle of Reason: A Biography of Joseph Krauskopf (Philadelphia: Dorrance & Co., 1973). The National Encyclopedia of American Biography vol. 3 (1891) has an entry for Krauskopf that describes him as the leading exponent of Reform Judaism in the United States. He served two terms of the president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR), 1903 – 05. During his career he held many advisory and committee positions for government including work for the National Relief Commission (1898), the U.S. Dept of Agriculture (1900,1917), the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1904), and the Food Conservation Commission (1917), the American Red Cross (1917). His life-long work was the development of a National Farm School, established in 1897, which he himself helped finance with various fund-raising initiatives including the proceeds from his Sunday Lectures series.  Of the 23 candidates who entered HUC in 1875 only four graduated in 1883; at the time, the issue of Reform’s attitude to dietary regulations was undecided and the notorious graduation banquet (the ‘treyfa banquet’) would offend many and was a factor in the emergence of Conservative Judaism.  In this work Krauskopf suggested that ‘With a rational, purified Judaism, Christianity, as the religion of Jesus, the Jew, will mean the religion of Judaism, pure and simple.’ Joseph Krauskopf, Evolution and Judaism (Kansas City: Berkowitz, 1887), 309. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664119-007

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attempt ‘to reconcile religion with science rather than religion and science.’⁴ It was the most lengthy and comprehensive of the Reform Jewish treatments of the subject,⁵ with sermons addressing the theory in a variety of contexts including the Bible, the history of religion, modern cosmology, paleontology, the implications for understanding man’s intellect, society, religion and morality, and in the context of worship. It was written for a Jewish congregational audience, but with a Christian readership in mind, too, citing many Christian theologians in the index and the footnotes, and with almost as many references to Christian thought and practice as to Jewish ones.⁶ Particular favourites were the historian and philosopher, Jonathan Fiske, whose Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy (1874) had promoted Spencer’s doctrine of universal evolution and whose influential article ‘The Idea of God as Affected by Modern Knowledge’ (1885) pioneered a panentheistic conception of God, and the revivalist clergyman, Henry Ward Beecher, who also likewise espoused a profoundly immanent deity in Evolution and Religion (1885). In terms of a programmatic agenda, Krauskopf’s study shared with earlier Reform writings on evolution an explicit concern to counter the inroads made by materialism.⁷ Krauskopf explained that ‘the great mass of believers insisted upon bringing certain primitive speculations of a purely scientific nature within the horizons of religion’ and that he sought to ‘remove some of that skepticism which is engendered by poorly understood science’ to ensure a

 Joseph Blau, “An American-Jewish View of the Evolution Controversy,” Hebrew Union College Annual XX (1947): 624.  Although Krauskopf wrote further on the subject he added little to the views he set down in Evolution and Judaism. For example, in 1890 he wrote a short series of sermons about heredity (which reflected strong Lamarckian assumptions and drew heavily upon the work of Galton’s Hereditary Genius), environment (a call to improve the social conditions that bred criminality and deprivation), and life after death (which considered the arguments for and against the doctrine), in all of which evolutionary theory featured heavily. See Joseph Krauskopf, “Heredity,” in Miscellaneous Sunday Lectures (Philadelphia: Oscar Klonower?, 1890), Joseph Krauskopf, “The Law of Environment,” in Miscellaneous Sunday Lectures (Philadelphia: Oscar Klonower?, 1890), and Joseph Krauskopf, “After Death – What?” He also extolled the achievements of Darwin as an individual in the sermon Joseph Krauskopf, “Ninetieth Birthday of Lincoln and Darwin,” in Sunday Lectures (Philadelphia: Oscar Klonower, 1899).  For example, in a section criticizing anachronistic worship practices and beliefs, Krauskopf listed Jewish practices such as separate seating for men and women, the use of head-coverings and phylacteries, and prayer in Hebrew, alongside Christian beliefs in immaculate conception, faith cures, Jesus’ miracles, his vicarious atonement, resurrection and ascension, the doctrine of the Trinity, and baptism and other sacraments as a means to avoid eternal damnation. Joseph Krauskopf, Evolution and Judaism, 282– 83.  Ibid., 38, 60 – 66.

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modern ‘rational faith’.⁸ He readily admitted that religious knowledge could not ignore ‘the icy breath of skepticism which touches it’ and which undermined tradition. He fully accepted that ‘Flaws [in its claims] are detected. Its authority is questioned. Its claims and doctrines are subjected to scrutiny. It no longer satisfies the requirements of truth. It is weighed and found wanting…’⁹ But Krauskopf’s lecture series was explicitly intended to refute the claim of the materialists that Darwin’s teachings had a central role in this process, as if such teachings should by necessity ‘drive God out of nature, and lead to infidelity’.¹⁰ More subtly, it attempted to win over its Jewish audience with its frequent allusions to the anti-rational, anti-evolutionary stance of popular Christianity,¹¹ or to Christian ministers’ unfair treatment of evolutionists such as Thomas Huxley.¹² On the other hand, he was quick to point to Christian evolutionary theists if he believed it would strengthen his case, confident that his Jewish readers would identify closely with the views of liberal Christians, perhaps even more so than with the views of their Orthodox co-religionists.¹³ Krauskopf certainly did not hesitate to reproduce Orthodox Jewish condemnations of both his own teachings on evolution and of Reform Judaism.¹⁴ His style was characterized by grandly sweeping

 Ibid., preface.  Ibid., 6.  Ibid., 13.  For example, Krauskopf wrote: ‘We know that the word “Evolution” is not popular in the pulpit, and rather in bad repute among Church people. The pious see all sorts of danger in it, and they are alarmed at its progress. It is feared that such teachings drive God out of nature, and lead to infidelity: that everything hitherto revered must go to ruin; that it removes a whole series of miraculous events out of nature; that creations once looked upon as the direct handiwork of God are by this teaching nothing but the results of Natural Law; That it destroys the people’s faith by taking from them their old beliefs and substituting new ones in their stead.’ Ibid.  Ibid., 37.  For example, towards the end of the book, he exclaimed: ‘The outlook is bright. When such men as Professors Dana, Le Conte, Asa Gray, McCosh, men like Mivart and Wallace and the Duke of Argyle, men like Henry Ward Beecher and Minot J. Savage, all prominently connected with religion, and some of them even with very orthodox denominations, hold substantially to the doctrine of evolution, we are encouraged in our belief, that the blessed day, when the Doctrine of Evolution will form a fundamental article in every creed, is not very distant.’ Ibid., 328.  Krauskopf appeared to revel in the accusations of ‘rank infidelity’ and the ‘customary abusive language’ of the Orthodox press in its criticisms of his sermons on evolution and Reform Judaism in general. He provided over several pages a selection of histrionic examples, including claims that he proclaimed ‘Darwinism as a divine revelation’, that his was an ‘infidel attack on the Bible’, and that Reform Judaism offered ‘an excellent recruiting ground for socialism’. Ibid., 291– 93. The criticisms of Krauskopf by anti-evolutionists are the primary concern of Swetlitz, who notes charges of, among other things, pantheism and the misuse of evolution to defend

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and often provocative statements, and by frequent reference to non-Jewish poetry and literature; he did not tend to refer to the corpus of Jewish religious literature without criticizing some aspect of tradition.¹⁵ A consequence of its flamboyant style and lengthy composition over many months, the collection was occasionally incoherent in some of its theological claims.

Science and Judaism Of all the Reform thinkers, Krauskopf was the one most enamored by science. For him, science perfectly complemented religion and there was no need whatsoever to choose between them. At times he appeared to regard them as nonoverlapping magisteria. Science exists to explain natural phenomena, religion exists to teach us our duties towards God and man, and only the erratic mind of the fanatic can conclude, that the acceptance of the teachings of the former must inevitably lead to the rejection of the latter.¹⁶

At other times, he went much further. For Krauskopf, the scientific enterprise was imbued with religious significance to the extent that the work of the nineteenthcentury scientist could be regarded as a form of worship, engaged as he was in comprehending God’s handiwork in all its complexity and wonder.

and promote Reform Judaism, in Swetlitz, “American Jewish Responses to Darwin and Evolutionary Theory, 1860 – 1890,” 229 – 30.  For example, at various points Krauskopf asserted that observance of the Talmud and Schulchan Aruch could not represent ‘right teaching’ in regard to Judaism, and refused to accept the Orthodox claims, arguing that ’the Talmud is not an inspired work, nor the Schulchan Aruch a code of laws, binding upon all Israelites.’ Krauskopf, Evolution and Judaism, 296, 301. Having said that, he also cited a passage from Joseph Albo’s fifteenth-century Ha-Ikkarim (First Principles) in the frontispiece, which discussed the hierarchy of life, and he readily likened the challenges faced by the new teaching of evolution to those of revolutionaries in Jewish history, including ‘Maimonides, Spinoza and Mendelssohn, the most brilliant triumvirate of modern Israel, [who] were, by their own people defamed as heretics and excommunicated because of their new teachings.’ Ibid., frontispiece and 325.  Ibid., 272– 73. Elsewhere Krauskopf argued that the limits of religion had been defined in Micah 6:8, that is, to train men ‘to do justly, and to move mercy, and to walk humbly before God’, and he insisted that ‘this and all this, and no more than this’ was the proper extent of religion, citing in support the Talmud ‘the beauty and brevity and comprehensiveness of [such a view of religion] which the sages of the Talmud had already called attention’ (BT Maccoth 23b and 24a). Ibid., 41.

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[P]eople constituting this age are permeated by the spirit of science, and as those who have entered deepest into the realm of science possess the devoutest souls and are the truest ministers of religion, so, too, are the science-permeated masses in a state of mind most favorable towards religion, if the religion of our day were but made to harmonize with the reason, which the science of our day has matured. The depth into which the true scientists have entered, has made them not only deeply religious, but has also prepared them for finding full scope and expression for their religious cravings, independent of any church or any religious community.¹⁷

The hint of approval of scientific religiosity as a religiosity decoupled from institutionalized religion was further reinforced by comments about the need for clergymen to take natural theology much more seriously. [The clergyman of today] must have less protracted prayer meetings and more of geologizing and botanizing, and observatory expeditions with his people, not kitchen and diningroom and parlor attachments to his church, but instead a well equipped laboratory, not money collections for the conversion of the Hottentots, but for building up good libraries, good observatories…¹⁸

In fact, the whole point of Krauskopf’s book, he explained, was designed to communicate his understanding that the future religion (a topic about which he wrote repeatedly throughout his life) would be entirely harmonized with scientific truths and sensibilities. It was self-evident to him that Judaism, in particular, already possessed the resources to demonstrate just how far along this path it had already come. That religion that will carry the flag of science in the van of a progressive people, that will vanquish forever every antagonism between it and science, that will boast of good deeds accomplished more than of the excellency of its creed, is the religion of the future… I have not endeavored to formulate new creeds in these lectures, not to establish a new faith. I have but sought to reconcile Judaism with science.¹⁹

The science on which he focused most attention was biology, but here he did not display the same kind of mastery of detail as had, for example, Isaac Mayer Wise. In fact, in terms of discussing the actual field evidence provided by the natural sciences, his most extended discussions concerned intelligence in apes²⁰ and a more general discussion on the establishment of a hierarchy

   

Ibid., 277– 78. Ibid., 286. Ibid., 330. Ibid., 134– 35.

