“‘Together a Step Towards the Messianic Goal’

“‘Together a Step Towards the Messianic Goal’ –

Jewish-Protestant Encounter in the Weimar Republic”
By Ulrich Rosenhagen, UW-Madison [Oct. 18, 2008, working draft]

 

In an extensive book review in the Monatsschrift fuer Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums in 1927, Max Dienemann, Rabbi, scholar, and one of the most prominent figures in German liberal Jewry during the Weimar republic, couldn’t stop praising the recent works of Gerhard Kittel, a New Testament scholar thirteen years his junior, a liberal Protestant with a thorough and keen understanding of the rabbinical tradition, who had just begun his tenure at the University of Tuebingen.¹

“It is with special pleasure to read his books as a Jew,” Dienemann wrote, “because in recent days no other scholar has done as much justice to Judaism as Kittel.” Kittel, Dienemann emphasized, “puts away the many claims and misjudgments (…) to which Protestant biblical scholarship still clings to so tenaciously.” Kittel’s books also helped Dienemann to reflect upon the Jewish-Christian dialogue, which Dienemann considered to be first of all a dialogue among scholars. “One has to thankfully welcome [Kittel’s] assumptions and demands. [He] speaks out against the deficient recognition of rabbinical literature (…) and [he] demands that Christian scholars in community with Jewish scholars stimulate each other.” But beyond that, Kittel’s work is also eye-opening for the wider community. “One has to be thankful for [Kittel’s] excellent books which are an enrichment of knowledge and insight and a piece of the good fight for truth of all honest and noble men.” Rabbi Dienemann admired especially Kittel’s fair treatment of the Jewish religion. “A Jew can only have respect and praise for [Kittel’s] position, because Christianity is not lifted up on behalf of Judaism.” Accordingly, Dienemann can express his sincere hopes for any future dialogue. “Kittel needs to be credited that he, without diminishing Judaism, attempts to explain Jesus and Judaism. Much blessing will grow out of his method of scholarship for all sides.”
Dienemann wrote this review at the height of the Weimar republic, he, of course, could not foresee that the Christian scholar he was praising so abundantly here, would, in 1933, reverse his approach.² Yet this is still Weimar in 1927, and, however irritating it is to see proponents of Jewish-Christian dialogue swiftly changing sides in 1933, Kittel with his rigorous historical approach to the New Testament, and his deep knowledge of the rabbinical traditions is but one example for the fruitful theological interconnections between Protestants and liberal German Jews at that time.

When we refer to the “Weimar moment” we are justified in referring to a number of genuine new exchanges of religious ideas and opinions unseen before in the history of Jewish-Christian relations. There is abundant evidence of the marked spike in interest among both Protestants and Jews to foster dialogue for greater understanding. In this regard, we need to call to mind Hugo Gressmann’s invitation to members of the Hochschule des Judentums to lecture at the Institutum Judaicum in Berlin.³ Of importance are also the contributions to the second edition of Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart by Jewish theologians.⁴ The Association of Defense against Anti-Semitism, founded in 1890, was another place for encounter. Its board was now joined by Professor Otto Baumgarten and Pastor Eduard Lamparter - two prominent and, in their fight against anti-Semitism, very outspoken Protestant clergymen.⁵ Especially noteworthy are the many attempts for dialogue by Martin Buber. Buber attended conferences run by missionary societies,⁶ founded the inter-religious journal Die Kreatur,⁷ published a special edition of his journal Der Jude focusing on Judentum und Christentum,⁸ and he met at the Stuttgart Lehrhaus with New Testament scholar Karl Ludwig Schmidt for their famous Streitgespraech⁹ – all these examples are part of a fundamental inter-religious effort to clarify and re-define the relationship between Jews and Protestants during Weimar.

