Krochmal on Exegesis

The description of Krochmal as eastern European—widespread among scholars^{Footnote 12}—is not without complications. The boundaries between eastern and western European Jewry are notoriously fluid,^{Footnote 13} and Krochmal’s life reflects this dynamic. While his home of eastern Galicia—including the Ukrainian cities of Brody, Zolkiev, Lwow, and Tarnopol where he lived—is typically seen as falling on the eastern side of this divide,^{Footnote 14} he was familiar with intellectual and political developments that occupied German Jewry. He was engaged with the work of German philosophers such as Kant and Hegel,^{Footnote 15} and Galician Jews encountered reform efforts similar to those associated with Prussia. After the territory that came to be called Galicia was seized by Austria during the late eighteenth-century partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Galician Jews were subject to reforms enacted in the 1780s by the Austrian Habsburg monarch Joseph II, who—pursuing an imperial project of state-building—sought to curtail premodern Jewish communal autonomy, incorporate Jews more fully into the Austrian body politic, and promote the adoption of German culture.^{Footnote 16}

Nevertheless, Krochmal’s biography reflects the distinctive intellectual and socioeconomic circumstances of his eastern European, Galician home. He was deeply engaged with Galician religious life, corresponding with the region’s Karaites and navigating conflicts with local Hasidic groups.^{Footnote 17} His Galician setting was also one where Jews—significantly more than in areas to the west—maintained corporate frameworks of identity and participated in a largely premodern economic system that involved, among other activities, managing businesses leased from the Polish aristocracy. After Joseph II died in 1790, his successors showed little interest in continuing his reforms, seeking instead to preserve stability through alliances with traditionalist Jews wary of efforts to dissolve corporate autonomy and promote Germanicization. Additionally, hoping to maintain Galicia as an agricultural province, Joseph’s successors did not encourage the region’s industrial development, with the result that lease-holding—especially in the alcoholic beverage industry—remained important to Jewish economic life. The result, in one historian’s words, was that “Galician Jewry’s encounter with the Austrian government opened with a short-lived radical attempt to change Jewish society, but in the end, the government, the Polish aristocracy, and the major forces in Jewish society joined together to conserve the existing situation, at least until the 1840s,” and “Jews largely still maintained corporative frameworks of identity.”^{Footnote 18} Krochmal’s life was marked by precisely this persistence of premodern economic patterns and corporate communal structures: he operated a liquor franchise and served as community leader for Zolkiev’s Jews (with duties including assisting tax collectors, interacting with government officials, and supplying Jews for military service).^{Footnote 19} Viewed against this backdrop, Krochmal’s Guide provides an opportunity to explore how a figure embedded in eastern European, Galician surroundings deployed yet repurposed German-Jewish philosophy.

Published posthumously in 1851, the Guide explores topics ranging from metaphysics to history. My initial focus lies with Krochmal’s claims about halakhah or Jewish law—more specifically, about how this system emerged from the rabbis of antiquity and their predecessors extending back to the First Temple’s destruction and the Babylonian exile. This history, Krochmal suggests, exhibits a pattern followed by “any comprehensive legal system given to a full collective.” Such a system will initially codify, in writing, only a few principles, and these general statements will exist alongside unwritten “methods of bringing forth particulars,” of interpreting general principles to derive detailed rules:^{Footnote 20}

If a society’s foundational document articulates principles that must be interpreted to yield detailed rules (“particulars”) amid shifting circumstances, individuals who can interpret such texts and derive laws suited to new conditions will serve a crucial societal function, “aiding … in governance” by generating norms that leaders can administer.

Krochmal continues:

For Krochmal, “everything … mentioned” above applies even “more” to “a divine legal system.” The need for experts who provide norms derived from a core text will be particularly pronounced when a system is linked to God, since such a system may be envisioned as enduring “for all time” and enacting divine principles in all areas of life, and may therefore require the ongoing interpretation of foundational texts and development of detailed rules.

This framework, Krochmal claims, illuminates ancient Judaism:

Krochmal casts “the sages of the Mishnah and Talmud” and their predecessors as examples of his sociolegal model: just as that model envisions the initial written promulgation of principles alongside the development of additional rules over time, with Judaism “there likewise appeared alongside” a written Torah additional legal content elaborated by sages over “many generations.” For the Guide, then, ancient Jewish intellectuals played a crucial social role. Interpreting a foundational document (the Bible) to derive detailed communal rules (halakhic norms), the rabbis and their predecessors enacted a process vital to “governance.”^{Footnote 24}

Krochmal then discusses practitioners of this socially relevant exegesis: “scribes,” whom he dates to the time of Ezra (following the First Temple’s destruction and the Babylonian exile), and “teachers of halakhot,” whom he takes to emerge around 200 BCE and include the early rabbis.^{Footnote 25} Introducing the word midrash when discussing this second group, he explains that this term denotes the manner in which exegetes would generate “particulars.” Also known as derash, this approach took two forms: midrash halakhah, involving the production of the detailed laws outlined above, and midrash 'aggadah, yielding “particulars of character traits, ethical teachings, and good beliefs and opinions, and every matter or story conducive to ethics and faith”:^{Footnote 26}

