Judeo-Christian

Is it inappropriate to speak of ‘the Judeo-Christian tradition’? One can hear that phrase more often nowadays, especially from the side of Dutch populist politicians. But at the same time other people protest against that combination of words, so it is not that obvious to make the connection.

The protest is quite understandable for who knows a bit about the history of Christian crusades, pogroms and discrimination against Jews. But I thought that phrase also to have something nice, because if after so many centuries two traditions discover their commonalities, isn’t that laudable?

But since last week I tend to find it a bit more inappropriate than before to use the combination ‘Judeo-Christian’ as a matter of course. That’s because someone who in earnest can not be suspected of wanting to enlarge gaps, held a lecture and made clear how wishful the phrase may be, while the endorsement by historical facts is completely absent.

The speaker was the renowned art historian Gary Schwartz, and he made his point by a closer look at the romantic image of ‘Rembrandt the Jews Friend’. He described the creation of that image - actually a myth - in the nineteenth century.

In France this was done by attributing to Rembrandt, in line with the French republican tradition, a kind of socially progressive character. This could be derived, according to the myth, from the unconventional artistry and humanity with which he painted his many portraits. In Germany, at the end of the nineteenth century, Julius Langbehn presented the painter as spiritually congenial with the Jews. Rembrandt’s affinity with the Jews would mainly lie in his love for the earthly and popular character of the Jewish tradition, not its intellectual aspects, which Langbehn did not like at all.

It seems that the core of the affinity between Rembrandt and the Jews in the twentieth century is sought in the combination of earthly simplicity, earnest and resignment to fate which is imputed to both parties. In that vein H.W. Janson in his standard work History of Art from 1962 writes that Rembrandt had a special sympathy for the Jews “as the heirs of the biblical past and as the patient victims of persecution”.

Schwartz told that when he went to study, the image of Rembrandt as humane friend of the Jews was almost unquestioned. And that maybe that image played a role in his choice for the study of the history of art. But paradoxically, precisely Schwartz was one of the first to have occasion to question the myth.

The turnaround for Schwartz came when he considered in more detail some of Rembrandt’s paintings, such as the Christ portraits and the Hundred Guilder Print. In the latter (see figure) a striking feature is that the immediate entourage of Jesus is portrayed as a bit more Dutch than the jawing bystanders in the periphery. Besides Schwartz points to a copy of that picture with an anti-Jewish poem written by Rembrandt’s friend Hendrik Waterloos. Schwartz thought: yes, that’s the way Christians view Jews, in the 17th century probably in a no less ambiguous way then in the 20th century. And there is little reason to believe that Rembrandt thought much different about Jews than his friends did.

The idea remains attractive: to believe that Rembrandt had much interest and affection for the Amsterdam Jews. And more generally: that Judeo-Christian is an integrated combination. But caution remains necessary.

Also see Rembrandt's Heads

Lazy

What, up to now, the Palestinians did not manage to get done the Israeli women may at this time succeed in: the initiation of a certain collective self-reflection in the large secular Israeli majority. Indeed, the driving force behind the Israeli actions and demonstrations in recent weeks is the indignation about the status of women in the Israeli public domain.

From that indignation originated the demonstrations held in Beit Shemesh for the eight-year-old girl who on her way to school was spit on because she would be immodestly dressed. And the same indignation is behind the actions of liberal and modern orthodox women against segregated seating on the bus for men (in the front) and women (in the back). Equal rights for women equally is the reason for the efforts of women to to pray with the Torah at the Wailing Wall.

This type of conflict is hardly new, it lurks in Israel for decades beneath the surface already. It goes back to an at the background always-present tension between a secular majority and an (ultra-)orthodox minority, which has a monopoly on defining the Jewish spiritual identity.

The curious thing about this tension is that the secular majority is, to be sure, spiritually far removed from rabbinic thinking, but still allows the religious establishment to prescribe (sometimes literally) the law in many areas. For example on marriage, the construction of cemeteries for the more liberal religious currents, or the separation of men and women on the bus.

On the side of the secularists there always were pragmatic and sentimental reasons to take this position. By sentimental reasons, I mean a certain mental laziness, which tends to leave the control of the Jewish spiritual inheritance to those who dress in the most outdated way and act accordingly. That’s easy, it gives a sort of historical security and appeals to rather vague but at the same time attractive feelings of communal sense.

The pragmatic reasons have to do with the security situation in Israel. It has long been thought that the country could afford no fundamental discussion about the position of orthodox Judaism. That might disrupt the national unity which is so badly needed in the fight against a hostile environment, and even lead to civil war. The idea was: first to improve the security situation, only then to fight the internal battle.

