Return to the Promised Land.. Jacek Surzyn
in the state of the Messiah, Erec Izrael. The historic role of Christianity ended at the moment of restoration of nations to a new life. Thus, Christianity fulfilled its historic (in other word, “Messianic”) mission.36 ←33 | 34→According to Hess, the latest three hundred years’ period in Europe’s history was sufficient witness of accuracy of his diagnosis concerning the decline of the historic role of Christianity: on the ruins of “Rome,” a new world was created with the idea of free nations shedding the chains of “death.” Hess clearly glorifies the French Revolution, which hatched the “soldiers of civilization, … gradually sweeping away the dominance of the barbarians; and with their strong Herculean arms will roll off the tombstones from the graves of the supposedly dead peoples and the nations will reawaken once more.”37 But according to the author, the healthy tissue of the nation survived thanks to Jews dwelling in all the corners of the Christian and Islamic world. Hess distinguishes between Jews living in the region where Islam meets Christianity and Jews living in the West. In the former, he can see sticking to the original healthy religious dogmas, reflected in unwavering faith and conviction of the coming of the Messianic era: the formation of the state of Israel and the saving mission of the Messiah. In his opinion, this provides an opportunity to awaken Jewish nationalism. The situation was different among the Western Jewry, who by departure from the Jewish faith and culture lost their hope and the attitude of waiting for the Messianic era. Therefore, reform was necessary to restore the spiritual and social life in the West. This task was fulfilled by the father of Jewish enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn, who through Haskalah blew a new spirit in the Western Jewry, giving them hope for national revival. Mendelssohn combined the tradition of rabbis and religious prophets with modern social transformations initiated with the French Revolution.38 According to Hess, this is the real national renaissance ←34 | 35→linking tradition with modernity. The true awakening of nations, including the Jewish nation, is taking place just now, leading to the Messianic era.39
I. 4 Judaism: Religion of the Future
Further, Hess moves on to analyze the essence of Judaism in order to specify its mission.40 First of all, he stresses the obvious fact of two thousand years of Jews’ permanent isolation – living in ghettos, most of them are completely closed to the external world, which has certain consequences. The consequences are twofold, both negative and positive. On the one hand, Jews’ isolation leads to their far-reaching alienation, which means that for non-Jewish environment they are strange, and this has always been good fuel for strengthening various stereotypes, especially when they have a strong religious basis. Christianity, which originated from the Jewish religion but positioned itself as a strong opponent of Judaism and developed its main dogmas by negating the sense and essence of traditional Hebrew monotheism, consolidated in tradition the negative stereotype of a Jew-Pharisee. Traditional Christian anti-Judaism definitely aroused in many Christians the aversion to Jews as those who rejected the Messiah (in the ←35 | 36→mild version) or those who were responsible for the death of Christ, and thus condemned and rightly suffering. There is no doubt that Jews to a certain degree contributed themselves to that negative image, because an important element being the basis of Judaism was perceiving the tragedy of exile from the perspective of the right punishment for their own sins. Another factor reinforcing all those tendencies is the very character of the Jewish religion, with its rituals and strict rules hard to understand for non-Jewish environment.41
But in these characteristic Hess can also see a positive aspect of Judaism, because Jews’ isolation and closing in a ghetto allowed them to preserve all that was the most important, i.e. the already highlighted essential elements of their faith, for example the common indifferentism of Judaism, significant in the context of transformations of the contemporary world. Judaism appears to the author as the religion of life, overcoming death, and thus able to implement the idea of universal humanism. At the same time, the author criticizes many attempts to reform Judaism that have been made for centuries, because in his opinion, they always went in the direction of making Judaism similar to Christianity and actually were influenced by that religion, without focusing on the specific character of the Jewish religion.42 Jews survived in ghettos without creating a caste of priests and their servants, which according to Hess was extremely important, because it prevented serious social tensions present in the external world, which consolidate the injustice of social life and generally contempt for other people. According to him, Judaism managed to avoid all those negative phenomena and even reduce them by including Jewish content in all the expressions of social life. Hess can see many such motifs in culture and science.43 He also comments on the attempts to reform both Christianity (referring to the example of Martin Luther)44 and Judaism (Moses Mendelssohn and his enlightenment-Haskalah). ←36 | 37→Hess can see positive aspects of these reformatory attempts, but he can also see their negative effects, which mostly result from the approach characteristic of these reforms – they always have a negative attitude to the reformed content, i.e. they reject the present state of their religions and consider them to be detrimental. They strongly advocate rejecting all that has been achieved so far and creating something new (or returning to sources, which seems to be a delusion, since the “sources” are simply the present idea of what a certain religion should look like, yet always perceived from the contemporary perspective). Therefore, Hess mentions a crisis of reforms made within Judaism and their dangerous consequences for the Jewish community: “Our reformers, on the contrary, attempted to reform the basis itself. Their reforms have only a negative purpose – if they have any aim at all – to firmly establish unbelief in the national foundation of the Jewish religion. No wonder that these reforms only fostered indifference to Judaism and conversions to Christianity.”45 Any reformation attempts also caused great damage to Christianity, which according to Hess ultimately lost its chance for the “national character,” oppressed by the malady of materialism and spiritualism.46 The result of contestation of this state was new movements appearing on the basis of some philosophical concepts oriented at the creation of the “religion of the future” – religion that must revive the spirit of faith anew, this time originating from national roots.47 In this meaning, Hess could see the role of the whole religious reformation tradition, which in his opinion initiated the process of peoples regaining their national awareness, the sense of being a nation. For him, the religion of the future will be the national religion, and he can see a positive role of Judaism, cultivating for ages the belief in the chosen nation.48 As a result, the chosen nation will involve all the peoples that create ←37 | 38→their own national religion based on the historical myth or worship of the nation. The author notices this phenomenon in the contemporary national tendencies, because the development of national awareness as a social process has the form of a new religious movement, or even a secular religious form (including elements of old pagan cults, such as the worship of Nature). Thus, secular religion would be the product (and negation) of the confrontation of materialism and spiritualism, what is individual and what is general. Hess defines and sums up this phenomenon like this: “It therefore must continue to suffer from internal dissensions arising from the constant clash of irreconcilable principles, until it is finally replaced among the regenerated nations by a new historical cult. To this coming cult, Judaism alone holds the key. This ‘religion of the future’ of which the eighteenth-century philosophers, as well as their recent followers, dreamed, will neither be an imitation of the ancient pagan Nature cult, nor a reflection of the neo-Judaism skeleton, the specter of which haunts the minds of our religious reformers. Each nation will have to create its own historical cult; each people must become, like the Jewish people, a people of God.”49
Hess sees the liveliness of the Jewish faith in the fact that it is resistant to national and humanitarian movements of the modern era, which are a great ←38 | 39→danger to religion in general. Judaism wins the confrontation with modernity and national challenges, because these movements are simply a primitive return or reference to the very essence of Judaism, but they do not contain its philosophical or religious depth.50 In this respect, the Jewish religion proves to be stronger than other religions. According to Hess, for example Christianity was weakened because the proper experience of life got dissolved in the dogma of faith. The author disagrees with Mendelssohn’s opinion that in Judaism, there is no dogma and that the reform