Krochmal begins with communal laws, suggesting that legal derash derives such norms from textual details or “components,” such as specific “words,” “utterances,” and layers of “sense” beyond “ordinary” and “essential” meanings. The contrast is with a peshat or straightforward reading, described elsewhere in this section of the Guide as focusing not on details such as specific words’ subtle nuances, but on terms’ basic meaning and literary context—as an approach that refuses to look away “from words’ and utterances’ primary and natural sense, the ways of using them in a language, an utterance’s connection with what is before and after it, or what is recounted regarding that utterance and the sense of its neighbors in the Holy Writings.”^{Footnote 28} While peshat and legal derash thus differ, their shared focus on textual detail entails that they are often compatible. Krochmal insists above that “peshat and the sages’ midrash regarding halakhot can in most cases be held … together”; similarly, the Guide elsewhere invokes the relation between peshat and derash by noting that “we are permitted by all the sages collectively to consider the peshat in the case of a difference with the derash, which nevertheless remains valid and honored."^{Footnote 29}

Yet halakhic interpretation did not exhaust midrashic activity. Rather, the rabbis also pursued midrash 'aggadah, disseminating “character traits and ethical teachings … founded in the intellect” by using the Bible to “introduce the good teaching to the listener’s ear and serve as a reminder.” Instead of clarifying textual details, this approach involved formulating teachings about topics such as ethics (among other matters) through rational reflection and then framing this content as the message of “whatever portion of Scripture” occupied the interpreter. Finding themselves engaged with a text for some pedagogic or other reason, the rabbis would identify a feature that could be used to convey ethical content already generated through reason; indeed, the Guide suggests that many aggadic readings emerged from public sermons, and that scripturally-focused public instruction about matters such as ethics arose with the scribes.^{Footnote 30} For Krochmal, these readings generally break more significantly with the Bible’s plain sense than do their textually-focused legal counterparts, since 'aggadah treats Scripture less as a source of textual details to be clarified, and more as a collection of literary opportunities to present pre-formulated teachings about matters such as ethics: while “peshat and the sages’ midrash regarding halakhot can in most cases be held on scales together,” he notes, “this is not so with midrash 'aggadah.” For example, discussing midrash halakhah, Krochmal invokes an attempt to derive laws regarding kidnapping from the details of a verse on that topic;^{Footnote 31} by contrast, he illustrates midrash 'aggadah with a rabbinic text linking an ethical teaching regarding jealousy to a listing of cities in a verse on geography.^{Footnote 32}

To be sure, Krochmal stresses, ancient Jews valued peshat:

Even as they generated detailed legal and ethical content, earlier generations held that “no one may … completely” abandon the explication of Scripture’s plain sense. Nevertheless, Jewish intellectuals were committed to going beyond that sense for “instruction either regarding the halakhah … or regarding some ethical teaching.” Krochmal’s picture of ancient Jewish intellectuals is thus, in part, an account of how they enacted socially vital biblical hermeneutics, engaging Scripture to supply legal norms and interpersonal ethics required by the Jewish nation. He even uses the same term—hanhagah (governance)—for both types of content, emphasizing their shared role in regulating ancient Jewish society: we have seen him describe the production of legal particulars as aiding “leaders … in governance (hanhagah),” and he elsewhere applies hanhagah to “midrash on verses for the sake of ethics.”^{Footnote 34}

Krochmal, Mendelssohn, and Exegesis

Krochmal’s hermeneutics have been read in apologetic terms. By emphasizing rabbinic concern with the Bible’s details, he parries charges that rabbinic Judaism broke with Scripture; by linking 'aggadah to rationally generated ethics, he addresses accusations that such readings are so absurd as to undermine rabbinic credibility.^{Footnote 35} His approach has also been linked to the non-Jewish jurist Friedrich Karl von Savigny and premodern Jewish thinkers such as Sherira Gaon and Azariah de Rossi.^{Footnote 36} Another potential source is the German-Jewish scholar Leopold Zunz, who edited the Guide after Krochmal’s death. Krochmal was familiar with Zunz’s work: although we possess no correspondence between the two and Zunz is not cited in the Guide, he was reportedly identified by Krochmal as the book’s preferred editor.^{Footnote 37} Readers have also noted affinities with Zunz’s 1832 Liturgical Sermons of the Jews. Like Krochmal, Zunz contrasts midrash halakhah and 'aggadah, describing the latter as “free” interpretation that often breaks with the Bible’s plain sense to discuss matters such as ethics; like Krochmal, Zunz traces 'aggadah to sermons focused on engaging listeners.^{Footnote 38} Admittedly, there are also significant differences,^{Footnote 39} and one reader has speculated that it was Zunz who was indirectly influenced by Krochmal.^{Footnote 40} Nevertheless, Zunz has been identified as a potential source for the Guide. ^{Footnote 41}

