Nathan from a Jewish Point of View

The first and probably best known of those Jewish reactions to Lessing’s theological provocations was Moses Mendelssohn’s own blunt rejection of the idea of religious progress, as expressed in his major work, Jerusalem, published only two years after Lessing’s death.^{Footnote 20} There is an evident resemblance between Lessing’s idea of a progressive moral education of humanity and the concept of at least the non-apocalyptic, rational, Maimonidean form of Jewish Messianism.^{Footnote 21} Mendelssohn, however, seems to be unaware of this. “I, for my part, have no concept of the education of the human race,” he wrote in 1783—and the Jewish philosopher could not conceive of how his “esteemed late friend Lessing” had come up with such peculiar ideas. Mendelssohn thought that human progress was only possible for the individual over the course of a single earthly life and that “the purpose of Providence does not appear to me to have been for humankind as a whole to advance itself perpetually here on earth, perfecting itself over the course of time.”^{Footnote 22} Mendelssohn consequently refuted the idea of a personal messiah miraculously and unexpectedly redeeming humankind. Human salvation must be conditioned on accepting the laws of reason, using common sense.^{Footnote 23}

Some fifty years after both thinkers’ deaths, Reform Jewish theology, as developed within the framework of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, rediscovered the messiah as an essential part of the Jewish contribution to the development of the universal religious idea, as those theologians saw it.^{Footnote 24}Wissenschaft des Judentums was an intellectual movement founded in the 1820s in Berlin, which, for the first time in Jewish history aimed to approach the entire corpus of the religious literature of Judaism with scientific tools and methodology. It was deeply rooted in the revolutionary paradigm shift that took place during the first half of the nineteenth century—with the introduction of the critical, empirical, and inductive method of research and with specialized, university-trained experts replacing the aristocratic polymath.^{Footnote 25}

In the wake of Hegel, the concept of intellectual development took on salience in the philosophy of religion. Accordingly, most first-generation Reform theologians rejected Mendelssohn’s view of an enlightened Judaism wherein law and reason are two completely separate, static categories.^{Footnote 26} Some of these thinkers, as we will see, turned to Lessing’s dynamic theology of progress instead.^{Footnote 27} This implicit rejection of the (at first sight) likelier identification with Hegel’s philosophy of history is probably surprising, but it may find its explanation in the intrinsically Christian nature of Hegel’s thought. While indeed some important nineteenth-century Jewish theologians turned to Hegel in their attempt to modernize Judaism, most of these approaches ultimately failed because decisive aspects of Hegel’s deterministic philosophy of ethical realism would not find expression in traditional Jewish thought.^{Footnote 28} Especially the incarnation of Hegel’s Weltgeist, closely connected with his belief in the rationality of the ontological being, instead of a transcendently commanded ought, made it difficult for Hegel’s Jewish students to incorporate his ideas into Judaism. Contrary to all forms of Hegelianism, salvational progress in Judaism is not asserted because of natural or actual inevitability, but in spite of historical irrationality. It is the fully transcendent God of the Hebrew Bible who represents the moral good and the demand for humans to achieve it, and not any historical reality. Jewish salvation is an imperative, the more categorical for its empirical failures. In addition, most Jewish theologians of the nineteenth century explicitly emphasized what they perceived as Judaism’s fundamental differences from Christianity, a perfect example of which is future messianic hope.^{Footnote 29} The perfection and ultimate redemption of humankind was often viewed by Judaism, from talmudic times on, as an event that was infinitely approached rather than practically achieved—and German Reform theology further expanded this idea. Here, Lessing’s emphasis on the infinite, progressive search for religious truth seemed to serve Judaism’s theological interests much better.^{Footnote 30}

