From Scepticism to Tolerance of “the Other”: The Example of Yeshayahu Leibowitz

Abstract

The European-born Israeli thinker Yeshayahu Leibowitz was as provocative as he was popular among the Israeli public, and he influenced more than one generation of society both in Israel and abroad. Born in Riga in 1903, he studied chemistry in Berlin, medicine in Cologne and Heidelberg, and later took his MD in Basel. After participating in the religious-Zionist Mizrachi movement in Germany, he later migrated to Palestine, where he lived from 1934 until his death in Jerusalem in 1994. Leibowitz was widely interpreted as provocative yet highly topical due to his harsh criticism of the Israeli government—particularly after the Six-Day War (1967)—and his interpretation of the Jewish religion, which was “a highly resilient form of Jewish religiosity, capable of enduring the most vigorous philosophical and ethical criticism from the Enlightenment to our time.”1 To this day, there is discussion as to whether Leibowitz can be defined as a philosopher and whether he was part of the tradition of serious Israeli philosophy, as his roots were in natural science. Perhaps this is one reason why his thought has regrettably never gained much popularity outside of Israel.Yet Leibowitz is worth engaging with. At the very least, he was an important thinker in a generation and time that was occupied with asking: “What would be the character of the new Jewish society?”2 He is worth engaging with because of his vast spectrum and originality of thought about the Israeli state and the role of its religious Jewry, and because of his interesting personal development from a young ambitious religious-Zionist thinker into a near-existentialist.3 Finally, he is worth engaging with because his interpretation of Jewish religion allows space for a modern form of Jewish religiosity within a mostly secular Jewish democratic state, as he himself said that his approach was not historical, but contemporary, for the “here and now.”4