While correct, these readings offer only a partial picture of Krochmal’s concerns. I argue that his account of biblical interpretation also involves a politically inflected encounter with the work of Moses Mendelssohn.^{Footnote 42} A clue emerges from an earlier section of the Guide which, exploring biblical texts such as Ecclesiastes, invokes “peshat-focused interpreters who preceded us, among them, in particular, the master Moses the son of Menahem, may his memory be for a blessing.”^{Footnote 43} The reference to a “Moses the son of Menahem” concerned with peshat and Ecclesiastes is to Mendelssohn and his Hebrew commentary on that book, a 1770 text whose introduction explores the nature of peshat and derash. ^{Footnote 44} Although Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings have until recently been overshadowed by his German oeuvre,^{Footnote 45}this material was well known to Krochmal, who also cites Hebrew texts from the 1780s including the Bi’ur or “Elucidation” (Mendelssohn’s Hebrew commentary on the Pentateuch) and 'Or Lanetibah or “Light for the Path” (the commentary’s introduction).^{Footnote 46}

These works exhibit striking similarities with the Guide. Consider the Ecclesiastes commentary’s account of methods employed by exegetes such as the rabbis:

Characterizing peshat as focusing on words’ context and general “sense,” Mendelssohn continues:

Mendelssohn presents derush (used interchangeably with derash) as exploring “details and precise features”—as looking beyond words’ “flow and context” and general “sense” to consider nuances and layers of signification associated with “every word, every letter.” This approach is animated by an awareness that while speakers may intend to communicate a “primary” meaning that is not dependent on the nuances of specific words, individuals sometimes also intend to express a “secondary” meaning by choosing one word or phrase over another. If such linguistic sophistication is possible with “even the natural human speaker,” then it is possible with the Bible’s divine author, and it will be necessary to scrutinize even seemingly minor scriptural features for potential meaning: for example, when the Bible demands both “remembering” and “observing” the Sabbath, we should read the different verbs as emphasizing distinct Sabbath-related rules.^{Footnote 49} Mendelssohn thus develops an account of biblical hermeneutics focused on language use. He states above that his predecessors’ exegesis reflects a familiarity with the “natural human speaker,” and he elsewhere invokes the habits of “one who has mastered a language.”^{Footnote 50}

The resonance with Krochmal is clear. Just as the Guide links legal derash to textual details or “components,” Mendelssohn links derush to Scripture’s “details and precise features.” Just as Krochmal’s examples of such “components” include layers of “sense” beyond the “essential” meanings of words and phrases, Mendelssohn’s examples of “details” include the “specific matter” to which “one of the words or statements that are alike in meaning” can “refer”—layers of signification associated with words or phrases beyond their basic meaning. Just as Krochmal links peshat to the context of biblical lines rather than such nuances (invoking “an utterance’s connection with what is before and after it” and “what is recounted regarding that utterance and the sense of its neighbors”), Mendelssohn associates this approach with the “context of the statement.”^{Footnote 51} Most fundamentally, both thinkers emphasize linguistic sensitivity. Krochmal casts ancient readers as “sages knowledgeable regarding language and text” and sensitive to how “language … changes,” just as Mendelssohn presents them as linguistically sensitive exegetes attentive to the “natural human speaker.”

These similarities extend beyond content to phrasing. A minor example emerges above: just as Krochmal’s claim about peshat and context cites a verse’s “connection with what is before and after it (qešuro 'im mah šelefanav ule’aharav),” Mendelssohn invokes a line’s “connection with what comes earlier and afterwards (qešuro 'im haqodem vehamit’aher)” More suggestive is Krochmal’s statement, cited earlier, that “we are permitted … to consider the peshat in the case of a difference with the derash, which nevertheless remains valid and honored”—that while derash should be accepted, a peshat reading also merits consideration “in the case of a difference (behiluf) with the derash.” While there are premodern precedents for using the Hebrew root h-l-f when discussing peshat and derash, Mendelssohn deploys this language in precisely the same context as the Guide: a case where both approaches should be taken seriously. 'Or Lanetibah states that “a rule was laid down for us” regarding peshat and derash specifying, in part, that when “the path of peshat merely deviates and differs (umithalef) from the path of derash, but is not opposed to it, Scripture does not depart from its peshat, and the derashah can be expounded.”^{Footnote 52} Similarly, the Bi’ur on Exodus 21 endorses accepting both readings when peshat turns out merely to “differ (mithalef)” from derash, but not when “what appears to be Scripture’s peshat contradicts rabbinic tradition” regarding laws.^{Footnote 53}

