Erich Unger Der Universalismus Des Hebraertums

TheJournal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Vol. 4, pp.
271-314 © 1995
Reprints available directly from the publisher.
Photocopying permitted by license only
Erich Unger's "Der Universalismus

des Hebraertums"
Translated by Esther J. Ehrman
Introduction
Erich Unger, a leading intellectual in Berlin after World War I, can be seen
as a European philosopher conscious of the Judaic dimension in Western
thought. His writings show that he responded to many varied philosophical
trends around him, to Nietzsche in Germany, to Levy-Bruhl and to Sartre
in France, to the logical positivists in England. His own thinking, however,
retained certain pivotal anchors, some of which he had developed together
with his friend and one time mentor, Oskar Goldberg.
Unger looked to philosophy to reach out into areas beyond the scope of
reason, using the cognitive function called "imagination." Strictly disciplined
and guided by reason, a "rational mysticism" might apprehend laws of the
universe, principles, values and being in that universe. He thought it impor-
tant to examine this sphere and to discover how it relates to the empirical
world, the world of physics and, especially, to the biological forces of the
world. It was equally vital to him to study the ethical significance of
the relation of the empirical world to that other, the extended natural (not a
supernal) world. At the same time, Unger was working on formulations of
what he saw as the inclusiveness of philosophical truths. Thus, equal value
cannot be accorded to every principle simply because it exists, though a
principle cannot be denied existence simply because it does not fit into
a particular vision. Readers will find echoes of such ideas below;
In Berlin, Unger and Goldberg gathered about them a significant section
of the intelligentsia of the nineteen twenties. At weekly meetings, up to fifty
people would debate the latest developments in science, philosophy, litera-
ture or mathematics. Poets, journalists, writers in every field participated.
Among those who attended occasionally were Walter Benjamin and the
young Gershom Scholem. Here Benjamin heard Unger outline one of his
books, Politik und Metapf?ysik, and wrote to Scholem that, in his opinion, this
seemed to be "the most significant work on politics in our time." We know
from the Benjamin-Scholem correspondence that Benjamin had enlisted
Unger for his projected periodical, ''Angelus Novus." Benjamin and Unger
had much in common; Benjamin and Goldberg very little. Scholem had
received a personal rebuff from Goldberg---one that clearly offended him
271
272 Esther j Ehrman
bitterly since, some thirty years later he related how Goldberg had called
him a "Modephilosoph" (fashion philosopher). Here Scholem had the last
word, since it was he who wrote the entry on O. Goldberg in the Enryclope-
dia Judaica.
Unger's career came to an abrupt end with the advent of the Nazis. Then
in his forties, he understood the direction that events were taking in Ger-
many and left with his family in the summer of 1933, to lead the frustrating
life of an immigrant in France. Seeing the danger signals there in 1937, he
went on to England, where he died in 1950.
The essay that follows here is part of the ongoing confrontation between
Goldberg and Unger on the one hand and Scholem on the other. Scholem
had written a long letter about Goldberg and his ideas to Benjamin in 1928,
the year in which Scholem wrote his essay on Cardozo and Sabbateanism.
The letter was apparently passed around by Benjamin. A copy of it was in
Goldberg's hands; it is among his papers. Manfred Voigts, in his book, Oskar
Goldberg, der mythische Experimentalwissenschciftler (Berlin, 1992), which devotes
one chapter to Unger and one to the philosophical group in Berlin, suggests
that Unger's essay was written to provoke Scholem to a public discussion.
Biographical Note
M. Voigts has published an edition of Unger's Politik und Metapl!Jsik (Konigs-
hausen & Neumann, Wurzburg, 1989) with a fairly extensive bibliography,
also a collection of early essays by Unger, VOm Expressionismus zum A1ythos
des Hebraertums (Konigshausen & Neumann, Wurzburg, 1992) in which the
present essay "Der Universalismus des Hebraertums," probably written in
1929/30, appeared in print for the first time. The translation here is by
Unger's daughter, Dr. E. J. Ehrman.
Most particular thanks are due to Professor Elliot Wolfson for constant
and invaluable advice on making the somewhat intractable German text
accessible to the contemporary reader.
E. UNGER: Universalism in Hebraism
Philosopf?y and Kabbalah

The posltlon of O. Goldberg in The Reali!J r!f the Hebrews discussed in
response to The Theology r!f Sabbateanism as seen I!J Abraham Cardozo by G.
Scholem.
1. The Theology of Sabbateanism according to G. Scholem

In a special issue of Der Jude in honor of Martin Buber on his fiftieth birth-
day, G. Scholem evokes the religious mentality of Sabbateanism-the Messi-
anic movement of Jews of the seventeenth century. The conclusion to his
Der Universalismus des Hebraertums 273
remarks, attached by the author to the writings of Abraham Cardozo, is as

follows: Sabbateanism is a manifestation of a crisis in Judaism in the soil of
Kabbalah. The manifestation of this crisis is based or finds expression in a
form of antinomianism within the world and structured life of Judaism.
A brief elucidation of the term "antinomianism" is called for. The word
has become a technical term in the study of religion and as such denotes
"opposition to the laVl,"directed both against the general moral law and
against the more narrowly defined laVl,the Law in the Old Testament. With
these definitions in mind, historians of religion use the term to designate
the opposition to law characteristic of Christian Gnosis, the result of Chris-
tian annulment of Mosaic Law. The attitude of the new religion towards the
Law of the Old Testament and towards the moral law in general informed
the many widely different uses of the term antinomianism-thus, for
instance, in the so-called antinomian debate at the time of the Reformation,
the movement of Christian opposition to Gnosis that came to a head as a
belated consequence of these problems is frequently described as directed
against antinomianism. The differing uses of the term amply demonstrate
that the word, incidentally also employed when determining movements
within Christianity, cannot be used without qualification to designate the
antithesis: Judaism-non-Judaism.
The ambiguity in the concept antinomianism in Scholem's exposition
impels us to consider yet another meaning of the term, one that is not con-
nected with the technical term but associated with the more general mean-
ing of "antinomian"; it designates attitudes determined by antinomianism
that are not against law but express contradictions in juxtaposed legal norms,
principles, doctrines, antinomian in the ordinary sense of contradiction of
values-the antinomy. In this sense, antinomianism would designate an in-
tellectual stance that comprises contradictory tendencies, antinomies. In the
context of that section of the intellectual history of Judaism discussed by
Scholem, this second meaning is not essentially different from the first one.
The antinomianism, which in Scholem's analysis of Sabbateanism is seen as
so significant, the self-contradiction, the manifestation of a fundamental
duality, containing within itself an irreconcilable division, also includes the
specific sense of hostility to law, inasmuch as this law demands unity and
unambiguousness, which the Law of Judaism can be said to demand, condi-
tioned as it is to Oneness. Antinomianism, meaning cleavage and duality,
would thus at the same time designate hostility to law. Since the meaning of
antinomianism as "characterized by antinomies" seems to be more fruitful
for philosophy of religion and since, as has been said, this meaning encom-
passes the meaning "hostile to law" wherever, as here, claims to Oneness in
Jewish teaching are relevant, we will base the following analysis on the wider
meaning of antinomianism. We are encouraged to do so by the fact that a
number of characteristics stressed by the author in his explanatory account
of antinomianism, terms such as "paradox," "problematic," "in crisis," inner
tension leading to "explosion," lead one to suppose that, for him too, the
274 Estherj Ehrman
one meaning can replace the other, that in his considerations the notion of
duality also played a significant part, in short that he saw the two connota-
tions of antinomianism as intertwined. We have in no way sought to belittle
the reasoning of Scholem's paper or to simplify his arguments in a way that
might lay them open to easy refutation. This does not mean that such a
presentation would not be necessary as an essential chapter in a discussion
of a religious nature, in which one would need to clarify the meaning of the
phrase, "tending towards annulment if the laul'-the word "law" taken literal-
ly and without Karaite input. Let us now try to present the content of
Scholem's account in broad terms.
Antinomianism denoting a general duality, which characterizes the spiritual
content of this period and its religious understanding of Judaism, derives on
the one hand from the historical situation in which the Marranos (those
Jews forced to become apparent Christians while remaining Jews at heart)
found themselves; it also has its origins in specific contexts belonging to
"older" Kabbalah. The tension of this duality grew to be explosive in the
Sabbatean and Frankist movement and threatened to tear Judaism apart, the-
oretically and physically.
How did antinomianism manifest itself? First, in the mysticism of "early"
Kabbalah, articulated, we are told, in the book Temuna. This book divides
all of universal time into seven separate ages of the world, seven eons, in
each of which the Torah has a different meaning and is understood differ-
ently, proscribing differently and prescribing differently. Already here, in a
mystical way, an antinomian tendency endangers the unequivocal meaning
of the Torah. The seeds of just such a tendency to antinomianism which,
Scholem seems to believe, are to be found in the paradoxes of concepts
used by "early" Kabbalah to apprehend the relationship between the divin-
ity and its modes, the middot, expressed as the world of the sephirot. These
"inner" divine worlds and stages of being, the editor believes, originally
formed part of the domain of the divine itself The continuing web of kab-
balistic speculation led to such complex multiplicity that an overview was
unattainable; it also led to a series of infinite mystery worlds. This finally
distorted the living relationship with God and, in the end, forced religious
consciousness to decide whether to forgo all intelligible schematization of
the mysterium and apprehend it through the senses, or to separate this
world of mystic essences from the divinity very strictly and regain the con-
nection afresh with a simple theology.
Scholem finds the second of these possible approaches in the religious
system of Abraham Cardozo, one of the theoreticians of Sabbateanism, him-
self of Marrano descent. Scholem sees in the theology of Cardozo the full
expression of antinomianism, evident in every area of religion, in theology
(teaching about God), in the history of salvation, in Messianism and in
morality-the antinomianism that, as has been said, became historical dyna-
mite in Sabbateanism and Franksim and nearly exploded Judaism.
Antinomianism in Theology. In Cardozo's system, the simple oneness of the

divine being is replaced by a duality-in fact, a double duality. At one point,
"the first cause" of all things is differentiated from "the first to be caused."
Whereas the prima causa, since it has no immediate connection with cre-
ation, is not given any religious significance in Judaism, the primum causatum,
which emanated from the prima causa, is the God of Israel, the creator of
the universe. Heathens, Christians and Muslims revere the religiously irrele-
vant prima causa as the godhead. The concept "revelation" (though not it
alone) becomes a kind of criterion. Cognition of a prima causa requires no
revelation, since every primitive causal thinking demands and recognizes it.
The primum causatum can certainly not be known in an unredeemed world
without a revelation. Revelation is thus necessarily attributed to the primum
causatum, which is why the God of Israel is characterized as the God of
revelation. There is, however, a further duality in the nature of this God
of creation, a doubling that Cardozo designates as a dynamic unity, namely
the dynamic androgynous unity, comprising the God of creation and the
Shekhina. Antinomianism seems to be amply documented in these modifica-
tions of absolute oneness.
The antinomian components in Cardozo's presentation appear most
crudely, according to Scholem, in the "history of salvation," which essentially
consists of the recognition and nonrecognition of the primum causatum as the
God of Israel, his wrongful identification with the prima causa in the history
of exile and redemption. Clues lie hidden in the Zohar and in the Talmud,
placed there by the Sages before the genuine knowledge of God became
extinct. Hidden and revealed indications of the true God are supposedly to
be found in those very aggadoth in Talmud and Midrash that speak blasphe-
mously about God. Blasphemy and the godhead-that is one manifestation
of an antinomian approach; the other is the strange combination of under-
standing and mystery that reaches its greatest intensity in the person of the
Messiah.
Scholem sees the third and fullest form of antinomianism in Cardozo's
messianism, more specifically in his teaching on the fall (defection) of the
Messiah. The editor of this particular chapter of the history of religion sees
a hitherto latent antinomianism now stepping into the light and reaching a
crisis; he points out that Cardozo uses the basic concepts and nature of his
theology to justify the conversion of Sabbatai Zvi to Islam.
With his paradoxical interpretation of the Ephraimitic "suffering servant"
Messiah, Cardozo establishes a necessary connection between a characteris-
tic feature of the Messiah and offensive conduct. Scholem, who sees here
the end and emergence of the long hidden antinomianism (and the whole
ambiguous basis of "early" and Lutianic Kabbalah), explains that the relatively
weak dialectic of the Judaism of that time in the face of the conclusions of
the advocatus diaboli was present in the true missionary thinking of Judaism
and even in its messianism. Such thinking includes the possibility that the
276 EstherJ Ehrman
Messiah, in order to fulfill his act of redemption must, as it were, himself

become the one to be redeemed, in part one of the sinners and evil doers
and must meet his end among them. This teaching is seen as all the more
dangerous because the crisis in Judaism, which here clearly breaks out, is
covered up one more time by Cardozo, who legitimizes the Messiah as an
extreme case, whose deed, namely leaving Judaism, was not exactly to be
imitated. In this way the now visible explosive force of antinomian fever
was to be defused, that is, maintained within Judaism.
Sabbatean theology had a last outcome, a harmful product of the process
of disintegration evident in Frankism, namely, the loss of certainty in moral
consciousness. By relating the deeds prescribed and proscribed by the Torah
to a mystic recreation of Adam Kadmon and by making the fulfillment of
this obligation possible quantitatively, morality that had demanded an un-
ceasing and a continuously to be renewed fulfilling of law, becomes a task
to be performed piecemeal, without further obligation-namely the specific
task relating to Adam Kadmon. Moreover, since uncertainty as to the meta-
physical effect of early conduct belongs to the principles of this moral
teaching, the eternal and unfailing demands of divine law and the certain
knowledge of having either fulfilled or not fulfilled it result in a question-
able claim, the very existence of which is made doubtful by the possibility
that fulfillment has already been achieved. Morality has become problematic
where it had been apodictic.
So much about Scholem's account of Cardozo's theology and its conse-
quences.
2. Features if an ((apocryphal review !?J G. Scholem

