DOES ANYBODY STILL NEED JUDAISM?

Both of the books under review focus on the tradition of Jewish scholarship and debate. The Genius of Judaism is written from a religious perspective, whereas the authors of Jews and Words envision a future in which Jews live without Judaism; they see Jewishness as a culture that can be divorced from religion. For Lévy, a sense of the divine—including the concept of being a chosen people—is the source of Jewish identity and historical continuity. Lévy also argues that the Jews are chosen to serve non‐Jews. Inspired by the prophet Jonah, Lévy undertook diplomatic missions in the Ukraine and in Libya, and I consider the lessons he draws from these missions. I also discuss the relationship of Judaism to various concepts in the philosophy of history: revolution, progress, messianism, and utopianism, as well as the affinity between Judaism and skepticism.     

Bakhtin,Boredom, and the ‘Democratization of Skepticism’

This article examines recent scholarly work on boredom by drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s account of modernity, irony, and mass skepticism. In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin noted that, beginning in the 1840s, Western societies had been gripped by an “epidemic of boredom.” He was referring to a peculiarly modern form of mass boredom, associated with the “atrophy of experience” in a mechanized and urbanized social life—a boredom Elizabeth S. Goodstein has characterized as the “democratization of skepticism.” Although Bakhtin says little about “boredom” directly, he probes the sociocultural conditions that give rise to it. Bakhtin, for example, celebrates the liberatory and egalitarian promise of modern vernacular speech, which displays a healthy suspicion of “monotonic” qualities of elite genres, and which springs not from the pulpit or the palace, but from the street, the marketplace and the public square. Bakhtin is concerned about the nihilistic implications of this disenchantment of the world and the threats it poses—indifference, reification and alienation—to the “participative” mode of social life he favours.     

UNIVERSAL AND PROFANE: THE HISTORIOGRAPHICAL CONSEQUENCES OF NATURAL RELIGION

Natural religion in the eighteenth century was seemingly unhistorical or even antihistorical: it “dehistoricized” morality. It posited a morality that was uniform in all ages, not dependent on any particular revelation, watermarked onto the fabric of our nature, and accessible merely by the light of reason. Even so, natural religion played an important role in the secular historiographical turn in eighteenth-century England. There was in fact an organic relationship between the two, one that historians have failed to articulate. Precisely because natural religion was thought to rest on timeless and universally valid rational foundations, it became possible to treat traditional religion (meaning above all, but not only, Christianity) as a subject of secular historical study, in the sense that it was subject to the same laws of historical knowledge and historical development as all other subjects of historical study, and left no room for miracles. A central figure in this conceptual relationship was Conyers Middleton, a once-famous, now-obscure Cambridge librarian. Middleton's account of natural religion has been swamped by the attention lavished on Matthew Tindal, and his turn to secular historiography lies in the shadows cast by Edward Gibbon. Yet Middleton played a crucial and distinctive role in laying historiographical foundations without which Gibbon could not have written as he did. His understanding of natural religion differed from that of other participants in the “deist controversy” in ultimately far-reaching ways. Those differences explain why he could treat Cicero as a kind of saint in the church of natural religion, reversing, as it were, the elevation of the Bible above Cicero that Augustine had put into effect at the beginning of medieval history. They explain above all why Middleton could approach the history of Christianity in a manner that anticipated both Voltaire and Gibbon and made their historical writings possible.