Has Jewish thought ever been “modern”? Periodization and Queer Temporality

• In Event: Modern Jewish Thought/Philosophy and the Politics of Religious Studies

Abstract

Scholars of religion complain that the discipline is at once too devotional and not devotional enough. We are simultaneously urged to draw a line between religious discourse/practice and the scholars who study it and castigated for epistemic violence and distortion attendant to such a strategy. One way to talk about this methodological ambivalence is to suggest that in the last three decades, or so, religious studies has discovered that, in an importance sense, it “has never been modern,” to use Bruno Latour’s turn of phrase.

As a thought experiment, I want to use recent conversations about temporality and periodization in queer theory to make more visible the challenges of periodizing Jewish thought as “modern.” Registering the contamination between assimilation and resistance, theological longing and the demands of public discourse, the identificatory pleasures of reaching across time for the theological affect of an imagined past and an uncreated future, might help us see not only how the discipline of religious studies constrains the study of Jewish thought but, more importantly, what Jewish thought has to offer religious studies. After all, one way to characterize “modern Jewish thought” is as an ongoing attempt to respond to the co-constitution of Christianity’s configuration of “religion” and the political form of the nation-state. At a time when (what we now call) religious studies naturalized the Protestant character of the kind of inward, apolitical, disembodied “religion” deemed compatible with the nation-state, Jewish thinkers challenged the ubiquity of this definition of “religion.” Legible in the tradition organized under the umbrella of “modern Jewish thought,” then, are a set of insights about the category of “modern” and “religion” that religious studies scholars have begun articulating over the past few decades. Whether we look at Mendelssohn’s insistence on the insufficiency of disembodied “reason alone” to bind communities together or Cohen’s retort that “Christianity” is really “prophetic Judaism,” these thinkers provide vibrant and diverse data for the idea that a division between critical and confessional, historicist and antihistoricist, rational and affective, and modern and pre-modern may not be effective explanatory binaries for what scholars usually periodize as “modern.”

author

• Larisa Reznik, University of Chicago