JJ
if
The Reality if the Hebrews
In the last paragraph of Scholem's account, in the moral and historical con-
clusions to his analysis, we find a strange phrase. It should not be read as
an incidental remark; it expresses a logical conclusion, the moral kernel of
his remarks, the ethos to be learnt from the whole account, and it applies
to our subject: ''Already in those days (in the days of Sabbateanism) the
'Reality of the Hebrews,' the space of Judaism, threatened to become that
chimera into which Judaism risked being dissolved at so many important
moments in its history." Now, the modern Jewish and philosophically inter-
ested reader is aware that the term "The Reality of the Hebrews" is the title
of a work, the object of which is a new orientation in the understanding of
the religious and philosophical content of Judaism. The essay would thus
acquire a new and interesting meaning: Scholem's disquisition on the history
of religion would appear-both the above turn of phrase and several other
indications evident on closer examination would bear this out-to be a cryp-
tic review of Goldberg's book The Reali!} 0/ the Hebrews. It must be seen as
cryptic, since the author of The Theology 0/ Sabbateanism does not say that he
is discussing Goldberg's book. Thus, one cannot simply assert that it is so
without risk of being contradicted. But the ambiguity was deliberate: A
"harmless" critique of a book, even if it were to be explicitly denigrating,

would necessarily underline the importance of the work and attract atten-
tion to it, and this was not desirable in the eyes of the writer. How then
judge and evaluate a work without discussing it expressis verbis? By using a
procedure that only the "initiated," who are not likely to be influenced any-
way,would understand, leaving other readers blissfully unaware of the actual
intention-it was, after all, a critique of Abraham Cardozo! Those in the
know would be aware that the obscure, hidden quotation addressed Oskar
Goldberg and the uninformed would profitably take part in the excursus
into the soul of Sabbatean Judaism, unaware that this disquisition on the
history of religion was solely intended as a warning against something spe-
cific, the twentieth-century structured presentation of The Reality if the
Hebrews.
Naturally, our accusation can be rejected by Scholem. He can deny that it
was ever the real, let alone the sale purpose of his analysis, to warn the
reader about Goldberg, since that would lend far too much importance to
the subject, given the detail and thoroughness of the attack. We have an
admission that some criticism was intended. If we can take this further and
show clearly (since we love clarity) that his account allows itself to be read
perfectly as a detailed critique of Goldberg's book, if we can prove that his
objections, not openly presented as objections to The Reality if the Hebrew~
can be made to appear openly as such he may perhaps agree to further
admissions-and perhaps scrap the apocryphal critique. Perhaps it does not
matter. Perhaps we ourselves are such hypochondriacs, so hypersensitive,
that we sense objections where no one has raised any. Well, in that case,
there will be no harm in raising the points and analyzing the themes of The
Reality if the Hebrews with you. Since Scholem's presentation lends itself amaz-
ingly well to the structuring of such a critique, even if he is not looking to
clarify things with us, let us make the elucidation for the benefit of people
of his way of thinking and those who use his kind of arguments.
What, then, is the basic objection to a system that claims to be offering a
new perspective on the content of religion and that is understood by many
a thinker to be doing just that? The decisive objection (so the critic believes)
would be that this new orientation is, in fact, old. Something new, clad in
the garb of seeming originality-quite apart from its scholarly consistency-
is endowed with a certain potency, partly because it cannot be conveniently
fitted into things that already exist. It is important to cancel any such
potency. And, since the literature of the world is vast, the first blow against
a scholarly work is given by fishing up something analogous from the ocean
of literature; in this way it is possible to make known one's own boundless
knowledge of that literature and to announce with some relief "nothing new
here." So one finds Abraham Cardozo and his unpublished writings, avail-
able only in manuscript form. These seemed to Mr. Scholem to belong to a
cultural area that could profitably be given new life by The Reality if the
Hebrews. Since we already know where that particular cultural trend led, it
278 Esther j Ehrman
would appear to be custom-made for anyone looking to suggest that the

matter is suspect. Moreover, here would be proof that the "new" approach
claimed for The Reality if the Hebrews is old. Now, perhaps the approach is
even older than Scholem thinks, perhaps it is so old that, predating Sab-
bateanism as well as a few other even earlier stages in Jewish consciousness,
he had forgotten all about it. Scholem may see this all-too-new or all-too-
old thought as a characteristic of contemporary thinking, which he terms
"hybris." He seems to know and understand only the Middle Ages and their
thinking; perhaps he ought to try to look beyond the (in the deeper sense)
fruitless activities of these medieval centuries, to hesitate before labeling
things "hybris" and to consider whether a certain humility might have
allowed him to see his own role and task as less definitive sub specie aeterni.
Having made these rather psychological remarks, let us turn to a factual
analysis.
3. Discussion 1
A few concepts will give some indication of the cosmological and philo-
sophical premises in The Reality if the Hebrews, a work that sets out basic
elements of a philosophical bridging between the world of the Pentateuch
and "our reality." We shall be making reference to part one of Goldberg's
work, to two other writings that expand on its basic thinking, to the Intro-
duction to The Reality if the Hebrews! and to the writer's epistemological sys-
tem, directly connected to Goldberg's position.2
First, a distinction is made between the "pre-universe God" and the God
after and in the creation. The relationship between world and godhead, the
relationship in which the Being of God is necessarily altered through
the act of creation, is very clearly expressed in the Pentateuch through the
fact that God appears and acts manifestly to the senses in the world. This
manifest Godhead, who "causes death and gives life," enacts and wages war,
is the Elohim of the Hebrew nation and is so as a result of a covenant made
between God and the patriarch of that nation. He has a place in space in
which He "dwells," a mishkan, a center for His (visible) deeds-in the midst
of the nation. It is difficult to associate this localization of God at a point
in the world totality with which the whole Pentateuch deals, with the Being
that is "all-embracing" and brought forth the world as a whole, conceived
of as necessarily outside and everywhere in the world, known as One, Echad
And it is specifically this being-in-one of One and Elohim that is expressed
by the central formulation in the early Hebrews' conception of the world,
"Our Elohim is One, Echad" ''We have the pre-universe God as Elohim."
This means that it is from the pre-universe and extra-universe Godhead that
1 E. Unger, Das Problem der Mythischen Realitat, Berlin, Verlag David, 1926.
2 E. Unger, Gegendie Dichtung-eine Begrundung des Konstruktionsprinzips in der Erkenntnis, Leipzig, Ver-
lag Felix Meiner, 1925.
not only the world derives as created and existing separately from God, but
also-together with the creation-that there is an agent-being of the creat-
ing Godhead itself within this world. Indeed, this agent-being is the pre-
universe Godhead inasmuch as it creates, since creating necessarily includes
projecting of the self in some way into that which is being created and per-
sisting in that which has been created. If the Godhead creates the world, it
must remain there in some modality. The creation of the world thus neces-
sitates an alteration in the identity of the Godhead. The Godhead projects
itself into that which has been created, into the projection-being at the
beginning of creation and throughout extended time and space, into that
which has been created as its developing history. The projection-being then
seeks and assumes an ever more specific and narrowly circumscribed posi-
tion in the midst of life. The beginning of the history of mankind, as The
Reality if the Hebrews shows from the Pentateuch, is the history of a "sorting
out" in which birth and choice, causality and teleology work together, end-
ing in a combination, seemingly strange when viewed in perspective and
from the outside, which links the power of the creation of the universe with
a specific branch of mankind, the Hebrews. The Hebrews, viewed histori-
cally,are as it were, the last point in the world totality, a point still connected
with the power to bring forth the world, whereby the completion necessi-
tated experiencing the presence and contact of the Creator Godhead. At
the moment of the creation of the world, God is "Being, Omnipresence"
and is, as Goldberg shows, present at the eschatological moment in time
when, according to Isaiah, "The earth will be filled with the manifestation
of the One God." (Is.ch.6,v.3). In the days of the Pentateuch and in the
"middle days" this is not so; that time is dominated by the relationship of
identity between the pre- and extra-universe God and His presence or
appearance-when circumstances allow;
These concepts in the Pentateuch, which The Reality if the Hebrews eluci-
dates in some measure and which can be complemented and developed on
the basis of that book, are, of course, diametrically opposed to Cardozo's
construct as presented by Scholem. The pre-universe God is self-evidently
the focus and content of the early Hebrew religion in exactly the same way
as is His manifestation, apparent and active at the so-called "revelation."
The differentiation is a delineation and a materialization of the [divine] One-
ness. Cardozo's claim that "the prima causa is nowhere, but nowhere men-
tioned in the holy books" must, according to Goldberg's presentation, be
rejected outright. One would have to say that the prima causa is the subject
at every crucial point, wherever statements are made about the being and
the nature of God, be it in the controlling formulation of identity, "ehrye
asher ehrye," which expresses unequivocally the finality of a principle, i.e.,
beyond which it is impossible to go back, its prima causa character; be it in
the statement of the double I, "an~ ani hu," which expresses the absolute
in the Godhead in that it is conceived as above contradictions; be it in the
Name itself. That this pre-universe Godhead, as Cardozo claims, according
280 Esther J Ehrman
to Scholem, "does have a simple unity which, however, has no religious con-
tent" may explain a religion of a particular kind, such as Sabbateanism. It
has nothing to do with Hebraism. The idea developed by Cardozo, accord-
ing to Scholem, that "an identification of the prima causa with the God of
Israel" is the hallmark of an aberration is such a radical contradiction of the
essential expression of the early Hebrew reality that one would have to say
that it is this identification, this "secret of the double meaning of One," as
Goldberg puts it, this alteration of the identical, which is the center and
fulcrum of pentateuchal reality, decisively formulated in the Shema, "Hear
o Israel, the Lord our God the Lord is One," meaning: Understand that
the One [apprehended as] the Elohim of the Hebrews, is identical with the
pre-universe and absolute first cause, One, Echad. The Reali!} of the Hebrews
thus expresses the very opposite of the theory of Cardozo.
We have isolated the thinking concerning this modification of identity
from Goldberg's system in order to drive home how opposed it is to Car-
dozo's kind of philosophy of religion. We have selected this particular sphere
of ideas because it is the only one that can be said to have echoes in cog-
nate literary writings. We shall leave aside the clear external differences, the
idea of a pre-reality nothingness, out of which both finite and infinite reality
was created and which, itself, is to be differentiated from the Godhead that
it is taken to dominate.
Returning to the subject-matter, where confusion may be the result of
lack of knowledge or of intent, two further criticisms are crucial. First, con-
cerning the idea that the prima causa is within the grasp of "the elementary
reasoning of every schoolchild" in "the ABC of causal thinking." It should
be said that it would be difficult to find a cruder lack of understanding of
the complexity of the concept of a first cause than is evident here in
Scholem's interpretation of Cardozo. The latter would not seem to be aware
that practically all universal problematic questions converge in this concept.
Second, concerning the differentiation of the existential modes of the God-
head, there was certainly no need to refer to Cardozo the Sabbatean in order
to mention this idea, since it does not originate with Cardozo, but is as old
as Kabbalah itself. To save space, it will be sufficient to name only one of
the best known writers. Scholem must know that, three and a half centuries
before Cardozo, Isaac of Acco cites a statement by Rabbi Jacob Nazir con-
cerning Abraham ben David: "the cause of causes (the prima causa) was
never manifest to man-it is possible that there is no emanation of the
supreme cause that contains the highest power, unless it be the 'sar' (or
archon) the Prince of Torah in Merkavah mysticism) that appeared to Moses."
The theology of the much quoted, if rather superficially understood, Gnosis
essentially consists of nothing but such differentiations of the Godhead and,
as Graetz and others-unlike Scholem-have shown, it "connected" these
differentiations with the Kabbalah in the same way that Christianity linked
its content to Judaism, in both cases with equal distortions in the process
(cf. Marcion and especially Saturnilos). So, why Cardozo? One must here be
wary in view of the simplistic idea that Cardozo has of the prima causa. It is
questionable whether the idea of a differentiation between the Creator of
the world and a prima causa) although certainly taken on by Cardozo, was
ever fully understood by him. The superficially understood differences, seen
by Cardozo as evident to elementary reasoning, are actually concomitants of
the prima causa. Cardozo's conception is flat; it represents a contradiction to
Hebraism and any deeper meaning that can be developed from such a con-
cept does not derive from Cardozo.
4. Digression. Delimitation of The Reality of the Hebrews