Contrary to Hegel, for many Jewish Wissenschaft scholars of nineteenth-century Germany, Lessing also remained the ultimate proponent of the idea that humanist ethics stand high above all positive religions. Most Jewish debates about Lessing during the nineteenth century turned on the question of religious tolerance and the relation between Judaism and Christianity.^{Footnote 31} I will mention a few among many examples of arguments about Nathan that are connected to theological questions before engaging with the impact of Lessing’s actual theology on Reform Jewish thought. In theological terms, the nineteenth century saw a widespread conviction among educated German Jews that Judaism stood far above half-pagan Christianity, a religion that adopted all its positive values from her Jewish mother.^{Footnote 32} With this modern sense of Jewish pride, Nathan was seen—for example, by Rabbi Dr. Abraham Meyer Goldschmidt of Leipzig (1812–1889)—specifically not as a call for the leveling of religious differences, as many understood the play’s message.^{Footnote 33} Goldschmidt argued that this standard reading of Lessing’s play countered the idea of religious progress in history, as found in Lessing’s Education of the Human Race, written only shortly after Nathan. Lessing at least suspended the question of “the most progressive religion,” Goldschmidt claimed in 1860, and left it for the future to decide, “in the same way as he approached this subject in the Education of the Human Race.” The idea of tolerance in Lessing, per Goldschmidt, is one of interhuman love, which still leaves room for a future decision about the “true religion.”^{Footnote 34}

In July 1867, Rabbi Ludwig Philippson, editor of the popular and influential Allgemeine Zeitung des Judentums, published in his paper a self-written editorial about Nathan that cited at length an open critique of the play. Titled Nathan from a Jewish Point of View, the critical letter was authored by Moritz Ehrentheil of Raab, Hungary (1825–1894).^{Footnote 35} If Lessing intended with Nathan to pen a plea for the sake of Judaism, he utterly failed, Ehrentheil wrote in his letter to the editor. With regard to the historical succession of Judaism and Christianity, Ehrentheil argued that “he who cannot tell the original apart from the copy certainly does not want to know the truth.” It is rather obvious that the entire parable of the rings “aims at a negation of all positive religions.” Such a negation might be to the political advantage of modern Jewry, Ehrentheil concluded, but it is to the incalculable disadvantage of Judaism, because no religious tolerance must be bought for the very price of Judaism itself.^{Footnote 36}

Philippson’s editorial sets out to refute Ehrentheil point for point, claiming that Ehrentheil’s critique is actually not directed against Lessing or Nathan but against modern Jewish indifference toward religion. Of course, one cannot say that all three monotheistic religions possessed equal authenticity and validity, Philippson conceded. Judaism is not an imitated (nachgeahmt) ring, as the two other religions are. Indeed, this is also the main line of argument in Philippson’s own theological approach to Judaism, published about this time in a major three-volume work.^{Footnote 37} In fact, the rise of the Christian religion is understood by Philippson as, at best, an “indispensable error of world history,” as he once quipped.^{Footnote 38} In his editorial response to Ehrentheil, he argues (like Goldschmidt before him) that, in the metaphysical discussion of religious doctrines, Lessing was “definitely not willing to give an ultimate (endgiltig) answer.” For Philippson, too, Lessing was not pleading for Judaism specifically, nor for any other religion, but against persecution and intolerance in the name of religion, and for brotherly love. However, Lessing does not deny, Philippson added, that a time will come when truth concerning religious doctrine will be obvious to all humankind and “the originality of one ring will become manifest.”^{Footnote 39}

