From Secular Religiosity to Cultural Disjunctions: Visions of Post-Traditional Jewishness in the Thought of Paul Mendes-Flohr

Abstract

“Post-traditional” Jewishness—a distinctively modern condition wherein past sources of theological authority and religious normativity are no longer self-evident—has been one of the most abiding interests in Paul Mendes-Flohr’s writings for more than four decades. The present article traces the contours of this concern over time. In a number of publications between 1978 and 1987, Mendes-Flohr highlights “secular religiosity” as a manifestation of post-traditional Jewishness, exemplified by figures such as Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. These early writings intimate the possibility of a critical and yet nonetheless integrated Jewish religious subject, grounded hermeneutically in Jewish sources and sociologically in the Jewish community of destiny (Schicksalsgemeinschaft). Starting in the late 1980s, however, Mendes-Flohr’s representations of post-traditional Jewishness begin to emphasize greater degrees of complexity and, indeed, fragmentation. These later writings gesture less to visions of secular religiosity than toward postures of “undogmatic, pluralistic, and open” self-reflectivity before the ever-changing faces of reality. Throughout this rich trajectory in Mendes-Flohr’s thought, though, we see that he returns continually—and ever more trenchantly—to dialogical life as a grounding principle.