in relation to the Kabbalah
It should be stated right away that in the contribution of the Kabbalah, and
certainly that of Gnosis, to the problem of the differentiated modes of
God's being, the doctrine of potencies emanated from God, given the "self
propelling of concepts," comes suspiciously close to the idea of polytheism.
If the supreme Godhead issues beings with a divine attribute, what is the
difference between this notion and the myth of the polytheistic world? It,
too, knows a relationship between higher and lower godheads and a causal
relation between them. In Gnosis, there is certainly no difference.3 In cen-
tral documents of the Kabbalah, the difference is a certain "inclination" as
well as a certain intangible "tendency" towards monotheism, it is true, but
this tendency never actually penetrated the thinking. It remained insubstan-
tial, "floating" and oscillating, in a state that would allow it to move in those
swaying regions without ever becoming conceptually stable or gaining a hold
in those rotating spheres. The danger is that, in this way, inclination and
tendency are easily thrown off the track that seemed to correspond in nature
and in kind to their original intentions. To a consciousness that does not
even attempt to confront the problem from within, but only envisages it
from outside (thus naive orthodoxy, Graetz and others), something that is
merely an intangible tendency becomes totally invisible and does not modify
pure polytheism. And here we find the real basis for the age old argument
between firm, textually defined (Talmudic) Judaism and a constantly rede-
fined (Kabbalistic) Judaism. The written word did not say enough, explicitly
and kabbalistic thought, in its underpinning, had no assurances against the
possibility of straying into the alien territory of polytheism. It offered
only imprecisions, trends, tendencies, not controllable "indications," vague
symptoms of a desired direction and an oft surprising congruity with alien
thinking.
3 Because Gnosis, at any rate Christian Gnosis, has no other function than to protect Christianity
from "The Old Testament"-which leads to ajuxtaposition of highest beings; whereas a simple differ-
entiation can be traced formally along the direction of a specific structure of identity just as much as
the juxtaposition within Gnosis can be seen to be taking the clear direction of polytheism. Very fine
conceptual distinctions come into play here; it is an area where only informed consideration is appro-
priate, not sophisticated tendentiousness serving demagogic ends.
282 EstherJ Ehrman
We can now see the essential difference between the stream of the Kab-
balah and the-no younger-line of thinking into which The Reali!J of the
Hebrews fits. The line taken by the spirit of Kabbalah,4 on the borderline
between self and alien, meant that it could articulate and engage only an
emotive and experimental "inclination" for the basic elements of Mosaic
Hebraism. Kabbalah could never itself lead to a crystallization of concepts
that would have provided absolute unity, outright, of the two age-old oppo-
nents, as represented by Talmud and Kabbalah. But then neither would
orthodoxy have wished or been able to bring that about. To produce
the network of concepts needed to avoid getting lost in the labyrinth of the
world's structuring is, in our view, an essential merit of The Reali!J of the
Hebrews. But, one might say, is Kabbalah anything other than just such a set
of concepts? To this one has to reply: such a system of concepts can clearly
not be random, which is why it is not possible to select concepts freely;
naturally, the vast number of Kabbalistic systems of concepts belong to the
totality. The point is that the concepts must not articulate just any but rather
a specific state of the world. The conceptual webs of Kabbalah lead, as we
have said, only to formulations that, if one seeks to cover the structure of
reality of Mosaic Hebraism, offer nothing but vague pointers to such a
totality, never a congruity. On the most vital point, the uniqueness and
supremacy of the Godhead of the Hebrews, they can at best be said to fail
while oscillating into perspectives of alien cults. (To distance oneself from
this type of work on concepts-as Scholem, Graetz and the entire liberal
orthodoxy of Cohen observance have done-simply means running away
from the problem, shocked, instead of driving the underpinning structure
beyond the end of Kabbalah's expedition, to a point of coincidence with
the orientation document of Judaism.) It is not enough to "exclude the evil,"
to localize it outside the philosophy of Judaism and to retain the harsh
phraseology of Cohen, with hardly an echo left of the Pentateuch. Philoso-
phy is all embracing and there is no highest concept of existence or of the
godhead, which allows for anything contradictory outside, for anything out-
side itself Nor can there be a highest form of monotheism that sets itself
against polytheism as a, logically and metaphysically necessary, possible
position, to be denied, rejected outright, without remaining permanently a
simple polarity, i.e., a logically equivalent, opposing partner, instead of pre-
senting a genuinely overriding, unpolarizable concept. It is not enough to
"reject" polytheism-because it then remains as a danger--{me can only
accord it a conceptual place, house its reality within the world structure
unfettered by the limited spheres of a tension-susceptible, abbreviated cos-
mic system, of which there are thousands-on account of which there are
thousands. Polytheism and the danger of polytheism then simply signifies
that the image of polytheism and the image of monotheism interpenetrate,
4 Cf. also here The Reality of the IJebrews on the metaphysical effectiveness of Kabbalah in Dr-times;
the statements are remarkably apt for the speculative Kabbalah of the unmetaphysical era.
take up the same space, as it were. The danger disappears if such mutual
interpenetrating of concepts is excluded by a structure with a fIrm frame-
work of concepts that separates,5 such that the framework of concepts has
as a logical postulate of its structure the principle of the uniqueness and
supremacy of the idea of monotheism. The world is infInitely greater in
range, complexity, richness and measure than suits Scholem. To acquire even
a notion of its range, it is not useful to complain about the complication of
Lurianic Kabbalah that, after all, did not see things as easy or "simple"; nor
will it help to follow the path of trivial conceptions that can be multiplied
at will, none of which has precedence over another. A scholarly pursuit in
the direction of the greatest possible multiplicity, difficulty and wealth of
form attainable to the "far-reaching soul" would seem preferable.
We must now make the point that the world is greater than Judaism and,
if we are to bring about a clean relationship, we must take the world as the
measure of Judaism, not Judaism as the measure of the world. Otherwise,
we would be theologians or scholastics. Perhaps-and this is our opinion-
Judaism has no need of scholastics. That would be the case if our measur-
ing of Judaism by the world, adequating it to the world, were not to be an
"artifIcial linkage" and union, but a recreation of its own, original, world-
related delineation, which it had as Hebraism and which it lost as "Juda-
ism." Perhaps Judaism can afford to have a conception of the state of the
world in which everything that is non-Judaism is given its place, "its truth."
Perhaps the essence of Judaism lies in the fact that this situation cannot be
reversed. Polytheism, as a particularly important, if by no means the only
articulation of an extra-Judaic position, "included" in the comprehensive
world structure, is "excluded" into truth, i.e., provides-it does this specifI-
cally-the conceptual criteria for an exact differentiation between the pre-
sentation of "a plurality or multiplicity of gods" and the "alteration of
identity," even for a recognition (conceptually, in the fIrst instance), of how
the modality of an identity is to be separated with precision from the gesta-
tion of the "other," something that one cannot well avoid having to deter-
mine, unless one wishes to prohibit all thinking about "fringe states" such
as "Creation."
But even that is not nearly sufficient. It is not sufficient to collect varia-
tions of positions in philosophies of religion in one conglomerate, as the
Kabbalah frequently does-setting one here, another there, without taking
any account of systematic objections and contradictions that arise from the
mere juxtaposing of these perspectives. A proven collectivity must be con-
ceived of as immediately possible, logical, structural moments, in a non-
random, necessary "order" and sequence. Nothing else can qualify as sys-
tematic in an objectively conceptualized, comprehensive representation. It is
thus not enough to deny conceptions that Judaism rejects as "unreal," nor
5 Cf. the principle constituting spheres in Gegen die Dichtung, p. 170 ff.
284 Estherj Ehrman
to allot them some mythological place (in mystic terms, saying "that might
also be the case." That could result, as it has done in our days, in a Judaism
that is safely categorized as a "religion among other religions," allocated a
place). Such conceptions need to be linked, settled typologically speaking, to
the principle fundamental to Hebraism in an unobjectionable, ontologically
systematic way. There are, it is true, "polytheistic elements" in Kabbalah,
but these constitute either an unwilling polytheism, which is dangerous and
cannot be handled by consciousness or will, or what we have is once again
a pure mythological setting of the perspectives of Judaism next to polythe-
ism, not obligatory, not necessary, not in a valid system. There is only one
way of combating that which must be combated: to allocate to it its true
place in the world. That is the task that The Reality of the Hebrews sets itself.
Denial or the allocation of the wrong place means to be defeated. To com-
pel knowledge and recognition thus appears irrefutably within a religious
orientation. The immeasurable wealth of those uncontrollable systems calls
forth the long since discarded concept, "objective truth" and makes it nec-
essary to apply every conceivable criterion, which then reduces the entire
Kabbalistic speculation to "mere fragmentary material," collapsing in an
epistemological structure.
Philosophical objections to Kabbalah, which only makes limited use of
ontological logic and otherwise proceeds in mythological ways, demonstrate
the difference between the method of Kabbalah and that of The Reality of the
Hebrews. The latter demands and offers a term in ontological logic for every
mythological situation. The methodology of this logic sets a transcendental
order and the apparatus of scholarship will tell, fIrst, whether the order is
complete, whether the schema of the world remains too narrow; secondly,
whether the conceptual elements that give expression to the mythical con-
cepts really serve the understanding of objectivity (i.e., follow the inner law
that informs judgment) or whether they are "custom-made" for a scholastic
or Gnostic translation of myth. We do not intend to set out the whole of
Goldberg's system here; we mean only to mark the difference between his
frame of reference and the Kabbalah's schema of the world. SignifIcantly,
the parallelism between myth and cognition is present throughout his work.
Arising from this consistent linkage there emerges a paradigm, which we
can here only state rather simply, of the metaphysical and mythological
antithesis "monotheism-polytheism." This antithesis must not be taken as
giving value equally, as in the category alternative "one-many" (where
"many" is then simply "denied"); it must be accorded the function "whole-
part," where the metaphysical part is not, of course, denied but is given its
true transcendental and empirical place as "the relative reality of polythe-
ism," this seen (in the fIrst instance, conceptually) as excluded, made alien.
(Such an "allocation" does not, as such, resolve the problematic situation.
It only leads to the allocation being applied in The Reality of the Hebrews.) The
more insidiously "abstract" the whole is than the parts, the more drastic,
conscious, noticeable are the parts in the visible image of the world, the
more often recurring and extensive-as The Reality if the Hebrews shows-is
the reality of the parts' functions, and the greater is the space taken up by the
manifestations of power of the polytheistic principles than that of the whole,
restricted as such manifestation is among all the countries of the world, to a
desert or to some small point of penetration-and this applies not only to
the visual image.
All in all, it is not possible to face the question of God's being, without
commanding the universality, i.e., the completeness of the category of its
possible conceptions. It is not possible to set up the unbreakable oneness
of God's being until the question of this oneness has been resolved-it is
certainly the most profound one and its initial perception contains more
than one antimony-until all the perils have been integrated, until, quite
literally,the antinomies have been resolved. For this purpose, it is necessary
to unroll the logical modality/universality, where the oneness can be tangled
into coundess pairs of opposites, in order to learn how to separate all the
structures that appear, one from another. It is particularly important to
diagnose with certainty, in opposition to the resolution of the oneness, the
unfolding of the oneness and to delimit it with equal certainty from a genu-
ine multiplicity, as e.g. the opened out oneness that is nominalist and com-
prehensive (roughly as in the position of pantheism). This element, the
complete category, is set out in The Reality if the Hebrews and marks it off
from the Kabbalah. To get to the "supremacy" or to accentuate the value of
a specific principle, such as the monotheistic one, among the possible con-
ceptions of God's being, it is necessary to secure the rights of other princi-
ples, not less but more firmly. True, justice in cognition cannot be a
"partisan" justice, even if it is not "unpartisan" in the normal sense. The
question is more difficult. As far as Kabbalah is concerned, it missed the
epistemological expression of the myth content of Hebraism, because it paid
too litde, not too much, attention to the problem of universality.Whoever
claims to be convinced of the validity of the position of Hebraism, must-
unless he adopts the method of "Christ," i.e., faith-be equally convinced,
and he must be able to legitimate his conviction rationally, that the world is
constructed in the way Hebraism says it is, that such a conclusion is a nec-
essary one, without scholasticism, theology, secret or open "intent," having
accepted the method of epistemology and arrived at the goals contained in
Hebraism.
There remains really no option but to reintroduce the criterion of objec-
tive truth into the world of myth and of philosophy of religion. This truth,
which cannot be apprehended on the level of mythology, can be evaluated
by two characteristic features: one criterion requires a complete parallel on
the level of myth with the epistemological and logical level of the world,
mutually enlightening. The second criterion concerns a feature that shows,
in a rather drastic way, the peculiarly isolated, dead-end, "erratic" situation of
286 Esther j Ehrman
the Kabbalah. The latter is seen to have moved away from the path
of objective cognition because it offers no parallel between myth and cate-
gory, never mind a continuation or extension on the parallel level of the
world. The requisite, even if not realized, transition from the level of cogni-
tion to areas of single fields of knowledge is totally beyond the myth in
Kabbalah. This inevitably means that myth in Kabbalah is not viable,
because it is unable to transfer the revolution that it signifies in the abstract
domain to the empirical domain. Kabbalah ma'asit is not a means to that
end. It is to be understood as a tradition of secret-meaningful or other-
wise-aesthetic concepts that may be compared to an esoteric, unconceptu-
alized, archaic cognition of a natural-real or not real-source of energy
("electricity in antiquity"), energy that can only be taken directly from
the universe. It cannot be traced through an intermediary area, between the
world-all and practice; indeed, Kabbalah ma'asit does not ever sight such an
intermediary domain, which alone can signify "reality" and which would have
to correspond to the, always essential, fundamental areas of phenomena of
every single field of knowledge, e.g. the basic phenomena of physical and
living energy. Kabbalah does not transfer its reorientation into the empirical
domain, nor can it do so, because its theoretical system, to which its myth
corresponds, has too short a structure. It would not be an exaggeration to
say that in no kabbalistic schema are there concepts that allow a continua-
tion of the concepts into the manifold domain of single fields of knowledge.
If we now try to summarize the above and to define the position that The
Reality of the Hebrews sets out in opposition to the Kabbalah, we can juxta-
pose the theoretical characteristics of both positions in terms of philosophy
and metaphysics in the following way:
Firstj Kabbalah does show a certain interweaving, a measure of mutual

interpositioning in it categorial and mythological constructs, but the bounds
of the constructs, at least as regards the categorial concepts, are demonstra-
bly fragmentary.
Kabbalah doe not have within itself a !)1stem of categoria4 ontological completeness.
To use a rather dangerous, European-oriented description, the Kabbalah, in

its system of concepts, lacks a thorough and cogent "Hegelian tendency."
The Hegelian system only represents an advance that began too late and
therefore came to a dead end; it is itself only one of those "summary sche-
mata of the world" referred to above that work with too few coordinates in
their systems of coordinates, which explains their so-called inapplicable,
abstract character. But that kind of systematization retains one thing: a ten-
dency to justify and defend the conceptual category on its own level. The
Kabbalah's conceptual construct does not offer the possibility of scientific
verification because it takes no outside view of the mythological system; it
comprises no parallel system and thus, in the end (as The Reality if the
Hebrews6 describes it), stays as "religion," at best "philosophy of religion"; it
does not qualify as "philosophy."
If now one is convinced that a religion or a religious system is "true," an
expression of "the truth," that can only mean that there is a conceptual
level, relating to the level of reality as a projection, presenting like judg-
ments, objects and procedures, although and just because, on the level of
conceptual category, only its own reasoning is valid. Every "squinting" from
the conceptual domain to the domain of religion ends in scholastics, a rela-
tionship where thinking serves religion. If, however, the autonomous rule
determining legitimacy inherent in cognition is applied and there yet emerges
unambiguous evidence of a religious account, then that account is an ex-
pression of literal reality. So, any philosophical system that seeks to present
a parallel to a religiously formulated system must be set out in such a way
that the "expansion" of the parallel level opens onto the procedures specific
to philosophy, until it comprises only philosophical procedures.
From the "piece" of philosophy added on to a religious situation, it is
necessary to diagnose, as it were, the entire remaining philosophical struc-
ture, at least formally. Kabbalah cannot do this because, although it makes
use of philosophical expressions when describing religious, antithetical pos-
sibilities, it is actually being religiously partisan and to be partisan is to ex-
clude philosophical universality. Real philosophy and surprisingly, the Pen-
tateuch too, only become partisan after all metaphysical sections have been
"heard," i.e., have their place,-that is, at the end.
Now one might well say that The Reality if Hebrews does not have that all
embracing philosophical system. How, then, can one diagnose universalism
from the "piece" of philosophy advanced in the "philosophical and cosmo-
logical foundations" set out in that work? To which one has to reply that it
can be done because, in The Reality if the Hebrews, the entire level of category,
the purely logical sphere, is projected to a level of application, namely the
level of the concept of God, presented by a total disjunction of all religious
positions concerned with the concept of God: henotheism, polytheism, pan-
theism, atheism, monotheism. These are given expression through the com-
prehensiveness of the disjunction: unity, plurality, totality, nothingness, infinity.
Of course, merely setting up these possibilities does not express the move-
ment between the categories nor the inner capacity for modification of each
one of them, which is what really matters. However, the rule that matters to
philosophy is being applied: not to allow the metaphysical possibilities
to deny one another (which is what religions do to one another, and the
Kabbalah does it as well), but to unfold them and mark out the area of
6 Cf. The Reality of the Hebrews, English translation of the title: Die Wirklichkeit der Hebraer, Berlin,
Verlag David, 1925, p. 178.
288 Estherj Ehrman
validity of each (perhaps the Pentateuch does that-if so, it would be doing
what thought itself does). It follows from what has been said that The Reality
if the Hebrews is to be distinguished from Kabbalah because the Kabbalah
cannot see individual religious positions in an all embracing schema, let
alone acknowledge that they have a validity, without endangering its own,
because it is unable to admit simultaneously that they may have a relative
reality and yet are subordinated to its own reality. Now, to the detail.
Second The Kabbalah has no Theory if Alien Cults.
Herein lies a determining feature of incalculable importance. It is this theory

