Martin Buber's folktales

Martin Buber (1878–1965) is regarded as one of the most influential and prolific Jewish philosophers of the twentieth century. His first anthology of Hasidic tales, The Tales of Rabbi Nachman (1906), is a masterpiece of storytelling, comprising six folktales (translated, or rather retold, in German), four short introductory texts, and a compilation of aphorisms.Footnote ¹⁷ The introductions convey the historical context with such remarkable language that Rabbi Nachman comes across not only as a historical figure but also as a mythical one. In 1909, Buber published Ecstatic Confessions,Footnote ¹⁸ a global anthology of mystical texts featuring excerpts from Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and Jewish sources, though most of its attention is devoted to the Catholic and Protestant traditions. The tacit argument that Buber makes with Ecstatic Confessions is even more radical than the one suggested by Rabbi Nachman. Not only does Judaism possess mystical, mythical, and folkish traditions, but also these traditions partake in the universal discourse of human spirituality. Both volumes were enthusiastically received.Footnote ¹⁹

The two volumes belong in a thoroughly examined cultural context. Since the late eighteenth century, German intellectuals and writers developed notions like “folktale” (Märchen), “the mythical,” and “mysticism” in an effort to spiritualize or “reenchant” a world undergoing rapid social, political, and economic change.Footnote ²⁰ Buber's volume of Hasidic tales knowingly participates in this discourse. With this work he implies that Jews share a set of spiritual concerns not dissimilar from those of Gentile society. They too are troubled by the rapid rise of industrialization and bourgeois society; they too feel that the grand promises of Enlightenment, formulated most succinctly by the slogans of the French Revolution, have failed to materialize. And they too sought solace in mystical, mythical, and folkish traditions.

Buber's rediscovery, or one might say invention, of the Jewish folktale and Jewish mysticism is typically described in the scholarship as part of an intra-Jewish debate surrounding the problems of Jewish cultural renewal. As mentioned above, many influential nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals believed theirs to be a religion of reason and ethics, and the Kabbalah and Hasidism to be aberrations of Jewish history, the result of external influences, or the vestiges of a primitive past.Footnote ²¹ Buber's turn to myth has therefore been understood as an attempt, influenced by currents in German Romanticism, to reinvigorate the Jewish spirit from within and to refute nineteenth-century Jewish skeptics. It has been coupled with his Zionist positions as well: Buber, it is suggested, hoped to harness myth in order to rekindle the spirit of a nation that had dwindled in its exilic existence.Footnote ²² His early Hasidism is described as the manifestation of a cultural revolution pitting the scholars of the nineteenth century against the intellectuals of the twentieth. Whereas the former group, influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, emphasized ethics and acculturation, the latter group aspired, in the manner of the German Romantics, to rejuvenate Judaism in both its spiritual and national character.

While this formulation is important, it often overlooks the wider Jewish–Christian context. For nearly two millennia, Christians cast Judaism as the religion of the flesh and the law in contrast to the religion of spirituality and love. This portrayal dates back to Paul's epistles and became a fundamental tenet of the Western episteme. As David Nirenberg explains, the Christian understanding of Judaism as materialism “helped to transform thinking about Judaism into a way of thinking about the world.”Footnote ²³ Buber's Rabbi Nachman and Ecstatic Confessions take a polemic stance against this very understanding, speaking as they do from the vantage point of universal spirituality, and refusing to distinguish between religious law and spiritual faith. Buber's outlook sees human history as a tale of evolving spiritual traditions, more similar to each other than distinct. It is a patently esoteric worldview, operating beyond what institutional theologians and academics usually call theology. Nevertheless, the social implications are likewise far-reaching: nations are no longer separated according to their spiritual quality, but rather share in the light of the divine presence, whatever its exact historical form may have been.

