No Religion without Idolatry: Mendelssohn’s Jewish Enlightenment by Gideon Freudenthal (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: No Religion without Idolatry: Mendelssohn’s Jewish Enlightenment by Gideon Freudenthal David Novak Gideon Freudenthal. No Religion without Idolatry: Mendelssohn’s Jewish Enlightenment. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 332. Paper, $40.00. In his learned and insightful reading of the eighteenth-century German–Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Gideon Freudenthal clearly wants to rescue him from total irrelevance. For Freudenthal claims that “Mendelssohn’s philosophy of Judaism—and of religion in general—can be defended and, in fact, still deserves contemporary interest” (12). But does Mendelssohn’s philosophy deserve the interest of philosophers who are interested in what is still significant in the present first for themselves and then for everybody else; or perhaps it deserves the interest only of historians of ideas who are interested only in what was significant in the past for those who lived then? (Let it be assumed that a philosopher speaks in the first person in the present tense, that is, “This is what I think is true; and why.”) So, does Freudenthal himself now agree with what Mendelsohn thought is true, or does he try to ascertain only what Mendelssohn truly meant back then? Freudenthal does a fine job in refuting the putdown of Mendelssohn as a second-rate metaphysician made by his contemporary, the Lithuanian–Jewish philosopher Salomon Maimon, which was picked up by most later scholars of Jewish philosophy. He does this by showing that Mendelssohn did not really intend to be a metaphysician, but that he employed metaphysics (mostly that of Christian Wolff) only to bolster his semiotics. Mendelssohn conducted his semiotics in his treatment of language in general and of the Hebrew Bible in particular (something neglected by most scholars, even by those who can read the original Hebrew text of Mendelssohn’s Bible commentary). Since Mendelssohn saw the primary intent of the Bible to be practical, he interpreted the ceremonies it prescribes to be a “language of action” (18). These performative acts are tangible expressions, mandated by revelation, of the truths of “natural religion” (17). Metaphysics can help a philosopher explicate the meaning of these symbolic actions, but metaphysics should not be taken to be the ground from which natural religion (the religion of “common sense”) is derived. For Freudenthal, Mendelssohn’s primary task was to interpret the biblical text (and subsequent sacred texts), selectively employing ideas of speculative metaphysics so as to enable the Bible to gain philosophical respectability. That is why his methodology, if not his actual ideas, can be of interest to hermeneutical philosophy today. Mendelssohn recognized that “permanent signs are conducive to idolatry” (9) (hence the title of Freudenthal’s book). He saw the temptation of idolatry for any religion of revelation, yet he argued for the superiority of Judaism over Christianity nonetheless (ignoring Islam, though). For the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation (in Catholic and Lutheran theologies of the Eucharist) seems to mean the act of divinizing physical objects by the theurgic speech-acts that so elevate them. But that is not the case with Jewish speech-acts [End Page 494] (i.e. mitsvot or “precepts”) because they are not hypostatized into physical objects. Nevertheless, Mendelssohn is quite aware of the fact that in the Jewish mystical tradition of kabbalah, theurgic speech-acts are much more than the expressions of subjective human approaches to the Divine; they have objective efficacy of cosmic proportions. Therefore, Mendelssohn considers kabbalistically founded Jewish practices to be superstition, which is incompatible with what he held to be essential, philosophically respectable Judaism. Finally, though, does Freudenthal make a convincing case for genuinely philosophical interest in the content of Mendelssohn’s thought? I think not. For he says that Mendelssohn’s approach to the Jewish tradition assumes it has normative dominance over most Jews. Hence a philosophy of Judaism like Mendelssohn’s need explicate only sacred texts, plus refute those who would deny the intellectual and moral authority of that tradition. But it does not have to argue for the validity of the tradition itself. Yet Freudenthal recognizes that the tradition no longer has that kind of authority for most Jews, because of the political dissolution of the pre-modern Jewish communities (of which...