Mendelssohn’s declaration that “a rule was laid down for us” specifying that “Scripture does not depart from its peshat, and the derashah can be expounded” is particularly telling. While each of the two clauses used—”Scripture does not depart from its peshat” and “and the derashah can be expounded”—appears widely in premodern sources, I have not found this formulation—this combination of the clauses with no words added—in earlier texts, and none of the few works using these phrases in close proximity describes this idea as “a rule [that] was laid down.”^{Footnote 54} As we saw, however, Krochmal employs precisely this Mendelssohnian formulation, adding only a talmudic source: “Scripture does not depart from its peshat (b. Shabbat 63), and the derashah can be expounded” Even more strikingly, he echoes Mendelssohn’s introduction of this formulation, casting these clauses as part of “a great rule [that] was laid down (kelal gadol munah),” just as Mendelssohn includes them as elements of “a rule [that] was laid down (kelal munah)."^{Footnote 55} And although two post-Mendelssohnian sources published prior to Krochmal’s death join “Scripture does not depart from its peshat” to “and the derashah can be expounded” without intervening words, neither is cited by Krochmal, nor do they use the term “laid down (munah)” invoked by both him and Mendelssohn when describing the rule built from these phrases. The relevant passages from these sources, in fact, themselves reflect Mendelssohn’s influence, further pointing to this formulation’s association with the German-Jewish thinker.^{Footnote 56}

Yet despite these (and other) similarities,^{Footnote 57} there are differences. Krochmal locates ancient exegesis against a social backdrop absent from Mendelssohn’s argument. While Mendelssohn suggests that all derash involved textual attentiveness rooted in a concern with language use, Krochmal limits this to legal exegesis, arguing that 'aggadah was animated not by a linguistically-driven concern with clarifying textual features, but by a desire to disseminate rationally derived intersubjective ethics. Whereas Mendelssohn insists that “in every place where the sages … expounded a verse according to their methods … they saw that the path of peshat is insufficient for understanding the [Bible’s] details,” Krochmal states that 'aggadah linked “ethical teachings … founded in the intellect” to “whatever portion of Scripture was present.”

Even when associating legal exegesis with textual detail, Krochmal grounds this in social considerations that Mendelssohn does not invoke in his Hebrew account of exegesis. Whereas Mendelssohn links derush to a recognition that “peshat is insufficient for understanding [the Bible’s] details,” Krochmal links legal derash to the need for norms enabling communal “governance.” Whenever Krochmal emphasizes linguistic sensitivity, in fact, he also emphasizes societal concerns. He casts the rabbis and their predecessors as “knowledgeable regarding language and text,” but in the next clause portrays them as “wise regarding matters of law and statute”; he writes that these groups attended to how “language … changes” and to “utterances’ and words’ meaning,” but he then emphasizes their concern with “jurisprudential science” and “comparing one time with another … in deed and thought.” By contrast, despite linking halakhah to social concerns on a number of occasions, Mendelssohn rarely identifies legal exegesis as the site of halakhah’s social significance. The conclusion of the Bi’ur on Exodus suggests that halakhically mandated behaviors cultivate attentiveness to sociopolitical circumstances, but this passage says nothing about legal interpretation figuring in this process.^{Footnote 58} Similarly, writing to his collaborator Herz Homberg, Mendelssohn describes shared halakhic practices as creating a “unifying bond” and “some kind of connection” among Jews confronting “polytheism, anthropomorphism, and religious usurpation,” but says nothing about halakhic midrash ^{Footnote 59}Indeed, I know of only two brief comments by Mendelssohn linking halakhic exegesis and societal concerns. Both appear in his 1783 German treatise Jerusalem, oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum, which suggests that because the Bible leaves many legal details unarticulated, adherents must further clarify the biblical text to understand their obligations, and that such interpretive activity in turn promotes “sociability”—substantive interactions among individuals seeking to determine how to act. Because the Bible contained “few written laws,” Mendelssohn writes, halakhah would “impel” Jews “to social intercourse,” since there would be a need for “the unwritten laws, the oral tradition, the living instruction from man to man … to explain, enlarge, limit, and define more precisely what … remained undetermined in the written law”;^{Footnote 60} he uses similar language in a second passage shortly thereafter.^{Footnote 61} Even here, the difference with Krochmal is striking. Whereas Krochmal explores the social significance of norms emerging from exegesis, Mendelssohn’s brief comments emphasize the dynamics of interpretive activity itself: whereas Krochmal’s exegetes generate rules needed for “governance,” Mendelssohn’s interpretive endeavors themselves produce “social intercourse.”^{Footnote 62}

Krochmal thus resonates with, but also diverges from, Mendelssohn’s Hebrew treatment of hermeneutics. Krochmal echoes some of Mendelssohn’s key phrases, along with his picture of ancient Jews as linguistically and textually sensitive exegetes; Krochmal and Mendelssohn even offer strikingly similar accounts of peshat and (some) derash. Nevertheless, Krochmal breaks with his predecessor regarding ancient interpreters’ broader agenda. For Krochmal, although groups such as the rabbis possessed a sophisticated understanding of language and explored the meaning of textual details, these linguistically inflected projects of textual clarification were animated, and sometimes even displaced, by a concern with societal life.