of the alien cult, the very clear, enunciated, no longer hidden concept of
polytheism that allows the unique possibility of differentiation between the
inflection of identity in the conceptualization of God that is legitimate and
necessary and the genuine polytheistic structure that is alien to and forbid-
den to Hebraism. Only and uniquely a clear discrimination of religions that
drives to its extreme form the negative emphasis in the real and theoretical
context, stretching it in its domain, letting it run to extremes in its own
domain, which infinity and totality must include-only the existence of that
which is alien, the sundering of spheres, can provide self-certainty. This
certainty is endangered and shattered in that stepping over and into one another
of the spheres in a kind of metaphysical "lack of space," while the genuine
and real enemy of Hebraism is repressed in some kind of neurotic anxiety,
instead of being excluded. However, the principle of the infinite to which
Hebraism is attached, not by "nature" but through a "covenant," does not
know a procedure of denial, only one of subordination and distancing of
the "other" from a domain that only comes into being beyond the "simply"
infinite in a renewed, independent modality of the infinite; distancing from
the orbit of the gradable "presence" of the infinite in the finite, from the
penetration area of that which is "other." Assigning a place above or below
does indicate at least a tendency in the principle of a relationship between
the infinite and the finite; the problem of the whole and the part does at
least give an indication of the direction of that relationship. This does not,
however, apply to "being and not being," unless that is again understood as
allowing for a multidimensional scale of the regions and gradations of being
and not as a plain, one-dimensional alternative. Even so, the last stage in
the orientation of the relationship between the infinite and the finite has
not nearly been reached; only the direction of such an orientation has been
indicated; it will only be possible to draw near to it when the nonpolarity of
that relationship has been successfully stabilized, conceptually.7
7 There is even a penetration of monotheistic and polytheistic tendencies attacked by Kabbalah,

i.e., referred to in the context of the question of oneness and forced into the direction of Hebraism;
such ambiguity also exists as a deliberate position, namely everywhere where the question of oneness is
presented in such a way that its relation to plurality must or can be described as deliberately polarized
or as having equal status.
Instead of positing a complete order, one that has to provide location and
value, to provide higher or lower ordering and be compatible with philoso-
phy, the philosophy of Kabbalah (and, incidentally, the so-called world
religions) tried to define the infinite within a fragmented order, with its own
reality. This injures the principle of totality while remaining "ambiguous."
Because the Kabbalah has no theory of alien cults, of elohim aherim, it can-
not be aware of a possible orbit of rights. This means that Kabbalah, which
seeks to qualify as philosophy, simply repeats the-religiously justified-
rejection of the alien cult, a rejection that, from the point of view of a spe-
cific people (the Hebrews), should follow as a philosophic necessity. Kab-
balah repeats the religious rejection without, as philosophy must, examining
and determining whether the rejected' religious position deserves to be
negated and annihilated in itself or as an encroachment in a domain in
which it is not due. A relativism of religions cannot be overcome if it is not
there, if the sphere of its validity has not been found and delimited. All of
this may be withheld from the internal perspective of religious systems; it can
and must be uncovered by the external perspectives and by general philosophy.
If one wishes to counter the thesis that Kabbalah has no theory of alien
cults with the statement that the personification of "evil" and its hosts has
a considerable role in its metaphysical speculation and cosmology, the reply
must be that this morally determined division of the world into "good and
evil," affirming and denying, is a repetition of a point of view that is ade-
quate in a religious document of internal perspective, concerned with deeds
and conduct, but inadequate in philosopy, the domain of observation. Such
repetition adds a supetjiuous band of theory to the document of religion. If
the Pentateuch intends to offer a hypothetical redrawing of a structure of
world dimensions, then the parts of the world-and in the animate world
alien nations must be counted as these-must be able to recognize them-
selves spontaneously and they must be able to do so in accordance with a
.!J!stematic modification of the moral dimension. A "central" ruling position must
be characterized by the fact that it can give expression to the relative "right"
of the rest in such a way that this rest can recognize itself in such an
expression (in the theory of its cult) and that there yet remains a residue;
the residual then acquires prime importance and leads to the ultimate,
unmistakable, decisive position, one that cannot be "fitted in," outside of all
religious positions. Philosophy must not decide "too early"-in the past-it
must not make a moral rejection too early and it must construe matters in
such a way that the alien spirit can recognize itself just as it can recognize
itself. How to avoid this developing into relativism and to show, once and
for all, how to attain the possibility of a final and absolute position, the
basis for which is a relativity that must have preceded and been abrogated,
belongs to the discussion of that subject. However, a criterion can be given
8 Cf. The Reality if the Hebrews, ibid.

290 Esther J Ehrman
here. It is in the justified assumption that, ultimately, the real universal spirit
will be the one that can bring forth a structure that it allows for all others
in their appropriate placings. Leaving aside the dispute between philosophy
and religion about reality, we can formulate a provisional theory. It envi-
sages the hypothesis, yet to be verified, that the spirit of Hebraism can rep-
resent and acquire the remaining spiritual world, that such a representation
is its hallmark-but that the reverse is not possible. We even have here
something like the possibility of an experiment. We can only suggest it. If
the rational construct of myths alien to Hebraism is validated in their con-
tent, the religious/philological material of these myths must emerge from
the obscurity that an incorrect and partial examination can never penetrate,
in the same way as the question of Hebraic ritual emerges-although it may
not be possible to invert such a procedure. Solving riddles has long been a
good method in determining matters.
The path now leads from the plane of philosophical, i.e., all-embracing,
general considerations, to the domain of specific perspectives, i.e., of single
fields of knowledge; the inadequacies of this path, as we shall see, are,
according to The Reality rf the Hebrews, characteristic of the differences
between the world of scholarship and the approach of Kabbalah.
A philosophy of Hebraism that does not wish to be identified with scho-
lastics, would thus aim at nothing short of the possibility of a legitimate,
overall perspective. If only on account of the absence of a theory of alien
cults, Kabbalah must be denied a claim to universalism from the outset.
And from this there stems a further inadequacy:
Three. The Theory rfCultlessness is whollY absent from Kabbalah.
We cannot here discuss the concept of "fixation" in The Reality oj the Hebrews.
Suffice it to say that it designates positions basic to the non-henotheistic
and the non-genuine polytheistic cultures, alien to and opposing the world
of gods. It includes our culture consciousness as one in a series of non-mythical
spiritual positions: allegorizing polytheism (e.g., of Rome)-now no longer
taken seriously-"philosophy" in the Western sense, abstract monotheism,
pantheism and, lastly, so-called "world religions." All, in a way as a unit,
stand in opposition to the strictly cuitic, or more specifically ritual religion of
national religions in the genuine periods of myth. All, taken together, may
be seen as the age of cultlessness. That such a concept, which can only be
recognized and defined by its opposite, is absent from Kabbalah and from
the character of myth to which it can lay claim, whereas the Pentateuch is
well aware of such a concept, needs no elaboration. It is a position that
philosophy is obliged to know, to locate and perhaps to overcome; religion
is not under any such obligation.
Four. Apart from a potential parallelism between myth and thought,

Kabbalah is not aware of such a parallelism extending to one of the many
levels of experience of reality, i.e., of the possibili!J of systems isomorphic to myths

in the field of specific sciences.
The above are the criteria that determine the divergence of Kabbalah from
the standard requirements of a philosophical orientation. Kabbalah, although
inftltrated by philosophy, is pure mythology, i.e., mythology that is cut off
from experienced reality, particularly so because the speculation that accom-
panies its myth has no way of descending from the heights of abstraction
to the lower regions of experienced reality, i.e., to areas open to specific
sciences. We now have the means to determine this matter: If the basic
concepts of specific sciences, life, matter, consciousness, the relationship of
individual to plurality in all its forms-if these basics are sufficiently affected
and changed by philosophical consciousness, so that such a change is nec-
essarily felt in the domain of concrete matter, of empirical sciences, then
we can say that the philosophical level is continued into the empirical
regions. It is not possible to treat myth philosophically, i.e., to attribute to it
the significance of reality, unless the meaning of myth is presented in such a
way that the phenomenological content of literally concrete experience is
affected in everyone of its fields. Apprehended experience has a definitive
contribution to make on this subject and can therefore serve as the clearest
means of differentiating between paths to knowledge, indicating whether
access to these problems is open or closed to experience. We must be con-
tent with this general indication of the task since it was never our intention,
in the context of this analysis, to present even an outline of the content of
The Reali!J of the Hebrews. That task is undertaken and begun by Goldberg in
his work that, in its overall aim and in the detail of its sections, contrasts
with the very hallmarks of Kabbalah. However, a delimitation from
Kabbalah as a whole is necessary, so that the lack of meaning of Sabbatean
theology can appear clearly and the present attempt at its resuscitation can
be seen to be based on ignorance of substance and on a form of deviation
particular to Kabbalah. Let us now pursue that subject in some detail.
5. AnalYsis II
We have outlined some aspects of the concept of God that Cardozo took
from earlier speculations-and to which he added anything but depth-and
set this against the Hebrew concept. We have been unable to fathom
Scholem's statement, rather more literary than philosophical, concerning Car-
dozo's perceived danger to monotheism. We cannot tell whether the writer
sees this danger in the confrontation of prima causa and divine Creator or
rather in the dynamic unity of the divine Creator or, perhaps, in the fact of
assigning the Lurianic "Pleroma" to the world of creatures or, perhaps, in
all three constructs equally or, perhaps, not in one of these but very much
so in the others. He speaks of all this as one. However that may be, it is
clear, on the one hand, that Scholem holds at least some of these moments
responsible for shattering the principle of monotheism. It is equally clear
292 Esther J Ehrman
that in the unaltered content of Kabbalistic speculation that they retain, Car-
dozo's theories concerning the concept of God are peripherally connected
to the sphere of Hebraism, but that they are right outside the regions of
Hebraism in everything that is particular to and characteristic of Cardozo,
in everything that he has added, everything that is not older than he is. It
should be said here that Scholem ought to have felt obliged, in the context
of Luria's exclusion of the sejirot and parzufim from the radius of the God-
head, elsewhere presented as particularly daring and original on Cardozo's
part, to at least refer to azmut vi-kelim, to the great rift that echoed the con-
flict of universals and split intellectual opinion some three hundred years
before Cardozo; its derivatives and variations contained all of Cardozo's con-
siderations. It would not then have seemed as if Cardozo's originality lay
only in his thoughts about Luria, thoughts that others see already in the
Zohar itself concerning Kabbalah.
What all this has in common with The Realiry rf the Hebrews is a few
peripheral questions, but not a single answer. We shall now follow up our
proposal to discuss briefly the remaining questions raised in Scholem's chap-
ter in the history of religion and contrast it with The Realiry rf the Hebrews.
The reader should note how markedly the structure of Scholem's essay par-
allels certain important themes of Goldberg's work, making one think of
the "apocryphal review," the only clear reference that we found in Scholem's
concluding remarks. Perhaps the writer of the outline of Sabbatean theology
wished to have this lack of clarity in evidence, using obscure phrases such
as "the messianic phraseology of Zionism," which "is not the least mislead-
ing of Sabbatean statements," "which could prevent the renewal of Juda-
ism." Perhaps, by not naming names or clearly identifying movements (how
proper in a historical warning), he wished to create murky waters in order
to fish in them, holding a super-clever answer ready in case of a possible
reaction to what had been dimly alluded to: "He who defends himself and
does not name himself is accusing himself." The tragedy of silence and wait-
ing in matters of fact is not above reproach. As distinct from the personal
sphere, in matters of fact it is essential not to leave any dispute unopened.
We confess to feeling just as much under attack by what Scholem does not
think or write about or against The Realiry rf the Hebrews as by what he does
say. In short, we would see an attack behind everything that Scholem pur-
veys, on the basis of his overall philosophy. Consequently, the cue that he
gave is only the stimulus, not the reason for the fact that we cannot leave
unchallenged his views on theology, history, Kabbalah or Judaism. These
views themselves provide the reason, even where their author does not ex-
press them directly, let alone defend them. Although the parallels between
Scholem's account and the structuring of certain themes in The Realiry rf the
Hebrews are interesting, we do not wish to embark on the wearisome game
of decoding "key" statements. These, it has to be admitted, can never be
irrefutably worked out; they always allow for arrogant rejection, the allega-
tion that due attention was not given to the core, but only to the periphery
of the writer's delphic, oracular pronouncements. We shall not enter into

that particular game; we prefer to confront the "attack" factually, as a fol-
low up of Scholem's account, an attack he did not address to The Reality of
the Hebrews (as we hypothetically suggested). We shall show the natural in-
compatibility of the thinking of Kabbalah and of Cardozo as Scholem pre-
sents it and the thinking in The Reality of the Hebrews.
It is appropriate at this point to set out the disposition of the following
remarks: we shall single out five themes that are essential to the position
taken in Goldberg's work and also figure in Scholem's account in the form
of questions arising in Luriaruc Kabbalah and in Cardozo's theology, ques-
tions that determine the structure of Scholem's entire account. These five
complexes will be handled as some form of categories. We will show that
the relationship between Kabbalah, or, more specifically between Sabbate-
arusm and The Reality of the Hebrews cannot be reduced to a so-called formal
correspondence between official chapters of every theology. It ought rather
to be seen in terms of points of contact related to content, set out in the
following way:
1. The already discussed problem in the concept of God in The Reality of

the Hebrews) set against Kabbalist speculation and its Sabbatean inter-
pretations and variations.
2. Luriaruc mythology, in particular a plurality of inner, mystical "worlds,"
set against the philosophical and cosmological premises of The Reality
of the Hebrews) in the context of the problem of "worlds."
3. Cardozo's so called "salvation doctrine," to which a theme in The
Reality of the Hebrews corresponds; it appears in the latter under the
heading: "theological development;' i.e., historical changes in concepts
in what is termed "religion."
4. The relationship of "secret" and ratio in Cardozo's thinking, contrasted
with the basic attitude to this question found in the methodology of
The Reality of the Hebrews.
5. An ethical theory of Luriaruc Kabbalah, paralleling Goldberg's argu-
ments against a merely "moral" connotation of ritual and his conclu-
sions on the mearung of ritual.
The first antithesis has already been discussed. We shall turn to the
second:
2. J1;[ysticaland Biological Worlds