Buber creates his Jewish–Christian religiosity by weaving together folktales of Rabbi Nachman into one composed by himself. In his aesthetic appraisal of the folktale, Max Lüthi observes how folktales, with their characteristic lack of ambivalence and satisfying vindication of good against evil, elide the deeper and more complex aspects of human experience. He proposes that such “emptying (Entleerung) also means sublimation. All elements [of the folktale] become pure, light, and transparent and join in an effortless interplay all the important themes of human existence.”Footnote ²⁴ Lüthi's description illuminates how not only Nachman's stories but also their introductions serve as folktales, insofar as they empty out the complexity of the historical circumstances in favor of a sense of the sublime.

The first introductory section of Rabbi Nachman, titled “Jewish Mysticism,” is considered by some scholars to be the earliest historical account of the Jewish mystical condition.Footnote ²⁵ This is probably not the case, and at any rate the historical debate obscures the section's aesthetic qualities. It indeed purports to offer a brief account of the history of Jewish mysticism, but what appear at first glance to be factual statements quickly become something else. In the opening line, for example, Buber writes, “Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, who was born in 1772 and died 1810, is perhaps the last Jewish mystic. He stands at the end of an unbroken tradition, whose beginning we do not know.”Footnote ²⁶ These opening lines brilliantly blur the facts, transforming them into a fantastic myth of origin. The same device can be observed throughout. In the third paragraph, for instance, Buber describes the history of the reception of mystical knowledge:

It is with remarkable lightness that Buber disposes of the thorny issues of reception and of the differences between his modern audience and the “old masters.” Following Lüthi, however, it can be argued that what the text loses in complexity it gains in sublimation. Buber uses the term “Kabbala” to transform an apparently factual discussion into a little tale (Märchen) about ears and mouths that turn upwards towards a hopeful and even utopic horizon. For those who missed this nuanced indication, Buber makes the point also explicitly, claiming that “Hasidism is the Kabbala become ethos.”Footnote ²⁸

Buber employs the same strategy (emptying and sublimation) in his account of Rabbi Nachman's life, in a section he titled “Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav.” In this telling, the historical Rabbi Nachman was a mythical figure, living on the fault line between this world and the next. He fought a heroic and doomed battle to preserve the spiritual teachings of Hasidism, which threatened to be quashed by the powers of modernity. The opening of the section sets up this history as a chapter within a universal struggle: “The period of the beginning of the degeneration of Hasidism is a profoundly tragic one. There arose men who saw the decline come and wanted to halt it, but were not able to.” It seems as though the very idea of Hasidism had degenerated. Nachman's solution, according to Buber, was a mystical one: he “certainly recognized the perversion of the institution of the zaddik (the Hasidic sage), yet wanted not to annihilate it but to heal it, demanding in place of the empty and deceitful wonder-maker, the dedicated mediator living in devotion.”Footnote ²⁹ That is, the zaddik would serve as a mediator of spiritual energy and reinforce man's connection with heaven. Once again, what seems at first to be historiography evolves into mystical musings.

Buber believes that Hasidism is a mystical teaching akin to those of the medieval nuns and monks. It is from this position that he develops an esoteric worldview undermining the epistemic division between spiritual Christianity and material Judaism, putting them both in line with many other similar traditions. He makes this point in Ecstatic Confessions by presenting a universal scheme of spiritual equality. Reflecting on his position, he writes,

There is much to unpack in Buber's tribute to human–spiritual equality.Footnote ³¹ Not least is his ability to turn even a list into a little tale of pure spirituality; that is, into a Märchen. As in his introduction to Rabbi Nachman, the factual transforms into a spiritual vision of an open and free world, which now has also room for a German Jewish–Christian utopia.

Buber's vision of Jewish–Christian religiosity is consistent with some of his other, more famous, areas of concern, namely with his views of Zionism and his later dialogical philosophy. It is impossible to exhaust the discussion of either of these two issues. It must therefore suffice to draw attention to the fact that both Buber's Zionism and his dialogical philosophy are intensely spiritual endeavors. As in the German Jewish–Christian religiosity described above, both his Zionism and his dialogical undertaking, the truth is interior and spiritual. And similar to the case discussed here, this truth connects people, in a profound way, whatever their circumstances or background.

