In modern times, with the help of course of the Greco-Roman tradition, Judaeo-Christianity sought answers to one its defining problem – that of the suffering of the just – in secular political institutions designed in part to protect those vulnerable to unjustified suffering. But as Levinas noted many years later, in a 1973 convention of Jewish educators, the political solution raises the very problem he confronted in the Frontstalag in a secular key. “Can the whole of Western humanism pass for a secularization of Judaeo-Christianity? Have the rights of man and of the citizen and the new spirit that conquered the eighteenth century not fulfilled in our minds the promises of the prophets?” The question afforded Levinas the opportunity to reflect once again on the Jewish remainder that no hyphenated Judaeo-Christian unity accommodates. If the ultimate justi-fied purpose of secularizing ‘Judaeo-Christianity’ is liberal humanism, what does the particularism of being Jewish still have to contribute in an already secular, emancipated age?
What Levinas here called “the very crisis of Jewish education in emancipated Jewish society” consists of the trembling of this hyphen, whether registered or unfelt. As citizens of a secular state founded on ‘Judaeo-Christian values,’ eman-cipated Jews risk being political agents for the assimilation of Judaism to liberal values such as the equality of dignity and the rule of law. Sympathetic to the polit-ical benefits of secularization and the post-Vatican II ecumenpolit-ical mood, Levinas was as much concerned with the problem these positive developments produce for Judaism, for under such conditions the enduring, distinct claim of Judaism on Jews becomes increasingly inaudible. The promises born by the hyphen of cor-recting a centuries old calumny also ring of a secular supercessionism in which the distinct conceptual contribution of Judaism is assimilated without remainder into the indistinct unity of an alleged ‘Judaeo-Christian’ humanism. “The notion
of Judaeo-Christianity, which is on everyone’s lips, certainly expresses an evolu-tion and an ideal to be realized in a synthesis inspired by the ecumenical age,” he concurred, before demurring: “but not every contradiction has yet been raised…
Judaeo-Christian friendship: there is a phrase that employs an absolutely proper use of this synthetic adjective. But on the level of doctrine, as regards the very finality of the human, major divergences remain” (Levinas 1973, 278 f., trans.
slightly modified).
A similar concern goes back to Levinas’s first reflections after the War on the purpose, or lack thereof, of ‘being-Jewish’. German Jewish thinkers from Mendels-sohn to Cohen, like their twentieth century American successors, had identified the distinctive contribution of Judaism as consisting of liberal, humanist values.
But Judaism itself, as a living spirit with an abiding contribution, was thereby reduced to a mere memory of “services rendered” to liberalism. “It justified its survival by the need to watch over the maturing of these sown seeds,” but since these seeds have long flowered amid Christian and democratic peoples, Judaism would seem to have nothing left to offer an emancipated world. The contribution of Jewish monotheism, of the Decalogue and the great moral prophets, to liber-alism would therefore appear to consign contemporary Judaism to “a colorless ancestor worship” (Levinas 1947, 206). Unless Judaism still bore “divergences”
that are worth preserving. What might they be? Is there a Jewish remainder that cannot be assimilated to ‘Judaeo-Christianity’?
A theistic answer affirming a Supreme Person governing the world was, and for many still is, no longer possible. “This was the century in which God died,” Levinas insists, “- that is to say, in a very precise sense, in which a certain discourse on God became increasingly impossible… One still hears it in certain assemblies where one does not hesitate when faced with phrases such as ‘God wished, God chose, God ordered’; we are told about God as we might be told about someone’s doctor or mother-in-law (Levinas 1973, 280).”
Since traditional theism will not do, Levinas explores the possibility that the tremor of the hyphen consists of a secularism that Judaism alone makes audible.
Judaism by itself would bear secular doctrines that are elided by the Judaeo-Chris-tian liberal form of secularism that emphasizes individual rights. Attending to this tremor does not involve denying the validity of individual rights but invites us to consider that Christian humanism might fall short “of the very finality of the human” in so far as this finality or purpose exceeds the scope of individual rights. A division of labour between Judaism and Christianity is thereby implied.
