Although it has become something of a cliché to talk of a Jewish obsession with defining what makes one Jewish, with what distinguishes the Jew from the non-Jew, and with where to draw the boundaries, it is no less true for all that. In addition to the dilemma posed by the cacophony of voices claiming to represent authentic Judaism, there is the question of how to navigate a safe path through the vast surrounding Gentile environment that has been so profoundly influenced by Christian thought and culture. Understandably, the characteristic attitude towards the non-Jewish world is often one of ambivalence. A particularly disconcerting discovery for many has been the extent to which non-Jewish worldviews have been internalised, the recognition that many of their attitudes and value-judgements are in fact indistinguishable from those of the unwashed world around them. For some, this discovery has been enough to send them hurrying off to self-imposed ghettos of strict religious observance. For others, it has led to the realisation that the non-Jew is not as alien, not as ‘other’, as they had been taught to believe.

Historically, it could be argued that the ambivalence with which Paul is regarded by Jewish commentators as a group reflects this ambivalence towards non-Jewish culture more generally. As we have seen in the two previous chapters, there is as much uncertainty and suspicion as there is interest in and appreciation of the theological achievements and historical significance of the apostle to the Gentiles.

As we have seen, for Jewish thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who wished to define themselves against Christianity, Paul had come to be seen as a replacement for Jesus as a symbol of Christianity per se. Concerned to defend themselves against Christian critiques of Judaism, they had preferred to champion the newly discovered Jewish Jesus as an ally rather than as a figure representative of the antithesis of Judaism; and so Paul emerged as his unfortunate successor. In this chapter we will consider how, for Jews who saw themselves as ideological opponents of Christianity, Paul's alien origins and absorption of foreign influences could be effectively contrasted with Jesus' Jewish authenticity. In this context, the apostle's influence and significance were more easily undermined than those of Jesus, his motives could be questioned, and the common view of his understanding of Judaism and the Law could be attacked as a betrayal of the faith of his master Jesus. We will also explore the options open to Jewish thinkers who wished to encourage better relations between Jews and Christians and who, with Paul as the new figurehead for Christianity, now had to address his place in the Jewish–Christian discourse as well as Jesus'. Although difficulties remained with many aspects of the apostle's theology, a small number of writers were ideologically predisposed to overlook his apparent weaknesses and, remarkably, to attempt to use him as a bridge to dialogue, that is, to view him as a means by which to better become familiar with and strengthen ties to the surrounding Christian world.

From its inception, psychoanalysis has had a complicated relationship with Judaism. Freud himself was anxious to prevent the association of his new science with Jews for fear that it would not be taken seriously by an anti-Semitic establishment. And yet, until Jung joined it, the psychoanalytical association was almost exclusively composed of Jews. As one contemporary, a British professor at Harvard, observed,

It is by no means only those hostile to the therapeutic system who regard it as some sort of Jewish science (as the Nazis notoriously referred to it). Anna Freud herself once described it as such, and David Meghnagi has suggested that the birth of psychoanalysis should be understood as ‘a cultural event within Judaism’, as a sublimated answer to the problems posed by secularisation and as a rejection of an authentic integration of Jews into Christian European society. He argued that it is best appreciated when it is set alongside the rise of the sociopolitical movements of Zionism and the Bund, that is, alongside Jewish nationalism and Jewish socialism.

In the post-Holocaust, post–Vatican II world of ecumenicalism and interfaith relations much has been written about Jewish views of Jesus, including works that approach the subject from a cultural perspective, drawing upon literature and artwork. Relatively little has been written about Jewish views of the apostle Paul, and what has been written tends to address the interests and concerns of theologians and New Testament scholars. In what follows, the role of the Apostle to the Gentiles in the popular Jewish imagination will be approached from a sociocultural perspective. The idea of a Jewish tradition of hostility towards Paul will be queried before the argument is made that popular awareness of the apostle had its origins in the nineteenth century. Drawing upon the weekly Jewish Chronicle as a useful indicator of public opinion, in Britain at least, some tentative suggestions for the different roles Paul has played in modern popular discourse will also be offered.