Nowhere does Buber proclaim the spiritual quality of the Zionist project more powerfully than in his lecture “Judaism and the Jews,” later published in the small and extremely influential volume entitled Three Speeches on Judaism (1911). It opens with the fundamental question inherent to a Jewish secular modern society, namely, what connects modern secular Jews to Judaism. Jewish individuals, Buber claimed, had very little in common. They did not live in the same land, speak the same tongue, practice or believe in the same things. Jews and Judaism, he thus intimated, seem to be at a dead end. For Buber, the solution to this existential problem lay in community, understood in a mystical–spiritual sense. Rather than taking up a petrified religion or fighting for an imagined nation, Buber follows Gustav Landauer, suggesting that Jews should take the path inward.Footnote ³² The path to Judaism was, in other words, a voyage into one's own self. There, Buber claims, in the interiority of each and every individual, lies the root of the Jewish community, free from any concrete obligation or restriction. As described here, Buber's Zionism may appear similar to other völkisch nationalist positions that were present at the same time and place. This affinity has been an issue of some controversy among scholars,Footnote ³³ to which the current analysis has little to contribute. Still, it should be clear that the universal spirituality Buber developed – the topic of the discussion here – is antithetical to an exclusivist national position.

There are reasons to distinguish between the models of spiritual communication described thus far and Buber's dialogical model developed in his monumental work I and Thou (1923). For one thing, the scale seems very different. In Buber's earlier work on Hasidism, discussed above, religions and traditions meet. In his lectures on Zionism, the individual gains access to a “community.” The dialogical imagination is intimate. It is literally about the Thou, which I experience directly as a revelation. And yet, the fact of spiritual or even mystical meeting remains. Scholars, therefore, debate the nature of the relationship between Buber's early work (on Hasidism) and his later work (dialogue). Some draw distinctions whereas others underscore the similarities.Footnote ³⁴ For the sake of the discussion here, it seems to me to be highly significant that Buber's work, including his later dialogical texts, were enthusiastically received by Christian readers who saw in it, among other things, a model for interreligious dialogue.Footnote ³⁵ Buber's dialogical philosophy, his Zionism, and his Hasidic tales all explore the conditions of profound meeting, even between agents that appear immensely different.

Meir Wiener's symbolic expressionism

It is difficult to overstate Buber's influence among the younger generation of German Jews, many of whom regarded his discovery of Jewish spirituality as epochal.Footnote ³⁶ Meir Wiener was one of these young admirers, and his life story falls squarely into the mold of the so-called post-assimilatory generation.Footnote ³⁷ Born 1893 in Krakow, he moved as a young adult to Vienna, and with the outbreak of World War I left to study philosophy in Zurich and Berlin. There he moved in circles of the literary avant-garde and cultural Zionism. In the 1920s he turned to communism and Yiddish literature, moving in 1926 to the Soviet Union, where he headed the Literature and Folklore Department at the Institute of Jewish Proletarian Culture in Kiev. The war in summer 1941 forced him to flee eastward, and in the winter of that year he joined the so-called Writer's Battalion of the Red Army. He went missing in action during the bloody battle of Wjasma, three months after enlisting, at the age of forty-seven.Footnote ³⁸

During the 1910s and 1920s, Wiener wrote and published some of the strangest and most daring works of Jewish–Christian religiosity.Footnote ³⁹ While Buber used the folktale to express his universal vision of spirituality, Wiener wrote in a symbolic and expressionist mode. I discuss Wiener's concept of the “Symbol” elsewhere;Footnote ⁴⁰ here it is important only to know that it shares some basic intuitions with the “Idea” of expressionist poetry.Footnote ⁴¹ Both have deep roots in the German literary tradition, both seek a path through which spirituality can flow, and both hope to transcend what is commonly called literature in order to intervene in history and transform humanity.Footnote ⁴² As for Wiener's position on Jewish–Christian relations, it diverges sharply from Buber's inclusive universality of human spirit. Wiener distinguishes between Judaism and Christianity and between the “Orient” and “Occident,” portraying the Christian West as spiritually inferior. Though there is nothing particularly Jewish about his writings, they do present oriental spirituality, and by extension Jewish spirituality, as a model for Christianity to follow.