Scholem criticizes the increasing complication of Luriaruc Kabbalah and
then states: "Any control of ratio disappears before the endless worlds of
mystery; the oft repeated claim to a connection with the Godhead, perhaps
made even more firmly here, gets ever more questionable." Once we have
ascertained that there is no question of literally endless worlds, but rather of
294 EstherJ Ehrman
a multiplicity, we recognize the difficulty faced by rational cognition when

confronted by these unlegitimated and non-legitimatable images of worlds.
However, we cannot adopt the gesture of rejection that Scholem and the
whole movement of the Enlightenment make as regards the construct of
the spirit of creation, in the sense that we cannot simply delete it from world
matter as he does and as the entire rationalist theology does too. Two things
evidently follow: one, a certain fundamental difference between mythologi-
cal (concrete making) thinking and thinking that is wholly abstract; to put it
more explicitly, if more vaguely: thinking that is typically European. The
other is the already discussed process of fragmentation by the Kabbalah of
the principle of totality. On the first point, the vagueness of formal con-
cepts and entities stand in clear contrast to the characterized content and
specifically concrete nature of mythological data, which goes beyond any-
thing that can be attributed to the nature of the world in terms of formal
cognition. We find statements here that at least suggest what "it looks like"
in some regions of the world edifice. Formalj abstract thinking does not
have the wherewithal to reach conclusions about the content, the specific,
multifaceted being of the cosmos; it is exclusively occupied in drafting the
pattern of the world and does not indicate what fills the fields that make up
that structure. The two ways have often interpenetrated, as in the thinking
of Plato, of Philo or Plotinus and in the Kabbalah. In those instances, the
interpenetrating constitutes an accidental meeting, a kind of short circuiting,
i.e. a meeting and mingling prior to their systematic and necessary point of
confrontation, prior to their real synthesis. This is not the place to defend
mythological thinking as it appears} nor its opponents. The latter are unable
to complete systematic thought and leave the world's system of coordinates
empty; the former, however, fill these systems in a haphazard and confused
manner, unsupported because they have failed to expand or broaden the
domain of cognition. This explains why consciousness is disturbed in
the face of mythological beings and regions. It raises the highly justified
query: Why these formations and not different ones? In the attempt to make
the world understandable, the principle of totality is damaged and this auto-
matically seems to trigger two opposing mental inclinations: one, to strike
out the torso brought forth by mythological thinking completely; on the
other hand, to pursue an, admittedly endless, progression in the direction of
total concretization. This path always and necessarily leaves something in a
formal and conceptually undetermined state until it is occupied by content
of a multiple kind; but the formal element it is that carries the hallmark of
totality and is an essential element of the total determination within the net-
work of an overall system. We shall try to show these conceptually charac-
terized creations of mythological thinking that lead reason into an unthink-
ing, almost automatic reaction, along a false, opposed path; we shall make
use of the paradigm of our theme here.
If the subject of a plurality of worlds is handled in such a way that ideas
precede the description of world visions (as in Kabbalah-also in Lurianic
Kabbalah)-these may have a shadowy relation to categorial meaning, but

they have no features to indicate that this is so-then the question, how
philosophical ideas lead to a specific content in these worlds, is esoteric, i.e.,
in no way verifiable. Thus, we have (as in the Ma'asechet AZilu~, an account
of four worlds, in one of which there is a "throne," taken over by a mystical
being, as well as "the storehouse of life," the "palaces of the will" and the
souls of the righteous, another one of which houses the holy animals from
the vision of Ezekiel and ten categories of angels; in the third, the ofanim of
the merkava battle with the hosts of a hostile principle, etc. No one can
consider the mentality reflected in these intellectual excursions, which have
no basis whatsoever, without being shocked by the complete absence of
valid criteria in such pronouncements. Indeed, philosophical thought draws
back from a momentum that marks the particular and concrete certainty
which, unsupported by any general methodology, hovers freely, unattached
as it were, in universal space.
It is in this kind of sphere, no less certain as to content, that Lurianic
speculation is to be found. It speaks, for instance, of a process that it terms
"the growing closer together of worlds" and determines that the spiritual
elements draw nearer to one another, from one world to another, while
the material parts of each world remain in their position, unaltered, until the
moment of redemption. This shows an alien kind of certainty in mythology,
alien to thinking because such certainties are far too isolated They have not
infrequently led thinking into considering all certainty as unworthy of rea-
son, forcing knowledge onto a path hostile to myth and leaving our present-
day philosophical consciousness, apparently without any better prospects, at
the other end of the path.
The concept of "worlds" also figures in the cosmological and philosophi-
cal thinking basic to The Reality of the Hebrews. In order to sharpen the con-
trast, we shall set the presentation of worlds in Kabbalah, in which there
appear mythical beings, angels of multifarious form and kind, warring hosts
and heavenly throne chariots, against the philosophical circumscription of
"worlds" in The Reality of the Hebrews. We shall do so at first in a purely
dogmatic way, to show how worlds are here defined within cosmic structur-
al systems, enclosed and separate from one another; they include the entirety
of archetypal forms in which "life" can emerge, the entirety of living exist-
ence in the universe. A closer determination requires a definition of the
concept "cosmos." It becomes clear that "cosmic" existence must be under-
stood as a kind of "teleorientation," based on the reification of something
that is brought forth from consciousness. Such reification of abstractions
entails a constant rearranging and widening of the picture initially presented
of the cosmos, meaning the sensual apprehension of heaven and earth. This
sensual image is replaced by an abstract image. In the four-dimensional
space-time continuum of the scientific, modern day cosmos, in which there
are no rapidly moving "events" in "time," but steady "world-points" and
"world-lines," the original visual image has vanished completely and another
296 Esther j Ehrman
has taken its place. However, the elements of the scientific, physical cosmos
that make up the consciously self-restricting, abstract picture offer only a
deliberately "poorer" picture of the "real" cosmos. Nothing is more com-
mon than a confusion of one with the other. The real cosmos has as many
building elements as the world, not as many as physics. The components of
consciousness and of life need to be penciled in, and thus the "abstract
picture" in turn alters; out of the physical cosmos there emerges the philo-
sophical cosmos. The constant changing of the world optic perspective that
consciousness undergoes when sense perception is raised to abstraction and
the newly attained abstractions are made concrete, can be compared to a
constant outward movement in respect of one area, one base, one category,
within which vision had but now been contained. The Reality if the Hebrews
posits as basic to its philosophical and cosmological thinking such a struc-
ture of the philosophical cosmos. From it we can take certain concepts that
lead to the representation of "the worlds," excluding any finite and infinite
object categories and- any modification of the relation between these. Ac-
cordingly, in the abstract image of the cosmos taken philosophically, i.e., as
universe, the three comprehensive world elements are spirit, matter and ani-
mate life as given. While these stem from the region of the infinite, they
take up the space of "finite reality," a continuum that, as ontological reason-
ing shows, must needs be far more comprehensive than the experience giv-
en to us, than "our" world. A heuristic application of the so-called totality
principle as the real guiding factor of cosmological construction coincides
with the principle of a self-regulating, methodically active autonomy of con-
sciousness as the only instrument for philosophical tele-orientation. (Any
"experiment" using physical instruments is by definition not applicable, i.e.,
in the context of the problem) inoperative.) Such autonomy shows nothing as
clearly as the distance between the real and the possible; more specifically,it
shows the real as the "event" in the series of possible realities. The extent
of experience, "our world," is seen, in the far more comprehensive scale of
completeness, as a limited section of something that is clearly itself "frag-
ment," i.e., the empirical potential: the philosophical cosmos completes ex-
perience. Experience includes neither the point of origin nor the totality of
structures that "figure" in its empirical individuation; for example, the con-
strued history of the origins of the earth and of its creatures, which naive
consciousness unthinkingly includes in the world of experience, just as it
includes the world of atoms, is actually taken as the true cosmos, i.e., "added
by the mind, of necessity." In the same way, that which is missing in experi-
ence necessarily designates that which must define the cosmos.
Searching for a totally comprehensive structure, we shall find in The Reality
if the Hebrews the cosmic total reality "life," filled with the totality of all think-
able structures of organized life, each one of which must be thought of as a
fact of the cosmic totality, represented separately in the empirical domain.
The totality, oriented as the category of the possible) contains infinitely more
structures than actual experience, which thus allows definition and limita-
tion to emerge. These structures lead to the concept of "worlds" in a nar-

rower sense than "world" as one, whole. In the first place, these "worlds"-
we shall be entering briefly into the reason for this designation-are in part
"represented" within the earthly reality of experience: they are the forms
and structures of organic life, experienced, "selected" in accordance with
the natural circumstances of experience from the totality of forms. To un-
derstand the problem of such "representation," it is necessary to realize that
the cosmos is also the configuration of the highest thinkable complication,
that it has to be the most complex configuration outright, since the prin-
ciple of total comprehensiveness requires the constant and universal inter-
changing of relationship between all of the parts and the whole, endlessly
projected. This complexity is only halted ultimately by the absolute, funda-
mental differentiations, by the true "elements" of the world. Respecting the
differences and their graduated validity will in the end enable the cosmos to
disengage from the chaos. The relatively simple "beginning" of cosmology
cannot mislead us as regards this complexity. That the totality of all think-
able structures of living formations, life-size in the cosmic domain, should
find its rightful place in the world, is just one of the early manifestations in
the wealth of ever increasingly intertwined threads, according to The Reality
of the Hebrews. In order to grasp the fact that the reality of "life" holds alt-
cosmic-living formations, some of which we know, empirically, as organic
forms of life, it may be of help to think of them in a Platonic sense, as
"living, star-like, archetypal images" of everything organic, although, on re-
flection, Platonism only developed a rather vague notion of a cosmic state.
There, the category "cosmic," a domain distinct from the empirical, funda-
mentally traniforms that being which must be thought of as the center and
origin of all its empirical projections.9 Furthermore, Platonism leaves un-
touched the decisive question of the communication of the different domains
Oeaving out of account the concept of Methexis), whereas The Reality of the
Hebrews does briefly develop relevant basic concepts (cf. concepts such as
"the descent of matter," "the ascent of conditions" and others in the con-
text of the relevant theory). This will be discussed elsewhere. Here it will
suffice to point out that the living centers of life forms, entities of cosmic
dimensions, have a place in the continuum of things living and that, since
the connotation "self-enclosed;' attaches to living structures, they are enclosed
!)1stems towards one another, worlds for themselves. They represent those loca-
tions in the ordering of life that may be manifest, that may appear in the do-
main of experience, namely as organic units, empirically, but that can not be
experienced in their totality nor in their point of origin (not in the cosmic
sense). Their number is necessarily unlimited.
These are some of the early moments in the "biological worlds" as de-
9 In this way, the so-called "doubling objection," often justifiably raised against the doctrine of the
Ideas, loses its force, since the original and the copy, the center and the peripheral projection, neces-
sarily differ considerably.
298 EstherJ Ehrman
fined in The Realiry of the Hebrews. We cannot enter here into their broader
delineations within which, at a certain point, the mythical content is recog-
nizable. What is important is that all the descriptions are literal and "un-
symbolic," in methodological terms conceptually pure, necessarily taken
from the "natural" components of the world and not set through with any
mythical concretization, as Kabbalah is wont to see it.
3. History of Salvation and Theological Development

The particular distortion in Kabbalistic speculation, referred back to Car-
dozo, that leads to a justification of Sabbateanism, has created a perspective
of history as a whole and given it a theological/historical optic that accords
with its theological views, in particular with its concept of God in the time
continuum. Hence the so-called "history of salvation" that therefore also
stands or falls with Cardozo's concept of God. In Scholem's account, Car-
dozo sees the destruction of the Temple as marking a dividing line bifore
which the inner state of the world was in tolerably good condition and peo-
ple worshipped the true God, made manifest in his "revelation," cifter which
worship of the revealed God gave way to honoring the prima causa, wrongly
identified with the God of Israel. Insofar as one goes along with these nar-
row formulations of Cardozo's, as we have done, ex concessis, to facilitate a
discussion, they can also be used to demonstrate, as we did above in dis-
cussing the concept of God, that there is no congruity there with the posi-
tion of Hebraism as The Realiry of the Hebrews presents it. Moreover, the
so-called "history of salvation" shows unequivocally how little the theoretical
resources of Sabbateanism-they do not, of course, attach to Sabbateanism
alone-can help understand the meaning of Dr-time or provide a meaning-
fullink between the material of theology that goes beyond the Dr-time into
the present and future with that of the earlier period. This requires an
understanding of the significance of "world history" that allows for a corre-
spondence with the spirit of Hebraism, while presenting at the same time a
recognizable empirical and historical reality. In Scholem's account, Cardozo
presents what is essentially the historical progression of the perception of God,
i.e., a conceptual history; all the arguments against the formulations of per-
ception that he uses naturally apply when the formulations reappear in his
history. Far from agreeing with Scholem's judgment that Cardozo gives all
too wide a span to the concept of God, we must object that it is an all too
narrow span, for it accentuates one component, albeit one that it is almost
impossible ever to envisage fully, in a history of the concept of God, pro-
gressing from concrete and accessible through the senses to abstract and
accessible through the mind; again, it is one-sided, presumably intended to
accentuate that which is earlier, alone true, religious, the "manifestly revealed."
A somewhat complicated situation emerges, in that a number of possible
theses arise that need to be kept separate. Cardozo's views on the develop-
ment from revelatory belief to intellectual belief is shared by every thesis of
Bible-criticism, every historical interpretation of religion, except that in his
case all the value symbols are inverted. The fact of a movement in the di-
rection of extra-sensual, prime cause, abstract, is only one, though undeni-
able, component in the historical happenings of religion. Nothing emerges
from this formally because it is conditioned by judgment, i.e., it is linked to
a metaphysical and historiographical system.
The determining question still remains, namely how such a general view
can translate into local parameters, and how it can fit into a context of reli-
gious value and structured history. Biblical criticism usually places the ge-
netic option into the Pentateuch itself, since it speaks of "stages" in the
history of religion, the "primitive, sense-determined" and the wholly spiritual,
"pure," which allegedly interpenetrate in the Pentateuch. It sees the purest
form of intellectual understanding of the divine first in the Psalms and it
accordingly rates these more higWy than the Pentateuch. This value per-
spective shares with modern Biblical interpretation a philosophical line that
also sees the undeniable movement from myth to intellectual as an "upward
development." Cardozo envisages a similar movement, only he describes the
process that modern scholarship takes to be upward as negative. His emphasis
is on the non-abstract, the aspect of the prime, archi-causal being that is
not accessible to rational and causal thinking. Indeed, he does not accept
the abstract as in any way part of the being of the God of Israel, seen by
him solely as the revealed God. He consequently views as decline that which
faith and scholarship both see as progression (that is, if one disregards the
latest variation in so-called Biblical research, hostile to its subject, which,
while it recognizes a value perspective in such progression, does not agree that
it is present in Dr-Israel, thus negating a feature that is presented as positive
in Cardozo's theology).
There remains the need to point out, on the basis of the argumentation
in The Realiry if the Hebrews, that Cardozo's interpretation is just as one sided
and, in a deeper sense, just as noncomprehensive as the equally one-
sided emphasis in so-called "rational" theology and philosophy, in the high
rating given by the "pure and intellectual," the (presumably) abstract and
comprehensive minded, to the extra-sense being of God. Early Hebraism's
claim is that it can harness together these two tensed tendencies, which ease
away if they are isolated from each other and become independent in lines
of thinking that make either for only concrete, only seeming, only manifest,
or for only mental, only abstract and universal. As The Realiry if the Hebrews
describes it, Hebraism is concerned with the most tensed, that is most live
coming together of the concrete and the universal, with giving finiteness to
the infinite, maintaining both fully upright.
The work also examines (in a different context) to what extent the real
and final universalism is concrete as opposed to abstract. A history of the
decline can only be a history of that de-tensing. De-tensing means an artifi-
cial taking apart of that which at the limits of the power of consciousness
may be thought of as one. It means a desire to divide up that which is
undivided in being. The result is that consciousness's simultaneous
300 Esther j Ehrman
formulation of oneness, togetherness in existence of a godhead as appre-