However, while these theological encounters and efforts opened a new chapter of Jewish-Christian relations, the Weimar period still seems to go fairly unrecognized when it comes to charting out the history of Jewish-Christian encounter and dialogue. ¹⁰ This seems to be especially true in Protestant historiography. Here we often find emphasis either on the Jewish-Christian encounters during the German empire or on the catastrophe after 1933.¹¹
On the side of Jewish intellectual history, however, we find a different picture. Historian of religion Paul Mendes-Flohr has looked at these encounters more closely, and he deems them to be “ambivalent” for their Jewish participants, because they were largely organized around the defense of theological interpretation of scripture. Mendes-Flohr underscores that Jews and Christians were in this dialogue together “in a common quest to understand anew the meaning and challenge of religious faith.”¹² However, Mendes-Flohr also takes notice of the limits of dialogue on the Protestant side. Protestants failed, he argues with the example of Martin Buber, to recognize Israel as a living reality of faith beyond Christian conceptualizing of it.¹³
My paper follows Mendes-Flohr in its overall conclusion, but offers some different arguments. In my view, the reluctance on the side of the Protestant participants to fully embrace the dialogue with their Jewish counterparts cannot be explained by a hermeneutical literalism of Scripture as Mendes-Flohr seems to suggest at the end of his essay. Rather, we need to investigate the Jewish-Christian relationship within the context of Weimar modernity and culture. Thus, we need to take into account the different theological approaches towards Israel among Protestants, while we also need to look at these Protestants in their fight against anti-Semitism. Accordingly, I want to examine more closely these Protestant theologians’ views, assumptions, and ideas about Jews and Judaism, as well as their assessments of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. I suggest that, despite their own calls for openness, despite their attempts to reach out to their Jewish fellow citizen, and despite their strong stand against anti-Semitism, in the end Protestant theologians failed to comprehend Judaism as a lived religion. In particular, the Protestant players in this debate did not fully grasp the possibility of religion as a part of Jewish modernity, and thus, their persistent reluctance undermined the promise of this inter-religious dialogue.
This paper focuses primarily on two major publications in which the Jewish-Christian dialogue took place. First, the leading Protestant encyclopedia in Weimar, Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, originally a liberal product of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, which was published in a completely revised second edition between 1927 and 1932. The articles by Gerhard Kittel on Judaism and Christianity, historian of religion Heinrich Frick on Anti-Semitism, and by missionary director Otto von Harling on Mission to the Jews help us to sketch a good picture of mainstream Weimar Protestantism on the issue of the Jewish-Christian relationship.¹⁴ Secondly, I want to look at the special 1927 edition on Judaism and Christianity of Martin Buber’s Der Jude. Der Jude was a widely- read quarterly journal for Jews of all political affiliations and backgrounds, which during its short existence became – according to Michael Brenner - the “most important intellectual forum of modern German Jewry.”¹⁵ The special edition included a diverse group of Protestant theologians representing a wide range of theological approaches and opinions. Religious socialist and Zurich pastor Hermann Kutter,¹⁶ cultural Protestant and liberal theologian Martin Dibelius,¹⁷ historian of religion and active missionary Alfred Jeremias,¹⁸ and Church critic and former pastor Christoph Schrempf,¹⁹ all these thinkers followed Martin Buber’s invitation to contribute a short essay under the guiding question “is it possible that Jews and Christians not just understand each other, but are opening up for each other?”²⁰
Before we now begin to analyze these essays in more detail, we need to reflect upon the way Weimar changed the ground rules for Jewish-Christian dialogue. When Philipp Scheidemann proclaimed the Weimar republic from the balcony of the Reichstag on November 9, 1918, he also opened the floodgates of modernity, and soon modernity penetrated every sphere of life in post-empire Germany.²¹ This sudden take-off was first of all a political, structural one. The inter-religious efforts could take place, because the Weimar constitution established new ground rules of religious pluralism. Modern states are based on the protection of individual rights, the separation of powers, and the separation of religious and governmental institutions, i.e., church and state. The Weimar constitution guaranteed those rights, it guaranteed religious freedom, and it guaranteed the institutional separation of church and state. What had long been established as constitutional practice on the other side of the Atlantic,²² in Germany it was not signed into law before August 11, 1919.²³
Yet, aside from this political creation of a modern, democratic state with a liberal constitution at its heart and center, another process took place. Modernity was budding in Weimar in another way. The great socio-cultural transformations towards modernity now broke through, and the case for classical modernity unfolded. To be sure, this case was a contested one. Weimar displayed, as Detlev Peukert so pointedly noted, the “fascinating and fatal possibilities of our modern world.”²⁴ Fascinating, because of its avant-garde, its all encompassing freedom of expression, and its freedom of religion. Yet, those possibilities were also fatal, and Weimar is a case in the cultural height of modernity as well as a case in the permanent crisis of modernity. People suffering under dreadful economic conditions and the continuous cultural criticism from the right echo the fragility of the Weimar moment.