Scholars have long recognized that German expressionist literature and art contain a strong spiritual-revolutionary impulse. In his much-discussed 1916 volume Expressionism, Hermann Bahr compares the expressionist artists to two contemporary influential esoteric thinkers, Rudolf Steiner and Martin Buber.Footnote ⁴³ The scholarly literature, while somewhat reticent to explore this aspect of expressionism,Footnote ⁴⁴ has nevertheless laid the groundwork for understanding it as an esoteric undertaking. Thomas Anz's study Literary Expressionism hints at the movement's esoteric tendencies with such section titles as “The New Human: End of the World, Transformation, and Utopia”; “Life”; “Spirit”; and “Masses and Human: Alienation and Community.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Another important term in Anz's discussion is “Action.” Literary expressionism, he argues, concerns itself with the effort to build a new world order through a community of spiritually transformed human beings. Lisa Marie Anderson takes this insight one step further by claiming that “diverse though the Expressionists’ projections of the future were, they generally shared both a visionary quality and an orientation toward some momentous rupture in the continuum of experience.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Wiener would probably have agreed.

The small volume Messiahs, published in 1920, is dedicated “with reverence” to Martin Buber.Footnote ⁴⁷ It contains three long poems, each focused on a contentious figure from Jewish history: Diogo Pires, Herod the Great, and Joseph della Reina. Pires, better known as Shlomo Molcho, was born in 1500 to a Marrano family, converted to Judaism, and in 1532 was burned at the stake after a short but impassioned career of prophesying the end of Jewish exile, especially in Italy. The poem describes his voyages, discussions, and dreams, but offers the reader little on his life's dramatic trajectory or his thinking. Herod was the Roman-installed king of Judea and renovator of the Second Temple. The poem reimagines the confrontation recorded in the Talmud between Herod and the sage Baba ben Buta, who advised the king to rebuild the Temple as atonement for his sins. Wiener expounds on matters of shame and guilt, but again offers little on the characters or their historical context. Joseph della Reina was a fifteenth-century Jewish mystic who according to legend nearly captured Samael (Satan) and redeemed the world of evil. Wiener's poem describes his famous attempt but pays more attention to its aftermath.

Messiahs is a confusing work. The poems almost completely ignore basic questions about the action and the characters, including who they were, how and why they acted, or what actually happened, in favor of exploring emotional terrain. The striking emotional register of Wiener's poetry, though not unusual for expressionist literature,Footnote ⁴⁸ seems in this case to serve a special function. It consistently reminds the reader that Jews are capable of spiritual intensity. More important, it invokes a higher plane of experience, one existing beyond the standard distinctions of life and death, good and evil, natural and artificial, and Jewish and Christian. The first section of “Diogo Pires” is a case in point:

The allegory described in this excerpt characterizes the entire volume. Here it compares a little boat, dancing on the waves by a rocky shore, to human life. Both are joyous and overconfident, and both are destined to die a terrible death, itself depicted as joyous. It appears that living a fulfilled life, in the deepest sense, justifies even death. The last line cements this with an ecstatic prayer: “God! To hear you and to shatter to splinters!”