hensible and apparent (sive "revealing itself") and alone thinkable (sive com-
prehensive) is stretched to be a striving apart in time, an unraveling of both
aspects of the formulation of oneness and leads to a changing, differing
orientation that includes both aspects as moments in that changing. In short,
a point is reached where the togetherness that is simultaneous, essential to
the central formulation of the world view in early Hebraism is dissolved
to become successive in the historical concept of God-a succession of two
aspects of oneness that belong together, which then emphasizes now the
one, now the other, lends stress on value and is made the corner stone of
the history of religion. In theology, in Bible criticism and in the philosophy
of the Enlightenment, that corner stone is the moment of comprehensive
abstractness; in Sabbateanism, on the contrary, it is the moment of revealed
concreteness. The two approaches are differentiated in that rationalist theol-
ogy and its accompanying philosophy-in part, at least-not only allows
the "facts of revelation" to stand dogmatically,but even reverently "believes"
in them (insofar as that is the case and it is not actually dealing in symbols),
whereas Cardozo, with his tendency to invert, goes so far as to exclude the
abstract moment from the domain of religion altogether. This differentia-
tion must be assessed according to the importance of the role of the non-
emphasized moment (in this case, "revelation"), not only in the so-called
'religious life,' but also in any elaboration by a genuine consciousness of
reality; in other words according to how seriously the so-called "revelation"
is taken. Actually, every succession or series, every variation of emphasis,
i.e., every differentiation in the spiritual approach to aspects of the divine
being-to the universal thought-object of ratio, of ratio and faith and to
that which is revealed to faith alone-is a mark of decline. Faith always
remains an unavoidable minus in consciousness, one that can only be held
back from the unmetaphorical experience of reality by an impotence--
deliberate or otherwise-of knowledge.
Therefore-and this is essential-this whole topic of alternative access to
the concept of God, through revelation or through ratio) is really only of
determining significance when it becomes the object of or the starting point
for deliberations on realiry. One may argue as to which source is more pro-
ductive for the "religious" content of reality: belief in revelation and tradi-
tion or ratio and one may even, in desperation, be content with that worst,
apparent solution, alternate underpinning by each of these methods. How-
ever, the oneness of cosmological and transcendental being, which is always
beyond the reach of the segment of conscious knowledge, can never be
envisaged until consciousness seeks to emulate this oneness. It is, however,
an essential precondition that the oneness in consciousness sets the germ
of duality within itself and not in a potential of two methods-that of faith
and that of knowledge. That might greatly lighten the task, but cannot for
that reason resolve it. In fact, as opposed to Cardozo's view, in a world
"hostile to revelation" the duality can only be overcome with the sense of
the greater claim, that of cognition. The only thing to do is to use the organ
ratio to stretch reality, as it were, beyond the complexity of a system initially
transmitted as transcendental, by means of that which opposes it most
strongly: the concrete evidence of the universal and the divine presence,
somewhat more accessible to abstract thinking. The only thing to do is,
slowly and step by step, to think about the conditions of a concrete reality
and presence of the universal and, in The Realiry if the Hebrews, that is the
purpose of the so-called "theological development." This concerns not only
a "change of perception"-although it does that too-not a change of per-
ception having any kind of status, one that may be conceived by mere history
or perhaps by a history of "salvation." Rather, in this historical perspective
of consciousness's perceptions of the Godhead, we find a reality correspond-
ing to "religious content," disclosed by, directlY ascertained from consciousness; we
find the conditions for such unmetaphorical way of being real and for the
self-representation of this reality in consciousness. Goldberg, therefore,
describes "the development from national religion to world religion" in
general terms; he does not bring Hebraism as illustration until he has dis-
cussed the reality of religious content as such.
In the non-metaphorical and non-abstract sense, reality carries the condi-
tion of limitation. In the case of the metaphysic of Hebraism, this character-
istic limitation, a characteristic of the general condition for every "event" in
the reality of experience, is presented in such a way that the limitation
becomes a means for orientation in a systematic world transposition of the
properties of the Godhead that express non-limitation, i.e., the concept,
limitation, leads to a topologically and schematically different localization of
the so-called "omnipredicates," such as "all-powerful," "omni-present," etc.
Set against these omni-predicates in the actuality of creation, are (according
to The Realiry if the Hebrews) the self-limitation of the infinite as moment of
limitation and eschatology as the suspension of the limitation. In the "phases
of theological development," The Realiry if the Hebrews shows the progression
from so-called naive acknowledgment and awareness of moments that counter
the "empty" omni-predicates in early Hebraism. Such awareness, with the
knowledge of a limitation comprising knowledge of nonlimitation, testifies
to the possibility of living reality and empirical existence in the metaphysical
and moves from the spirit of the awareness of limitation, i.e., of the real, to
the position taken in later Hebraism; drawing from the God that is near
ever more towards the God in the distance. The progression is immanent
testimony that no new event of metaphysical experience can have been pos-
sible within the ambit of these people. The analysis shows how, in the end, a
speculation that is increasingly colored by pantheism and that increasingly
legitimates the Godhead with something-if such a thing is possible-that
stands in opposition to it (e.g. "nature") breaks out into the flattering, meta-
phorical, eager, superlative omni-predicates. These not only prejudice the
302 EstherJ Ehrman
genuine non-limitation, they become loud in a world epoch in which

the actuality of the presence, i.e., the intervention by the Godhead, is more
remote than ever, in which catastrophic chaos reigns.
Let us keep hold of the two corresponding lines: fIrst, on the subjective
side, an awareness of categories countering the omni-predicates-the evap-
oration of these categories--omnipredicates; a series to which there corre-
spond on the empirical side, the enunciation of a perceived presence and a
real intervention by the Godhead in the domain of experience- echoes of
such an intervention-a statement of the total failure and distance of such
intervention. Thus, at any rate, the character of the concept coined for the
modality of the divine in one period corresponds in a remarkable way to
the actually stated contents of the transcendental happening of that period, so
that here the form, i.e., the way, how one speaks of the existence of experi-
ence of transcendental being can seemingly be read as a criterion of the
content of religious statements.
This, then, is the point made in the "theological development" in The
Realiry of the Hebrews, which differs from the compilation of a "history of
salvation": the stages are not just any stages in any changing concepts aris-
ing in a random, private scheme of some author of a religious system which
can then be read into history. The point is that, with the successive stages
of the representation of the Godhead, there are simultaneous indices of a
developing realiry, so that there emerges simultaneously a history of real be-
ing and its conditions. This, while it is history, can, at the same time, consti-
tute !ystematic sections to construct the real, sections of a continuum of reality--
just as realiry and unrealiry, in their pure form, can manifest themselves as indices.
4. MYstery and Ratio

In one important point Cardozo's theology shares the overall tendency of
the Kabbalah with respect to reality, namely the insertion of ratio into reli-
gious material, otherwise seen only through tradition and revelation. Indeed,
whatever the extent of the influence of Christianity on some concepts of
Cardozo, such as that of the "mystery of faith," which points to scholasti-
cism in opposing "faith" and "ratio," he does seem, in this context, to em-
bark also on an antischolastic path. At the historical climax, the Messianic
moment, Cardozo not only releases ratio from its position as "serving" faith,
but actually defInes the Messiah by his ratio-letting the Messiah acknowl-
edge God, not as others do, by virtue of revelation and tradition but of his
ratio. The "mystery of faith" is wholly clarifIed by the Messiah, rationally,
and this is indeed his determining characteristic. One has to say that Car-
dozo does here, at least formally, take the Kabbalah's trend as far as possi-
ble towards its target. According to him, it is in the Messiah that the power
of ratio logically culminates, as does every other condition that determines
the Messiah: "The Redeemer" is the utmost profoundly "Cognizant."
Although this parity, this equalizing of ratio and faith carries within it the
seed of an antischolastic element and will, at least formally, contribute to
the resolution of the antithesis, faith-cognition, the formulation that inhibits

Cardozo's-and every other-theology does not even allow for a method-
ological resolution and analysis,i.e., for a definitive identification of the oiject
of faith with the oiject of cognition, because cognition, ratio, remains all too
isolated when faced with the real world, especially when faced with meta-
physical reality. We shall briefly take a closer look at this rather difficult
position. It seems that Cardozo's conception is presented in such a way that
the object of faith, the metaphysical world, remains independent vis-a.-vis
cognition, to the extent that, while it is, indeed, object of cognition and can,
increasingly, be penetrated by ratio, it is yet marked by a peculiar freedom in
respect of this penetration by ratio. The freedom lies in the fact that meta-
physical reality responds to the "call" of the, now perfected, ratio, but does
not have to respond. In his account, Scholem presents this as follows: "Not
in every age do things respond to the call of ratio, but their relationship,
while not always founded in ratio, remains at all times in accordance with it,
something that is concealed in the absolute rationality at the utopian point
in history, the Messianic era." Apart from the fact that this sentence throws
together two concepts of ratio, the dimmed ratio of an erring era and the
necessary, integral ratio of a Hegelian "reason of being," it still emerges that
the basis for the statement "Not in every age do all things respond to the
call of ratio" may lie in ratio as well as in things and that the demeanor of
both can determine the character of an era. Had the silence of things been
attributed to ratio, dimmed and reduced in an unredeemed era, the state-
ment would necessarily have read "In every age things respond to the call of
ratio"-but only so many things respond, only so far does ratio reach; meta-
physical things do not respond to a defective ratio. Human cognition, the
true ratio of being, has long ago learnt that obedience of things, of objects
constitutes the true test of ratio. The scientific and technological age knows
better than any other that the absence of response of things signifies the
failure of ratio. Consequently, the stages of ratio determine eras, from
the lowest to the highest. But apparently the statement referred not only
to the purifying and enlightening of cognition in terms of periods of time,
but also to a parallel happening in the metaphysical domain. It, too, condi-
tions; metaphysics too, determine an era in which things respond to the call
of ratio, since "Not in every age etc." The spirit may indeed, rely on the
fact that when ratio "is purified in the birth pangs of the new eon, in
the crisis of the collapse," God does respond to it, but the response is an
entirely free reaction of the metaphysical being to a ratio of which God is
cognizant. The reaction is apparently presented in a paralle~ not a necessary
relationship. A metaphysical process parallels a history of ratio, but is not
identical with it. There is certainly not enough stress on such identity, since
the emphasis on ratio, on cognition as distinct from the metaphysical ob-
ject, naturally stops short at the duality that always, everywhere accompa-
nies thinking about the concept of cognition: the duality of the perceiving
and the perceived. The perceived-here the metaphysical-reality retains its
304 Esther j Ehrman
complete independence in relation to cognition, to ratio and to perceiving,