But for some reason it’s happening yet, on a larger scale than before the battle with the religious establishment is entered into. Apparently the country can afford now, people feel safe enough. Or the ultra-orthodox group is now simply too big and too bold and crosses too many borders.

Opposite those border crossings the philosophical laziness of the average secular Israeli is no longer sustainable, whether pragmatically or sentimentally inspired. The situation is forcing many of them now to think for themselves, to determine their own position in spiritual matters.

If this is the prelude to more reflection in Israël on people’s own spiritual identity, that would seem to me very laudable. Resurrection from the lethargic spiritual indifference might then call into question that other Israeli indifference which looms large: the indifference for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the plight of the average Palestinian. Then the order of priorities is just reversed.

Also see The Green Line and the Red Line

Levinas and Egoism

Egoism is bad. That's what we learned and the idea is deeply embedded in the surrounding Christian culture. But the idea is definitely not limited to Christians. The well known British Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman for example propagates the same idea in his numerous books. He opposes to the strivings of the ego selfless devotion to the Other and thereby confirms a mindset that is deeply rooted in the West.

Many people who think this way believe their views about the badness of the ego and selfishness to be confirmed in the writings of Levinas. By his emphasis on the ‘Face of the Other’ and on the inroad the Other makes on the I, Levinas seems perfectly ready for annexation into the originally Christian ideas about original sin, the wickedness of man and his selfishness. That could also explain why, precisely in the Calvinist Netherlands, Levinas relatively early became popular. Levinas is thus placed in line with the Christian denouncers of human selfishness and messengers of neighbourly love. According to this view he is, in short, an outstanding example of a moralist.

I have always objected against this view and fortunately recently a thesis has been published which goes into this matter more deeply. The thesis has been written by Henk den Uijl, who graduated in Philosophy of Management and Organization at the Amsterdam Vrije Universiteit, and is entitled Beyond Egoism and Altruism. A Levinasian Approach. In it Den Uijl calls, using the work of Levinas, for considering egoism as morally neutral.

That’s quite something, precisely because this call conflicts with the prevailing thought which by Den Uijl is characterized as a form of dualistic thinking. With dualism he means a polarized system of two opposing poles, of which one pole is good and the other bad. In this case, altruism is good, egoism is bad.

According to Den Uijl the prevalence of this dualism comes to the fore in the observation that “when theorized about it, people will say that altruism is better than egoism”. To this Den Uijl opposes that, “to say this (the ego) is wrong or good is a categorical mistake, the egoism is the (not yet) about ethics or morals”. Egoism has its own area where it is in place and should not be seen in a hierarchical relation to altruism. “Egoism is ethically neutral, and is good in the sense of enjoying life, yet not in an ethical sense. There is no definite hierarchy between egoism and altruism. Egoism is not something condemnable; it is no normative notion at all”.

How for this position Den Uijl harks back to Levinas becomes clear in his presentation of Levinas’ assessment of egoism. From that presentation I will present a few sentences that together summarize Den Uijl’s argument and which for the occasion I cite one after another. “He (Levinas) does not see egoism as a vice, rather, it is the very way a subject in solitude behaves through intentionality; the ego wants to understand, or better, grasp the world so to suspense anonymous being”. “Egoism is the very way an ego stands in the world. It is strange to say that the ego perceives the world wrong, for who else should perceive the world than the ego?”

Den Uijl tells us that when he talks about egoism in these terms to managers and economists, they sometimes find this very hard to swallow. Their reactions are often defensive. Den Uijl explains this because of the negative load the word egoism got under the influence of Christianity.

Apart from that, in those very circles of managers and economists, he also encounters the exact opposite. In those cases altruism is seen as naive and therefore bad, and egoism is hailed because individual ambitions and covetousness could engender the collective’s prosperity. Here dualism appears again, says Den Uijl, with its associated but now inverted hierarchy.

Apparently it’s hard to stay calm when it comes to egoism and quickly ideological terms slip into our discourses : there is either total rejection (as in Christianity) or total embrace (as in the extreme market-ideology). To these extremes Den Uijl (in line with Levinas) rightly opposes the idea that there is no hierarchy between egoism and altruism, and that they constantly alternate.