The poem does not simply preach an extreme existentialism: it seeks to re-create it as an experience for the reader. This is how the emotional intensity of the poems and their preoccupation with life and death, shame and pride, and honor and disgrace should be interpreted. The lives and deeds of Pires, Herod, and della Reina are not important; the goal is to offer a palpable vision of the fulfilled life, to make the reader feel the encounter with God in all its exhilaration and dread. Wiener's poems discuss life and death not to communicate their meaning but to evoke transcendence, the experience rather than the event of messianism.

The poems’ emotional register repeatedly overwhelms mundane distinctions. The above excerpt from “Diogo Pires” jolts between the opposing themes of life and death, nature and humanity, bravery and stupidity, and horror and joy, to the point where the oppositions become inconsequential. Other dichotomies treated in the book, including humility and arrogance, shame and pride, guilt and virtue, and above all Judaism and Christianity—are likewise imbued with such heightened emotion that their differences dissolve.

The synthesis of the two religions is expressed from the very first poem, which Wiener chooses to write on Pires, an embodiment of Jewish–Christian relations. Pires, whom Wiener refers to by his Christian name rather than by Shlomo Molcho, as he is usually known, “was born in 1500 as a Marrano in Spain and condemned to death on the order of Charles V, whom he tried to convert to Judaism.” What most interests Wiener is the creation process of a Christian Jew, not the outcome of his actions. And indeed, the possibility of looking beyond the Jewish–Christian divide is raised in the poem's final section. It features a description of one of Pires's visions which sees Jesus return to the bosom of Judaism. In the vision the Gentile nations taunt Jesus on the cross, laugh at him, call him “Jew” and “dummy” (Popanz), and demand that he leave. They say, “Hideous contorted Man, what are you doing in our midst?”Footnote ⁵⁰ They relieve him from the cross and watch as he retreats in shame and agony, carrying his cross under his arm. On the road, Jesus meets a group of downtrodden wanderers, who proceed to cast his cross away, clean the hardened blood from his wounds, and remove his crown of thorns. They then adorn him with phylacteries on his forehead and arm. The nations who observe this simply shrug their shoulders and turn away.

In his short discussion of the poem, Krutikov writes that this episode symbolizes the realization that the “Western world” has nothing more in common with “the Jewish man who preached humility and submissiveness.”Footnote ⁵¹ This interpretation is perceptive. Wiener differentiates between the nations who have lost interest in truth and spirituality, and Judaism, which still carries a message of observance and humility. But there is more to be said here. First, very similar ideas were propagated by some of the most influential German Jewish intellectuals, including Abraham Geiger and Hermann Cohen.Footnote ⁵² Second, this idea should not be understood as a Jewish chauvinist one. Rather, the claim for the ethical or spiritual primacy of Judaism is also a demand for equal rights in a pluralistic society. Judaism, in Wiener's depiction, is not better than Christianity; it is the real Christianity. It is the religion of love and humility, of the downtrodden, and of spirituality. In other words, the entire terminology that was so often used to distinguish Christianity is here used to define Judaism. It is no wonder that even Jesus finds his place among the Jews. Here, in short, the distinction between Judaism and Christianity, so central to the Western psyche, is no more attainable.

Ernst Müller's anthroposophical Zohar

If one system of esoteric thought stands out among those discussed so far, it is that of Kabbalah scholar, Zionist, and advocate of Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy Ernst Müller. Anthroposophy does not imagine, like Buber's folktales, a return to a primeval spirituality, nor does it seek to facilitate a heightened emotional experience like Wiener's poetry. It is instead built into the life of the bourgeoisie, endowing everyday practices—gardening, playing music, rearing children—with special, otherworldly significance.Footnote ⁵³ Put differently, it does not entail changing how the bourgeoisie lives but only transforming how this life is understood, radicalizing its very meaning. And it is all but completely divorced from the institutions of organized religion, most importantly from the church. Perhaps for these reasons, anthroposophy, in contrast to the other systems, still exerts influence today, and does so on a global scale.Footnote ⁵⁴

