Jews for and Against Modernity

David Hume at Secular Right is worth quoting at length:
Many Jews and anti-Semites are focused on the necessary and sufficient role of the Jewish people in the modern West. In the case of Jews I believe it derives in part from the same sense of national pride which is at the root of embarrassing imitations such as Afrocentrism. But the reality is that Jews did not become part of the mainstream of Western intellectual and cultural life until after their emancipation. For most of Europe this was at some point in the 19th century, and for Jews who did not convert to Christianity it was probably later in the 19th century at that.

To put a not too fine point on it, Isaac Newton, Gottfried Leibniz, and Rene Descartes were not Jews. Jeremy Bentham, Immanuel Kant, and David Hume, were not Jews. John Stuart Mill was not a Jew. There were plenty of gentiles involved in the “invention” of modernity, and because of the social constraints placed upon Jews, there were very few of that people of any note before the 19th century in Western public life. The religious minority often seen to be disproportionately involved in the French Revolution were Protestants, not Jews. The exception to the Jewish abstention from early modernity would probably be Baruch Spinoza (I don’t think Moses Mendelssohn would be noteworthy were he not a Jew, while Spinoza would have been).

The enormous Jewish contribution to the 20th century intellectual world is undeniable. Jews were critically involved in the maturation and ripening of Western modernity. But they were not present at, or instrumental, in its birth. Therefore, it is ludicrous to claim that Jews “invented” Western modernity. Whether the invention of Western modernity is something to be proud of depends on your perspective, of course.

To counterpoint the Freud/Marx/Einstein/Boas foursome, great Jewish critics of modernity include Leo Strauss, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt. I would also cite Kafka as a great implicit critic of modernity. Unthinkingly pro-modern Jews rarely consider that Nazism was a quintessentially modern (bureaucratic, pseudo-scientific, utopian, populist) ideology.

Comments

  1. BillyApril 17, 2013 at 1:21 AM

    Forgive me for this intrusion but I am interested on your perspective of Afrocentrism being embarrassing. Thank.s for your time

    ReplyDelete

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