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of life-forms,²¹ both of which were actually highly reliant on anthropological studies.²²

A Panentheistic Account of Evolution Perhaps the most interesting question with regard to Krauskopf is how precisely he understood the relation between nature and God. Certainly, he had no time for those who espoused a purely materialistic view of evolution. As far as he was concerned, that was a view ultimately based upon atomic theory, which represented a set of assumptions that were every bit as mysterious as those behind ‘theistic evolution’ and begged as many questions. For example, ‘materialistic evolution’ was currently unable to explain why something existed rather than nothing, or to account for the profound transitions from dead to living matter, or from vegetable to animal life, or from animal nature to the self-conscious, reasoning, moral nature of man. He mocked the materialist who treated Matter and Force as pre-existent phenomena and as fundamental to reality, and thereby refused to consider what came before and caused them, because of the theological implications.²³ The other major problem that Krauskopf had with ‘materialistic evolution’ was the significance of the role played by chance. It was self-evidently unreasonable to him to assume that ‘accident, a mere fortuitous concourse of atoms, should have caused the infinite variety of things, which manifest such wonderful design and adaptability and forethought…’,²⁴ and he claimed that many scientists and philosophers, including Haeckel, Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer, recognized this, so that he could make the dubious claim that the ‘Materialistic evolutionists [increasingly] become more and more theistic.’²⁵ It is not surprising, then, that when attacking materialist versions of evolutionary theory he not infrequently used the familiar, biblical language of an intelligent, personal, divine Creator and Law-Giver,²⁶ to whom the natural law of development

 Ibid., 145 – 48.  The common source was Edward B. Taylor, Anthropology: An Introduction to the Study of Man and Civilization (London: Macmillan and Co., 1881). Taylor is regarded as the founding father of social anthropology, and propagated cultural evolution such that both society in general and religion in particular were understood to perform cultural functions that evolved over time.  Krauskopf, Evolution and Judaism, 66 – 67.  Ibid., 68.  Ibid., 69.  For example, he railed against materialistic evolutionism: ‘We are asked to exchange a Living, Creating, Intelligent God for an aggregation of clusters of atoms.’ Ibid., 66.

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could be attributed.²⁷ But such statements need to be set against the wider context of what is more properly described as a panentheistic conception of the deity.²⁸ In Krauskopf’s thought, God’s immanent presence in nature was made manifest in three ways: through the work of natural law, in life itself, and in the evolved intellect. Particularly in discussions of science where his chief concern was to deny any essential difference between the conclusions of science and of religion, Krauskopf occasionally went so far as to identify natural law with God. [N]ature is under the power of government under the control of supreme order and uninterrupted harmony, under the reign of ever-present, ever active, never-changing law which shapes all matter, organic and inorganic, according to design, and directs all force, physical and vital, according to purpose, and compels both to be eternally the same in their manifestations. This universally acknowledged supreme governing power, this universally acknowledged eternally invariable law,… this universally admitted ever present design and purpose and order and harmony,… is named by evolutionists ‘Natural Law;’ by theologians it is called ‘God.’ The difference between the two is only in the name applied to the same power, but not in essence. Both are forced upon rational ground to the same conclusion, to the acceptance of the same ultimate; differing but in name, both ascribe the same attribute to the same mysterious and inscrutable Final Cause. With this conception of the nature of God every difference between science and religion disappears. With this perfect agreement with the scientific accounts of the Final Cause, I am prepared to accept every rational induction, every intelligible inference, every plausible theory that science may have to offer. With the conception of God, as manifested in nature, I am prepared to accept even Darwinism, if investigation prove that as a theory it satisfies the requirements of truth.²⁹

 He explained that ‘Theistic evolution attempts to prove that the past has given rise to the present by the simple process of development according to God-Created Natural Law, the higher and more complex arising from the preceding simpler and lower.’ Ibid., 84. And, contrasting the views of the believer in biblical literalism with those of the theistic evolutionist, he asserted a kind of harmonization of God and natural law: ‘The one makes God act as if He were human, makes Him converse with the serpent and receive answer from her, makes Him walk in the garden in the cool of the day; the other conceives God as invisible and incorporeal, the Supreme Force and Intelligence, establishing eternal and immutable law and acting with it, and never against it.’ Ibid., 130.  Blau also identifies a pantheistic element to Krauskopf’s thought. Blau, “An American-Jewish View of the Evolution Controversy” 630.  Krauskopf, Evolution and Judaism, 102– 04. And again: ‘[W]e see greater evidence of the marvels of God’s handiwork [via evolution] then ever we could glean from a belief in special creation… [W]e see God constantly creating… we see all nature reveal the ever present and constantly active final cause… This sum of Supreme Will, Supreme Power, Supreme Intelligence, evolutionists name “The Reign of Natural Law,” the theologians call it “God.”’ Ibid., 116 – 17.

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Insofar as nature was to be understood as the product or expression of natural law, and insofar as another name for natural law was God, then Krauskopf might have been regarded as pantheistic. In support of such an interpretation were such incautious comments as when, reflecting upon the monism of Haeckel, he suggested that ‘By it we arrive at the sublime idea of the Unity of God and Nature.’³⁰ But more often for Krauskopf, nature or natural law was only part of the divine reality, not its entirety, which was a classic expression of panentheism. According to our definition, God is the finitely, conceivable Ultimate, the Cause of all and the Cause in all, the Universal Life, the All-Pervading, All-Controlling, All-Directing Power Supreme, the Creator of the universe and the Governor of the same according to eternal and immutable laws by Him created. All existence is part of His existence, all life is part of His life, all intelligence is part of His intelligence, all evolution, all progress is part of His plan.³¹

In one of the most autobiographical sections of the book, Krauskopf confessed that he had taken much comfort from such a conception, since, in moments of doubt, he could reconcile his religious belief in God with the claims of science, and at the same time offer an alternative to the distant, transcendent God of the philosophers. While God might be conceived as the first cause, he was also the natural law that drove evolution to raise inorganic matter to organic. Furthermore, God was an immanent presence to be found inhabiting the living universe, which could itself be viewed as a kind of living organism, and yet still as something distinct from the universe itself and the natural laws that formed it. Here I could see Him as the Eternal and Immutable Law, directing all matter, organic and inorganic, all force, physical and vital, and gradually developing all life from the simplest to the more and more complex, from the crudest to the more and more perfect, from the not living to life… Here was no metaphysical God, thinkable only in negative attributes. Here were positive effects, all flowing from a positive First Cause. Here I could see Him constantly active and eternally creating, the Cause of all Life, the Life of all Cause, and I named Him ‘the Universal Life.’… I beheld the whole universe as a living and growing organism, thrilled in its every fiber with ‘the Universal Life,’ and my reason was humbled by the sublimity of this conception, and my heart was moved to adore the Creator of it all, as the ‘Cause of All’ and as the ‘Cause in All.’³²

 Ibid., 239.  Ibid., 279 – 80.  Ibid., 244– 45. At this point Krauskopf cited Beecher’s similar claims that ‘a God universally diffused, to such an extent that whenever there is a force, there is God behind that force… Though Agnostic and Atheistic reasoners should rename God, and call Him ‘Force’ or ‘Energy,’ I care not… and if there be one thing that is to be triumphantly demonstrated by Evolution, it is

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Here, as elsewhere,³³ Krauskopf asserted that the divine was to be found not only in natural laws but in the phenomenon of life itself. With a reference to Jewish mysticism and the divine sparks of Lurianic kabbalism,³⁴ he proceeded to develop what was perhaps the most distinctive and creative aspects of his theistic evolutionist theory, and one that was calculated to confound the pessimism of the materialists, namely, that evolution continued beyond the grave. The same life-principle that throbs in us to-day throbbed in us when we were yet a protoplasm and will throb in us when we shall become even as our God. If matter is indestructible, if force is persistent, who dare claim that life alone is perishable? Life is a spark of ‘the universal Life,’ and ‘the universal life’ is God… At the dawn of time into each of us a spark of ‘the universal life’ was breathed, with the divine necessity to carry it forward, to develop and unfold it until the ultimate goal is reached. That spark has been clothed in many a garb, and has assumed many a shape. It has advanced through every stage of the lower species, and will advance through every higher state to come, until the Godlike will be reached. When developing time comes, the unfolding life-principle forces the petals outward, they break and wither, but the seed lives. When developing time comes the caterpillar-crysalis [sic] shuffles off its old and uncouth coil and becomes the golden winged butterfly. So, too, when developing time comes in the slow unfolding of or spark of life, the mortal coil is returned to its primal earthly elements, is wept for and mourned over, while the spark of life lives and passes on to a higher and better state.³⁵

Another way to think about divine immanence with regard to all living things was to consider the evolution of the intellect. In its most developed form, in mankind, the awakening of the intellect could be regarded as a kind of divine revelation or as a manifestation of the essence of God. His theory was that the whole life of the world is permeated by the life of God himself.’ Beecher, Evolution and Religion, 78.  For example, in relation to germinal cell building he enthused: ‘I am filled with awe at the wonder of wonders, and in this, too, I behold the manifestation of God, I behold the presence of God…’ Krauskopf, Evolution and Judaism, 72.  In general, the modernist Krauskopf tended to associate Jewish mysticism with medieval Jewish theology, and was certainly not as interested in the subject as were, for example, Wise or Hahn. Ibid., 235.  Ibid., 264– 65. Blau’s view that with this passage Krauskopf ‘dismisses personal immortality’ in favour of a ‘life-principle’ is not self-evident, since the example given is of an individual organism’s metamorphosis. Blau, 630. And Krauskopf returned to the idea of ‘a personal continuance after death’ in 1890, suggesting that of the many arguments supporting the doctrine of immortality, ‘the evolution-argument is one of much force’ and arguing that ‘Man may not be the highest development attained by creation… The coffin of the material may be the cradle of the spiritual, and the much-dreaded death may only be the means of conveying imperfect man to a higher state of existence, just as the larva is the means of changing the loathsome caterpillar into the beauteous butterfly.’ Krauskopf, “After Death – What?,” 6 – 9.