Progressive Revelation in the Education

While this use of Lessing’s Nathan as a paradigm in theological debates was a trend in the Wissenschaft des Judentums circles in nineteenth-century Germany, only a handful of thinkers turned to the Education of the Human Race for the same purposes, despite the latter work’s offering a useful and progressive model for a modern Jewish theology. One of the few Jews to refer to the Education was Gabriel Riesser (1806–1863), a lawyer, judge, and politician and a prominent member of the board of the Hamburg Reform Temple. After the turmoil of revolution and war around the beginning of the nineteenth century, until the 1830s nobody even knew the location of Lessing’s grave. Only in 1833 did the art historian Carl Schiller (1807–1874) find the gravesite, and, four years later, Schiller and other Braunschweig dignitaries published a call to raise money for the erecting of a statue of Lessing in the town where the author had long lived. One of the first to reply to the call was Riesser, who in that same year (1837) published a booklet called A Few Words about the Lessing Monument to the Israelites of Germany, donating all the proceeds to the statue project.^{Footnote 40} Riesser, who was a standard-bearer of Jewish emancipation and civil equality, formulated in this essay an outright manifesto of modern Judaism—surprisingly, with none other than Lessing as a pivotal point of reference. Several key elements of Reform theology, such as the mission and the vocation of Judaism as a decisive contributor to world culture and civilization, are found in Riesser’s essay, alongside the important claim that a radical modernization of Judaism comes to the rescue and not to the detriment of the Jewish religion.^{Footnote 41}

According to Riesser, Lessing’s most valuable contribution to theology was his intransigent advocacy of the freedom of conscience and belief. Lessing’s view that “a holy urge for truth” is even more important than the eventually discovered truths themselves was a direct consequence of his lifelong theological thought and struggles.^{Footnote 42} For Lessing, only “the striving for religious truth” is undiluted, because it is still unclouded by religious dogma, untouched by the corrupt coercion of theological allowances. That is why, Riesser pointed out, Lessing sometimes disconcertingly came to the defense even of the most orthodox opponents of rationalism: freedom of opinion and argument was more important than truth itself, for truth is dynamic and needs unrestricted room for its progressive development. For this reason, Lessing respected every honest conscientious belief, rejecting only hypocrisy.^{Footnote 43}

This observation helped Riesser to appreciate Lessing’s personal example, which was crucial for Riesser’s own commitment to Judaism, as he indicated. For, as much as Lessing was attacked by his Protestant coreligionists, he never abandoned his own Protestantism. It probably was no coincidence that the same was true of Mendelssohn and his Judaism.^{Footnote 44} Riesser emphasized that Lessing knew as well as Mendelssohn about “the deficiencies and prejudices prevailing in the Judaism of their time,” and still Lessing was outraged (entrüstet) by all attempts to lure his Jewish friend over to Christianity. Lessing respected Mendelssohn’s critical but positive approach to Judaism as it was very similar to how Lessing himself related to his own religion.^{Footnote 45} Conversion to Christianity should be no option for the modern Jew, Riesser seems to imply here. Although Riesser’s essay is mainly a diatribe against those of his “enlightened” Christian contemporaries who saw the Jews’ abandoning of their “superstitious” tradition as a precondition for emancipation, it can also be read as a Jewish declaration that civil rights for the Jews ought not to be bought at the price of religious reforms but, rather, granted as self-evident.

After an extensive discussion of Nathan, Riesser drew from the play several conclusions concerning Judaism—conclusions that Lessing himself was still “not allowed to express.”^{Footnote 46} In Riesser’s Jewish reading, it was Lessing’s hidden message with Nathan that the long centuries of historical Jewish suffering, as a consequence of persecution and injustice, were not in vain but “served the higher purpose of humanity” itself. Interestingly, this complex theodicy concept, here attributed to Lessing, is common Jewish lore, found in writers from Rashi (1040–1105) to Hermann Cohen (1842–1918): “All of the nations gain atonement through the afflictions of Israel,” to quote a comment of Rashi’s on a verse in Isaiah.^{Footnote 47} But this historical theodicy is often based, Riesser explained, on the idea that only one religion could possess the absolute, unchangeable, and dogmatic truth, for which its believers are happily ready to suffer. In Riesser’s view, Lessing’s theory of religion is different, though it still provides a satisfying purpose for Jewish suffering in history. In the Education of the Human Race, Lessing gave “the most dignified expression” to the idea that all positive religions are important, but mere preliminary stages, “in the molding of a God-pleasing humanity”—which is to say, for Lessing, all religions represent only a striving for truth, not the fulfillment of it. A ruling majority religion, however, is easily inclined to attribute to itself the greatest contribution to this ultimate purpose of humanity and would thus soon neglect all striving and progress “in conceited self-idolization,” Riesser argued, still in the name of the “silent” Lessing. The despised minority, by contrast, suffers precisely because of the resulting spiritual obliquity and stagnation. Riesser concluded his esoteric interpretation of Lessing’s ideas by combining his reading of Nathan and the Education: The progressive revelation of new religious insights will necessarily come specifically from minority religions. This is because such insights “are suggested to the repressed minority by their very suffering,” while for the oppressor it would take too much self-mastery to arrive at the same opinions.^{Footnote 48}