These features were also what made anthroposophy so compelling to Jewish intellectuals like Ernst Müller.Footnote ⁵⁵ Müller was born in 1880 to educated German-speaking Jewish parents in a small town in Moravia. An accomplished student, he attended the University of Vienna, where he came into contact with Zionist circles and started writing for the Zionist newspaper Die Welt. There he became acquainted with Martin Buber, Samuel Hugo Bergmann, Theodor Herzl, and Max Nordau. He immigrated to Palestine in 1907,Footnote ⁵⁶ but soon contracted malaria and returned to Vienna. Back in Europe he reengaged himself with Zionist causes, but the turning point in his life came in 1910, when he heard Rudolf Steiner lecture and subsequently had a private audience with him. Throughout the rest of his life he moved between Zionist circles and the Anthroposophical Society. In 1938 he fled Vienna, first to the global hub of the anthroposophical movement in Dornach, Switzerland, and later to London, where he died in 1954.Footnote ⁵⁷

Müller's work on the Kabbalah attempts to demonstrate the deep interrelation of Judaism and anthroposophy. This dual engagement is evident from the first page of The Zohar and Its Teachings (Der Sohar und seine Lehre), his small but rich 1920 introductory volume to the principal work of medieval Kabbalism, the Zohar.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the short foreword Müller writes, “With thankful heart, I name especially Rudolf Steiner, who was the first to introduce me to the universal occult science [weltumfassender okkulter Wissenschaft], and Martin Buber, who pointed me in the direction of a hidden living heartbeat of subterranean spiritual Judaism.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Buber's Jewish and Zionist esotericism contributed as much to Müller's reconceptualization of the Zohar as it did to his reorientation toward Steiner's anthroposophy.

Anthroposophy, broadly speaking, is a method for developing vision in both the material and extra-material sense. It may thus be said that anthroposophy sees the goal of human life in developing the perception of the spiritual world to overlap with the physical one. According to Helmut Zander, “Steiner understood anthropology as the study of humans’ physical constitution, and theosophy as the conception of its ‘spiritual’ dimension. Anthroposophy is the intermediary perspective between scientific empiricism and the ‘theosophical’ ‘overview’.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Human beings only achieve their full existence when they grasp the cosmos in its material–spiritual entirety, a combination of scientific and theosophical points of view. Steiner's anthroposophy offered individuals access to this privileged viewpoint.

To understand Steiner's method, it is necessary to see that it is deeply rooted in nineteenth-century German philosophy as well as in Christian tradition, especially Christology.Footnote ⁶¹ Steiner's push for a way humans might observe both physical and non-physical reality belongs to the German idealist tradition since Kant. One of Kant's central philosophical challenges was bridging the gap between realism and idealism—the rival propositions that things are “really out there,” or that they owe their existence to and are imagined by the human spirit. Kant's solution famously involves the distinction between the “thing in itself,” which exists in the world, and impressions created by the senses; their combination is responsible for producing reality. Yet the solution left many thinkers of the nineteenth century wanting. The German idealists continued to search for the “true” world, existing beyond the simple dichotomies of physical and imaginary, material and spiritual, and objective and subjective. The influence of their monism is immediately apparent in Steiner's thinking.Footnote ⁶²