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that all intellect begins at the base of the column of animal life, and ever widens in its gradual rise towards the top, reaching its widest sweep in man; that as intellect manifests itself as Revelation of God at the top, it is the same revelation beneath, that remembering the vast difference between man and the lower animal in limitations of vital force and physical functions and anatomical structure, the animal low in the scale possesses, qualitatively as much of the essence of God, as does man; that intellect advances in its rise along the column, in a fixed series of geometrical progression, increasing with every increase of structural complexity or with the increasing obstacles in the struggle for existence.³⁶

So for Krauskopf, evolutionary theory suggested that, in a very real biological sense, intelligence was necessarily a phenomenon shared with all of life, to a greater or lesser extent; the intellect had developed through evolutionary processes and thus, qualitatively if not quantitatively, it was to be found throughout the tree of life.

Evolutionary Foundations for Morality One of the key characteristics of Krauskopf’s work was the focus on the evolution of mankind, on which he offered five dedicated chapters. His discussion of morality, which built upon previous chapters on primal man and on intellectual, social, and religious perspectives on human evolution, was the most interesting. In it, he argued that morality had an entirely naturalistic basis, a claim which must have appeared very radical for a rabbi to make at that time, even for as idiosyncratic a thinker as Krauskopf. Before setting out his own original theory, Krauskopf spent considerable time challenging certain assumptions of his more pessimistic readers. These included the claims of the doom-mongers that the civilized world was morally degenerative, and the ‘exaggerated reports’ of savage immorality that ignored evidence of the morality of uncivilized tribes.³⁷ For him, the origins of the moral sense were part of our common heritage as hominids. When Evolution advanced animal life to the state of primeval man, three dominant instincts innate in all higher animal nature, ‘sexual love,’ ‘parental affection,’ ‘social impulse,’ advanced and developed with it, and where these three innate cravings are unfolding, especially under the influence of intellectual and social and religious evolution, morality fol-

 Krauskopf, Evolution and Judaism, 152– 53. He cited as an authority for this the evolutionary theist, the Duke of Argyll, George Campbell (1823 – 1900), whose Reign of Law (1867) established him as one of the most prominent opponents of the Darwinian theory of natural selection.  Ibid., 211– 19.

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lows as a necessity… The crudest form of family life implies some sacrifice of private interest for the good of others, some affection and some sympathy… [T]here, too, exist the germs of the fundamental principles of all morality: ‘Honor parents,’ ‘Murder not,’ ‘Commit not adultery,’ ‘Steal not.’ In this view of the origin of moral sense, which, so far as I know, has never yet been noticed by any of the able writers who have dealt with the origin of the moral faculty in man, it seems to me that we have the clue to the solution of the entire problem.³⁸

The problem to which he referred here was that of the conflict between the two best-known theories of morality, namely, the intuitional and utilitarian schools of thought. On the one hand, he disagreed with the intuitionalist claim that morality was an in-born and highly developed faculty that functioned with no regard of the costs of actions taken.³⁹ On the other hand, he found lacking the utilitarian claim that right and wrong were learned values and that ethical action was in reality an expression of self-interest, merely a means of attaining human happiness.⁴⁰ Neither school of thought was adequate in accounting for the anthropological evidence, as Krauskopf saw it.⁴¹ His solution was to set both in an overarching framework of evolutionary theory and to view them as two stages in the development of morality that took place in the society of prehistoric man. Our theory is in the strictest harmony with the Law of Evolution. Starting with the three innate animal instincts, mankind was under the logical necessity of gradually unfolding,

 Ibid., 220 – 21.  Intuitionalism taught that ‘man was originally created with a perfectly developed “moral sense,” which, from the very beginning, perceived for us the absolutely moral, independent of experience, and made a law of our nature to cultivate the true and the good and the beautiful, and to repress their opposites, regardless of the consequences, whether painful or pleasurable.’ Ibid., 222.  Utilitarianism taught that ‘we have by nature no knowledge of right or wrong, that we derive these notions solely from an observation of the course of life which is conducive to human happiness, that such actions are only good which increase the happiness or diminish the pains of mankind, that the supreme type and expression of virtue is to procure the greatest happiness for the greatest number, and that all our good actions flow from self interest, that, for instance, our reflections are a form of self love, our worship is a service for reward, our charity ‘springs partly from our desire to obtain the esteem of others, partly from the expectation that the favors we have bestowed will be reciprocated, and partly, too, from the gratification of the sense of power, by the proof that we can satisfy not only our own desires, but also the desires of others.’ Ibid., 222– 23.  As he explained, ‘We cannot adopt the former for we are unable to discover among primitive proofs this perfectly developed special “moral sense” and because we do discover a thin thread of utilitarianism winding in and out through many of our moral actions. Nor can we adopt the latter because we see many moral actions pursued without any reference to pleasure or gain.’ Ibid., 223.

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with the aid of intellectual and social and religious development, a moral nature, according to the ‘utilitarian’ plan first, according to the ‘intuitional’ plan next. Pleasure and pain constituted the guide for right and wrong action, until the experience acquired for many ages, as to what groups of action are followed by agreeable consequences, and what groups by painful ones, establish fixed habits, which, by continuous transmissions, produced corresponding psychical modifications, and gradually developed a Conscience that responded instinctively to ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ without any reference to utility. ⁴²

He went on to suggest that three specific phenomena were implicated in this account of human morality. Firstly, the evolution of the intellect had led to an understanding of cause and effect, to self-command and moral restraint.⁴³ Secondly, the evolution of society had generated a social impulse that eventually arrived at the realization of the truth of the Golden Rule.⁴⁴ And, thirdly, the evolution of religion had established a superstructure that linked creed and moral code, with morality invested with ‘divine sanction’ and the idea of the brotherhood of all men.⁴⁵ Taking all this together, Krauskopf offered a triumphalist account that presented moral progress as inevitable: The Law of moral evolution is fixed. It is God’s law. It will brook no opposition and suffer no deterioration… [M]oral evolution has reached that stage in which it furnishes man with a self-directing and self-convicting conscience… The age of our fathers, better than that of our grandfathers, gave birth to us, and we, morally, intellectually, socially and religiously their superiors, shall give birth to a race superior to our own. ⁴⁶

As he saw it, only an awareness of the evolutionary foundations of morality could lead to a robust system of ethics.⁴⁷ A more accommodating thinker might have downplayed the apparent radicalism of the theory and stressed that morality, according to this evolutionary perspective, could be said to retain a basis in divine moral law, just as tradition held; after all, Krauskopf’s panentheistic views meant that one could not distinguish sharply between evolutionary law and divine law. But, typically, the confrontational Krauskopf preferred to assert vehemently that any ‘Dark-Age-Orthodox’ claim that morality rested ‘ex-

 Ibid., 224.  Ibid., 225.  Ibid.  Ibid., 225 – 26.  Ibid., 227.  As he put it, ‘Let would-be improvers upon morality ponder also upon this fact that any attempt to base morality upon any other foundation that that which God’s Law of Evolution has laid down, must inevitably lead to failure.’ Ibid., 227– 28.

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clusively upon a religious basis, is contrary to the law of God [i. e. God’s Law of Evolution] and therefore must fail.’⁴⁸

Evolutionary Progress and its Consequences for Biblical Authority To a considerable extent, Krauskopf was ultimately dependent upon Herbert Spencer and the idea of a universal evolution that explained so much more than biology. As Krauskopf himself put it, an acceptance of biological evolution followed on from an acceptance or recognition of the ubiquity of evolutionary processes in the world. We must accept it [i. e. the theory of organic evolution], if we accept the belief that all knowledge, all language, all society, all industry, all government, all art, all culture, all science, has evolved from the low and simple to the high and complex.⁴⁹

He also revealed the influences of the Christian critics of Darwin, the Harvardbased biologist and geologist Louis Agassiz and the Duke of Argyll, in his belief that evolution had a strongly teleological character, that it was necessarily progressive. In writing about the evolution of mankind, he embraced the idea of ‘prophetic organs’ and applied it to human development, both physical and mental. We are still but one remove from the animal, and countless generations will yet be necessary, before the God-like will have annihilated all the animal within us. But there are innate with us to-day, latent capacities, which are prophetic of that future, but not attainable in out present state. And this prophecy in organic life never deceives. The paddles of the whale prophecied the human hand and the human hand became a fact. Aquatic animals prophecied lungs and lungs appeared. Our prophetic conception of perfection of character yet to be attained, our progress towards it, our aspiration after it, finds in these facts, warrant for our anticipating that the future must afford scope for the realization of the possibilities after which we aspire. That the attaining of this ultimate perfection is the striving impulse of all evolution, we know. We also know that we are doing something towards its realization. So, too, did our fathers before us.⁵⁰

There was a strongly messianic flavour to his account that delighted in the future evolution of mankind, and saw the individual as a partner with God’s laws in the

 Ibid., 228.  Ibid., 116.  Ibid., 263, also 109 – 11.