This “higher vocation” of the minority, supposedly learned from Lessing, should sustain and raise his fellow Jews, Riesser insisted. The Jewish awareness of having this mission for the ultimate purposes of all of humanity “must be dear and holy to us.” More than any other religion, Judaism, with its inherent faith that truth is universal (“the possession of all mankind and confessions”), dialectically combined with its religious belief the conviction that it is the Jew’s duty “to be inseparably bound by this very belief to the community of his brothers in faith and suffering.” Hence, Judaism must cling to the thought “that we courageously persevere for the cause of humanity.” According to Riesser and many of his successors in the formulation of a Reform theology, it is Judaism’s self-sustaining religious mission to “perpetually raise objections against the falsification of truth”—objections formulated in the interest of one absolute truth, which, for Lessing, was nothing but “the pure striving for truth.” It is in this sense that Lessing secretly intended to award the Jews “a world-historical retribution” (weltgeschichtliche Vergeltung) for their suffering, Riesser exclaimed at the end of the essay, because Lessing believed that the Jews have “a more intimate relation to the idea of humanity.”^{Footnote 49} How much of this conclusion is borne of Riesser’s own, modern interpretation of Judaism and to what extent he discerned Lessing’s true intentions remains to be discussed. In any case, this attempt to invoke Lessing’s theology for the support of a universal mission of the Jewish religion is interesting in itself.

Not surprisingly, Abraham Geiger (1810–1874), one of the rabbinical leaders of the Reform movement, interpreted the message of Lessing’s theological thought in a similar way to Riesser, identifying strongly with Lessing’s perceived call to the religious minority to overcome oppression through theological intellectual creativity.^{Footnote 50} Already in 1844, Geiger had enthusiastically referred to Lessing’s Education in his polemical reply to Bruno Bauer’s anti-Semitic pamphlet Die Judenfrage (1842).^{Footnote 51} Later, in 1862, in a short appeal to raise money for another monument of Lessing, this time in Berlin, Geiger wrote that the “obligation for self-preservation” is the central motive that must draw the Jew to Lessing’s ideas. As the smallest of the three monotheistic religions, Judaism can only survive through “inner freedom, the spiritual energy of its believers.” If Judaism is not “constantly progressing on a path of inner development,” Geiger argued, it will soon disappear—while the other two religions are temporarily safe through their relation to political power of the state. For this progress, this eternal striving for truth, Judaism has a “courageous guide in Lessing.”^{Footnote 52} Evidently, Geiger, as others, saw in Lessing’s thought not the oft-suggested intention to negate Judaism, or positive religion in general, but rather the contrary: It was Lessing, in Geiger’s view, who taught the Jews how to persevere even in the modern age. Like Riesser, Geiger seemed to argue that if Jewish thought were to adopt Lessing’s model of progressively revealed truth, which was in many respects also Geiger’s own way of thinking about revelation, Judaism would not be superseded by Christianity; rather, it would have a better chance of becoming the true religion of the future, for Christianity had become increasingly corrupt through its alliance with state and political power.^{Footnote 53}