On one level, then, if the Guide not only singles out Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings on exegesis but also echoes those texts’ claims and language, the most compelling conclusion is that the Guide is drawing on that material. Yet the differences suggest that Krochmal also finds Mendelssohn’s approach to be inadequate. If Krochmal employs the linguistically-oriented account of ancient exegetes in Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings but locates these individuals against a social backdrop absent from that account, then Krochmal holds that his predecessor’s position is partial at best. Krochmal takes Mendelssohn to offer useful resources for theorizing classical exegesis, but holds that Mendelssohn’s perspective requires supplementation in the form of a turn to extra-linguistic factors—factors that surface elsewhere in Mendelssohn’s writings, but are framed in different terms and rarely connected to exegesis. Krochmal’s account thus involves a covert appropriation and development of Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings on interpretation. Krochmal implicitly draws on, but remains dissatisfied with, those texts: employing Mendelssohn to explain how ancient Jews read the Bible, Krochmal holds that his predecessor’s position must be revised to capture the social concerns animating such activity.

Krochmal, Mendelssohn, and Politics

More is at stake. Consider an idea foregrounded in Krochmal’s hermeneutics: that the type of exegetically grounded legal system that Judaism possesses should endure “for all time” amid “all changes.” The endurance of Judaism and the Jewish people is one of his central themes, receiving its best-known expression several chapters before the discussion of ancient exegesis:

Krochmal invokes his core concept of the “spiritual” (ruhani), understood as a dimension of existence distinct from (albeit discernable in) the physical world and particularly manifest in human cognition and culture. For example, a nation’s “spiritual inheritances” include elements such as “laws, ethical teachings, linguistic concepts, books of science.”^{Footnote 64}

Krochmal states that while Jews are associated with “the universal spiritual,” every other nation’s “spiritual is particular.” He alludes here to another recurring claim: that Jews are distinguished by their view of God as the “absolute spiritual” or “universal spiritual,” as “the source of every spiritual being and the totality of them all.”^{Footnote 65} What Jews treat as divine is the totality of phenomena relating to human cognition and culture: while every other nation accords supremacy to an entity such as a god of war or beauty and thus emphasizes only one “particular” subset of spiritual manifestations, Judaism takes God to be “absolute” or “universal” by in some sense encompassing all such phenomena, from art to ethics.^{Footnote 66}

For Krochmal, this view of the divine has consequences. History involves cyclical processes of growth and decline that typically result in nations disappearing. However, although Jews also “succumb to the … orders” common to all nations, “the universal spiritual that is in our midst … rescues us.” Despite experiencing growth and decline, the Jewish nation does not disappear after decay but instead “recovers” because of the “universal spiritual … in our midst”—because of its distinctive understanding of God.^{Footnote 67} Jews’ view of God, that is, allows them to survive catastrophes and rebuild flourishing communities. For instance, after the First Temple’s destruction, Jews were able to “gather the exiled” and “establish … full communities,” eventually “binding [them] together … until they would again become a full nation.”^{Footnote 68} Krochmal’s point seems to be, in part, that seeing God as encompassing the totality of spiritual manifestations confers considerable value on those phenomena and thus disposes Jews to preserve and cultivate these cultural inheritances, rebuilding communities that allow this treasured legacy to survive. Writing about renewal after the First Temple’s destruction, he links Jews’ commitment to “establishing their community” to “recognizing the value of the dear treasure that they possessed from their fathers” and even “giving up their souls for [these inheritances'] existence in times of need.”^{Footnote 69}

Beyond disposing Jews to preserve their inheritances, this view of God cultivates an awareness that renewal is even possible. Krochmal writes regarding non-Jewish nations:

Fixating on “particular forms of the spiritual,” and worshiping them as “powers,” is linked here to emphasizing “what is … particular” and “attached to a time and place” when seeking the “truth and persistence” of spiritual life. Habituated to elevating one “particular” subset of spiritual manifestations, nations will become mired in a mode of thinking that emphasizes other “particular,” or only partially important, aspects of collective life, such as a specific location in which that life flourished; accustomed to mistakenly ascribing ultimate importance to what constitutes just one dimension of its culture, a nation will become prone to making similar errors in other contexts, erroneously treating factors of limited significance, such as a specific land, as indispensable to national flourishing. When confronting a catastrophe such as territorial loss, therefore, such groups will despair of rebuilding in a new setting and be “lost.”

By contrast, a nation that understands the divine as the absolute spiritual will locate the “truth and persistence” of its spiritual life not in factors such as a specific territory, but “in what is universal—that is, what has the truth of its existence in the absolute spiritual.” Accustomed to taking God to encompass all spiritual phenomena, a nation will adopt a more “universal” mode of thinking, refusing to treat any “particular” factor (such as a location) as crucial to its cultural life, and focusing instead on the importance of absoluteness or universality itself. Aware that it differs from its neighbors by linking the totality of spiritual phenomena to the divine, this nation will view this conception of the divine as what grounds its collective life, and this group will therefore experience catastrophes such as territorial loss as setbacks from which recovery is possible: recognizing that its cultural life is grounded in its understanding of God as encompassing all spiritual phenomena, this nation will maintain hope when confronted with the loss of transient possessions, realizing that such losses leave intact the factor—the conception of God—vital to national existence.