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on-going work of perfecting His greatest creation. It was certain that evolution had not yet finished with man’s body or, even more, with his mind, and thus evolution had not yet reached its zenith. At the same time, mankind’s future did not lie entirely at the mercy of evolutionary forces. Reflecting an interest in Lamarckian ideas of acquired characteristics, Krauskopf suggested that It is in our power to work with God and to aid Him in the final establishment of that end for which all evolution, inorganic and organic, and intellectual, is the meaning… It is in our power to so live, physically, morally and mentally, that we may bequeath unto our descendants an heirloom that will make their life more blessed than ours. This must be our categorical imperative, so to live, physically, mentally and morally, that our descendants, even in the most distant generations, may bless us for having transmitted to them mind and body, which has enabled them more and more to triumph over their lower animal nature and to approach nearer and nearer to the God-like, to the spiritual realm of God.⁵¹

It is also worth noting that contemporary intra-Jewish debates about historical criticism were at the forefront of his mind when it came to discussing evolution. Unlike Wise or Kohler, he offered no attempt to reconcile the biblical account of creation with the findings of science and made no attempt to retain the dignity of the scriptures. If, he insisted, one truly adopted the perspective of theistic evolution ‘that our whole universe has been developed from a primal nebula,’ then [L]et us go the whole way, and not twist the Hebrew word ‘Barah’ (to create) into meaning ‘gradual unfolding.’ It means what it was intended to mean, ‘Creatio ex nihilo’… [Let us] not try to patch up the Bible into teaching universal solar systems, when it plainly means that the earth is the All… and [let us] not try to account for discrepancies and errors by arguing that God had to use an unscientific method, for the primitive Hebrews were not sufficiently advanced…⁵²

Instead, quite deliberately, he pointed to the natural sciences as offering an alternative source of revelation from that of the traditional textual sources. In comparing a zealous believer in the literal reading of the Bible and a theistic evolutionist, he suggested that The one supports all his beliefs by the authority of a collection of ancient books, which he believes to be inspired, not on any scientific basis, but on the basis of simple, unquestioning faith. The other supports his claims by the teachings of a sacred volume, too, very old, as old as time and as voluminous as space, whose countless pages unfold the records of all

 Ibid., 161– 62. This Kantian emphasis is shared with Hans Jonas’ theology evolutionary-inspired social ethics.  Ibid., 55 – 57. Likewise, he rejected claims for ‘creation from nothing’ in the Talmud (BT Rosh Hashanah 11a, Chulin 60a) and in Maimonides’ writings (Moreh Nebuchim 2:30). Ibid., 55, 84.

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the ages that have ever been, and show faithful illustrations of all the life that has ever existed, their joys and sorrows, their trials and tribulations, their rise and their fall, their appearance and disappearance, their struggle and their final triumph. The name of this volume is inscribed upon the title page in God’s own handwriting. It reads: ‘Nature.’⁵³

One commentator has argued that Krauskopf was disingenuous in his assertions that he engaged with the subject without preconceptions, but that in fact he had chosen the subject because he saw in it an excellent means by which to defend Reform Judaism.⁵⁴ This is undoubtedly true, but this does not mean that his particular theological findings concerning the nature of God were established beforehand. The panentheistic God Krauskopf obtained as a result of engaging with evolutionary theory was unlike anything he himself had written about before. While it shared similarities with the Cosmic God of his tutor Wise, and is probably best accounted for by the influence of the panentheistic writings of the Protestant philosopher Jonathan Fiske and his readiness to embrace the logical implications of any attempt to identify the Divine Evolver with the evolutionary process itself.

Summary What were the key ideas that Krauskopf sought to communicate in his writings about evolution? Like so many others in his own day, he was repelled by Darwinian natural selection and preferred to teach a more progressive, redemptive version of evolution. In contrast to Reform rabbis before him, however, Krauskopf was far less defensive in seeking to reconcile evolutionary science with Judaism. With regard to the Religion-Science debate, specifically, he was quite unequivocal in privileging the authority of science over religious tradition. Or, to put it more accurately, he attempted to privilege a specific conception of science that was premised upon theistic assumptions, while at the same time to justify the rejection of philosophical materialism. On the one hand, this allowed him to argue that, against the pessimistic claims of materialism, his theistic evolutionary theory promised survival beyond the grave and justified a belief in the progressive nature of morality. On the other hand, he appeared to enjoy articulating the radical implications of a sceptical approach to Jewish scriptures and of a historical-critical approach to the development of Judaism, and was unperturbed by any concern caused by his acceptance of the basic materialist premise  Ibid., 131.  Blau, “An American-Jewish View of the Evolution Controversy,” 634.

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that the universe operated free from any personal, interventionist deity but was rather the expression of natural law, which he called God.⁵⁵ If the cost of meeting the challenge of the materialist evolutionists was a panentheistic conception of God as the de-personalized evolving force behind nature, then that was a price worth paying for rabbi Krauskopf.

 It is worth noting that Krauskopf was not always consistent about his views on the subject. For example, as Blau puts it, for Krauskopf ‘God is both Law and the Creator of the Law.’ Ibid., 627, 629.

VIII Conclusion Wise, Kohler, Hirsch, and Krauskopf (if not Hahn), represent some of the leading intellectual lights of Reform Judaism in North America from the 1870s until the early 1920s. Their individual responses to Hirsch’s rhetorical question ‘Where then is the abyss that lies between Darwin and religion?’ constitute, in effect, a common programme of engagement with evolutionary theory during this period, with each arguing that a harmonious meeting of Jewish religion and science was both necessary and desirable. As such, and despite some scholarly suggestions to the contrary, the study of biological evolution appears to be of some consequence for the development of Reform Jewish thought. The argument for the centrality of evolution as an explanatory framework for these reformers at this time rests on three observations: Firstly, there is the evidence from the horse’s mouth. In ignoring or minimizing the significance of evolutionary theory for Reform rabbis, previous commentators have had to set aside the views of the men themselves, who frequently and explicitly sought to reassess Judaism through the lens of evolutionary science, even when (or especially when) it conflicted with tradition. Can the historian really afford to disregard the opinion of someone of Kohler’s stature when he claimed that the problem of how to reconcile evolutionist and creationist perspectives was probably the greatest problem facing modern theology?¹ Secondly, there is the frequent allusion to a theory of universal evolution. In studies that were ostensibly about biological evolution, all tended to link such apparently disparate subjects as biblical criticism, the historical development of religion, including the Jewish religion, and the progression of human morality, and they could do so for the same reason: that they found the same universal law of evolution at work in all these realms. And thirdly, there is agreement about the need for a non-traditional, de-anthropomorphized conception of God, which is implicated in their common tendency towards panentheism; admittedly, for Wise and Hahn this can best be explained in terms of engagement with Idealist philosophy, but the evolutionary science appears much more important for the panentheistic theology of the others, articulated most clearly in Krauskopf and Hirsch, but also present, if undeveloped, in Kohler’s later work. In attempting to make the case for the significance of evolutionary theory for understanding the development of Reform Judaism in the nineteenth-century, it is helpful to consider why previous scholarship arrived at different conclusions. In the space remaining we will consider some of the issues that were raised in  Kohler, Jewish Theology, 153 – 54. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664119-008

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earlier treatments of the subject of Reform and evolution, especially the question of social context (for example, what were the external factors that prompted Reform Jewish interest in organic evolution?) and the question of the function of the idea in Reform Jewish discourse (for example, in what different ways was evolutionary theory integrated into Reform Jewish theology?). Previous commentators, namely, Marc Swetlitz² and Michael Shai Cherry,³ have offered slightly different answers to these questions. Swetlitz, in his survey of Reform Jewish sermons and articles in newspapers such as The American Israelite and The Jewish Times, identified two specific surges of interest, in 1871– 1875 and again 1885 – 1888. He suggested that the timing of the earlier period was due to the publication of Darwin’s The Descent of Man in 1871, while the later period was due to the radical Pittsburgh Platform of 1885, and its assertion that modern science was not antagonistic Judaism. That there was little positive engagement before 1871 indicated to him that it was human evolution, rather than biological evolution in general, that interested Reform Jews, and he characterized the Reform Jewish position on evolution as being ‘interested in humanity and not in nature at large’.⁴ In his later broader study of North American Jewish responses to Darwin, he also argued that the acceptance of evolution among [North American] Jews did not induce a major transformation in theology… In Reform Judaism, the reformulation of theology and the practice of biblical criticism had begun in Germany many decades prior to the 1870s… Rather than transform theology, evolutionary ideas and language were used by Reform and traditional Jews to reinforce already established positions.⁵

Whereas Swetlitz had focused on the immediate triggers of Darwin’s writing on human evolution and on the radical Pittsburgh Platform, for Cherry the more important context was the wider nineteenth-century religion-science controversy. Among other things, this culture war threatened to undermine religious authority, especially with regard to its moral teachings, and to present a materialistic philosophical alternative to religion itself. As a result, Reform Jews characteristically used evolutionary theory as a means by which to champion a modern Jew-

 Swetlitz, “Responses of American Reform Rabbis to Evolutionary Theory, 1864– 1888” and Swetlitz, “American Jewish Responses to Darwin and Evolutionary Theory, 1860 – 1890.”  Cherry,”Creation, Evolution and Jewish Thought.” Cherry includes chapters on Wise, Kohler, Hirsch and Krauskopf.  Swetlitz, “Responses of American Reform Rabbis to Evolutionary Theory, 1864– 1888,” 105 – 06.  Swetlitz, “American Jewish Responses to Darwin and Evolutionary Theory, 1860 – 1890,” 233 – 34.

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ish progressive conception of morality, that is, to counter the moral pessimism of materialism but also the anachronistic teachings of both doctrinaire Christianity and ritualistic traditional Judaism.⁶ Cherry concluded that only ‘[t]wo things motivated our respondents to Darwinism: maintaining a foundation for ethical behavior and maintaining allegiance to Judaism.’⁷ At the same time he recognized with Swetlitz the Reform tendency to link organic evolution with the findings of biblical criticism, and the need to embrace an appreciation of the historical evolution of the religious texts, although he felt that this was arguably less important for U.S. Reform Judaism than for European.⁸ A third characteristic that Cherry added was a theological interest in locating God’s presence in nature and natural law, and a commitment to an immanent, progressive teleology; the sources for this, he suggested, could be found in ‘classical Jewish thought’, especially kabbalism.⁹ It should be clear from the close reading of the Reform rabbis offered in the preceding chapters that a few qualifications on these commentators’ observations are in order. Certainly, it is right to contextualize Reform Jewish engagement with evolutionary theory in the need to confront secular, materialistic philosophies in order to prevent the disappearance of Judaism itself, as both Swetlitz and Cherry do. One cannot ignore the widespread influence of the extraordinarily popular speeches and writings on scepticism and agnosticism by the

 Cherry distinguished between U.S. Reform, which made the argument in the context of an inter-religious polemic against Christianity, and European Reform, which did so in the context of an intra-religious polemic between reformist and traditionalist Jewish thought. Cherry,”Creation, Evolution and Jewish Thought,” 199 – 200.  Ibid., 200.  Cherry suggested that ‘For the [European] integrationists, science reveals what the Bible means; for the [North Americans] separatists, science reveals what the Bible does not mean. None of the Americans, including Wise, believes that science can help unlock the mysteries of Torah. Science is a wonderful subject of study, but it does not make a Jew a better reader of Torah. For Wise, and especially for Krauskopf, science helps to understand why Jewish religion should be reformed and Jewish theology modified.’ Ibid., 199. As we have seen, however, the evolutionary perspective did not just query literalistic readings of biblical accounts of creation for the reformers; ultimately, Kohler, Hirsch and Krauskopf claimed that evolutionary science in the guise of historical-criticism did indeed make them better readers of Torah, insofar as it made them acutely aware of the limits of its knowledge and authority.  Cherry maintained that ‘immanence was already an integral part of traditional Jewish theology via the mediated monism of medieval Kabbalah’ and concluded that ‘[n]ineteenth-century Jewish responses to Darwinism tend to articulate an immanent, progressive teleology, the sources for which are present in classical Jewish thought.’ Ibid., 194, 200. To Cherry’s credit, he mentions ‘panentheism’, albeit only once, in connection to Isaac Mayer Wise (194 n162).

