I had been invited to speak to a Deanery Chapter in rural Northumberland. When I arrived, the very rural dean asked me to remind him of my topic and I replied ‘Judaism’; he responded encouragingly ‘Not a lot of that round here’. Before my talk, he said exactly the same when reading to the chapter a diocesan missive on ‘Black and ethnic minority concerns’, enabling me to point out that their congregations did not live in a rural bubble but in their work, travel and wider families were in touch with a variety of cultures, beliefs and sexualities. I wondered if the unusually thin ELS attendance at David Frei's lecture this February also suggests that Jewish law may be a peripheral and esoteric interest, not much met by the Society's busy canon lawyers and clergy. If so, this book of essays would usefully open eyes.
For some decades now, Christian scholarship has shifted away from viewing first-century Jewish law as, crudely put, imprisoning and has recognised it as, intentionally, a structure for living within God's covenant grace. The learned authors of these essays, academics at universities in Israel and America, lead us through detailed studies charting the evolution of Jewish law from biblical origins through the Second Temple period, the classical rabbinic period of the first seven centuries of the Common Era and the medieval attempts to live within foreign legal systems without compromising the Torah's injunction against adopting ‘foreign’ laws – Maimonides’ division of laws between those indisputably from Sinai and those deduced by legal reasoning aroused opposition.
The second section takes us from juggling between jurisdictions around the heavily concentrated ghetto of fifteenth-century Frankfurt to the different choices faced by the vast majority of Central European Jews who by then were scattered thinly through countryside communities or by the late eighteenth-century diaspora in the Commonwealth of Poland-Lithuania, where some 750,000 Jews (ten times the number in the whole Holy Roman Empire) lived in private towns dominated by magnates and where their immense contribution to the estates’ economies often led to questions of jurisdiction. Business contracts, and also marriage or divorce certificates and wills, were administrative acts which, in some rural areas, Jews felt able to bring to Roman law in non-Jewish local courts where little anti-Jewish bias appears in civil rulings.
The European Enlightenment led to ‘the Jewish Question’: whether Judaism was a political identity as Spinoza claimed, rather than religious or ethnic, and whether obeying the Mosaic Law puts Jews outside the framework of the state. By contrast, Moses Mendelssohn insisted that Judaism was fundamentally a religion, not a political entity, and that freedom for their rituals and ceremonies was a litmus test for the protection of all minority rights. Some argued that economic discrimination forced Jews to turn inwards and become a more consciously political body.
Eastern Europe was the setting for debate, still vigorous in Jewish life today, surrounding Kabbalah and ecstatic mysticism and the extent of rabbinic authority. The movement to resist too much inwardness, and to see halakhah (not only the highly ordered code of rules and actions by which Jews should conduct their lives but, since the destruction of the Temple, the only means by which the divine–human relationship is sustained) as a return to the core values of rabbinic Judaism led to Hasidic communities’ loyalty even to the customary garb of their forefathers.
In nineteenth-century Germany, Jews neither rebelled against traditional Jewish law nor simply acculturated themselves into society as had happened with Jews in France and England. Instead, leaders began to use critical tools learned in German academies to work at an understanding of Jewish law as historically evolving and changing. This led to the Reform Movement, beginning to think of Judaism as a religion in protestant terms and recasting traditional modes of worship in keeping with German aesthetic standards. Kant had derided Jewish law as inferior to what might have evolved through reason, and Bauer had argued that Jews could not integrate because they had prior allegiance to particular laws. In response, Reform rabbis stressed that after the destruction of the Temple political separatism was obsolete, and Judaism's ethics could provide a foundation for universal morality, but that ritual kept Jews focused on that larger task. Opposition from those who hold that Jewish law is revealed, timeless and central, not identical with a state's aims of ‘morality, humanity and justice’, and to be obeyed in full, continues that debate today.
The twentieth century brought more response to Kant, seeing Judaism as the faith from which the religion of reason and standards of morality had developed, and seeing the Jewish belief in the uniqueness of God leading both to the oneness of humanity and the particularity of the individual. The separateness of Jewish ritual was essential for preserving that idea of the unique God. In Buber's thinking, that led on to advocacy of Zionism as a means of facilitating the idea's full cultural expression. Within that came a distinction between law and commandment, particularly God's commandment to love Him being itself an expression of God's love for the individual, a better articulation of Kantian morality's connection between duty and freedom.
The final section of the book explores the relationship between Judaism and law first in pre-state Palestine and now in Israel, together with what it means for that state to be ‘Jewish’.
Understanding these shifts in argument and practice is an increasingly important exercise in a nation wrestling with multiculturalism and assimilation, and with what accommodation to the nation's laws can reasonably be demanded from minority cultures and faiths. Issues to do with circumcision, same-sex marriage, food preparation and schooling will become more, not less, challenging in the coming years for lawyers and clergy alike.