Lessing as the “Founding Father of the Reformation of Judaism”

Geiger’s defense of Judaism against Bruno Bauer from 1844 introduced into the Jewish reception of Lessing a new element: the clear preference that Lessing enjoyed with some Reform theologians over his friend Moses Mendelssohn. It was in fact Lessing who first strictly separated religious orthodoxy from philosophy, Geiger wrote (with reference to a letter from Lessing in 1774), and not Mendelssohn, as widely assumed. Lessing originally feared that confusing religion and philosophy would lead to the “defilement” (Verunreinigung) of both and consequently insisted that every attempt to create a religion of reason would result in a very unreasonable philosophy, Geiger argued.^{Footnote 54} And while Mendelssohn later followed Lessing here, and while both theologians, therefore, explicitly defended even some irrational elements of orthodox belief and practice, Lessing soon understood that such a separation was actually impossible to implement. According to Geiger, this was because Lessing had now realized that “the entire intellectual and spiritual life must progress by way of homogeneous development and by way of mutual influence of all of its parts”—a position that Geiger’s own Reform theology obviously shared.^{Footnote 55} Unwilling to retain irrational Jewish ceremonies, Geiger always favored a historical-critical approach to the progressive development, as he saw it, of the countless legal regulations of biblical and talmudic Judaism.^{Footnote 56}

An even more outspoken account of Lessing’s important contribution to the shaping of a modern Jewish theology can be found in the thought of the historian Immanuel Heinrich Ritter (1825–1890). Ritter was a radical Reformer who, in 1860, replaced Samuel Holdheim as the rabbi of the Berlin Reformgenossenschaft, one of the most controversial Reform communities in nineteenth-century Germany.^{Footnote 57} From 1858 to 1865, Ritter published three volumes of an intellectual history of the Reform movement of Judaism, the first of which bears the surprising title, Mendelssohn and Lessing as the Founding Fathers of the Reformation of Judaism.^{Footnote 58} But indeed, for Ritter, Lessing’s share in the origin of the ideas of a reformed Judaism was at least as important as Mendelssohn’s—and actually even greater. It was Lessing, not Mendelssohn, who “found the right starting point” from which a reformation could hold its ground, Ritter claimed already in the preface to this volume.^{Footnote 59} Lessing, despite being Christian, could be considered one of the “main participants in the founding of the Jewish reformation” (Hauptteilnehmer am Begründungswerke der jüdischen Reformation) because his “description of Judaism’s relation to the question of religion in general was a template that later began to become reality through the work of the Jewish reformers—and towards the completion of which we are still working.”^{Footnote 60}

All progress in Christian and in Jewish theology since Lessing has drawn upon Lessing himself, Ritter argued. The most momentous idea in Lessing’s theological approach was the absence of all presuppositions—because only on this basis could religions other than one’s own be viewed objectively. Lessing’s approach became an asset of Reform Jewish theology early on, Ritter explained, with the consequence of opening up the possibility for Judaism to receive from Christianity a “happily accepted enrichment.” Freed from its own dogmatic presuppositions, Jewish theology could close the gap with its Christian counterpart, and, indeed, Jewish thought quickly reached the heights of Christian theological research. If there had ever been a historical reason for Christian gratitude toward the theological achievements of biblical Judaism, Ritter concluded, it was Lessing who had ultimately paid off this debt with his writings on religion.^{Footnote 61}