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lawyer and orator Robert Ingersoll throughout the 1880s, for instance.¹⁰ The inroads made by science and scepticism into popular culture were a constant source of concern, with Darwinism identified as one clear and present danger, and biblical-criticism another. The first suggested that purely materialistic mechanisms accounted for the variety of life, and the second that the irrational elements of the Bible made it largely irrelevant to the faith of the modern, sceptical Jew. In response to such challenges, it is no surprise that a number of Reform rabbis developed Jewish theologies of biological evolution that criticised, among other things, naïve biblical creationism. But in terms of identifying the intellectual context, Swetlitz is probably too narrowly focused and Cherry is too wide and general. What is missing from both commentators is a clear sense of the theological, philosophical and scientific landscape in which such works were being written. As we have seen, a small group of authors, cited by the Reform Jewish leaders and including Christian evolutionary theists, probably represent the key intellectual foils and provocations. These included the German Eduard Hartmann who was one of a number of Idealist philosophers who was representative of those who sought to incorporate evolutionary biology into a more general conception of an unfolding universe governed by the mysterious Will; the British evolutionary scientist Thomas Huxley, who gave a well-publicized lecture series on evolution in the U.S. in 1876 and wrote popular works on the implications of evolution for Bible and theology in the mid 1880s; the German evolutionary scientist Ernst Haeckel, who promulgated an evolutionary history of mankind in the mid 1870s, which involved a Spinoza-influenced monistic philosophy and included a consideration of the ethical implications; the North American Protestant historian and philosopher John Fiske, who more than anyone else promoted Herbert Spencer’s alternative to Darwinism in the U.S., whose own study of a cosmic, evolutionary theology was published in 1874, and who offered the first public pronouncement of panentheism in 1885; and the North American Protestant clergyman and evolutionary theist Henry Ward Beecher, whose major work on evolution and religion was published in 1885, before he died in 1887. Arguably, the position of the leadership of U.S. Reform Judaism on evolution was the result of intellectual intercourse and some creative misreading of non-Jewish works to an extent not fully recognized by previous commentators. In terms of characterizing the Reform Jewish stance, Swetlitz’s claim about its exclusive interest in human evolution is not very helpful and it is by no means

 For an assessment of the influence of Ingersoll and Felix Adler on U.S. Reform thought, see Langton, “Discourses of Doubt.”

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obvious that Darwin’s The Descent of Man was the catalyst, considering that Darwin’s works were rarely engaged with directly.¹¹ In fact, Wise, Hirsch and Krauskopf were actually very interested in the phenomenon of biological evolution more generally, and Hahn and Kohler, while less concerned about the scientific details, were just as interested as the others in the theological implications of evolution of life itself, and not just of humans.¹² That is not to deny that these thinkers were largely focused on the implications of evolutionary theory for reassessing morality after Darwin, a fact which Cherry also highlights, but this should not be confused with a focus on human evolution. As we have seen, this interest in ethics was bound up in a kind of cosmic or universal understanding of evolution, and was not limited to the implications of human evolution alone. One might also question the claim made by Swetlitz that Reform Jewish theology remained untouched by its engagement with evolutionary theory, and that the theory was primarily used to justify already existing views about biblicalcriticism, progressive revelation and the historically development of religion. To this list of pre-existing views can be added Cherry’s observation that Reform theology was characterized by an interest in divine immanence that found support in evolutionary theory but which could ultimately be traced back to traditional sources. From these perspectives, evolutionary theory largely functioned as an analogy, providing credibility and authority for the radical Reform agenda. But, as we have seen, it is not unreasonable to interpret the evidence quite differently. Rather than view the evolutionary writings of Wise, Hahn, Kohler, Hirsch and Krauskopf as presenting an analogical comparison of the biological and historical realms in order to facilitate the justification of pre-existing reformist views, one might see them as espousing a non-analogical approach that subsumed the biological and historical into a more general universal law of evolution, which did indeed have profound theological implications. One might easily argue that the emergence of immanence as a theological concern at this time can be better explained in terms of external influences, specifically, the inspiration of Idealist philosophy or, more significant still, evolutionary science, rather than in-

 Swetlitz admits that ‘[i]t remains uncertain why it was Darwin’s book [The Descent of Man] that stimulated American Jewish responses’ rather than works by Huxley, Haeckel or North American scientists and Protestant clerics. Swetlitz, “American Jewish Responses to Darwin and Evolutionary Theory, 1860 – 1890,” 215 – 16. In fact Kohler, Hirsch and Krauskopf were much more likely to respond to precisely those other authorities that Swetlitz identifies as less important.  Despite his general claim to the contrary, Swetlitz admits as much for Wise and Krauskopf. Swetlitz, “Responses of American Reform Rabbis to Evolutionary Theory, 1864– 1888,” 106.

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ternally, that is, as a development from within the Jewish religious tradition. The immanent tendency in Reform theology, made manifest in various attempts to reconceptualize the nature of the Jewish God panentheistically, especially when viewed as a consequence of the engagement with science, was a much more radical innovation than even Cherry allows.¹³ It also undermines Meyer’s view, noted previously, that the representatives of ‘classical’ Reform Judaism in the U.S. were conduits for German thought in the main, and were not original Jewish thinkers.¹⁴ To put this another way, it would be a mistake to approach Reform Jewish attitudes to evolution primarily in the context of the religion-science debate and thus to view evolution almost exclusively as a challenge to Judaism, as Cherry does. While this was part of the story, one cannot ignore the way in which a matrix or cluster of ideas related to evolution (including biological and cosmological evolution, historical- and biblical-critical studies, naturalistic accounts of morality, and a powerful sense of religious progress) coalesced constructively to provide a new foundation for the Jewish religious imagination. Both Swetlitz and Cherry appeared to miss the shift from evolution as one battleground in the war between the proponents of religious and materialistic worldviews to the reconceptualization of evolution as a universal law and the key ideological framework that could unify the various aspects of the radical revisionist programme of Reform Judaism vis-à-vis authority, morality and theology. Cherry’s conclusion that ‘[e]volutionary theory was not the primary challenge for Judaism in the late nineteenth-century’¹⁵ is true but misleading. It is true in that there were many other important challenges facing American Jews, including the fear of assimilation and conversion, anti-Semitism, internecine conflict between the orthodox and the reformers, and rise of Zionism. It is misleading in that evolution was a much more prominent feature of Reform Jewish thought than his conclusion suggests, and that evolution was viewed not as a challenge so

 Cherry also presents the movement of ideas differently. In contrast to the present study, he suggested that Krauskopf’s interest in immanence was influenced by Wise (rather than by Fiske) and that the influences at work on Wise ‘probably included German idealism as well as the immanent theism of the American Protestants’ such as Henry Ward Beecher (although no evidence is adduced for this, and in fact it is Krauskopf who tended to cite Beecher). Cherry, “Creation, Evolution and Jewish Thought,” 193.  Meyer, Response to Modernity, 272.  Swetlitz, “American Jewish Responses to Darwin and Evolutionary Theory, 1860 – 1890,” 200. Another questionable observation is the claim that theodicy was of little interest in Reform Jewish discourse about evolution (Ibid., 194– 95.), which overlooks the frequent allusions to the natural wastage in biological evolutionary processes, and the general sense that suffering and injustice in the natural world can be justified by the greater good of the telos of humankind.

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much as a solution for the problem of the apparent incoherence of the reforming agenda. Whatever the shortcomings of this present study, it is hoped that future historical treatments of Reform Judaism in the U.S. will at least think twice before disregarding the role of evolutionary theory in its story.

Appendix: Evolution and Progressive Judaism in Britain Up until this point, the focus has been on making the case that biological evolutionary theory had been central to the thought of Kohler, Hirsch and Krauskopf, and had led to some distinctive and innovative theology among the progressive and radical reformers in North America. Of course, many other adherents of progressive Judaism engaged with evolutionary theory, albeit usually to a lesser extent; Swetlitz summarizes most of those in the U.S. and Cherry widens the study to include Europe.¹ We turn now to England and to those whose views offer something of a comparative perspective on the subject of the post-Darwinian foundations for Jewish religious truth, specifically on the question of how to approach the young, and who add something new to the debate concerning the nature of post-Darwinian theology. British progressives were less likely than their North American counterparts to discuss science and evolution and they rarely offered any dedicated treatments of the subject. They also joined the debate much later, perhaps because the theory had gained wider acceptance in the general population and because Orthodoxy was the dominant denomination among Anglo-Jews in contrast to the U.S. where Reform was in the ascendency. Yet the issue was no less fraught or controversial for progressive thinkers in the U.K. than it had been for those in the U.S. As was the case for the States, the standard history of Reform Judaism in Britain neglects the issue,² despite there being good examples of Reform ministers and progressive thinkers, such Philip Magnus³ and

 In addition to Wise, Kohler, Hirsch and Krauskopf, Cherry also includes the German Reform rabbi Abraham Geiger, despite the fact that he rejected the transmutation of species in general and Darwinism in particular. Cherry, 108 – 10.  There is no mention of either Darwin or evolution in the history of the British movement in Anne J. Kershen and Jonathan A. Romain, Tradition and Change: A History of Reform Judaism in Britain, 1840 – 1995 (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1995).  Philip Magnus (1842– 1933) studied science and arts at University College London and spent three years at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin before returning to Britain to serve as Reform minister at the West London Synagogue from 1866 until 1860, when he retired from his religious duties and committed himself to civic life, including 16 years as an MP, and the promotion of public education. One of three surviving sermons by him was entitled ‘The Immortality of the Soul’ and combined Scripture with contemporary scientific knowledge; it assumed no conflict between science and faith. Magnus’ niece commented in a biographical study that ‘His doubts came later when Darwin’s epoch-making thoughts on evolution influenced his enquiring mind and led to a correspondence with Darwin that was followed by a friendship.’ Ruth Sebag-Montefiore, “A Quest for a Grandfather: Sir Philip Magnus, https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664119-009

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Nathan Solomon Joseph,⁴ who espoused strong interests in science and evolution. Here we will focus on the writings of two others, namely, the father of Anglo-Liberal Judaism, Claude Montefiore, and the Reform minister Morris Joseph, to demonstrate that similar concerns, in terms of religious authority, ethics and theology, were also central for British progressives.