as does every object of mere thought. A rationally based hope that a meta-
physical instance listens to the call of a purified cognition does exist, but there
is no certainty that it must listen to it. The event of such listening demon-
strates both the wholly free character and the parallel, expected random aspect
of the metaphysical sphere. Clearly, a thoroughly theological understanding
of the transcendental being is retained here.
If this were not to be the case, a new element would be required, one
that brings cognition and being, ratio and the metaphysical reality closer to
one another. The distance and difference usually set and maintained between
perceiving and perceived by the concept cognition are markedly reduced in
The Reality of the Hebrews through a moment that is determined by a basic,
non-theological position: the moment of constructing. The "construct prin-
ciple" describes the basic process whereby cognition steps out, going above
its contemplative function and reaching into the domain of concrete, physi-
cal intervention, able to evoke and have drastic impact within the spiritual
and physical object world. This denotes a very much closer relation between
that object world and consciousness than the spectator faculty, cognition,
normally has. While allowing the object to remain intact and not depriving it
of its "freedom," the construct function can impinge upon its reality, touch
and affect it. What is significant in The Reality of the Hebrews here is that it
carries the construct principle, familiar in applied, practical fields to centu-
ries of science, and takes it into a domain which one could only think of as
by definition removed from any contact, from any drastic, affective impact
emanating from cognition: into the domain of metaphysical reality itself
The theological perspective is hereby definitively abandoned. It is impor-
tant here to avoid any confusion and to maintain the distance between Kab-
baslistic longings and the aims of the construct principle, which is necessary
if one wishes to set about analyzing its determinants-a task on which we
cannot, of course, embark. We should, however, indicate the negative delim-
itations of the Kabbalistic analogue as a precondition: this means showing
how the construct principle is to be difftrentiated from any form of Kabbalah ma~asit.
The latter is "magic" in every sense, while the construct principle refers to
"rational Messianism," if one can take this much misconstrued term, as The
Reality of the Hebrews does, in the sense of a "repetition" or "repeatability" of
a metaphysical event that can somehow stand comparison with events in
Dr-time that alone qualify as world history. The essential criterion that dis-
tinguishes the idea of repeatability from theological Messianism is that the
latter expects the reappearance of divine reality as an event "from above,"
while the thinking about Messianism that is based on the moment of
construct, sees the repetition "from below," from humanity, as the final
moment of history. "From humanity" does not entail the moral connota-
tion of "good works and rightmindedness," nor does it mean through magic
consideration and deeds, the direct practice of an open or secret ritual. "From
humanity" means by bringing about prerequisite conditions of world historical
dimensions that make possible the implementation of the law-and this po-
tential situation will be opposed by a situation of equal world historical
force. Even these indicators risk causing fundamental misunderstandings,
above all a misunderstanding due to trivialization; it is remarkable that this
likewise applies to all beginnings of practical Kabbalah; it is also a feature
of every dull political undertaking that likes to liven itself up by a clever use
of Messianic perspectives. It is a misunderstanding though trivialization in
the sense that such a reductive procedure, if one can speak of it in this
context at all, often presents itself as a "precondition"; as if it were possible
to cut up live reality into any number of little sectional conditions, evoke
and range sequences of conditions ad lib; as if the being of organic life
could be put together in sections in just any order, instead of according to
prescribed phases, each of which contains all: the divine and the human, the
whole that is empirical and transcendental.
In Cardozo's Messianism, we maintain, the value accorded to cognition,
to ratio, seems, in true theological fashion, to afford the metaphysical
domain its total independence. God hears the word of purified cognition in
a way analogous to hearing the pleas of the righteous. To this interpretation
of Sabbatean theology, which we have described as a parallelism between
metaphysical being and ratio, with a correspondence that may, perhaps, lead
to true coinciding on a psychological level (the relationship between faith
and cognition), but not ever on the level of the real (the relationship
between cognition and being), we would like to add a few features.
Can the person of the Messiah have any distinguishing characteristic other
than that he repeats a metaphysical act that belongs to the category of events
in Dr-time? It is certainly a genuine "inner" Messianic facet that such a rep-
etition was brought about through an indestructible cognition; but the evi-
dence that cannot deceive, the sign, also the hallmark, the necessarily out-
ward, visible, at the same time all-conquering proof is his act. The act is the
criterion for cognition-not the reverse. To say that absolute, rational pene-
tration of the "mystery of faith" is the unequivo~aJ hallmark of the Messiah
indicates that a psychological coincidence of faith and knowledge is being
referred to-and that linking cognition and act, an act that repeats, reenacts
an act of Dr-time is not what had been thought about. We have, further
"Revelation and tradition are only testimo1!Jl' for the one recognizing the
Messiah. But should one not rather assume that repeating a metaphysical
reality in the Messianic era is testimony of "revelation," of tradition and of
cognition? "OnlY" testimony for recognition; this clearly indicates the still all
too separate duality of the domain of cognition and the metaphysical world
in Scholem's account. If we then read in that account that "the fundamental
claim of rational cognition is made with the greatest emphasis, specifically
for the most paradoxical mysteries of faith," leading to "an almost Mai-
monidean concept of the redeeming power of cognition," we note once
again the naked counterplay of faith and knowledge and the fact that the
actual moment of verification, one that must be placed cifter this antithesis
306 Bstherj. Bhrman
has been resolved, that the real repeatability of the mystery itself was not under
consideration. Unquestionably, the "paradox" of a new realization of the
mystery that presupposes a rational understanding must be greater; just as,
equally unquestionably, the progress from cognition of the mystery to that
mystery being made real indicates an understanding of the redeeming power
of cognition that is totally "un-Maimonidean."
All this should make it clear that Sabbateanism, even when it continues
the most powerful Kabbalistic tendency in validating ratio, remains theology.
Against this we have sketched the non-theological base in The Reality of the
Hebrews} from which we have taken two characteristics, the construct princi-
ple and the repeatability principle.
5. Ethics and Ritual

Scholem devotes the final section of his review to the pos1tlon taken in
Cardozo's metaphysics towards morality. The ethical theory of Lurianic Kab-
balah, as we indicated above, took, as the measure of man's earthly doings
not a moral principle that determines good and evil, but a mystical obliga-
tion: It is the task of every human being to restore in part the metaphysical
Ur-form of Adam Kadmon, damaged in the pathology of the world. This is
the purpose of the commandments in the Torah and it is in respect of these
commandments alone, their fulfillment or non-fulfillment, that good and evil
are determined.
The great alternative in moral philosophy between autonomous and het-
eronomous morality seems here, at first glance, to be decided, roughly, in
favor of the second option. In this opposition between two ethical ways of
thinking, it is well known that the one takes the universal as such as basis of
its morality and, as it were, uses the formal criterion "all ought to do so" to
determine the good, which it applies to every ethic. It thus inverts the actual
situation and declares "what everyone ought to do for everyone to be
human-that is the good" to be the norm. This notion of a kind of inde-
pendent good, first fully articulated by Kant, which in fact occupied minds
and dominated thought long before Kant and that is especially close to
modern Judaism, is set against the other, so-called "natural," "heterono-
mous" concept of morality: "something specific is good-therefore all people
should do it." The source of this good in relation to the moral domain is
heteronomous: it is to be found in God-or in any metaphysical construct.
In this variant on the Kabbalistic basis for morality, a mystical construing
of the basis for morality appears clearly and is the obligation of every per-
son to help restore the mysterious Ur-figure of Adam Kadmon and to ful-
fill the commandments of the Torah in the perspective that correlates each
commandment to a limb of the "heavenly man"-that is the good. As op-
posed to the rational universality of formal ethics, a mystical specificity
seemingly dominates the moral obligation. Scholem presumably sees such
correlating of the commandments to Adam Kadmon as an attempt to find
the "meaning of ritual."
However, if one looks a little more closely at this mystical specificity, it

will be seen that it differs very little from the formal universality discussed
above. For, in this context, what is Adam Kadmon if not the "idea of man,"
the "universal in man," which also provided the basic principle for the for-
malistic doctrine of morality. What was logically stated there is here formu-
lated mystically: The Dr-figuration in the idea of man has been damaged.
That which all men ought to do so that all should be human, a perfect
humanity, is not happening in the world; Adam Kadmon has to be reconsti-
tuted. Clearly, the formulations overlap. The only remaining difference
between the two methods, the fundamentals of which here converge, is the
concrete correspondence between anyone commandment of Torah and a
part of Adam as well as the handling of the principle. Clearly,this interpreta-
tion of Adam Kadmon is deliberately suited to a nominalistic rationalism and
adequate only at the level of rationalizing morality. Equally clearly, the con-
cept also extends in the direction of a very different evaluation. It is neces-
sary to point out the increasingly evident possibility that the two ethical
methods can converge in order to show that while conventional moral think-
ing cannot resolve the meaning of the old Hebraic ritual, neither is the,
basically not very different, Kabbalistic moral teaching capable of doing so.
lts ascent into mystery, which distinguishes it most obviously from a for-
malistic ethic, is not based on a specific function of rationalizing morality,
but relates to a general incapacity to fit "religious" content into the ordinary
world, both in the domain of being and in that of the law; It takes as basic
to explanations of the components of the law the absolute impossibility of
any immediate rational accounting for the majority of the commandments
of the Torah, the chukkim. It is well known that the chukkim are those com-
mandments that, as distinct from those, for example, of the Decalogue, are
not normally self-explanatory; they are imbued with the strangeness and def-
initeness of a sphere hidden to empirical ways of being and doing. Thus,
certain animals may not be used for human consumption, as e.g. the hare,
without any reason being offered for that prohibition; thus, too, the param-
eters of metaphysical "purity" and "impurity," the laws on sacrifices and
their substances-in short, the clear majority of the so-called ritual section.
In order to penetrate this complex of sealed commandments, it became nec-
essary, as it were, to abandon the strictly empirical domain.
It is in the context of this-already existing-orientation that one should
understand the mystical aligning of Adam Kadmon in Lurianic Kabbalah.
But that is to replace one mystery by another of equal rank. Or rather, the
mystery has not been accorded its correct place nor set in its rightful course,
where it is perpetually to experience an ever greater transformation in the
domain of cognition while yet drawing away from it. The disposition in
Lurianic Kabbala, even if justified on a deeper, metaphysical level, necessar-
ily remains obscure to rational proceedings "from below" i.e., the leap from
the rational level of moral understanding to the Dr-being, presented as the
basic principle of understanding is similar to the leap towards the hidden
308 EstherJ Ehrman
content of the commandment that requires explanation. This is not a way

to reach a "meaning to ritual," at least not at the beginning of the process.
The beginning of the process of explaining ritual must, let us repeat, be
able to begin on earth, with man, allowing a place for ratio, not in heaven
and not with "heavenly man."
The Reality of the Hebrews, accordingly, begins by offering a general idea of
the nature of ritual. The Hebrews are not, after all, the only nation
in ancient days to include the ritual phenomenon in their world. True, the
ancient Hebrew ritual stands opposed to all other cults in everything and
differs from them radically. However, it does conform to the general char-
acteristics of ritual, defined as presenting demands and situations that are
not decipherable in strictly empirical terms. We are unable here to take even
the first steps in this truly immeasurable field nor to indicate even the most
superficial conceptual differences that emerge between the purely [Ymbolic
ritual, such as that of world religions, and the reality-carrying ritual of spe-
cific, national cults. We would simply like to name the external characteristic
of true ritual, in order to show that, methodologically, it is possible to draw
a rational line to mythical content, even from our world; thus, by entering
more deeply into the empirically given, it is possible to glimpse at relation-
ships and objects that, after extensive research, do enable one to recognize
the outlines of the mythical world. We neither wish nor can approach this
whole field except from the outside and only in the most general way. Every
ritual that is wholly impenetrable in the context of general morality-what,
for instance, can distinguish the enjoyment of hare from the enjoyment of
lamb in a moral perspective-is seen by The Reality of the Hebrews as within
an order that is not generally but specificallY determined, as having not a gen-
eral but a specific purpose--one that is biological. Ritual is a biological tech-
nique. On the basis of a biological state that characterized life in Dr-time,
namely the ethnically conditioned linking of individuals as a fact of life, the
technique aims to enhance the manifestations of life.
How this starting point of the enhancing of empirical existence can lead
to the regions of mythical reality and its beings is beyond the confines of
the present account, since it would entail the description and reconstruction
of an entire world. We would only note the following: Ritual has a function
that is concrete/metaphysical, not abstract/moral, namely enhancing the
domain of biological phenomena. The position of ritual in ancient Hebraism,
so the thesis maintains, is that, surrounded by the other-genuine but
alien-cults of the mythical world, it sees these as seeking the particularized
independence of part of life and extending the enhancement to that section
alone; whereas the hallmark of ritual in ancient Hebraism is that the
enhancement is planned to reach its potential limit and extend to a biologi-
cal totality. The reality and uniqueness of the divine enters into a quite spe-
cific correlation here with the sectional domain within the entirety of legiti-
mate life. In the metaphysic of ancient Hebraism, the criterion is in
conformity with the essence of its Godhead and the enhancing potential is
extended to the whole biological reality. Ritual thus becomes a seal character-
izing the Godhead who gave it and to which it is appropriate. The fact that
ritual in ancient Hebraism does have a series of universal statements, such
as the decalogue, where it ought, as ritua~ to have only specific statements,
is merely !J!mptomatic of such universalism. Ritual repeats the whole prob-
lematic concerning the concept of God, as briefly discussed above. The
combination of universality and concreteness that characterizes the concept
of God in ancient Hebraism, is also the hallmark of its ritual. The universal-
ity can be seen from the fact that this ritual, while wholly removed from
the formal generality of moral statements in the vast majority of cases, yet
contains the entire arsenal of the moral canon. Formal ethical meaning may
not attach to its statements, since that meaning would be legitimized by its
universality-instead of being legitimized by the characteristicum attaching
to the Godhead. It is, however, this that marks the essence of the concept
"ritual." For logical/abstract generality differs from metaphysical universality
inasmuch as the latter encompasses concreteness, while the former excludes
it. To be more eox:act,the latter can exist together with it, the former cannot.
It is a confusion of the formal and general with the metaphysical and uni-
versal to say that such moral statements are to be attributed to the dictum
of an abstract, moral god, instead of to the ritual of a universal God. Moral
signals logical autonomy; ritual signals measures taken to realize the God-
head in the world of experience. This would not be an alternative if the
question were only about such general statements as those of the Deca-
logue and a philosophical concept of the divine being, such as rational the-
ology offers. It would then be easy to understand the bare abstractness of
the Godhead and the bare abstractness of morality as conceptually homo-
geneous. Since, however, the ancient Hebraic concept of God is not
abstract-only and since, further, the conceptually general Decalogue stands
in the midst of wholly specific commandments, equally attributable to the
essence of the Godhead (specific commandments, unlike the specia~ judicial
commandments that are special in the sense of a deductive unfolding-are
simply specific, as such) and since, methodologically, cognition necessitates
a unit, a single principle characterizing and explaining the divine command,
the principle cannot have the standpoint of morality, but only the stand-
point of ritual. Specifically determined laws cannot be understood as state-
ments of morality or of a god determining morality only, but universalistic
statements can be seen as pertaining to the ritual of the universal Godhead.
In The Reali!J if the Hebrews we find the statement ''As opposed to the moral
laws of the other metaphysical nation-laws, the biological universalism of
Hebraic metaphysic leads to 'moral' laws which do not become meaningless
when separated from the remaining ritual, but which contain in themselves
the possibili!J if a universal application."
In the course of last section, we have indicated the differences between
The Reali!J if the Hebrews and the Kabbalah in almost all essential aspects. In
doing so, we have taken particular account of the Sabbatean distortion of
310 Esther j Ehrman
the Kabbalah that Scholem adds on to his account of its theology by way
of a critique, intended or easily inferred, of Goldberg's system. While this
might conclude our remarks on the factual content of this account, it seems
relevant and, in this context, even of general import, to look at the psy-
chology of the, not uncommon, type of historical perspective evident in
Scholem's history of religion. The orientation that determines the views of
a critical historian nowadays concerning philosophy, Kabbalah and the his-
tory of religion deserves some attention.
First and most significantly: Scholem does not have any declared stand-
point. We have before us, in his account, a type of historical presentation,
easily and frequently used, in which a stated, clear overall stand expected of
every critical historian, but especially of a critical historian of spiritual history,
is replaced by-silence concerning the determining viewpoint. A straight-
forward reporter may not have, and may not need, a point of view and yet
claim historical accuracy-if such a thing is possible-for his account. The
reporter who passes judgment in his account is bound to declare the princi-
ples underlying his evaluation quite clearly, even if he does so dogmatically,
so that the reader may know that he has before him not only a historical
account but also an ideology. The greater his claim to scientific research in
the account, the less willing will an author be to admit to an ideology. The
well-known tragic fact that there is no such thing as a neutral report should
not be the pretext for an orgy of subjective narrative and judgment or for a
blurring of the fundamental difference between the-perfectly legitimate-
paradigmatic handling of history that seeks general validation for a perspec-
tive of systematic values based on empirical/historical material and the -
equally legitimate-attempt to eliminate any overall value judgment for the
sake of documentary accuracy. A lack of concern about mingling the two
trends in the writing of history may be less important in external history,
e.g., the history of wars or of politics (partly because external factors are
largely unaffected by any "higher" world view and partly because they re-
tain their relatively stable and "objective" state more easily in a stream of
opinions than do internal factors). A historical method that presents judg-
ments together with reports without communicating explicitly the principle
of orientation on the basis of which the judgments are made leads, in a
spiritual history, to truly chaotic consequences. Everyone is familiar with in-
adequate transmitters in spiritual matters, both in the field of "history of
philosophy" and, particularly, in editings of alien religious institutions. Wher-
ever the subject is other than spiritual i.e., where it is imperative to differen-
tiate the two-that is in the vast field of external history-there will always
remain a core interpretation, in whichever way it may be highlighted, to
which cling rests and a starting point that echo a general consensus: No-
one will deny that Greece repelled the Persian advance at Marathon and
Salamis and, if "world history" is, inevitably, the history of once great
powers, then one of the unquestionably relevant facts might be the process
whereby, in the course of a thousand years or so, power in Europe shifted
from the Mediterranean to the North. However, where the subject is in the
mind, where the mind is the subject-and at the same time the object-of
a history, no matter of substance can be taken from such an internal hori-
zon and transmitted from one conscious mind to another without showing
the definite imprint of the transmitter's persona.
It is therefore essential to know this persona, so that it may be set along-
side the information offered and separated from it. It is enough for Paul
Deussen to write the name Schopenhauer at the head of his version of the
Upanishads to let the reader know what the editor and commentator intends
to do and to direct his sight to the Indian world of thought. Indeed, it is
enough for the most ignorant person in the field, with but the slightest
knowledge of the topic, to note the higWy unpleasant tone in Graetz's his-
torical work on the subject of Kabbalistic writings in order to become aware
of the total incompetence of the narrator here. Having hawked the stand of
Rabbinical liberalism throughout thirteen volumes, Graetz deceives nobody.
That is not the case where someone writes a short, arrogant essay about
one of the fundamental spiritual forces in Judaism such as Kabbalah (and
this does not only apply to the Sabbatean distortion) and coins judgments
in tones of a philosophical and historical judge without revealing the system
of underlying criteria for those pronouncements other than in occasional
obscure dicta that claim to be self-evident. We have tried, in some measure,
to resolve the riddle of the underlying criteria that the writer kept quiet. We
must accept the risks involved in this kind of analysis. Nothing is easier for
the one who has been forced out from behind his cloak of obscurity than
to deny our solution. We shall leave it to other, later critics to decide
whether we were wide off the mark.
We estimate that Scholem's optic is rougWy that of the religion of the
Enlightenment as formulated by Cohen, characterized by the fact that it
feels obliged to understand all religious material as psychologically introvert
or as symbolic or, at best, as real to faith; the variant here shows a certain
added sensibility. Scholem would probably admit to the well known "puri-
fied" religion of reason, residue of several ecstatic faiths. The latter presum-
ably relinquished any motivation to consider Kabbalistic material altogether;
the former would declare its reluctance and poor understanding of the sub-
ject. Significantly,it is by no means only the essentially apostate Sabbatean-
ism of the 17th and 18th centuries that distresses Scholem so much today.
By virtue of his use of "antinomianism," the central concept of his account,
he draws a line linking the explosion of the open antinomianism in Sab-
batean theology that ends in the sick doctrine of the necessary apostasy of
the Messiah, back to a latent kind of antinomianism in early Kabbalah itself.
Since it is acceptable in works on the history of philosophy to attach the
label "antinomianism" to Gnosis, Scholem copies this particular wisdom and
speaks of the undertaking "to take the Ur-Gnostic central idea of antinomi-
anism and integrate it into the world of Judaism itself." He is unable to see
antinomianism in any direction other than one of danger. Scholem's simple,
312 Estherj Ehrman
self-evident philosophical convictions are not concerned that there is anti-