Entering upon a lengthy comparison between Mendelssohn and Lessing, Ritter held that, as much as Mendelssohn’s philosophy of Judaism was disappointing for the modern European Jew, Lessing’s account of religion was motivating and eye-opening. The most frustrating aspect of Mendelssohn’s theory for Ritter was that “one feels nowhere compensated” for the enlightened transformation of Jewish belief that we are expected by Mendelssohn to comprehend. His most influential—albeit generally rejected—theory of Jewish belief was that Judaism knew no articles of faith (Glaubenslehren) but only revealed legislation (geoffenbartes Gesetz).^{Footnote 62} Following Mendelssohn, Ritter complained, the modern Jew is thus no longer set apart by the particularity of his religious knowledge (Erkenntnis), yet he is still “hindered from entering humanity by a particular [ritual] law.” Lessing, in contrast to Mendelssohn, abandoned all dogma: He was “impressed neither by Mount Sinai nor by the Mount of Olives.” For Lessing, reason is constrained neither by revelation nor by law. Mendelssohn, Ritter wrote, begins with the attempt “to faithfully accept all that his religion dictated” and ends with calling everything into doubt. Lessing, for his part, begins with raising doubts about everything and eventually ends with faith—and this faith is all the stronger for being rooted not in the lowly letter but in human reason and passion.^{Footnote 63}

What Ritter presented here as Lessing’s theological program is the very approach to a modernization of the Jewish religion that his own Reform movement attempted half a century after Lessing: “A reconciliation with traditional belief, which just needs to be stripped of (entkleiden) its original, dogmatic features in order to find it again reasonable and meaningful.” Lessing’s criticism of religion is fertile and productive, Ritter wrote. Using it today, the result is not that one piece after the other of the old religion sadly disappears, as with the “insipid Enlighteners,” but precisely the opposite: one old religious concept after the other is happily reborn, in a youthful, fresh shape.^{Footnote 64} Like Ritter, many of the first-generation Reform rabbis believed that true reform was, in fact, a return to ancient and authentic Judaism, that reform must be based on traditional Jewish sources, and that it should only introduce changes that reflect the spiritual essence of Jewish concepts as abstracted from the thick, now-useless historical shells.^{Footnote 65}

Ritter was particularly impressed by Lessing’s undogmatic reading of the Bible. Religion is not true because it was taught by the apostles and the evangelists, he summarized Lessing’s view, “but they taught it because it was true.” This axiom could easily be adopted for Judaism, Ritter suggested; one need only replace apostles and evangelists with prophets and lawgiver.^{Footnote 66} Lessing’s radical criticism of traditional Judaism in the Education of the Human Race has become, in every single detail, “of the most influential importance” for the inner reformation of Jewish thinking but, at the same time, objectively, for the reformation of Judaism itself, Ritter claimed boldly.^{Footnote 67} What Lessing had described as the mistaken method of the rabbis in interpreting the Torah, that is, “to insert into it more than is really there in it, and extract from it more than it can contain,” was precisely what Reform theology came to rectify.^{Footnote 68} Here, again, Ritter clearly tried to dissociate Reform from the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment—because it was not a universal Religion of Reason that was the purpose of his attempt to reform Judaism but a new, albeit reasonable, viable, and living form of the old Jewish faith.^{Footnote 69}

Critique “for the Honor of Lessing”

Unlike the Reformers, the “positive-historical” stream of Judaism (which would later develop into what is today Conservative Judaism) was highly critical of Lessing’s theology in the Education of the Human Race—despite the fact that many of the adherents of this stream admired the ideas found in Nathan the Wise.^{Footnote 70} The above-mentioned historian, Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891), for example, in his typical anti-Christian fervor, insisted that the play “castigated fossilized and paranoid (verfolgungssüchtig) Christianity” while glorifying Judaism, at least concerning Judaism’s main representative in the work.^{Footnote 71} But when it comes to the Education, Graetz’s almost unrestricted admiration for Lessing suffered its first crack. In his account of Lessing’s thought, stretching over seven full pages of the last volume (1870) of his landmark History of the Jews, Graetz arguably appears as the greatest Jewish Lessing-enthusiast of the nineteenth century, calling him nothing less than “the first free man of Germany.”^{Footnote 72} Had only Lessing taken his own anti-Lutheranism seriously, Graetz daringly averred, he would have been able “to overthrow the entire edifice” of Christianity—an event that apparently would have been much to Graetz’s liking. But, unfortunately, Lessing was biased toward “the deception that pure Christianity was identical with humanity” (in der Täuschung befangen).^{Footnote 73} Clearly, Graetz found the source for Lessing’s “deception” in the Education, where humanist Christianity superseded Judaism, and not in Nathan, with its central idea of religious tolerance. As Graetz was not even ready to accept the human value of “pure,” ahistorical Christianity, he was forced to reject the theology of the Education as mistaken ab initio. Such harsh judgment, however, only follows from Graetz’s lack of appreciation of any Christian contribution to general culture. For example, even medieval Christian scholasticism “is but a daughter of Judaism,” as he wrote elsewhere, drawing heavy criticism especially from Catholic historians.^{Footnote 74}