1st Bart., Victorian Educationalist,” Transactions of Jewish Historical Society of England 34 (1994– 96): 146.  By profession an architect, Nathan Solomon Joseph (1834– 1909) was brother-in-law of the Chief Rabbi, Hermann Adler, and honorary secretary of the London-based Orthodox rabbinical training institution, Jews’ College, from 1860 to 1869. Towards the end of his life, however, he revealed increasingly progressive tendencies, attending the Reform West London Synagogue for New Year and Yom Kippur, and being a founder member of the Jewish Religious Union, which, shortly after his death, transformed into the Liberal Jewish Synagogue. He wrote a number of religious tracts and published the non-dogmatic work Religion, Natural and Revealed: A Series of Progressive Lessons for Jewish Youth in 1879, which was reissued, unchanged, in 1906. The first chapter was concerned to demonstrate ‘The Existence of a God’ and was premised on the argument from design. A two and half page appendix was designed explicitly ‘for teachers and advanced pupils’ and took the subject further with a short treatment of ‘Evolution and Design’. Here, Joseph presented a highly teleological account of evolution, arguing for the necessity of God to explain the first life form, the life force, and natural law as an alternative to chance. He wrote that ‘the “Argument from design” is vastly intensified in force if the theory of Evolution be true. For if it be true, as the Evolutionists tell us, that all living creatures have gradually descended from a low organic form known as protoplasm, acted upon by forces which have ever remained subject to the same invariable laws, what must be said about the Origin of such protoplasm, such force, and such law, as could produce such results as the living creatures which people our world? Are not the marks of design all the more striking if, with a foresight which the human mind can scarcely grasp or realize to the faintest degree, the matter, force, and law were so ordained, countless ages ago, as to produce, without intervention in the interval (as the Evolutionists would have us believe), a world teeming with all forms of life, as we see it now?… [T]he scheme of primal creation is thereby immeasurably ennobled… [D]esign of a kind so full of numberless nascent and unborn conditions for life, actual and potential, that the mind… quails beneath the burden of the developmental idea; and we feel that language is poor and weak, nay, powerless, since DESIGN is the strongest world we have to cover the far-sighted Creative Intention, which started into life a world of germs, that, after countless ages, could produce the wondrous world of life now surrounding us!’ N.S. Joseph, Religion, Natural and Revealed. A Series of Progressive Lessons for Jewish Youth (London: Trübner & Co., 1879), 273 – 74.

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Claude Montefiore Claude G. Montefiore (1858 – 1938)⁵ was brought up as a Reform Jew, which, in England at that time, meant under the auspices of the long-lived leader of the West London Reform Synagogue, David Woolf Marks. Marks was hostile to biblical-criticism and to a Continental-style of liberal Jewish religion more generally; rather, he sought to emulate the piety of the Anglican Evangelicals and offered a kind of bible-based, anti-rabbinic conception of Judaism over his long period of office 1840 – 1893, when he retired from active service. Frustrated by a refusal to engage with what he saw as the real challenges of modernity by either the Orthodox or the Reformers, Montefiore, along with his close associate Lily Montagu and others, established the Jewish Religious Union in 1902, which eventually transformed into the Liberal Jewish Synagogue in 1910; at the turn of the century, then, it was Anglo-Liberal Judaism, rather than Anglo-Reform, which approximated most closely to the Continental and U.S. models of Reform. As such, Montefiore best illustrates the particular dynamics of the progressive Anglo-Jewish situation with regard to science and religion, at least in its early stages. Although he rarely cited his scientific sources, his library demonstrates that he certainly maintained an interest in evolutionary science.⁶ In Truth in Religion (1906) Montefiore addressed the question that Marks had shown little or no interest in, namely, the question of religious authority in the light of modern knowledge, when he asserted

 For an intellectual history of Montefiore and his contribution to the progressive movement, see Daniel R. Langton, Claude Montefiore: His Life and Thought (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2002).  While Montefiore did not write much about the subject, it is possible to see from his pamphlet collection, which is now held at The London Library, that he was interested in both Jewish and Christian treatments of evolutionary science in relation with religion. Some examples include: E. Haeckel, ‘Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft’ (1873), T.H. Huxley, ‘Evolution and Ethics’ (1893), J.O. Bevan, ‘The Science of Religion and the Religion of Science’ (1895), V.F. Storr, ‘Teleology in Paley and Darwin’ (1897), J.O. Bevan, ‘The Spheres of Action of Science and Religion’ (1903), James Wilson, ‘Evolution and the Holy Scriptures’ (1903), Leonard Levy, ‘Evolution or Revolution’ (1910), Karl Pearson, ‘The Scope and Importance to the State of Eugenics’ (1911), Maurice Harris, ‘Evolution and Religion’ (1925), James Wilson, ‘Christianity in the Light of the Idea of Evolution’ (1925), J.S. Huxley, ‘Biology and the Science of Life’ (1926), Eleanor Calhoun, ‘Christ and Evolution’ (1926), Dean Inge, ‘Scientific Ethics’ (1927), J.S. Boys Smith, ‘Christian Doctrine and the Idea of Evolution’ (1930), J.S. Haldane, ‘Science and Religion’ (1936).

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There can be no opposition between Science and Religion, for Science must be a part of Religion. Whatever laws of Nature science ascertains and proves, are also the laws of God.⁷

An Oxford educated scholar, Montefiore’s lack of concern about the implications of evolutionary theory for traditional readings of Genesis reflected a sense of the wider British acceptance of the triumph of the physical sciences, and of his readiness and that of his fellow progressives to accept the negative implications for a literalist reading of scripture. Furthermore, it was clear that, for Montefiore, knowledge of God could be just as readily be discerned from the natural world as from tradition. If the statements in the sacred books of any religion were contrary to the proved doctrines of science, then those statements should be regarded as erroneous. While such beliefs had been held in good faith until proven false by science, he argued, that they could no longer be held in good faith. Thus, to take the simplest instance which nowadays nobody minds, science has shown that the time, the order, and the manner of the Earth’s origins and man’s as related in the first chapter of Genesis, or again as related in the second chapter of Genesis (for the two chapters contradict each other), are inaccurate. Earth and man did not so come into being, but quite otherwise. Therefore, because God is true and the source of truth, it is scientific truth, because it is the truth, which is here Divine and not the Book of Genesis. It is science and not the Pentateuch which we must here believe. Other examples will easily present themselves to your minds.⁸

While the reconciliation between science and religion was a matter of record for progressives of Judaism and Christianity, Montefiore recognized that the issue remained highly contested within traditional Judaism. Insulated from wider societal currents, Montefiore predicted the eventual decline of Orthodox Judaism into obscurity unless its adherents could accept truth as the ultimate authority, be it the evolutionary theories of the natural sciences or the biblical criticism of the historical sciences. Any argument that sought to evade the dictates of modern knowledge was not only specious, but dangerous for religion itself. The ‘alarming elements’ he saw emerging in the Anglo-Jewish community included the fact that the new teachings of science, history, and criticism were largely ignored by ‘official Judaism’. It was, he maintained, a serious problem that Jewish youth and even Jewish ministers continued to be trained as they might have

 Claude G. Montefiore, “Truth in Religion,” in Truth in Religion and Other Sermons (London: Macmilliam, 1906), 3.  Ibid., 4.

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been trained eighty years earlier, before Darwin or Colenso.⁹ The divorce between Judaism and truth was becoming greater in each decade, and consequently he rejected specious arguments about ‘not disturbing the innocent faith of an educated person, about preserving unity and Judaism, about not making bad blood, about letting sleeping dogs lie, about letting error destroy itself, about the urgent practical questions which beset and menace the community, about the sovereign virtue of peace, about the immense need of outward forms, about the needful illusions in the education of children, about all things under heaven except one.’¹⁰ Montefiore’s position was that the first loyalty of the Jew was to truth, because truth was allied to righteousness and knowledge was allied to God. He went on, No religion, in the long run, will be able to resist the transformations and readjustments which truth may decree. But the longer the process of transformation and readjustment is postponed, the greater the danger. The longer the ministers of religion are not allowed officially to speak about the new conquests of truth, the greater will be the number of those who will become alienated from or indifferent to the religion of their fathers, the larger the number of those who will think Judaism and the religious curiosity and anachronism, incapable of change or transformation. Greatly do our official leaders deceive themselves if they think that the results of science, history, and criticism will remain unknown, if only official Judaism and all ministers and teachers of religion keep silence, and look the other way. You cannot build a ring-fence around the community, and expect that the light of knowledge and truth and free discussion will never penetrate the barrier… If the results of science and history and criticism are not taught by the friends of Judaism, they will be taught by its foes.¹¹

In 1912 Montefiore wrote Outlines of Liberal Judaism, in which he returned to the subject in a work that was intended for the use of parents and teachers. In it, he espoused an evolutionary theism that was primarily focused on human development. As he explained, What some people call development, and others call evolution, we accept as the deliberate will of the divine Ruler. The development or evolution is the deliberate will… It is possible that man has himself been ‘developed’ out of the animal, so that if we could trace our own

 John Colenso was a controversial Anglican priest whose popular biblical-critical treatises that assessed the historicity of the Pentateuch and Book of Joshua had caused a scandal in the 1860s and 70s.  Ibid., 8 – 9.  Ibid., 10.

