An Ambivalent Turn: The Changing Image of the Talmud Among Twentieth-Century German-Jewish Intellectuals

Abstract

This essay explores the attitudes of five prominent German-speaking intellectuals, active in the early twentieth century, to the Talmud: Martin Buber, Max Brod, Shmuel Hugo Bergmann, Franz Rosenzweig, and Gershom Scholem. All were central and influential figures in the turn to irrationalism that characterized this period whose discovery of Kabbalah and Hasidism is well documented. However, this essay explores their interest in the Talmud and how it was related to their take on the trend toward irrationalism. These five intellectuals renounced the critical view of the Talmud that was prevalent during the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), and were inspired by the pivotal role of the Talmud in pre-modern and present East-European Jewry. Nevertheless, their turn was ambivalent, as they kept some of the Enlightened images of the Talmud, and were influenced by Buber’s disdain of the Halachic part of Judaism.