The young Jewish Wissenschaft scholar on whose research from the 1860s Graetz had based this last-mentioned claim concerning scholasticism was Manuel Joel (1826–1890). Joel, a graduate of the University of Berlin, taught religious philosophy at the Breslau rabbinical seminary where Graetz also had been working and living since 1854.^{Footnote 75} In 1879, now officiating as the rabbi of the town of Breslau (as the successor of Abraham Geiger), Joel rejected the same radical argument in Lessing’s Education of the Human Race that was wholeheartedly endorsed by his Reform colleague Immanuel Ritter, as we saw above: the supposedly flawed interpretation of the Hebrew Bible by the talmudic rabbis.^{Footnote 76} For Joel, Lessing’s critique of the rabbis was based on an ahistorical reading. Ironically, Joel’s critical response to Lessing appeared in the voluminous Lessing-Mendelssohn-Gedenkbuch (memorial book), published by the Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeindebund (an umbrella organization for the Jewish communities in Germany). Among all the contributors to the Gedenkbuch, Joel was the only one to memorialize Lessing by critiquing him. But the criticism belied his reverence for Lessing, as Joel explained, for “to dispel a prejudice means to work in the spirit of Lessing.”^{Footnote 77}

Once again, Joel’s leveraging of Lessing clearly indicates the perceived currency and relevance of Lessing’s thought for nineteenth-century Jewish theologians—independent of the question of whether Lessing himself had intended to impact discussions of some highly specific aspects of Judaism’s religious worldviews. In this case, the short essay is a (thus-far untouched) document depicting a modern, liberal rabbinical approach to the talmudic exegesis of the Pentateuch, that is, to the very validity of the biblical foundation of practical Jewish law. At the time of Joel’s writing, this subject already had a certain history in modern Jewish thought: In 1844, Abraham Geiger published a groundbreaking and highly controversial article on the “turbidity” of this far-reaching legal justification, as he called it. Geiger’s basic claim concerning the talmudic rabbis is that, in an effort to create a scriptural basis for their own extra-scriptural law, they distorted the literal meaning of the Bible through turbid exegesis. Yet, these sages truly believed, said Geiger, that this law indeed emerged logically from their interpretation of certain anomalies in the biblical language. In his view, the talmudic rabbis thus imparted to their own law both infinite validity and divine authority that it did not deserve—thereby suppressing the flexibility and adaptability to time and place that the earlier strata of “oral” law still possessed. This adaptability is still found in the Mishnah, according to Geiger, the first code of rabbinical law, apparently dating from the second century.^{Footnote 78}

Inspired by Lessing’s attack on the rabbis in the Education concerning this point, Manuel Joel essentially affirmed Geiger’s view.^{Footnote 79} Nobody would call the talmudic exegeses “exemplary” today, he wrote, thereby dauntlessly ignoring large numbers of Orthodox rabbis of his time, who still saw the Talmud as relevant. Lessing’s error was rather, according to Joel, that he did not take into consideration what historically motivated the rabbis to interpret Scripture the odd way they did. “The abuse of the Bible begins in Alexandria, not in Palestine,” Joel wrote, introducing his argument. It was the Hellenistic philosopher Philo (first century CE) and his school of Greek-speaking Jewish scholars who, because of their ignorance of both the Hebrew language and the subtleties of Jewish thought (especially concerning prophecy), had left the path of a sober, pedestrian reading of the Pentateuch and had given themselves over to the wildest allegorical interpretations. At the very same time, in Palestine, the style and language of the Mishnah proved how prosaically the rabbis could proceed in scriptural exegesis, Joel—like Geiger before him—explains.^{Footnote 80}