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ancestors far enough back we should ultimately come to ancestors who were not human at all.¹²

In general, Montefiore’s writings were characterized by the frequent footnoted inclusion of other’s comments on his views. On this occasion, he debated a colleague’s concern that children should not be exposed to Darwinism, concerned as ever to address what he regarded as specious arguments that would damage Judaism in the long run. I may mention here that one of my critics, though unfortunately he gives no reasons for his opinion, very strongly objects to the possible evolution of ‘man’ from the animal (to which I have several times alluded in the course of this chapter) being mentioned to ‘children.’ But surely the modern child is sure to hear of Darwin at school, and he may even be taught ‘Darwinism’ before he is fourteen or fifteen. Nor do I see why it is unfitting that children should be taught that God ‘evolved’ man from animals, while it is not unfitting that they should be taught that God developed and civilised man from very uncivilised savages.¹³

At the same time, he was prepared to express his ignorance as to why God had chosen such as gradual, convoluted method of development. But, just as others had argued, he took comfort in the fact that it was an ascent rather than a descent that described the evolutionary history. Why all this long development? Why all this apparent waste? Why all this long painful history of slow movement from animal to lowest, and from lowest savage to civilization? We do not know. We cannot tell. Still it is, I think, much more cheering and comforting to believe that man has slowly risen than to believe (as has been widely believed) that he suddenly fell. A slow ascent fits in better with our conception of God than a sudden fall. An enduring golden age in a far-distant future is a more comforting and bracing idea than a transitory golden age in a far-distant past. There is comfort, too, in the very thought that human nature has in it the power to grow and improve, and to reach ever nearer by whatever gradual stages to the perfect ideal. It makes us think more and not less of human nature when we realise that in some early savage there was the germ of a Socrates or an Isaiah.¹⁴

Thus for Montefiore, a liberal theology of God’s nature could be gleaned from an awareness and understanding of evolutionary progress. The same might be said of human nature. Like many progressives Jews, he defined Judaism primarily in ethical terms, and also mused about the origins of morality. He concluded that

 ed.  

Claude G. Montefiore, Outlines of Liberal Judaism: For the Use of Parents and Teachers, 2nd (London: Macmillan, 1912), 116. Ibid., 116n1. Ibid., 116 – 17.

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humanity itself had emerged from the evolutionary process with the appearance of ethical self-awareness, which then followed a trajectory of increasing internalization until the present day. If we assume that man has been developed from the animal, we may say with good reason that the first evidence of his humanity appeared when he was first dimly conscious of wrong-doing and of sin. Man came to know goodness by also knowing sin. He could not, it appears, have risen to the one without falling into the other. To rise above the beast he had to fall below the beast… Against what law did primitive man first sin? What law was he first conscious of fulfilling?… Let us, if you will, assume that… he was gradually conscious of faults committed against the rules of his tribe, against the will of the gods, and against the inward proclamations of his own conscience. After generations of progress we are still conscious of the same three kinds of wrong-doing.¹⁵

In summary, with regard to the question of religious authority and truth in the context of the Religion-Science debate, Montefiore assumed as self-evident the failure of any form of Judaism that set itself up in opposition modern evolutionary science. He viewed as particularly vulnerable Jewish traditionalists and Jewish youth, who would inevitably be exposed to such ideas, probably from materialistic authorities hostile to religion. For Montefiore, evolutionary thought encompassed biology, including human biology, biblical criticism, and the historical adaptation of religion and of human society and civilization. Ethics, too, were regarded as part of the story of the emergence of humankind from its bestial origins. While Montefiore regarded it as a mystery as to why it was the case, he nevertheless perceived the wide-ranging gradual process of such evolutionary laws (which, although not expressed as such, approximated to a universal law of evolution) as a manifestation of the divine will. Thus Montefiore’s God, although He remained a person, certainly acted through evolutionary processes.

Morris Joseph Morris Joseph (1848 – 1930) was one of the few Anglo-Reform thinkers to expressly and repeatedly address the topic of science and religion. Originally trained as an Orthodox rabbi, he replaced David Woolf Marks as minister of the Reform West London Synagogue in 1893. His somewhat conservative philosophy was set out in Judaism as Creed and Life (1903), which showed that, while he recognized that development was possible in Jewish religion, he drew a line at the  Ibid., 128 – 29.

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need for ‘certain recognized principles’ including the dogmas of God’s existence, unity, providential power, and spiritual nature, and His selection of Israel.¹⁶ The book was in large part concerned with ritual and ethics and met with the approval of both the British Orthodox and the Reformers of his day; it was published while he was a member of the Jewish Religious Union, which included individuals from across the Jewish religious spectrum. He also published popular sermons and educational tracts which expressed a view that, in addition to a belief in the organic development of religion, he also accepted the Darwinian account of the natural world and the evolution of humanity, all of which he presented as evidence for the reality of a providential God. In Judaism as Creed and Life, Joseph has a chapter on ‘The Existence of God’ in which Darwin is credited with the widespread rejection of the Genesis account of special creation.¹⁷ What attracted Joseph to the ‘highly plausible’ theory of evolution was the idea of potentiality in matter, such that only a theistic conception of evolution could account for ‘the infinite intelligence’ that had obviously ‘planned and ordained the long series of changes that would have to take place before the potential became the actual, before the jellyfish developed into an Isaiah or a Shakespeare.’¹⁸ Darwin is cited with approval for his references to ‘the Creator’ (in Origins) and for describing as a delusion the belief that the universe could be explained solely in mechanical terms (in Descent of Man), and Haeckel is attacked for his claim that evolutionary theory adequately accounted for life ‘without any preconceived design’. It was self-evident to Joseph that God was the first cause, responsible for ‘ordaining the process which ensured the variety of organic forms.’¹⁹ He could also offer evidence in support of his position from human experience, including the argument from design (i. e. the eye as an ‘example of perfect adaption’ and of the miraculous process of sensory perception), and of the human conscience and moral sense, which were regarded as the result not of chance or accident but rather as a manifestation of divine wisdom.²⁰ Later, in a chapter on ‘The Mystery of Pain’, Joseph suggested that evolutionary science actually appeared to give purpose to otherwise purposeless suffering:

    

Morris Joseph, Judaism as Creed and Life (London: Macmillan, 1903), 41– 42. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 54– 55. Ibid., 55 – 56. Ibid., 56 – 57.

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The scientific doctrine of evolution, which shows how the arduous struggle for existence has produced the most perfect types of animal life, reveals the merciful nature of conditions which, to the uninstructed gaze, seem to spell only soulless cruelty.²¹

In 1907 he discussed evolution and science in a sermon in which he again challenged the aggressive materialism of Haeckel, whose monism sought to explain the cosmos in terms of purely physical processes, even if he had to admit to some kind of mysterious forces behind Nature.²² A year later Joseph published a Course-Book on the Jewish Religion in which evolutionary science featured in a section on ‘The Existence and Nature of God’. In this work, which is reminiscent of Hahn’s similar course book for Jewish youth, Joseph presented Judaism as rational, in contrast to Christianity, and thus in accordance with the findings of science: Judaism is said to be ‘the religion of reason’; justify this in your mind. Contrast Judaism in this respect with Christianity, whose fundamental dogmas it is impossible to accept without suspension of the reasoning powers… Far from negativing [sic] the idea of the Divine Existence, the doctrine of Evolution supports it. Try to grasp this and also the general truth that between the results of modern scientific inquiry, conducted on truly scientific lines, and the essential principles of Religion there is no conflict.²³

He wrote that modern science revealed the laws that govern the universe, microscopic ‘wonder-lands hitherto unknown’, and the physiology of the human body, all of which he argued witnessed to the existence of God.²⁴ Questions or tasks that he set his young readers included: ‘Why must we hold that the Force behind the Universe is mind, i. e. intelligent?’ and ‘Assuming that the doctrine of evolution is true, show that we must still hold that the universe has had a divine author.’²⁵ In 1909 Joseph gave a sermon to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Darwin’s birth.²⁶ Here he assessed Darwin’s influence not only for the physical sciences but also for its ‘far-reaching influence upon religious thought’. Again, Jo-

 Ibid., 131.  Morris Joseph, “Science and Religion,” in The Message of Judaism: Sermons Preached at the West London Synagogue (London: George Routledge, 1907), 194– 95.  Morris Joseph, Course-Book on the Jewish Religion (Philadelphia: The Jewish Chautauqua Society, 1908), 13.  Ibid.  Ibid., 13 – 14.  Morris Joseph, “Charles Darwin,” in The Spirit of Judaism: Sermons Preached Chiefly at the West London Synagogue (London: George Routledge, 1930). The date of the sermon is given as 1909.

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seph focused on the potentiality of matter, so that ‘the primordial organic atom was endowed with the capacity of evolving the countless varieties of animal life that fill the world’, which he conceived of as a ‘long, orderly and majestic process’ free of divine intervention but ‘eloquent of Omnipotence’.²⁷ As for mankind itself, The human soul was not placed in the first man with its full stature attained. It has grown in the long interval by small degrees. But the capacity for growth was given to it from the first; the heavenly pattern was held before it, after which it might and must slowly mould itself… What but Omnipotence could have endowed that prehistoric speck of sea-slime with the ability of ultimately developing into an Isaiah… or a Darwin.²⁸

Likewise, there was widespread recognition that ‘Religion, like the animal organism itself, must change in its outward manifestations in response to a mutable environment of thought and knowledge… and lives on all the more vigorously for its power of adaptation.’²⁹ The inroads of biblical criticism and the physical sciences need not lead to scepticism, he argued, for the rise of psychology meant that biology no longer held a monopoly on our understanding of mankind. Thus, the phenomena of the human spirit are equally deserving of being taken into account with those of physical life… [T]he facts of religious experience are as eloquent as the story of the development of the human species… And without the theory of God, they defy explanation.³⁰

Whether writing instructional works for Jewish youth or sermons or books of theology, Joseph’s repeated and rather narrow concern in relation to the question of evolution was to assert that there was a divine purpose or plan to the natural developmental laws that had shaped life on earth, including human life, and also religion. As such, there was no conflict for Judaism in the religion-science debate, nor any reason to fear scepticism as the result of engaging with science, since evolution without an acceptance of God as the evolver made no sense; like others before him, Joseph attacked Haeckel as the best-known exponent of a mechanistic, design-free conception of evolution. In terms of ethics, which greatly interested him, he saw little or no relevance for evolution, but in terms of theology more generally he was keen to apply a theodic reasoning to the theory, suggesting that the goal of ever-improved forms of life actually jus-

   

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

247. 247– 48. 248. 249.

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tified the apparent cruelty of the struggle for existence. Reading Joseph, one is struck by the sense that evolution could and should be a non-issue for religious moderates, because it was a modern truth that supported rather than challenged the older truth of God’s providential nature.