nomianism that is not part of the essence of early Kabbalah (he does in
part concede this, though grudgingly, as is evident from his dismissive use
of terms such as "paradox" and "problematic"), that antinomianism does
not necessarily originate in Gnosis (we shall discuss elsewhere the theory
common to Scholem and Graetz that the current of Gnosis flows into
Kabbalah,lO)that the antinomianism of Gnosis must be differentiated from
that of Kabbalah or, lastly, that Kabbalistic antinomianism, while it can (like
every other) take a dangerous direction, is at the same time an unavoidable
condition of the subject when seen on a deeper, metaphysical level. That
the antinomian element, on a deeper level, cannot be circumvented nor
annulled by thought, but only-as set out above-brought into conceptual
security by driving the antinomian tendency itself further in the direction of
philosophical completeness, into the realm opposite to the danger, is not
something that Scholem knows. Nor would he need to know it if he had
retained the instinct of the spirit of Kabbalah for the antinomian element as
a genuine life-giving force in the orientation of knowledge, instead of acting
like someone who does without the basic mechanism in a movement
because it could explode and limiting thought before it approaches the anti-
nomian sphere by not allowing the problems to be raised.
The fact that Scholem sees the antinomian as going in the Sabbatean
direction only-he would otherwise have had to define the term-is evi-
dence of a view that, while partly correct, is false when presented as total
optic; it is characteristic of one sided anti-Kabbalistic rationalism and differs
little from Graetz's semi philosophical Rabbinism. Indeed, if one compares
the theses presented by these two historians of the literature and religion of
Judaism, discounting stylistic differences that are easily accounted for by the
physical gap of three generations, one will notice a striking similarity in
approach, in historical judgments overall, documented not only by such
things as paralleling Spinoza and Sabbatai Zvi, but also evident in matters
as important as the relationship between Gnosis and Judaism.
Such historians are linked not only by what they say but by what they
keep quiet-the latter option, of course, links them to a far larger company.
Both types act as though it were possible to separate out from the domain
of Judaism a number of targeted phenomena such as Spinozism or Sabbate-
anism (to stay with the examples provided in our context), manifestations
taken as powerhouses of ideas that can and must be combated from a posi-
tion on the soil of the residual body of Judaism. This is the case when
Graetz refers to the once "ugly face" of the fair structure of Judaism, appar-
ently not recognized by Spinoza's world-penetrating eye, or when Scholem
develops a mechanistic "crisis" concept, whereby he sets the crisis-laden
elements, i.e., Kabbalah and the Marranos (whom Graetz does not like
10 C£ Graetz, Gnostizismus und judentum, Krotochin, 1846.

either) against the other, presumably not crisis-laden elements of Judaism.

As if, with the exception of the smallest, wholly sealed kernel of its origin,
everything in Judaism were not crisis-laden; as if the contemporary historian
were capable of locating the crisis by applying certain criteria or could as-
sume that he had the ability to distinguish, to separate conceptually the
healthy from the pathological, the legitimate from the non-legitimate in
Judaism. Certainly, catastrophes that have already occurred are generally vis-
ible and it is all too easy to draw a burdened line of responsibility from the
now visible catastrophe to a point within Judaism-because one can draw
such a line anywhere with equal justification, because, in fact, the whole of
Judaism must bear the burden of the pathogenesis, the non-antinomian be-
ing responsible for the antinomian, the rationalistic for the believing, invert-
ed and continuing because, in short, the source of the crisis is as great as
Judaism itself, from whose confused spheres only the inaccessible center of
its origin can be exempted; and it is there, if anywhere, that the solutions to
the dilemmas lie sealed away.This particular historian of Sabbateanism, how-
ever, who naturally does not possess the all-embracing, total vision of the
systematic mind, but only shares the views of a Synagogue community re-
garding non-Judaism, uses history in order to denounce, as every declared
partisan, i.e., part-perspective has always used it, so that its part-perspective
may be seen as whole. He would lay the burden of responsibility for catas-
trophe and apostasy on a specific manifestation of what is really an entirely
crisis-ridden Judaism. He would make suspect views other than this particu-
lar partial view and, using this form of research into causes (on the Euro-
pean model), would render any overall optic questionable.
Which of these arguments actually articulates a partisan view and which
an overall view set above the partisan is not, however, to be determined by
democratic means; these only know of an equality of partisan views. Nor is
it determined according to the external criteria of an external party.
Indeed, it is not something to be agreed on between declared, opposing
historical constructs. This dispute has to be arbitrated on the level of philo-
sophical systems.
And that is a sphere that Scholem has carefully eluded. Having set aside
any systematic position of his own, any explicit basis for his philosophical
and religious convictions out of the way, he naturally avoided every system-
atic confrontation with the philosophical and religious concepts of those
centuries upon whose history he cast his light. That certain elements in Ju-
daism ended in Sabbateanism and in apostasy, we knOV1.Such knowledge is
quite different from the knowledge of facts that should be set on record by
the chronicler: a network of cause and responsibilities that, if it is to have
timeless, genuine historical value, posits the area, the measure of the rele-
vant system and world view, a philosophical deliberation, the considered
arguments and positions in a sphere of thought in which historical time
has to be brought to a standstil4 in which the arguments have to be given
a modern context; that is, if the subject is to be set within a domain of
314 EstherJ Ehrman
timeless truth. This, however, is a domain that the European historian is

reluctant to enter, his imitator even more so. Apart from one moral and
theological thought that our historian of religion just about contributes by
bringing to the light the collective concept of antinomianism or echoing the
Catholic views on Gnosis, we do not find the slightest attempt to offer any
philosophical statement that might contain arguments-not political ones-
with which to counter basic antinomian intuitions; there is not even a half-
way perceptive presentation of a non-antinomian formulation of the central
problem based on some overall category, let alone the least effort to con-
fute antinomianism.
True, if so much reasoning, so much pursuing of systematic trains of
ideas, so much debating about truth and untruth are required as well as so
much discussion relating to the world and infinity and so many questions
about being, there will be little room left for history or for an overall vision
of a small section of history, if the intention was merely to strengthen the
convictions held in some small community publication. We must also admit
that we are truly tired of the whole cultural enthusiasm that encouraged
fashion oriented European philosophy to throw itself headlong into the
psychology of history, in the hope of reawakening interest in both; since
productivity in systematic thinking has been extinguished in Europe, specu-
lations in cultural history that require no effort and are free of responsi-
bility have stepped into the foreground. Unhappy about the culture chatter
in recent decades, we would gladly be spared the appalling copy of a method
of inquiry that even Europe already sees as a surrogate science being applied
in the field of Judaism.
In accordance with) on the basis if a comprehensive, existential concept, it is
feasible to judge the development or the history of experience and thought.
The ease, the unscrupulous way in which the most profound dialectic and
(within the outside limits of its connotation) antinomian subject matter is
handled, prior to) without any systematic foundation, with barely any orienta-
tion, let alone one that is fit to take on arguments from all sides, all this
should serve as warning to a thinker whose scholarship is sound even if it
lacks understanding for matters of Kabbalah, a warning of orgies of soph-
istry that could abound. Maimonides said: "There are matters that may be
perceived by profound thinkers but that, at the slightest attempt to commu-
nicate them to others and to give outward form to their inner thought, lose
their import and give expression to a wholly different meaning." In our
opinion, mysticism is not a subject for a literary supplement. We would
gladly have been spared this exalted assimilationist phenomenon, a combi-
nation of Spengler with the Rabbinate.

Erich Unger Der Universalismus Des Hebraertums

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TheJournal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Vol. 4, pp.

Erich Unger's "Der Universalismus

E. UNGER: Universalism in Hebraism

Philosopf?y and Kabbalah

1. The Theology of Sabbateanism according to G. Scholem

remarks, attached by the author to the writings of Abraham Cardozo, is as

Antinomianism in Theology. In Cardozo's system, the simple oneness of the

Messiah, in order to fulfill his act of redemption must, as it were, himself

2. Features if an ((apocryphal review !?J G. Scholem

"harmless" critique of a book, even if it were to be explicitly denigrating,

would appear to be custom-made for anyone looking to suggest that the

4. Digression. Delimitation of The Reality of the Hebrews

Firstj Kabbalah does show a certain interweaving, a measure of mutual

To use a rather dangerous, European-oriented description, the Kabbalah, in

Second The Kabbalah has no Theory if Alien Cults.

Herein lies a determining feature of incalculable importance. It is this theory

7 There is even a penetration of monotheistic and polytheistic tendencies attacked by Kabbalah,

8 Cf. The Reality if the Hebrews, ibid.

Three. The Theory rfCultlessness is whollY absent from Kabbalah.

Four. Apart from a potential parallelism between myth and thought,

levels of experience of reality, i.e., of the possibili!J of systems isomorphic to myths

of the writer's delphic, oracular pronouncements. We shall not enter into

1. The already discussed problem in the concept of God in The Reality of

2. J1;[ysticaland Biological Worlds

a multiplicity, we recognize the difficulty faced by rational cognition when

Kabbalah)-these may have a shadowy relation to categorial meaning, but

tion to emerge. These structures lead to the concept of "worlds" in a nar-

3. History of Salvation and Theological Development

formulation of oneness, togetherness in existence of a godhead as appre-

genuine non-limitation, they become loud in a world epoch in which

4. MYstery and Ratio

the resolution of the antithesis, faith-cognition, the formulation that inhibits

complete independence in relation to cognition, to ratio and to perceiving,

5. Ethics and Ritual

However, if one looks a little more closely at this mystical specificity, it

content of the commandment that requires explanation. This is not a way

self-evident philosophical convictions are not concerned that there is anti-

10 C£ Graetz, Gnostizismus und judentum, Krotochin, 1846.

either) against the other, presumably not crisis-laden elements of Judaism.

timeless truth. This, however, is a domain that the European historian is

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