An Introduction to Origins

In “The Non-Jewish Jew,” the Polish social revolutionary Isaac Deutscher, who began his education as a yeshiva student, argued that those who rejected their ancestral religion and their people in favor of secular universalism had historical precursors. In a paradoxical formulation that captured something of his own identity, Deutscher wrote: “The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition.”1 This “Jewry” is Judaism— not only the religion but all of the traditions built up over nearly three millennia. Yet, in transcending Judaism, the heretic finds himself or herself in a different Jewish tradition, a tradition no less Jewish for being antitraditional. Secular universalism for these heretics paradoxically became a kind of Jewish identity. Many of these ideas originated in the European Enlightenment, but they also often had a Jewish provenance or at least were believed by secular Jews to have such a provenance. Deutscher, for example, started his famous essay on an autobiographical note, remembering how, as a child in the yeshiva, he had read the story of the heretic Elisha ben Abuya (or Aher—the Other— as he is known). Elisha’s favorite student, Rabbi Meir, became one of the towering legal authorities of his generation, yet he never renounced his wayward teacher. By raising the question of the relationship of the Orthodox Rabbi Meir and the heretic Elisha, Deutscher implied that even the heretic remains somehow connected to that which he rejects, for the source of his heresy may lie within that tradition. For Deutscher, Elisha was the prototype of his modern heroes: Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Freud. They were all heretics, yet their heresy might be understood as a rejection that grew out of the Jewish tradition itself. Like Deutscher, I want to argue that Jewish secularism was a revolt grounded in the tradition it rejected. The relationship between the premodern and the modern, in which the first is associated with religion and the second with the secular, remains one of the most fraught for students of religion. According to a common master narrative of the Enlightenment, also sometimes called “the secularization theory,” modernity represented