While the great majority of German Jews endorsed Weimar and the challenges and possibilities of modernity, and while German Jews soon began to play an important role in Weimar culture,²⁵ there were numerous opponents of the new republic - and many of them were to be found on the side of Protestant conservative monarchists. These conservatives bemoaned the loss of the old order, and the Protestant cultural and political hegemony which had characterized the old empire. Weimar democracy did not provide for the same strong bond between Protestantism and the monarchy which had put its stamp on the Kaiserreich. Weimar did not provide for a new alliance of throne and altar. Monarchy by the grace of God and the Protestant church were no longer the cornerstones of the German state. Accordingly, Protestant conservatives in their great majority did not accept the new modern state, its challenges and possibilities. These Protestant conservatives were keen to delegitimize the new state’s constitutional heart and center, and increasingly they joined the choir of anti-Semites.²⁶ Based on racial biases, they lamented the granting of civil liberties for all citizens. Conservatives were also vehemently opposed to the growing influence of individual German Jews in the cultural sphere. These and other issues were debated widely and across all camps in the Weimar media under the label of the so-called Judenfrage (‘the Jewish question’). In addition, under the Judenfrage, many leading Protestant conservatives questioned the 19^th century process of emancipation as well as the growing number of immigrants of Eastern European Jews. By repeatedly bringing up the Judenfrage in the media people were not only letting loose their hazy anti-Semitic emotions. Rather, the Judenfrage was bundling up the question of modernity, its challenges and consequences. In the media, Jews were referred to as a paradigm of modernity. The Jew became the standard negative symbol in the cultural criticism of the right against modernity. The Judenfrage displayed Jews as the deputies of modernity in a culture war against modernity.²⁷
Despite the increasing dominance of the conservatives, many Protestant theologians and clergy supported the broad aims of inter-religious dialogue. Broadly speaking, we find in the Protestant mainstream at least three different groups which actively participated in the Jewish-Christian encounters in Weimar. These groups, however, often times overlapped, and we can recognize some individual thinkers moving back and forth between them.
In the first group we find liberal theologians who fully accepted modernity and the new democratic state. These liberals did not take issue with the new cultural strength of German Jews, although the socio-economic problem of uncontrolled immigration of Eastern European Jews was critically debated among liberals as well. The liberal theologians’ defense of Jews was rooted in the old alliance of liberals and Jews of the German revolution of 1848. Liberal Jews and liberal, cultural Protestants also clung to certain elitist cultural ideas, and their social milieus overlapped to a good degree. It is hardly a surprise that liberal, cultural Protestants played a key role in the inter-religious dialogue during Weimar, and in the fight against anti-Semitism.²⁸
The second group of Protestant theologians who were important contributors to the Jewish-Christian dialogue in Weimar came from the tradition of the German Awakening. Although these theologians had trouble with modernity, their critique differed substantially from that of other conservatives. Theologians of this tradition didn’t oppose Weimar for political reason, but rejected the process of modernity on a religious basis. They looked at history from the point of salvation, and they argued that salvation cannot be brought about unless all Jews collectively convert and accept Christ as Messiah. Yet modernity and emancipation contradicted this heilsgeschichtliche theology. The process of emancipation, they claimed, led Jews to assimilation, and moved them further away from collective religious renewal. Theologians advocating the mission to the Jews were also permeated by a deep philo-Semitism. Following scholars like Hermann Leberecht Strack, Franz Delitzsch, and Gustaf Dalman, the thorough study of rabbinical sources grew, because of the idea of Israel as God’s means for the salvation of the world. Though the final objective of these theologians was conversion, their missionary efforts were still fueled by love for Jews.²⁹