What is crucial is the process by which Jewish national renewal occurs. Krochmal’s most extensive account of rebirth—also appearing several chapters before his discussion of hermeneutics—explores the period after the First Temple’s destruction and the Babylonian exile:

Facing dispersion, Jews renewed themselves through “spiritual activity”:

Krochmal depicts renewal as a project in which Jews generated legal rules and other practical content necessary for communal life (in which Jews would “establish their community and fortify and crown it with Toraitic commandments and good customs”), and he elaborates on this activity by adding that it involved explicating biblical texts—taking up “the holy books” and “reflecting on them, understanding them clearly, and giving [them] sense.” At least in part, then, the Jewish nation renewed itself through norm-generating activity involving scriptural exegesis. Linking God to the totality of spiritual phenomena, Jews treasured these inheritances and sought to rebuild communities in which this legacy could survive, and they did so by using the Bible to generate laws and other practical content needed for collective life.

Far from a minor component of national renewal, this exegetical activity was vitally important:

Having framed the exegetical production of practical content as “spiritual activity,” Krochmal states that it was primarily such “spiritual arousal,” rather than “arms or … the sword,” that secured national survival. The references to “the sword,” “arms,” and foreign “rule” are telling. By juxtaposing military activities with “spiritual arousal” involving the exegetical production of norms, and by stressing that this occurred when Jews were ruled by others, Krochmal both posits a shift from military strength to exegesis, and links this development to political circumstances. He casts a practically oriented engagement with Scripture as a mode of fostering national survival tailored to a context where communal well-being could no longer be secured through tools such as force of arms.

Krochmal’s political focus also emerges when he compares this era with earlier periods:

While Krochmal laments that post-exilic Jews lost access to their literary heritage, he is also concerned, to a significant extent, with their new political context. On his telling, whereas Jews had once sustained their collective life through a shared territory and shared wars, this nation now turned to activities such as exegesis because its communities were “separated … by great distances” and “subjugated under foreign rulers and their governance in political matters.” The project of “fortifying and crowning [their community] with Toraitic commandments and good customs” is thus cast as a political adaptation. By describing endeavors such as the exegetical production of laws and other practical content as part of “spiritual activity” that would “bind together … different communities” to “again become a full nation,” Krochmal explains how Jews secured their survival in a particular type of political context: exegetical pursuits helped sustain a diasporic Jewish collective without territorial or military resources by generating shared norms necessary for communal survival.

The important point is the resonance between this interpretive activity crucial to national renewal and the exegesis described in Krochmal’s later chapters on hermeneutics. Both endeavors secure Jewish national survival: Krochmal treats the post-exilic production of norms as part of how the Jewish nation avoids “destruction,” just as he casts ancient exegetes as enabling their legal system to endure “for all time.” Both involve explicating the Bible: Krochmal takes Jewish national renewal to involve “reflecting on” biblical texts, just as he takes ancient exegetes to investigate biblical “utterances and words.” Both involve generating communally required legal norms: Krochmal narrates national renewal as a story of Jews striving to “establish their community and fortify and crown it with Toraitic commandments,” just as he takes ancient exegetes to “aid … in governance” by utilizing “jurisprudential science” to produce legal rules. Both are linked to times of textual inaccessibility and historical change: Krochmal locates reliance on exegesis in an era when “holy books … were like a sealed book” and geopolitical circumstances had radically transformed, just as he links ancient exegetes to periods when “meaning … is forgotten” amid “changes.” Both endeavors even appear to involve biblically-framed moral pedagogy. We saw Krochmal stress this when discussing 'aggadah, but indications of this project also appear in his account of post-exilic renewal, which is presented as involving not only “reflecting on” biblical texts, but also “understanding them clearly and giving [them] sense.” The Guide identifies the latter phrases—drawn from Neh 8:8—as referring to the practice of deploying the Bible to offer public instruction about matters such as ethics.^{Footnote 75}

Again and again, then, Krochmal’s analysis of ancient exegesis recalls his discussion of national renewal, suggesting that one functions as an elaboration of the other—that his treatment of hermeneutics provides a more detailed account of the interpretive activity crucial to Jewish communal survival. This connection between exegesis and national restoration becomes even more pronounced when Krochmal describes the next period of renewal.