Once one realizes this, it starts sounding quite outdatedly dualistic to hear philosophers say that in our time the Christian emphasis on charity is crucial. As for example the Dutch philosopher Andreas Kinneging did when he said that “Christianity, based on neighbourly love, makes people less selfish and makes them more focused on the community and the other”. For this reason, according to Kinneging, Christianity coexists better with democracy than Judaism and Islam do.

Kinneging says so despite the fact that by now the Christian dualism and the privileging of altruism are experienced by many people as an overstrained ideology and have lost much of their credibility. It is no coincidence that Alexis De Tocqueville, whom Kinneging holds in high esteem, could define himself as still only a ”Christian by culture”, not by faith. He could not really believe all that anymore.

Also see A Real Shame and Emergency Shelter

Greek and Jew

Hannah Arendt's observations about Eichmann remain to the point. They show it is not necessarily far-fetched to see a connection between totalitarian thinking, bureaucracy and our common desire for the creation of order. If such connections exist indeed, honest family men just can become schreibtischmörder à la Eichmann and evil can get a somehow banal character.

But occasionally Arendt could be off and run on. At such moments she had ideas in her head and she was only interested in events that corresponded with those ideas. One of the prosecutors in the Eichmann trial, Gabriel Bach, recounts: “A few days before the trial at once a philosopher arrived, who only used the testimonies and documents which fitted her ideas. With us, the prosecutors, she never even wanted to talk”.

Moreover Arendt could be very severe in her opinion, especially when she speaks about the attitude of the Jews during World War II. According to Bernard Wasserstein she divides Jews roughly into two categories: on the one hand, the passive majority that let itself be led to the slaughter, and on the other hand the members of the collaborationist Jewish councils.

I am inclined to link Arendt's harsh assessment of the Jewish attitude during the Second World War to her predilection of the autonomous, sovereignly acting subject. This predilection is associated with a certain disregard towards people in situations in which their free agency is seriously hampered or absent. That is: people in a tight corner, for example by persecution, poverty, or other kinds of dependency. This contempt is there despite the fact that Arendt, as a German Jew, experienced firsthand what it means to be unwanted. She had to flight to France and finally to America to find safe shelter.

Maybe she found that to be the only dignified way out for independent thinking people. In any event philosophically she felt most at home with the ancient Greeks, who also believed that there is little glory to be gained by carrying out activities directed at earning a living or at creating a minimum of security. Entirely in the classical Greek vein she sees unbound thinking and acting as the most sophisticated and the most pleasant thing a person can do.

It is true the Greeks went a step further and organized things in such a way that servants and slaves performed the lower types of work. Thus free citizens could be completely devoted to the worthy work, such as politics and philosophy. Arendt definitely doesn’t go that far, because in her book The Human Condition she pays much attention to those inferior kinds of work which she calls ‘labor’ and ‘work’. Together with the (political) ‘acting’ which for her embodies the highest species, they constitute the human condition.

Yet Arendt was not unequivocal in this respect, she sometimes contradicts herself. On the one hand she says: one cannot cut up reality, all types of work are part of being human. But elsewhere she argues to sharp distinguish between different types of work, and she puts the lower kinds of work on their place: laboring man is actually an animal laborans, a toiling animal. And no craftsman transcends the result-directedness in the same way as the unbound polismember could. Between the lines it is possible to hear Arendt’s craving for the sovereign existence of the Greek free man.

From that predilection I explain the reserve she shows on more than one occasion towards the Jewish conception of human existence. Because the latter deviates at this point in an important way from the Greek conception. Whereas the Greek view extols a life purified of labor and work, in the Jewish tradition there is no question of such a strive for purity. Sure, a person shall be praised for the time he spends on Torah and study, but the depending economic existence that we lead should be taken fully seriously. Purifying that away would mean, for the Jewish mind, nothing less than a reduction of reality.

Also see Hannah Arendt's Heroes and Levinas and Arendt

Are Jews smarter?

It is sometimes claimed that Jews are smarter than other people. Indeed, that they are richer as well. I do not know if that’s true. I hear enough stupid things in shul. And I encounter plenty of people there who like me earn average or less.

That does not mean that there are no differences between the Jewish tradition and other traditions when it comes to the place of the intellect. I myself have experience with the Catholic tradition as well, and I daresay that piety there did not primarily engage the intellect. Rather it combined with simplicity, subservenience, humility. The innocence of small children and the statement “Blessed are the poor in spirit” are doing well in Catholic circles. And the Dutch Catholic newspaper De Volkskrant until long after the war considered its readers to be subjects who were to be instructed and entertained (respectively by the bishops and popular novelists).