In addition to these two groups, we can also recognize a wide openness for dialogue among the group of religious socialists. Protestant religious socialists and Jewish religious socialists mixed often. Alexander Szanto, for instance, a social democrat and representative of the Berlin reform congregation, reports in 1929 and in 1931 in the Marburg based Zeitschrift fuer Religion und Sozialismus on the relationship between religious socialism and Judaism. Szanto maintains in his articles that “the religious socialism of the Christian confession will be of valuable stimulus for the Jewish-religious socialism.”³⁰ Thus, it comes as no surprise when the honor of the opening essay in Martin Buber’s special edition of Der Jude on Judaism and Christianity went to the founder of religious socialism in Switzerland, Hermann Kutter.³¹
For Jews, on the other hand, the Jewish-Christian encounter had to be understood before the background of the “renaissance” of German Judaism during Weimar. German Jews were ready for the new chapter of encounter and dialogue, because they felt strengthened after the recent exchange with Eastern European Jewry and its spirituality. “All in all,” Leo Baeck pointed out in Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart in 1929, “Judaism today looks much deeper, stronger, and more confident of itself and its future than a century before.”³² Some of the Jewish participants, however, entered the debate with caution. Still fresh was the memory of the somewhat one-sided religious debate Jews had experienced at the beginning of the century by publicly disputing the claims regarding Judaism Adolf von Harnack had made.³³ Reminiscent of this earlier debate, Friedrich Thieberger noted the lopsidedness of the debates by referring to Christianity as an unquestioned measure of true religion: “On both sides, Christianity is not questioned as the highest religious value, and Judaism is measured against it [Christianity].” And, he lamented, “Even in Jewish circles it has become a fashion to accept Jesus as the executor of prophetic signs!” Thieberger found the reason for this lopsidedness deeply ingrained in western culture. “The intellectual reality of Europe (…) has uplifted the absolute value of the Christian idea to its axiom.” If, however, dialogue can take place only among equals, the Jews had yet to become equals. After a century of emancipation and assimilation, they still needed the necessary elbow room for themselves, their self-identity and their place in a culture of Protestant dominance. Accordingly, Thieberger continued, “It is more important for Judaism than for Christianity that the debate can be held freely without this axiom.”³⁴
This quest for Jewish identity notwithstanding, the inter-religious dialogue was clearly welcomed on both sides, and the general attitude with which participants joined these inter-religious encounters were open and positive. When entering the dialogue, Jews and Protestants even referred to it in striking archetypical metaphors underscoring their mutual sacred sources. Max Dienemann, for example, viewed the relationship between Judaism and Christianity as “two different river-beds of one river from the same spring.”³⁵ Gerhard Kittel, on the other side, frequently invoked the metaphor of soil to explain this relationship. Referring to the history of Israel, he staunchly declared that “all attempts to disconnect Christianity from this soil will turn it into an unhistorical phenomenon,” and will deny Christianity its “mother soil of moral strength.”³⁶ While the image of the olive tree of Paul’s letter to the Romans was also frequently cited,³⁷ historian and New Testament scholar Martin Dibelius advised his audience to look for the common ground between Judaism and Christianity not just in the historical origins of Christianity, but also in their “shared intellectual property.” This shared property Dibelius recognized first of all in the psalms of the Hebrew bible and in the monotheism of the biblical prophets.³⁸ Dibelius also didn’t tire of reminding all his Jewish and Christian readers that Christianity kept Israel’s theology of a God of history who judges over sin. Moreover, he emphasized, Christians acknowledge in the father of Jesus Christ the God of Abraham and the patriarchs.³⁹
The most astonishing fact, however, is that both sides eventually invoked messianic language to make sense of this new stage of inter-religious encounter. By doing so, they placed the dialogue in the widest possible spiritual and historical horizon. On the Christian side Alfred Jeremias, for instance, cited Hosea 3:5 (“Afterward the Israelites will return and seek the LORD their God and David their king. They will come trembling to the LORD and to his blessings in the last days”) - one of the key texts to determine what the Messiah will do - to express his confidence that in the last days a “religiously renewed Jewry” will look for the Messiah. But only God, Jeremias summarized, to whom “faithful Christians and faithful Jews pray together” knows when these last days will begin.⁴⁰