It is Müller's belief that the anthroposophical idea, according to which every individual may acquire spiritual–material awareness, can be found in the Kabbalist tradition as well, especially in the Zohar. He conveys this in The Zohar and Its Teachings, as well as in his German anthology of selections from Zoharic literature, The Zohar: The Holy Book of the Kabbalah (Der Sohar: Das heilige Buch der Kabbalah).Footnote ⁶³ Both works are remarkable for their erudition and clarity.Footnote ⁶⁴ It is taken from the Idra Raba (lit. “Great Assembly”) and discusses the problem of spiritual support,Footnote ⁶⁵ meant here in a cosmic sense: “R. Simeon said to his companions, ‘Until when will we dwell in the place (or status, situation, reality, existence, world, or foundation) of one pillar?’”Footnote ⁶⁶ The “pillar” is a rich and complicated metaphor that cannot be fully explored here, but roughly it refers to a person who, straddling the spiritual and physical worlds, serves as a spiritual bulwark for the universe, keeping it intact.Footnote ⁶⁷ Hence Rabbi Shim'on Bar Yohai laments the existence of only one such pillar. According to Daniel Matt, “Rabbi Shim'on seems to be saying, ‘How long will we remain with an inadequate unstable understanding in which the divine structure is not fully comprehended or not yet fully balanced?’”Footnote ⁶⁸ The imbalance of the universe is the reason why Rabbi Shim'on convenes the Great Assembly in the first place: to remedy the deficiency and erect new pillars. The pillars may include those present in the gathering. They may also include each of the text's potential readers—for this passage from the Idra Raba, which is also the first part of Müller's anthology, speaks in the language of Steiner's anthroposophy. It may well be that the Kabbalah's defining purpose, like that of anthroposophy, is to create human beings who see the universe in its spiritual–physical totality, and are therefore in a position to maintain its integrity.

Steiner might reasonably have accepted the Idra's observations. He too believed in the Kabbalah's spiritual significance,Footnote ⁶⁹ though Müller would explore it much further. Anthroposophy for Steiner was a universalistic worldview, and he crucially posited the German national spirit as its embodiment (which, among other reasons, earned him accusations of racism and anti-Semitism).Footnote ⁷⁰

Particularly important to Steiner's thinking were the teachings of Christianity and Christology.Footnote ⁷¹ Within the history of spirituality, Steiner assigned a critical role to Christianity and especially to Christ for revealing to humanity the true nature of the world. Christ's teachings had in effect made Judaism obsolete: the Old Testament religion, in the tradition of the Western episteme, stood for an atavistic materialism that Christianity had since surpassed. Steiner was not a Christian in the institutional sense, but Christian spirituality was fundamental to his worldview. His historiography understood the evolution of the human race, in its long march towards its spiritual destiny, as reaching its pinnacle with Jesus’ universal message. Put simply, Steiner propogated a slightly altered but entirely transparent supersessionist position. Zander writes, “a problem of many Christian theologies reemerges in Steiner poignantly in social-Darwinian manner, namely the demotion of Judaism to a defeated precursor of Christianity.”Footnote ⁷²

Ernst Müller was not deterred. He accepted Steiner's spiritual message but was convinced of the potential of the Jewish tradition. For him, the Kabbalah—in which spiritual progress is personified by the People of Israel—proved the viability of a joint Jewish–Christian worldview. He writes,

With this subtle yet forceful statement Müller responds both to Steiner's portrayal of Judaism and to that of an entire Christian tradition. Israel does not belong to a bygone era in the history of the spirit which came to its climax with the appearance of Christ: Israel is a symbol for historical evolution in its entirety, which began from the first man and will conclude with humanity's perfection. In a sense, Müller folds the entire history of spirituality, which Steiner had written as world history, back into a single set of events involving one exemplary people.

Müller's work on the Zohar demonstrated that Jews could remain faithful to both Judaism and anthroposophy and that the latter had something to learn from the Jewish tradition. More important, in his attempt to combine the two traditions Müller created a new esoteric school of thought: anthroposophical Kabbalah, or Jewish anthroposophical esotericism. He did not see an essential difference between the spiritual teachings of Christianity, Judaism, and anthroposophy. German idealism, Christ, and Rabbi Shim'on Bar Yohai speak in different ways about the same reality. All three are compatible, from which it follows that there should be no fundamental problem living as a German Jewish Christian. Better still, this way of life may very well epitomize what it means to be Enlighted.