THE MYTH OF A JEWISH TRADITION OF HOSTILITY TOWARDS PAUL

The Reconstructionist rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer once observed in an imaginary letter to Paul, as one rabbi to another, that

As we have seen, Jewish views of the apostle Paul are often discussed in the context of Jewish–Christian relations. This is because for many Jewish writers Paul represents an opportunity to contrast Jewish and Christian worldviews, or, for a select few, Paul potentially offers a chance to build relations and emphasise commonalities with Christians. Either way, Paul is used as a means by which to define Jewish religious views in relation to Christianity. For some writers, however, often those who are keen to distance themselves from anti-Christian polemics, alternative or additional agenda are apparent. A number of mainly progressive thinkers have used their studies as platforms from which to engage in a quite different kind of apologetic: an intra-Jewish one. As a result, Jewish Pauline studies can be regarded as a kind of ideological battlefield in which some of the most contentious issues for modern religious Jews feature prominently.

PAULINE STUDIES AS A FOREIGN THEATRE OF INTRA-JEWISH WARFARE

In ‘A Jewish Ideological Perspective on the Study of Christian Scripture’ (1997), the North American Reconstructionist rabbi and scholar Jonathan Brumberg-Kraus set out to identify and account for themes and areas that generate ideological conflict within Jewish New Testament scholarship in general. He observed that a common feature of such studies was that the writers often emphasised their lack of interest in Jewish–Christian polemics and stressed their own scholarly objectivity in contrast to Jewish studies before them.

The preceding chapters have explored some of the very different ways in which Jewish thinkers have constructed images of Paul. The range of often contradictory presentations is impressive, although arguably no more so than that offered by Christians over the same period. It seems fair to say that the one thing upon which those Jewish thinkers who have seriously engaged with the Apostle to the Gentiles can agree is that he is a vitally significant figure for the history of the Jewish people and even for Judaism, be it for good or ill. And yet such a claim sits uneasily with the fact that Paul barely registers on the popular Jewish cultural radar. If an individual's significance to a community is determined by his historical reception within that community as a whole, then one must admit that Paul's impact on the Jewish imagination has been a very minor one. It is hoped that this collected body of interpretations of the apostle will act as a corrective in bringing the historical Jewish engagement with him to the attention of a wider Jewish audience.

In Chapter one it was suggested that Jewish curiosity about Paul had its origins in the nineteenth-century emergence of historicism and the reinvention of the Jew in the modern world. Increasingly, naturalistic, rational explanations of the history of the Jewish people and their religion were privileged over supernatural, providential explanations.

‘Jewish philosophy’ has been defined in a number of different ways. Some regard it as the explication of Jewish beliefs and practices by means of philosophical concepts and norms. Others, such as L. E. Goodman, would place less stress on religious belief.

In so far as the views expressed by the Jewish-born thinkers in this chapter reflect common experiences among post-Enlightenment Jews, in so far as their Jewish backgrounds helps account for their contributions to the wider political debate and theory, and in so far as their arguments draw heavily upon traditional literary resources, the Bible in particular, one could argue that they belong to the honourable tradition of Jewish philosophy. As Jewish philosophers, however, Baruch Spinoza, Lev Shestov, and Jacob Taubes do have certain serious shortcomings. A philosophical tradition should be understood first and foremost in terms of the key philosophic problem, or set of problems, that gave rise to it in the first place. For these thinkers, the key problem concerns the nature of religious authority within society.

Rabbi Pinchas said, There was a story in Damascus about an idolatrous temple there. It had a priest whose name was Abba Gulish and he served before the idol many years. One time, a spirit of distress came upon him and he cried for help before the idol for many days but to no avail. After that he went outside one night and said, ‘Sovereign of the Universe, hear my prayer and redeem me from my distress.’ And he was cured. He stole away and came to Tiberias and converted [to Judaism] and he observed the mitzvot [commandments]. He was appointed administrator for the poor [but as soon as] monies were entrusted to him, the hands that had been accustomed to pilfer when they had been in the idolatrous temple, began to pilfer the dedicated money [once more]. Immediately he felt [pain] in one of his eyes and it became blind. Again, he reached out for the dedicated [funds] and felt [pain] in the other one and it became blind. And those from his [previous life and] place would come to Tiberias and see him blind and tell him, ‘Abba Gulish, what were you thinking, that you scorned the idol and abandoned it so that it punished you so?’ And more and more others [came and reproved him]. What did he do? He said to his wife, ‘Get up! Put all other business on hold until we have been to Damascus.’