Rabbi Max Dienemann met Alfred Jeremias on equal ground. Dienemann emphasized that the meaning of this Jewish-Christian dialogue was not to work out differences, but instead this dialogue has to be “one step on the way towards the messianic goal.” Dienemann was quoting from Isaiah 11:9 (“That the earth will be filled for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea”), a crucial text in the Christian liturgy in Advent, to link the Jewish-Christian encounter with the awaited eternal realm of peace through the coming of the Messiah. Though Jews and Christians read this text with very different eyes, Max Dienemann very well knew that by quoting it he laid out the widest possible dimension for this new chapter of Jewish-Christian encounter. In Isaiah 11, the Bible reminds Jews and Christians to expect everything from the future, when the whole creation will be penetrated with the knowledge of God, and the King of peace will rule eternally. For Dienemann, a re-definition of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity was a cornerstone of the messianic age. Jewish-Christian dialogue was not only essential to bring about a different, better world, but it was also a sign of that new world.⁴¹
But despite these striking messianic overtones, the inter-religious dialogue was a fragile and contested one. While embarrassed and challenged by widespread anti-Semitism in Weimar, Protestant theologians were almost always quick to point to the fundamental theological differences between Judaism and Christianity, which amounted, in the words of Gerhard Kittel, to an “unbridgeable opposition” between these two religions.⁴² According to Kittel, Jews can reach salvation as a reward for human merit within a “legalistic” setting, and the Jewish religion is represented best by the biblical figure of the Pharisee. Christians, on the other hand, assume that all man have sinned, and acknowledge therefore pure grace and forgiveness at the center of their religion. In this fundamental distinction between “Judaism as a religion of law” versus “Christianity as a religion of grace,” Kittel recognized the impulse which has “forever turned the daughter-religion into a different religion.”⁴³
In quite similar fashion, Martin Dibelius stressed the “decisive opposition of the Christian and Jewish religion to each other concerning man’s relationship with God.”⁴⁴ Yet Dibelius’ distinction is characteristically different than the one of Kittel. For him, the usage of legal concepts in the sphere of mind and spirit, the sphere of religion, indicated something anachronistic. And thus, already in his Geschichtliche und uebergeschichtliche Religion im Christentum of 1925, Dibelius viewed Judaism as a pre-modern and “legalistic” religion in opposition to Protestantism as an embodiment of modern religion.⁴⁵ This distinction between pre-modern Judaism and modern Protestant Christianity seems to be the centerpiece of his interpretation of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity.
For Dibelius, Judaism represents legalism, which is a constant threat for Christianity, because its basic precepts are not grace and faith, but a collection of rules which ought to be executed. The Jewish religion, he argued, emerged out of the Judaism of the Hellenistic diaspora and the rabbinical tradition. It is centered around law and synagogue, and it is, as a type, the first and permanent opponent of Christianity. In its essence, Judaism subordinates human existence and morality under a law which comes directly from God. And God’s will is present in this law and it gives clear guidance for the believer. Christianity is distinct from Judaism regarding the notion of revelation. In Christianity, what is revealed, is not a “to do” but a “to be”. Unlike Jews, Dibelius stressed, Christians are required not just simply to repeat, but to “creatively regenerate in their own lives the archetypical meaning of the life of Christ.” Jews on the other hand, Dibelius asserted, have received God’s revelation in the format of a book which contains God’s will in a list of rules. Faith, for Jews, means pious execution of such rules. The Christian on the other hand, is the real modern person. He can’t just execute the law’s requirements, but, according to Dibelius, approaches the law in “creative receptivity.” Moreover, for Jews the law is a continuation of God’s works of creation, and thus it is fundamentally good. And accordingly, the Jews’ attitude to the world is based on a strong optimism. In Christianity on the other hand, the relationship between God and world is symbolically expressed in the cross. The relationship between God, world and man is a broken one. The cross represents not a continuity of an existing relationship between God and man, but a new creation, and “man can achieve salvation only through the struggle with God, sin, misery, and fate.”