This period began around 135 CE, after Roman persecutions and the Bar Kokhba revolt:

Emphasizing that this renewal also occurred under foreign rule, Krochmal highlights the rabbis’ role in this process. Discussing this period further elsewhere in the Guide, he casts this role in exegetical terms, invoking a “forgetting of halakhot” during the preceding period of decline:

Traumatized by war and prevented by persecution from engaging in scriptural study, the Jewish nation retained laws’ “core content” but suffered a “forgetting” of “the midrash regarding the reason[s] and reasoning behind the halakhah”: Jews retained knowledge of many norms governing communal life but could no longer feel confident that this content possessed an adequate biblical basis. The rabbinic attempt to restore national flourishing under the “Roman Empire, to which all Israel’s exiled communities were subjugated,” therefore involved clarifying and publicizing the midrashic process grounding these laws:

While some rabbis formulated norms without explicitly outlining their scriptural basis,^{Footnote 79} others were committed to “teaching halakhah with midrash” Seeking to rebuild Jewish life in a dispersed nation recovering from a failed military uprising, some rabbis sought not only to formulate laws needed for communal survival, but also to instill confidence in those laws by clarifying their basis in the nation’s foundational text. Krochmal even stresses that this occurred “both with halakhah and with 'aggadah”—that rabbis sought to ensure that Jews would link the Bible to not only the legal norms, but also the moral teachings, governing social life.

Krochmal’s treatment of hermeneutics now comes into sharper relief. When discussing ancient exegetes, he uses language that hearkens back to his description, elsewhere in the Guide, of interpretive work crucial to national renewal amid the territorial loss and military powerlessness following the First Temple’s destruction. He also emphasizes that the socially vital interpretive methods of midrash halakhah and 'aggadah figured prominently in a subsequent period of renewal spearheaded by rabbinic sages supporting dispersed communities scarred by military failure. Repeatedly, then, Krochmal indicates that his account of biblical hermeneutics is intertwined with his arguments about Jewish survival. His hermeneutics functions as a building-block in a political vision that takes biblical exegetes to play a crucial role in sustaining a diasporic Jewish collective that has often lacked territorial and military resources: by describing how ancient Jews produced legal norms and disseminated ethical teachings through methods such as midrash, Krochmal fills out the details of a picture gestured towards elsewhere in the Guide, providing a more comprehensive account of the techniques by which exegetes promoted national flourishing.

Future studies might explore possible links to non-Jewish Polish thought. While studies discussing Krochmal’s Galician Jewish surroundings often distance him from his non-Jewish Polish intellectual environment,^{Footnote 80} his concerns exhibit intriguing affinities with debates emerging after the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Contemporaneously with Krochmal, Polish intellectuals wrestled with how to preserve and restore Polish nationhood without a state; such conversations intensified after the 1831 defeat of a Polish uprising in Russian-controlled territory bordering Galicia, with many authors (in ways perhaps resonating with Krochmal) linking national renewal to engagement with Polish texts, rather than military strength.^{Footnote 81}

What’s crucial now, though, is that Krochmal’s engagement with Mendelssohn appears in a new light. We saw that even as the Guide employs Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings on exegesis to explain how ancient Jews read the Bible, Krochmal implicitly holds that those texts fail to fully capture the extra-linguistic factors animating such exegesis. This indicates, first, that Krochmal takes Mendelssohn to have recovered a crucial element of Jewish politics. If the Guide's account of hermeneutics clarifies techniques by which ancient exegetes helped secure Jewish national renewal amid dispersion and powerlessness, and if the Guide derives its account of those techniques from Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings, then Krochmal takes his German-Jewish predecessor to have identified interpretive practices crucial to Jewish survival in certain political conditions. Yet Mendelssohn’s account is, from Krochmal’s perspective, inadequate. For the Guide’s author, even if Mendelssohn identified techniques vital to Jewish national survival, he failed to develop this point. Texts such as the Ecclesiastes commentary grasped ancient exegetes’ linguistic sensitivity, but for Krochmal this sensitivity must also be seen as part of the repertoire available to a collective seeking to “become a full nation” amid dispersion and subjugation; societal concerns appear elsewhere in Mendelssohn’s work, but rarely in connection with exegesis. Krochmal is thus engaged in a project of restoration and correction. Encountering an earlier account of Jewish exegesis, he seeks to restore the hermeneutical methods described to the political context in which they belong; taking “Moses the son of Menahem” to have come across a vital element of Jewish politics, Krochmal aims to retrieve this resource and reveal the centrality of exegesis to a nation confronting dispersion and military powerlessness.

This perspective extends to modernity. Corresponding with the Italian-Jewish intellectual Samuel David Luzzatto, Krochmal describes the Guide’s intended audience in emphatically diasporic terms, expressing hope that his words might “enter the heart and be accepted by the intellect of the Italian Jew and the eastern Jew, by the ears of the sages of Germany and the pious of the northern empire.”^{Footnote 82}The first task the Guide’s introduction assigns to this transnational network of readers is exegetical:

Urging his diasporic audience to properly date biblical writings,^{Footnote 84} Krochmal cites Psalm 137, which begins “by the rivers of Babylon … we sat, sat and wept, as we thought of Zion” (NJPS):