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Index Adler, Felix 52, 108, See also Ethical Culture movement Agassiz, Louis 30, 101 Albo, Joseph 92 American Hebrew, The 5, 78, 81 American Israelite, The 106 anthropomorphism 18, 20, 84, 95, 105 anti-Semitism 5, 110 Aristotle 74 atheism 5, 10, 17 f., 26, 28, 32, 38, 49 – 51, 54 f., 71, 75, 96, See also materialism Beecher, Henry Ward 12, 22 – 24, 26, 90 f., 96, 108, 110 Benamozegh, Elijah 10, 13, 25, 63 Bergson, Henri 7, 61, 71 Bettan, Israel 3 biblical criticism 6 – 8, 11, 24, 26, 27, 60 f., 62, 65 f., 70, 75, 87, 90, 102 f., 105 – 107, 109 f., 115 f., 118, 121 – opposition to 28, 63, 108, 114 Britain 1, 112, 115 Buechner, Ludwig 31 Central Conference of American Rabbis 52, 89 Chardin, Pierre Teilhard 7 Cherry, Michael Shai 2, 28, 34, 106 – 110, 112 Christianity 89 – 91, 120 – influence upon Jewish thought 12, 101, 114 Cohon, Samuel 3 Colenso, John 116 consciousness 13, 20, 22, 32, 35, 41 – 46, 48, 61 f., 68 f., 83 f., 86, 118, See also self-consciousness creation 28, 30, 33, 41, 43 f., 47, 53 f., 64 f., 70 f., 73 f., 83, 102, 113 – evolving 19, 23 f., 33, 42, 45, 65, 68, 75, 88, 102 – six days of 9, 14, 63

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110664119-011

– special 14, 42, 56, 60, 63, 65, 70, 83 f., 95, 102, 107, 119 Darwin, Charles 7, 9, 16, 18, 23, 29, 31, 55 f., 61, 64, 67, 70, 76, 79 f., 82 f., 90, 94, 105, 109, 112, 116, 119 – 121 darwinism 1 – 3, 5, 7 f., 16 f., 29 f., 32, 53, 55, 58, 79 – 82, 84, 87, 95, 107 f., 117 darwinisticism 8 de Sola Pool, David 59 death 20, 23, 38, 47 f., 68, See also life, after death Descent of Man, The 16, 23, 49, 106, 109, 119 design in nature 7, 9, 14, 33, 35, 39 f., 55, 71, 80, 94 f., 119, 121 Draper, John W. 62 Duke of Argyll, George Campbell 23, 98 Einhorn, David 2, 26, 60, 76 Ethical Culture movement 52, See also Adler, Felix ethics 8, 11, 16, 29, 51 f., 67, 75 f., 82, 84 – 86, 100, 102, 109, 113, 118 f., 121, See also morality eugenics 8, 52, 57, 59 evolution – chance 32, 41, 54 f., 67, 94, 113, 119 – competition 30, 32, 37, 72, 79 – human 21, 31, 56 f., 64 f., 74, 81, 85, 98, 102, 106, 116 f., 118, 121, See also savages – Lamarckian 7, 18, 32, 56 f., 90, 102 – natural selection 1, 3, 7 f., 16, 20, 23, 26, 30, 37, 79, 85, 87, 98, 103 – orthogenetic 7, 55 – sexual selection 8, 32, 44 – universal 4, 7, 18, 20, 25 f., 58, 61, 67, 69, 71 f., 75, 80, 82, 90, 101, 105, 109 f., 118

130

Index

Fiske, John 12, 19 – 21, 25 f., 61, 77, 90, 103, 108, 110 fossils 14, 16, 30 f., 60, 63, 77, 82 Galton, Francis 58, 90 Geiger, Abraham 1 f., 7, 9, 60, 76 Genesis, Book of 15, 31, 41 f., 61, 65, 71, 75, 80, 82, 84, 87, 115, 119 Germany 1, 7 f., 13, 16, 29, 48, 52, 60, 106 Gersonides 66 God – existence of 51, 55, 71, 119 f. – nature of 24, 45, 51, 54, 57, 61, 73, 84, 95 f., 104 f., 107, 118 f., 122 Goldenson, Samuel 3 Gray, Asa 53, 55, 91 Haeckel, Ernst 12, 14, 16 f., 23, 29, 31, 53, 55, 61, 64, 76, 79, 82 f., 88, 94, 96, 108 f., 114, 119 – 121 Hahn, Aaron 3, 5 f., 9 f., 13, 25 f., 75, 97, 105, 109, 120 Harris, Maurice 3, 114 Hartmann, Eduard 12 – 14, 25, 29 f., 63, 108 Hebrew Union College 5, 28, 52, 60, 89 Hegel 8, 13, 29 Hirsch, Emil G. 3, 5 – 8, 12, 16, 18 f., 22, 25 f., 58, 60, 71, 105 – 107, 109, 112 Hirsch, Samson Raphael 60 history 1, 3, 5, 10 – 12, 14, 23, 28 f., 31, 34, 40 – 48, 50 f., 55, 57, 61, 66, 68, 77, 82, 87, 90, 92, 108 f., 112, 115 – 117 history of ideas 4 history of science 4 Huxley, Thomas 12, 14 f., 29, 31, 53, 55, 61, 76, 82, 91, 94, 108 f., 114 Ibn Ezra 66 Ibn Gabirol 73 idealism 8, 10 f., 13, 25, 33, 44, 49, 51, 75, 83, 87, 105, 108 – 110 immortality 11, 21 f., 45, 50, 57 f., 97 Ingersoll, Robert 5, 108 intellectual history 4 intelligence in nature 39, 43 f., 54, 85, 93, 96, 98

Israelite, The 28 Isserman, Ferdinand

3

Jewish Advocate, The 77 Jewish Publication Society 89 Jewish Religious Union 113 f., 119 Jewish Times, The 61, 106 Job, Book of 39, 69 Jonas, Hans 8, 10, 102 Joseph, Morris 113, 118 – 122 Joseph, Nathan Solomon 113 Kabbalah 42 f., 73, 97, 107 Kaplan, Mordecai 8 Kohler, Kaufmann 3, 5 – 9, 12 f., 16, 18 f., 22, 25 f., 80, 87, 102, 105 – 107, 109, 112 Krauskopf, Joseph 3, 5 f., 8 f., 12, 14, 16 – 19, 22, 24 – 26, 58, 71, 84, 87, 105 – 107, 109 f., 112 laws, natural 7, 16, 18, 23 f., 31 – 33, 39, 42, 47, 53, 57, 64, 70 – 72, 77, 96 f., 101, 115, 118, 120 f., See also nature Levy, J. Leonard 3, 59, 114 Liberal Jewish Synagogue 113 f. life – after death 21, 25, 41, 53, 56, 67 f., 90, 97, See also death – origin of 16, 21, 34, 42, 70, 113 Locke, John 50 Lyell, Charles 61, 70 Magnus, Philip 112 Maimonides 28, 66, 92, 102 Mann, Louis 59 Marks, David Woolf 114, 118 materialism 5, 11, 14 – 18, 23, 26, 29, 32, 38 f., 45, 47, 49 – 51, 53, 55, 58, 63, 67, 71, 75, 79 f., 82 f., 86 f., 90 f., 94, 97, 103 f., 106 – 108, 110, 118, 120, See also atheism Meyer, Michael 2, 7, 110 mind 24, 45, 65, 83 Mivart, St George Jackson 23, 91 monism 14, 16 f., 53, 55, 76, 83, 87, 96, 107, 120 Montagu, Lily 114

Index

Montefiore, Claude G. 113 – 118 Moore, James 10, 12, 18 morality 3, 11, 15 – 17, 19, 21 – 23, 25, 28 f., 32, 34, 42 – 46, 48, 51 f., 55 – 58, 61, 64 – 68, 74 – 77, 81, 85 – 87, 98 – 100, 107, 110, 119, See also ethics – product of evolution 8, 17, 19, 21 f., 60 f., 64, 67 – 69, 82, 85 – 87, 90, 94, 98 – 100, 103, 105 – 107, 109 f., 117 natural theology 7, 9, 17 f., 50, 71, 80, 93, 115 Nature 1, 9, 15, 20, 21 f., 37 f., 54, 84, 96, 103, 115, 120, See also laws, natural Nieto, David 73 Olan, Levi 3 Origin of Species, The 2, 55, 82, 119 Orthodox Judaism 26, 58, 79, 90 f., 100, 110, 112, 114 f., 118 f. panentheism 9 f., 19 f., 25 f., 33 f., 46, 50, 53 f., 58, 61, 64, 68, 74 – 77, 82 – 84, 87, 90, 95 f., 100, 103 – 105, 107 f., 110 pantheism 9 f., 14, 17 – 19, 24, 50, 61, 71, 73 – 77, 91, 95 f. Philipson, David 3 Philo 71, 73 Pittsburgh Platform 5 f., 89, 106 Plato 74, 83 primitive man See savages problem of evil 8 f., 21, 38, 46 – 48, 51, 68, 72, 80, 110, 119 Proverbs, Book of 69 race 8, 31, 81, 100 Reform Judaism – Britain 112, 118 – Germany 1, 60, 107, 110 – U.S. 1 – 3, 6, 9, 14, 28, 52, 76, 89, 105, 107 f., 114 religion, evolution of 24, 65, 77, 79, 82, 86 f., 105, 121

131

religion-science controversy 4, 19, 25 f., 60 f., 63, 87, 89, 92, 95, 103, 105, 110, 114 – 116, 118, 120 f. savages 22, 45, 98, 117, See also evolution, human scepticism See atheism Schopenhauer, Arthur 8, 13, 33 Scopes trial 3 self-consciousness 11, 34, 41 – 46, 49 – 51, 73 f., 94, See also consciousness social darwinism 6, 8, 31, 81, 87 Social Gospel movement 6, 76 soul 17, 21 f., 25, 45, 54, 57, 73 f., 83 f., 93, 112, 121 Spencer, Herbert 12, 17 – 21, 23, 25, 29, 61, 66, 76, 78, 90, 94, 101, 108 Spinoza, Baruch 10, 17, 38, 50, 55, 73, 83 f., 87, 92, 108 suffering See problem of evil Swetlitz, Marc 2, 34, 62, 91, 106 – 110, 112 Talmud 28, 53 f., 74, 92, 102 teleology 3, 7 f., 14, 18, 23, 33 f., 37 – 42, 44, 47, 51, 55, 71, 82, 85, 95, 101, 107, 110, 113 Tyndall, John 12, 82 Union of American Hebrew Congregations 5 United States 1, 31, 57, 106, 112 vital force 98

7, 33 – 37, 39, 41 – 48, 50 f., 61,

Wallace, Alfred 23, 91 Wise, Isaac Mayer 3, 5 f., 8 – 11, 13 f., 25 – 27, 52 f., 55, 58 – 60, 66, 75, 89, 93, 97, 102 f., 105 – 107, 109 f., 112 Zionism

5, 110