Are the Liberal Movements in Judaism Really Modern?

Abstract

The liberal movements in Judaism, namely Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist, implicitly hold that they are guided by principles and methodologies that are consistent with what is generally held to be characteristic of the modern period. These certainly include an acceptance of the outcomes of the application of the critical apparatus and the embrace of scientific data that were mostly unknown to Jews in the premodern period. In this article I will argue that, in fact, the liberal movements, while acknowledging the principles and methodologies at work in the modern period, will disregard them when contrary to their overarching ideologies. A closed-minded disregard of new and scientifically supported information in favor of upholding established doctrine is associated with the pre-modern period. Hence, the liberal movements in Judaism are not modern at all. They are little different from the fundamentalism these movements claim to have transcended. Three initial clarifications are in order. First, the periodization of history is problematic. One can argue cogently that the Middle Ages began long before the last western Roman Emperor abdicated in 476 C.E. or long after. The date is debatable. The same is true with the transition from the Middle Ages to modernity. In his 1925 book Science and the Modern World, Alfred North Whitehead, ascribed modernity to the “assertiveness of science” which he dated to the previous three hundred years, a date substantially earlier than the French Enlightenment, the date identified by Jürgen Habermas as the onset of modernity. It is also culturally specific. While the Roman Empire was suffering a dramatic decline, Jewish civilization, in contrast, was thriving. Far from the beginning of a period of political chaos and cultural sterility, the usual criteria for characterizing the “Dark Ages,” both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmud were on their way to canonization and Jewish communities across the Fertile Crescent were flourishing. So whether the modern period universally begins with the Renaissance or the Industrial Revolution, with enlightenment or emancipation is an open question. In his Modern Varieties of Judaism (1966), Joseph Blau declares that modernity begins in the year 1800. It is more a date of convenience than significance.