Neve Gordon teaches in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University, Israel.
Is There a Jewish Philosophy? Rethinking Fundamentals
by leon roth
London, Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 1999. 220 pages
Paperback: UK £15.95, US $21.95
Most scholars of my generation are unfamiliar with Leon (Haim Yehuda) Roth, yet precisely in these dark times it is crucial to re-examine his work and life project, which may appear idiosyncratic in today’s political context but can, I believe, point to a new or lost direction. Is There a Jewish Philosophy?, published thirty-six years after the author’s death in 1963, begins with two short essays briefly outlining some of Roth’s achievements and, more importantly, providing the reader with a sense of his personality.
Born in 1896 to an observant Jewish family, Roth grew up in London, fought in the First World War in the Jewish Battalion and later returned to England to study philosophy at Exeter College, Oxford. In 1928, he decided to leave a comfortable position at Manchester University and accept a job offer in Jerusalem. Life in Palestine during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s was often gruelling; like other Zionists, Roth and his wife Winifred must have made considerable sacrifices. Upon their arrival in Jerusalem, Roth helped found Hebrew University’s philosophy department. At the age of forty-four he became rector (1940–3) and was later dean of humanities.
Student testimonies suggest that Roth was an immensely popular teacher, but by no means a pandering one; he had strong beliefs that were not easily swayed by public opinion. In the book’s foreword, Edward Ullendorff relates an interesting incident that took place in 1946, after the Va’ad Le’umi (Jewish National Council) declared a strike to protest against the British Mandate restrictions denying entry to the hapless Jewish victims of Nazi persecution who wished to find refuge in Palestine. Roth decided not to comply with the Va’ad’s call, and student strikers began banging on his class door to interrupt his lecture. Roth cried out to them: “Gentlemen … let me just ask you what you think is more likely to bring about the end to British rule in this country—your noisy door-banging or my philosophy? Surely no reasonable man can doubt that it is my philosophy that will achieve those ends!” (p. xiv). As this remark reveals and as will be seen momentarily, Roth considered philosophy to be a crucial component in the foundation of an ethical community.
During his tenure at Hebrew University, Roth helped establish what later became the Magnes Press and was the initiator and editor of its series in classic philosophy. Roth himself translated four short volumes of Aristotle’s writings and edited twelve other books. He began the project in 1934 by translating Book One of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. One should keep in mind that the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language had begun only fifty years before and that the Jewish population in Palestine consisted of a mere three hundred thousand people at the time. Many Jews were new immigrants who were struggling to make ends meet in an undeveloped country, and a large number could not even read Hebrew. How many Jews living in Palestine in 1934 could have been interested in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, and how many of these would have chosen to read it in Hebrew?
Surely the motives underlying the project were Zionist. A basic part of nation-building is the translation of classic texts into the local vernacular, and Roth took it upon himself to accomplish this goal. Indeed, the revival of the “holy language”, alongside the attempt to secularise and transform it, as it were, into a modern language, was part and parcel of the Zionist venture. But to understand the translation project simply in these terms is to misunderstand Roth. Neither an ardent nationalist nor a conventional Zionist, Roth was an independent thinker who believed in the establishment of a bi-national, rather than a Jewish, state.1 Moreover, following a brilliant career, he suddenly packed his bags and left the country in 1951, three years after Israel’s declaration of independence.
The move could not have been easy, considering that Leon and Winifred Roth had created a home and raised a family in Jerusalem, where they had been living for twenty-three years. In a memoir dedicated to the philosopher, Raphael Loewe explains that Roth’s decision was the result of deep disappointment with the Jewish State: “He had gone out to Palestine in the hope that it was to constitute a truly Jewish contribution to the polity of man. It being his experience that Jewish ethics and notions of justice were not given any marked enunciation in the national life of Israel … he saw no reason to remain in the country any longer.”2 Thus, Roth came to Israel for moral reasons and left it for moral reasons.
Loewe cogently describes Roth’s vision as one of establishing “Jewish ethics and notions of justice” in Israel’s national life. But one must distinguish Roth’s understanding of Judaism from that used to create Israel’s national identity and from the one held today by the Orthodox religious establishment. This is where the essays in Is There a Jewish Philosophy? prove inspiring. In a chapter entitled “Baruch Spinoza: His Religious Importance for the Jew of Today”, Roth criticises the great philosopher for perceiving Judaism as a “tribal habit of life, isolationist and misanthropic, a device for group survival” (p. 100). Spinoza was describing a form of Judaism—not unlike the one propagated by today’s religious Orthodoxy in Israel—which rejects the “other” and is intolerant towards difference. Roth denounces this form of Judaism, pointing out in the chapter on “Jewish Thought As a Factor in Civilization” that although the Bible has many crude and undeveloped ideas, “what is remarkable is that, against all this, we are offered specific teaching on a different and higher level” (p. 34). The Jewish prophets, for example, “dreamed of universal peace and clothed the dream with imperishable language. That idea remains, however much the prophets themselves may seem in other passages to forget it”. Roth thus advises his readers to ignore that which is possibly imperfect and to “fasten our eyes on the high peaks” (p. 30).