Christianity is credited with the secularization that yields liberal humanism and its political articulation in the form of individual rights, while Judaism is credited with the secularization of the relationality and implicatedness for which liberal individualism fails to account. Christianity is secularized as the ethics of liberal
humanism, while Judaism is secularized as the ethics of anti-humanism. And since ours is an age in which humanism finds itself in crisis, it is also the time wherein the specific contribution of Judaism become manifest. “We therefore needed a crisis of humanism in our society,” he told the Jewish educators, so that the “major divergences” of Judaism can become explicit. “That is a sad thing to say,” he admitted, since the “crisis of humanism… began with the inhuman events of recent history” (Levinas 1973, 281).
Levinas’s line of thinking, whose contours take form under very particular intellectual and political pressures, produces two conspicuous difficulties. The first, as he freely admits, is the risk that accompanies every critique of individual rights.2 Levinas is cognizant of the risk, for it goes without saying that if the sever-ance of Judaism from the hyphen of ‘Judaeo-Christianity’ enables the possibility of a secularism that goes beyond individual rights, this does not mean that Jewish antihumanism is in any way immune from falling short of liberal individualism, for example by “rejoining the forces of conservatism and the retrogressive moral-ity of the family, work and the Fatherland, in which the name of freedom is not even pronounced (Levinas 1973, 287).” If such a risk was evident then, how much more so today.
The second risk Levinas faces in severing the hyphen and dividing the moral labor between Christian liberalism and Jewish antihumanism is that of an exclu-sive geo-theo-political alliance of two faiths which together would exhaust our ethical and political exigencies. No one could doubt that in the decades after the Holocaust it was, and in many respects remains, reasonable and desirable for Jews and Christians to seek to overcome the theological and political enmity of their shared history. Their shared biblical heritage and history was readily trans-formed from the zero-sum game of exegetical rivalry, conversion and persecution into “a new period in Jewish-Christian relations…a new peace” (Levinas 2001, 70–71; see also 137, 263). The problem of course is that this geo-theo-political alli-ance is grist to the mill of a so-called ‘Clash of Civilizations’ by which billions of non-Judaeo-Christians bear the brunt of an imaginary covenant resulting from internal developments, ironies and catastrophes of nineteenth and twentieth century European history. The imaginary flag of a “Judaeo-Christian” civiliza-tion risks legitimizing new forms of post-Holocaust and post-colonial Western imperialism. The “new peace” forged after Auschwitz thereby recalls the cove-nant of pieces given to Abram when he beheld a “smoking furnace” and then
2 Marx’s critique of rights and Heidegger’s critique of individualism are the most significant comparisons to Levinas’s project, and of course he understood the risks of this enterprise as well as anyone. On Levinas and Marx see Gibbs 1992, ch. 10.
received the promise to occupy a conquered land (Gen. 15:17-18). I will return to this geo-theo-political objection in the final section.
For now, I want to suggest that the constraints within which Levinas explores the question of Judaeo-Christianity are also in large measure the parameters within which politically emancipated, liberal Jews continue to approach the Jewish remainder or remnant. On the one hand, the secularization of Judaeo-Christianity in the form of liberal humanism sells Judaism too cheaply, deflating the Jewish remainder by conflating emancipation and the ultimate purpose of Judaism with assimilation to a secularized Christian politics of individual rights. There are, Levinas insists, “major divergences” that require reckoning. On the other hand, traditional theism, with its resort to a God of providential design and effi-cacy, exacts too high an intellectual price to account for such divergences. Lev-inas’s constraints are the parameters within which the Jewish divergence from Judaeo-Christianity remains to be sought. If neither theism nor secular liberal humanism affords an adequate way of breaking the hyphen, where might the divergences of Judaism lie?