That does not mean that in those circles people don’t think. But the real thinking is preferably not left to the average believer. That can better be done by intellectual elite troops, such as the orders of the Dominicans or the Jesuits. They are allowed to indulge their theological, philosophical and scientific passions to the full. The responsibility to intellectually lead the Catholic faithful rests mainly on their shoulders.

Within the Jewish tradition it applies that learning befits an ordinary believer as well. Indeed, it is considered an achievement for every Jew to lern, that is to intensively study the sacred texts and to discuss them.

Whether one becomes smarter because of that I do not know. That actually is what René Kahn argues in his Ten Commandments for the brain: ten tips to make the brain perform better. These commandments are, in Kahn’s order: Study, Sleep, Make music, Don’t stress, Make friends, Enjoy prestige, Don’t drink, Sweat, Play. Finally is added: Choose your parents carefully, but that one is not meant seriously because it is obvious that you do not provide the implementation of that commandment yourself. This one only serves to put the rest in perspective.

Whether Kahn really assigns a prominent place to studying, can only be known for sure if for him the order of his tips is important. And if it would be clear that his order runs from major to minor or vice versa. Does he deliberately put "Study" at the beginning and "Play" at the end? That makes a big difference, because when play is more important than study then the Catholic Church may again have an advantage in the maintenance of the brains.

See also La Trahison des Clercs

AAA

Obviously they have all been asleep, the Moodys, the Standard&Poors and the Fitches, when the banks wholesaled their worthless mortgages and doomed debts. The credit rating agencies just continued awarding them top status unblinkingly. With the result that the bubbles grew bigger and bigger, as did the explosions which followed.

But now we are four years from then and now it are mostly state debts which are at stake, I am slightly more inclined to listen to them and to the markets. It might be true that the rating agencies at the moment puncture as much bubbles as they create.

I think so firstly because the rating agencies themselves are shocked by the extent to which they have let themselves be carried away in the financial charade. They seem to have resolved to be more critical in their assessments and to explicitly name and shame obscure and misleading financial constructs.

And secondly because the credit rating agencies, with in their wake the markets, seem to operate in a way which is less speculative and alienated from reality. This I gather from the fact that on the rare occasions that the EU and individual governments show some willingness to really put their financial affairs in order, markets react immediately. At such a moment the interest rate on government bonds goes down and the stock markets go up. Apparently then serious calculations are being made by rating agencies and financial institutions that demonstrate that trust is justified again and that investing can pay again.

The circumstance that what governments announce is generally felt not to be enough for a lasting effect, in my opinion does not alter that conclusion: apparently there are bottoms and ceilings. To that I connect the conclusion that, despite the disproportionate financial fictions, there still is a connection to the real economy. So that there is question of a reality check which aims at serious returns on investments.

The importance of this can be clear when you consider that it could be quite different. It is not inconceivable that markets at some point do no longer respond at all to political initiatives, that there is not any inhibition left whatsoever to interest rise and to speculating the euro to death, and that you no longer need any credit rating. Except for a number of speculators, that’s what we rightly fear the most.

A Palestinian state

What arguments can you bring in for not wanting a Palestinian state right now?

The idea can be: we must add the West Bank to Israel because that is ancient Jewish territory. This is an ideological position which has for its aim to annex the area. That is simply illegal.

You can say: If Israel can no longer fly over the West Bank, it loses the military control over the airspace and it becomes harder to control the borders. I think that’s true. But I would like to connect this with another thought: if military power is so important, make sure you – unlike minister Lieberman does – maintain contacts with your neighbors in a proper way. Because the loss thereof is probably of more importance when it comes to controlling your military position.

You may think: the Palestinians want to drive in Israel into the sea. Hamas says so explicitly, and that makes negotiating quite impossible in my eyes. Abbas and his club recognizes, at least verbally, the existence of Israel. I think we should cherish that.

The thought may be: besides the rockets from Gaza we will now get them from the West Bank as well. That could very well be the case indeed because Abbas’ authority is not large enough to be able to prevent that from happening. I would not know what you can do against it, so this seems to me to be a real problem.

Thus I arrive at three arguments for and one against. Of course there are many more issues and arguments to bring in, but I think my considerations soon will follow the pattern that just came out: more arguments for the Palestinian state than otherwise.

What I fear is that for the current Israeli government the first argument has the heaviest weight, that’s to say it embraces the ideology of Greater Israel. And that all other arguments must give way to this argument. Over against that position, I like to think that if we let go of the ideology, business can be done about the rest.

Also see Thought Police