Outright “whimsical” (wunderlich) rabbinical exegesis only came with Akiva ben Joseph (50/55–135) and his well-known way of “expounding a multitude of laws upon each stroke of the coronets” that sit on the letters of the Torah.^{Footnote 81} But even here, contended Joel, Lessing was wrong to place upon Rabbi Akiva’s school the full onus of historical blame. Already Jesus had spoken of the Yod (ἰῶτα), the famous “stroke of a pen” as not disappearing from the Law,^{Footnote 82} and the early Christian scholar Origen (third century) was faithful to that message when he read hidden secrets into all those small strokes, as Joel reminded his readers.^{Footnote 83} Akiva and his followers were forced by historical necessity to fall back on an exegetical method that retrieved rabbinical law from the authority of Scripture while in true fact it was rather “tradition and daily life” that had made all these laws valid in Israel.^{Footnote 84} According to Joel, as a defense of authentic, legal Judaism against the onslaughts of the Septuagint, Akiva had to pretend that the entire “oral Torah” was contained in the written Torah. Joel accused the Septuagint of “falsifying and exegetically abusing” Scripture to the point of causing “devastating effects also in Palestine” by talmudic times.^{Footnote 85} In order to minimize its influence, Joel argued, Rabbi Akiva had to bring extreme measures into play.

Now, it was exactly these exegetical measures that Lessing (and Geiger, for that matter) had characterized as exaggerated, and probably justly so, Joel wrote. However, applying Lessing’s own method of historical analysis would put these hyperbolical rabbinical techniques in a yet slightly different light. It would have shown, Joel seems to indicate here, that at least Rabbi Akiva did not truly ascribe to the logical validity of his own exegesis. But actually, the old question of whether the talmudic rabbis themselves took seriously their scriptural exegesis or whether, “it was but a mnemotechnical approach to the Torah,” as Joel thought—this medieval question was not decisive for Joel. The real exegetical question was not about honesty but about the defense of Judaism against the Hellenistic allegorizing of the divine law.^{Footnote 86}

In his summary, Joel’s anti-Christian sallies and Jewish pride come directly to the fore. Had Lessing only known the talmudic rabbis as well as he knew the church fathers, he would not have participated in “the customary disregard for the achievements of the rabbis.”^{Footnote 87} Why condemn the rabbis for deviating from the literal sense of the Bible, Joel asked, when the same dubious method of exegesis is explained historically to everybody’s satisfaction in the church fathers? Interestingly, as a modern scholar of Judaism, Joel has such high regard for Lessing’s model of theological progress that he himself falls into the trap of anachronism: He seems to ignore that, in Lessing’s time, half a century prior to Reform Judaism, the legal results of talmudic exegesis of the Torah still held full authority within Judaism. A hundred years before Joel’s own writing, talmudic exegesis was considered timelessly sacrosanct among almost all Jews—as it continues to be in many Orthodox circles today—at least as a legal fiction, and its fruits are the inevitable starting point for all Jewish adjudication. But this is not central to the present study. What is crucial, however, is that Joel understood his critique to be working “for the honor of Lessing,” as his title has it. For Joel, Lessing would have remained even truer to his revolutionary progressive theology had he not attacked the talmudic rabbis. Whatever the merit of this claim, thereby Joel, too, implicitly integrated Lessing’s thought into his own version of liberal and historical-critical Judaism.