The long history of Jewish–Christian religiosity

The tale of Jewish–Christian religiosity, part of which is described above, is new in its particular contours and circumstances. But, as I try to suggest in conclusion, it is also part of a story as old as the Christian faith itself. Over the last two decades, scholars have repeatedly acknowledged the difficulty of finding exhaustive distinctions between two groups which live in the same place, worship the same god, share Scripture, and have a similar set of values.Footnote ⁷⁴ The history of Jews and Christians is no less entangled than the development of Judaism and Christianity.

Especially illuminating in this context is the research about the beginnings of Christianity. A growing body of work questions the common perception about the “parting of the ways” of Judaism and Christianity.Footnote ⁷⁵ The clear-cut distinction between Judaism and Christianity implied by this metaphor is nowhere to be found. As Adam Becker and Annette Yoshiko Reed write in the introduction to The Ways That Never Parted, “Even after the second century, the boundaries between ‘Jewish’ and ‘Christian’ identities often remained less than clear, consistent with the ambiguities in the definition of both ‘Jew’ and ‘Christian.’” Scholars of medieval and early modern Europe offer their own versions of this entangled history.Footnote ⁷⁶ Judaism and Christianity, as we know them today, not only were born together, but also their development was essentially intertwined.

Jewish–Christian entanglement must have been seen to be a less important and less apparent issue for those studying the post-emancipation period in Europe. By the nineteenth century, religious institutions had achieved some form of stability. Both Jewish and Christian identities were fully formed. Secularity has also offered another existential choice for many, who now did not need to choose either Judaism or Christianity. However, it is also during this period that non-institutional religious trends became immensely influential. As we have seen, German Romanticism, idealism, anthroposophy, and expressionism envisioned new realities which, again, undermined the perceived distinctions between Judaism and Christianity. Following these trends and movements, the works discussed here sought to operate beyond the confines of institutional religion. Buber, Wiener, and Müller aimed to facilitate experiences and feelings rather than lasting social structures. This too was part of a much wider—largely occultist—trend that swept Europe around the turn of the century and in the first part of the twentieth century.

The three examples discussed here should also be understood as parts of a larger trajectory of German Jewry. One can mention figures like Oskar Goldberg, Moses Erich Unger, Jiří (Georgo) Mordechai Langer, and Walter Moses, whose works are beyond the purview of the discussion here but who have all developed some form of Jewish–Christian religiosity. They are all also part of a larger cultural trend.

In the first part of the twentieth century, Jews felt themselves to be culturally integrated even if they were largely excluded from general society. Jewish–Christian religiosity can therefore be seen as another attempt in a long and continuous struggle, undertaken by Jews, to establish a common denominator with Christian societies in Central Europe and to smooth their integration. The better-known attempts are mentioned at the beginning of this article: most were founded on the belief that if anything could bring Jews and non-Jews to communicate with tolerance and impartiality, it would be either ethics or science. Some philosophers, most notably Moses Mendelssohn, argued that a correct understanding of the ethical idea would forever secure Jewish life in Europe. The ethical society would allow Jews to become, as Jews, integral to their life and culture. Following the path of science were the scholars of the Wissenschaft des Judentums (science of Judaism), who believed that the correct understanding of the historical sources would demolish Jewish–Christian polarity. Yet both arguments, the ethical and the scientific, were largely rebuffed.Footnote ⁷⁷

As this article has tried to show, another solution to the problem of integration presented itself only at the beginning of the twentieth century. The common denominator between Judaism and Christianity or between Jews and non-Jews, it has contended, was neither science nor ethics but “religiosity.” I have used the term loosely in the discussion, but to the degree it can be defined, it opposes rational trends that drive modern technology and large societies; it is that which sparks a sense of wonder and it is a central concern for esoteric thinkers because it resists definition and embraces mystery and paradox. This suggestion may be plausible after all. Perhaps it is there, in the far-flung regions of paradoxical thinking, divine insight, and mystical, unity that Christians and Jews find a common language. In any case, Martin Buber, Meir Wiener, and Ernst Müller believed it was.