The Image of Judaism: German-Jewish Intellectuals and the Ban on Images

Abstract

The question of whether God can be represented visually or otherwise is a question as old as Jewish thought itself. In this essay, I focus on some of the ways in which GermanJewish intellectuals formed an image of Judaism through an argument about the second commandment ban on image making. This argument and its subsequent image of Judaism became a major philosophical, aesthetic, and political theme for GermanJewish intellectuals. By GermanJewish intellectuals, I refer not only to Jewish intellectuals living in Germany but also to German speaking Jews in other lands. I will suggest that a number of important, early twentieth century German-speaking Jewish intellectuals measured both their relation to and distance from German culture through an interpretation of the second commandment ban on images. On the one hand, the interpretation of the second commandment as an all out ban on visuality represented for GermanJewish thinkers a kind of hyper-rationality and thus the confluence between Judaism and modernity. At the same time, however, GermanJewish thinkers also presented the purported hyper-rationality of the second commandment as a way of understanding modern antisemitism and thus the distance between Judaism and German society.