The origin of the idea of a Judeo-Christian tradition, or heritage, or civilisation, or ethic, lies well before the advent of the modern interfaith movement. It has been suggested that its roots can be traced back to the Enlightenment, when the rationalists and the Deists started disassociating themselves from the adherents of revelational religion, be it Jewish or Christian. Later, in the context of nineteenth-century Christian biblical criticism, (German) Protestant scholars offered a response to Enlightenment criticism, by insisting upon the distinction between Judaism and Christianity, and arguing that profound differences had been evident from the start, in that Pauline Christianity had been the triumph of Gentile, universalising tendencies over the Jewish, particularising tendencies of the Torah-observant Jerusalem Church – in other words, that Christianity may have initially manifested itself as a Judeo-Christian entity, but quickly distinguished itself from Judaism. And during the Nazi period the Deutsche Christen or German Christians similarly aimed to purge Christianity of its Jewish roots; that is, they sought to eradicate any residual elements of Judeo-Christianity from within their faith, which for them, ironically, included the writings of Paul. All these are negative conceptions of ‘Judeo-Christian’, but, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term itself first appeared in 1899 in an entirely neutral sense to describe a ‘Judeo-Christian “continuity” theory’. This theory postulated the development of Church ritual out of the practices of Second Temple Judaism.

North American Jewish novels of the mid-twentieth century were largely concerned with explorations of identity and in particular with tensions between secular society and Jewish tradition. A number of high-profile writers appeared to have set themselves in opposition to their Jewish heritage. In the eyes of many, authors such as Chaim Potok (1929–2002), Saul Bellow (1915–2005), and especially Philip Roth (1933–) appeared to be committed to the demystification of Judaism and the deconstruction of Jewish life, revealing it warts and all and emphasising its disoriented secularism. Although some interpreted this phenomenon as an attempt to normalise the Jewish people, many others believed that they went too far in undermining Jewish values. One literary critic recalled that the ‘Jewish book-buying public were shocked and hurt to find [Jewish] writers representing their institutions as shams, their communities suffused with pettiness, spite, lust, hypocrisy, and pretence’. Mordecai Kaplan, founder of Reconstructionist Judaism and himself highly critical of unreflective loyalty towards Jewish tradition, believed that the impact of North American Jewish literature had had a highly detrimental effect on Jewish life in North America in general:

Certainly, many works of literature published in the decades around the midcentury were concerned to formulate North American Jewish cultural identity in painfully secular terms.

Few Jews, historically speaking, have engaged with the first-century Apostle to the Gentiles. The modern period has witnessed a burgeoning interest, however, with treatments reflecting profound concerns about the nature of Jewish authenticity and the developing intercourse between Jews and Christians. In exploring these issues, Jewish commentators have presented Paul in a number of apparently contradictory ways. He is both a bridge and a barrier to interfaith harmony; both the founder of Christianity and a convert to it; both an anti-Jewish apostate and a fellow traveller on the path to Jewish self-understanding; and both the chief architect of the Judeo-Christian foundations of Western thought and their destroyer. The goal of the present volume is to outline and explain these aspects of the Jewish debate about Paul, as represented in the works of individual Jewish theologians, religious leaders, biblical scholars, artists, musicians, playwrights, novelists, philosophers, and psychoanalysts of the last 150 years.

We will begin with an account of the popular Jewish view of Paul, which is often understood to be derived from a premodern tradition of hostility towards the apostle and which regards him as the damnable inventor of Christianity and the ultimate cause of centuries of Jewish suffering. Here it will be argued that claims for an ancient origin of this hostility have been exaggerated and that the real roots of modern popular Jewish antipathy lie in the apostle's association with much more recent sociocultural developments (Chapter one).

After the Enlightenment and the attendant phenomena of the dissolution of the ghetto and the widespread establishment of legal emancipation, there was no longer one norm of Jewish existence (if there ever had been). The first wave of Jews who did not abandon Judaism for another faith but who nevertheless found themselves living outside the Jewish community represented a new phenomenon. In earlier times, the existence of a Jew who was at odds with his community, who held ideas that were deemed by the religious authorities as heretical, and who was attracted to non-Jewish ways of thinking was untenable. And yet, over time, as a result of a tremendous variety of pressures and influences that accompanied modernity, the ‘secular Jew’ emerged to become a permanent feature of the Jewish landscape. From that time to this, a good deal of discussion has taken place as to whether such individuals can meaningfully be described as Jewish. One seminal contribution was a collection of essays entitled The Non-Jewish Jew (1968) in which the Polish-Jewish journalist Isaac Deutscher made an impassioned defence of this new species of Jew. Insistent that ‘the Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry’ was part of a Jewish tradition whose revered membership had begun with Spinoza, he went on to describe some of their characteristics.