Although none of the chapters gathered together in Is There a Jewish Philosophy? is, strictly speaking political, in a sense they all are. Roth maintains that that an isolationist Judaism is based on a misguided reading of the religious texts and a misunderstanding of the message offered by the great Jewish prophets. “When the prophet wishes to lay down our duty in this life, he says: ‘God hath told thee, O man, what is good.’ He does not say: O Englishman, O Frenchman, even O Jew; but O man” (p. 33; also p. 78).3
While passages like these may appear abstract, Roth’s writings also convey a very concrete message for the current political crisis in Israel/Palestine, whereby Israel continues to oppress the Palestinian people and refuses to abide by United Nations Resolution 242. In his book on Maimonides, Roth suggests that we do not find in the great medieval philosopher “the conception of an exclusive connection between religion and the Jewish people, or between religion and Palestine, or between such religious phenomena as prophecy and the geographical condition of Palestine. Judaism for him is not a product of ‘race’ or an inheritance of ‘blood,’ nor is it bound up exclusively with any one people or any one soil”.4 Elsewhere in the book he writes, “The vision of Maimonides, like that of Genesis and Job, of the prophets and the Psalms, is ‘beyond the border of Israel’” (p. 121). There is nothing more foreign to Roth’s way of thinking than the repression and suppression of another people in the name of a greater Israel and some kind of distorted conception of Judaism. In Is There a Jewish Philosophy?, he clearly states that even “the devil can cite Scriptures for his purpose” (p. 81).
The political message underlying Roth’s writings is inextricably linked to his theoretical standpoint. There is no Jewish philosophy, he avers in the essay entitled, “Is there a Jewish Philosophy?”, just as there is no Jewish physics or Jewish mathematics. Rather, there is a philosophical interpretation of Judaism or a philosophy of Judaism, that is, a discussion of the answers offered by Judaism to some general problems of life and thought. The vital theme again is the relationship between the universal and particular; Judaism, in Roth’s view, encapsulates this relationship. Thus, Roth did not simply adopt a conception of universalism that disregards traditional life and thought, as some secular thinkers attempt to do, but rather he spent many years studying Jewish texts and uncovering their universal significance for human life. He constantly accentuates the basic features of equality and freedom within Judaism, writing in one essay: “The children of earth are envisaged as one family. There is by nature no such thing as caste or class, no differentiation by blood or descent. Human equality is thus a primary fact” (p. 33). Later he claims, “Freedom is the basis of all community life; law—justice—is its framework and guarantee” (p. 72).
A Judaism true to its origins is thus universalistic, one that emphasises the past but has meaning for the future, one that makes room for the other and enables him/her to live in his/her otherness. Roth stresses that according to the rabbis, the command to be kind to strangers is repeated in the Pentateuch no less than thirty-six times. Roth’s reading of the Jewish texts led him to advocate the establishment of a bi-national political entity with complete equality of rights between Jews and Palestinians. He believed that this worldview not only correlates with Judaism and classic philosophy, but that both, when read correctly, enhance it. He therefore endeavoured to make the writings of Plato, Aristotle, Descartes and many other thinkers accessible to Jewish students in Palestine. It is in this light that one should understand his refusal to stop teaching during the general strike.
It is no coincidence that Roth left Israel a mere three years after the state was established; his views, as readers of Is There a Jewish Philosophy? will surely note, did not sit well either with the secular or the traditional streams of thought that constituted the Zionist project. In the words of the Greek philosophers whom he admired, Roth was concerned with the good and just life at a historical moment when most people were concerned with mere life. When he realised that his attempt had failed and that the Jewish leadership was interested only in questions of existence, he dissociated himself from Israel’s nation-building project and returned to England. “We are at home,” he writes, “with the non-conformist Amos and the protesting Job because it is they who taught us the nature of non-conformity and protest” (p. 54).
Endnotes
1. He was a member of Brith Shalom, an organisation that advocated peaceful Jewish–Arab coexistence, as were Yehuda Magnes and Martin Buber, all of whom favoured the creation of a bi-national democratic state and emphasised the equality of rights of Jews and Arabs. See Martin Buber, A Land of Two Peoples, ed. Paul R. Mendes-Flohr (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
2. Raphael Loewe, Rationalism, Judaism, Universalism: In Memory of Leon Roth (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 8–9.
3. Roth was a child of his time, and this may be the reason that the book is riddled with gender-biased language.
4. Leon Roth, The Guide for the Perplexed: Moses Maimonides (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955), p. 123.
