The Jews and the Bible by Attias Jean-Christophe

Author:Attias, Jean-Christophe [Attias, Jean-Christophe]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2014-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

Five

The Bible of the Moderns

The modern age of the Bible is in a sense the age of its triumph. Perhaps at no other point in the history of the West or of Judaism has the Bible enjoyed a symbolic, cultural, and political position as central as it has during the past four centuries. In the Christian world, the tendency first crystallized with the birth of Protestantism and its orientation to “Scripture alone.” Then it developed and reached fulfilment in a new “Promised Land,” with the emergence of a power that may be described in more ways than one as both “biblical” and “messianic”: the United States of America. In the Jewish world, the process was in many respects comparable, though spread over a longer time period. Rooted in the Haskalah*, the Jewish Enlightenment movement that appeared in eighteenth-century Berlin and gradually moved into eastern Europe, it developed in the late nineteenth century into a new “Palestinophilia,” as in the case of the Lovers of Zion.1 And it finally led to Zionism and the creation in 1948, on the ancient land of Canaan, of a state no less “biblical” and no less “messianic” than its predecessor: Israel.

This modern triumph of the Bible, however, has been more complex than it may seem. It did not conflict at all with the advance of a certain secularization, especially as it unfolded at the expense of the centralized churches and traditional clergies. Moreover, the two trajectories mentioned in the last paragraph did not run strictly in parallel. Nor did they develop inevitably, in a straight line from one point to another, in accordance with some mechanical historical determinism. A critical observer must, of course, resist any temptation to engage in teleological reconstruction, bearing in mind the ambiguities and contradictions, the splits and internal conflicts, and the side tracks that were never lacking in either case.

The novelty of the phenomenon is certainly relative for Judaism, and it requires at least to be precisely identified. Before the modern age, the Bible had more than once played the role of springboard for reform and renewal. Scripturalism had permitted Karaism to shake off its rabbinical straitjacket and to propose another way of being Jewish. It was through a return to the Bible, its language, and the model it suggested that the Oriental and Sephardi* moment in the history of medieval Judaism had been able to come forward as one of the most creative. These past triumphs of Scripture had gone together with—and supported themselves upon—a profound renewal of (often critical) biblical scholarship among grammarians, philologists, and lexicographers initially trained in the Arab-Muslim school. With the Karaites, the Bible had taken over the whole space and stripped the Oral Tradition of its authority. But against all odds, amid tensions and in sometimes complex forms, the Bible had maintained a solid (but renewed) link with that tradition in the Oriental and Sephardi cultural area.

Although some of its features were not unfamiliar, the movement that first got under way in the sixteenth century was new from at least three points of view.

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