Insisting that Psalm 137 was composed after the First Temple’s destruction, Krochmal stresses that this perspective reveals the psalm’s role in national renewal: lamenting a catastrophic loss, this psalm strengthened ancient Jews’ commitment to their nation and its inheritances, reminding these individuals of their “limitless love for [their] land, people, and God.” But Krochmal also envisions the psalm having a similar impact in his own era. He states that the psalm’s effect in its original context can also emerge from a historically sensitive reading in “this modern generation”: by highlighting an earlier case of national renewal, this reading might arouse “trust” and “hope” regarding the possibility of revival and thus inspire modern Jews to pursue similar endeavors. Indeed, Krochmal hints that his era may be one of potential renewal,^{Footnote 86} and his description of this psalm’s modern impact echoes language he uses to describe national growth.^{Footnote 87}

Far from relegating the political relevance of biblical exegesis to the past, then, Krochmal reimagines this relevance for the present. He suggests that a historical hermeneutic can be politically significant, revealing earlier cases of national renewal and inspiring similar projects in modernity: the diasporic Jewish collective that has sustained itself by endeavors such as midrash should now be renewed by a transnational project of historically sensitive exegesis.

Modern Jewish Thought

Already, then, recovering Krochmal has opened up a richer story about Jewish thought, revealing that one of modern Jewish philosophy’s early episodes is a politically charged engagement with biblical exegesis. Discovering in Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings on hermeneutics the core of an undeveloped political vision, Krochmal draws on those texts to restore biblical interpretation to what he sees as its proper place at the heart of Jewish politics.

Future scholarship might explore Krochmal’s long-debated relationship to Zionism^{Footnote 88} and relevance for diasporic politics.^{Footnote 89} For now, though, I return to my opening topic: trajectories of Jewish thought across eastern and western Europe.

As I noted, recent studies typically emphasize either striking differences or surprising affinities across these settings. However, while both narratives are important, Krochmal suggests another possibility. His engagement with Mendelssohn cannot be described primarily in terms of eastern European-German affinities. Even as Krochmal draws on Mendelssohn, he breaks with his predecessor’s hermeneutics, locating exegesis against a sociopolitical backdrop absent from texts such as 'Or Lanetibah and the Ecclesiastes commentary (and connected to hermeneutics only rarely, and in a different form, elsewhere in Mendelssohn’s writings).

Moreover, the political vision that Krochmal constructs by using Mendelssohn differs considerably from the German-Jewish thinker’s own politics. Living in a Galician context where attempts to integrate Jews more fully into the body politic had largely stalled after Joseph II’s death (and perhaps resonating with broader Polish conversations about nationhood), Krochmal theorizes the mechanisms by which Jews constitute themselves as a collective that transcends the boundaries between non-Jewish states while remaining separate from those entities. His is a transnational collective that incorporates both “the Italian Jew and the eastern Jew,” both “the sages of Germany and the pious of the northern empire,” but that pursues exegetical endeavors which render its survival independent of the fate that befalls surrounding polities.

This is not Mendelssohn’s political program. He, too, describes Jews as a diasporic, transnational collective whose members remain distinct from their non-Jewish neighbors: he stresses that Jews are widely scattered^{Footnote 90} and possess distinctive laws (yielding benefits such as the preservation of monotheism).^{Footnote 91} Yet Mendelssohn and Krochmal disagree about the place of this diasporic Jewish group in the modern world. Whereas Krochmal turns to exegesis to construct a transnational entity whose fate is separate from that of non-Jewish polities, Mendelssohn argues that members of this distinctive collective can also be committed participants in non-Jewish societies. Living in a Prussian setting with vigorous debates about Jewish civic inclusion,^{Footnote 92} Mendelssohn urges the state to begin treating Jews as “citizens and enlisting into its service the many hands and heads born for its service,”^{Footnote 93} and he expresses hope that non-Jews might “unite with us as citizens” even “as we are outwardly distinguished from you by the ceremonial law.”^{Footnote 94} He offers a similar vision to Jewish readers:

The Mendelssohnian resource Krochmal utilizes to develop his argument about national separation may itself be part of the German-Jewish thinker’s case for civic inclusion. On one reading, Mendelssohn’s account of Jewish exegesis and its strengths serves to show that Judaism merits acceptance by states committed to tolerance.^{Footnote 96}

Yet Krochmal’s engagement with Mendelssohn is more than another instance of rupture. Krochmal breaks with Mendelssohn, but he does so on the basis of resources provided by Mendelssohn himself. Mendelssohn’s account of exegesis allows Krochmal to generate his non-Mendelssohnian position; Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings allow Krochmal to articulate an exegetico-political vision absent from those texts. What we have, therefore, is neither primarily a story of rupture nor primarily a story of affinity, but rather an instance of repurposing and redirection: an eastern European thinker drawing on a German-Jewish predecessor to develop a sharply contrasting philosophical vision. My recovery of Krochmal’s voice thus contributes to broader conversations about Jewish modernity, complementing—but also complicating—an emerging constellation of narratives about eastern and western European visions of Jewish life. While there are cases where we should emphasize differences and cases where we should stress affinities, we should also be attentive to a strategy of creative appropriation and redirection.^{Footnote 97} An eastern European thinker such as Krochmal could break with the German-Jewish philosophical tradition precisely by deploying that tradition’s own resources.