in faith, will be able to find that balance which allows us to perceive a divine spirit in aspiring and increasing perception. And once this path has been initiated, then some day they will enter into the world with the confidence to faithfully pursue the goal set before them. They will firmly oppose the self-idolatry and the hubris that is foreign to the true essence of scholarship, for this has no power over them; what is uplifting and enlightening in science is warmly received and supported by faith.— Faith also teaches: loyalty to the sovereign, loyalty to the fatherland; and this spirit shall be nurtured at the institute, that the [aspiring] leaders declare these teachings of faith, assured by the fidelity of which they will become fervent supporters. [. . .] It has begun: this institute was founded with the blessing of the king; may this blessing forever remain with the institute! It has begun with trust in God, and the project was undertaken in honor of his name: may he spread his favor and protection, such that the delicate plant ripens into a refreshing fruit which spreads blessing! Copyright © 2023. Jewish Publication Society. All rights reserved. ludwiG philippSon (1811–99) Ludwig Philippson (b. 1811, Dessau; d. 1889, Bonn) was a rabbi, newspaper editor, Bible exegete and translator, and one of the mostly widely known Jewish intellectuals in nineteenth-century Germany. In 1837, he founded (and edited for more than fifty years) the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums (General newspaper of Judaism), which would become the most widely read German Jewish newspaper in Central Europe. Many of its most influential editorials, especially those dealing with theological problems, were written by Philippson himself. If Abraham Geiger (see chapter 2) was the Reform’s intellectual visionary, Philippson was its organizational mastermind. In the 1840s, he played a significant role in the early growth of the German Reform movement. He convened three rabbinical conferences concerning legal reforms of the Jewish religion that succeeded in uniting all the various efforts to modernize Judaism’s ceremonial laws. Likewise, Philippson 44 eSSentialS oF JudaiSm Modern Jewish Theology : The First One Hundred Years, 1835-1935, edited by Samuel J. Kessler, and George Y. Kohler, Jewish Publication Society, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=30841336. Created from buffalo on 2024-06-06 20:43:03. Copyright © 2023. Jewish Publication Society. All rights reserved. acted as the publisher for many major works of Jewish scholarship. In 1855, he founded (and ran for eighteen years) the Institut zur Förderung der Israelitischen Literatur (Institute for the promotion of Jewish literature), a Jewish publication society that would print more than eighty works of Jewish history, poetry, fiction, and biography, including many volumes of Heinrich Graetz’s History of the Jews. He also published a German translation of the Hebrew Bible (Die Israelitische Bibel) which featured his personal theological commentary. The short text translated here is part of the introduction to Philippson’s Bible translation, a three-volume set with Hebrew and German text, dozens of woodcut illustrations, and Philippson’s extensive elaborations.66 Throughout the volumes, his erudite commentary makes frequent references to archaeology, botany, natural history, and Egyptology, as well as biblical criticism. The introduction and commentary can be seen as exemplars of modern Jewish thought, standing between old and new. Philippson believes in the Mosaic authorship of (almost all of ) the Pentateuch, but for theological, not purely dogmatic reasons. For him, the concept of God stays essentially constant throughout the whole of the Bible. He has no difficulty accepting the idea that several authors composed the book of Isaiah, but he outright rejects the lex post prophetas (the law comes after the prophets) thesis (that the Torah is a product of the Babylonian Diaspora and not Revelation) that would later become popular among liberal Jewish theologians. Finally, in the development of liberal Jewish theology after Philippson, the division between duties toward God and duties toward other human beings gradually disappears. In its place, “neighbor-love” comes to be seen as the full and sufficient service to a monotheistic God. In this excerpt, Philippson is still convinced of the equal importance of ritual and interpersonal ethics for the sanctification of God. philippSon 45 Modern Jewish Theology : The First One Hundred Years, 1835-1935, edited by Samuel J. Kessler, and George Y. Kohler, Jewish Publication Society, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=30841336. Created from buffalo on 2024-06-06 20:43:03. Introduction to the Five Books of Moses (1844) Translated by Alexandra Zirkle Copyright © 2023. Jewish Publication Society. All rights reserved. idea [of the five BookS of moSeS] Corporeality endowed humans with sensuality. By virtue of man’s free spirit, sensuality was not constrained to instinct’s known and unchanging bounds. Rather, sensuality became capable of ever stronger development, waxing stronger until it attained sovereignty over the entire human, culminating in degeneracy. With corporeality, bodily appetite arose, which, once it outpaced its thoroughly natural realm, increasingly grew, desired ever more satisfaction, and demanded even more activity, until all of man was beset by bodily appetite and by the work necessitated by satisfying it. With sociality, ownership emerged along with its various sorts of work. Ownership and inequality, however, necessarily brought about opposing ambitions, jealousy, and conflict, until these overtook all of man and his activities. Under the force of these factors, the spiritual life of man foundered and sin corrupted man’s soul. Thus it came about that although the yearning for knowledge was present in the human spirit, the human spirit did not possess the aptitude for attaining true knowledge by itself. Thus the human spirit necessarily sank into the endless errors of heathendom.67 To redeem man’s domination by sensuality; his spiritual life from the excessive pressures of work and sociality, as well as from sin; and his spirit from error; that is, to give man true understanding—namely, knowledge of law and of holiness—God had to directly share with man that which man had heretofore not known: Revelation.68 Indeed, the divine precepts of law and holiness were unknowable by any means other than direct Revelation. But mankind as a whole should not and could not be deprived of free development, or else humanity’s nature would be destroyed. Thus, to bring this divine Revelation to mankind, a particular people had to be appointed as the bearers of Revelation to humanity. This people was appointed to constantly preserve Revelation 46 eSSentialS oF JudaiSm Modern Jewish Theology : The First One Hundred Years, 1835-1935, edited by Samuel J. Kessler, and George Y. Kohler, Jewish Publication Society, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=30841336. Created from buffalo on 2024-06-06 20:43:03. until all of mankind had succeeded, through their own path of free development, to progressively, ever more extensively and intensively, accept the divine Revelation and allow themselves to be permeated with it. This people could not be a people that was already formed, saturated with evil, and of a defined character, but rather a people who had been isolated for this purpose and who matured as a people which, from their very beginning, had nurtured their consciousness of this calling.69 trend Therefore, the Five Books of Moses intend to substantiate: 1) the necessity of Revelation, and, to this end, detail the history of Creation, in particular of mankind, humanity’s primitive condition, the origin of sin through carnality, the origin of society and its troubles in its gradual development until our time; 2) the education of the People of Revelation as depicted in history; 3) the giving of Revelation, which was imparted to this people, with all of its surrounding circumstances.70 Copyright © 2023. Jewish Publication Society. All rights reserved. teaching god is the eternal, unchanging, and single Being, who, through all His power, was able to bring forth and sustain the material world through His will, since He is Himself immaterial and pure-spirited (holy). God is Immanent to man, in that He thereby did the following:71 He gave mankind a free, spiritual nature; created them in His own image; revealed to them truth; judges man’s actions, insofar as God allows the consequences of the actions to occur; but forgives the guilt of the remorseful soul. Amongst the People of Revelation, divine guidance, as well as punishment and remuneration, are immanent to everything that relates to Revelation. human, endowed with free will which remained his even after the revelation—destined to satisfy his corporeal needs, therefore to work and to sociality, therefore capable of sin and implicated in material life—is called to keep himself free of sin, to dissociate himself from his corporeal needs, and to live with God. Hence, he must absorb knowledge philippSon 47 Modern Jewish Theology : The First One Hundred Years, 1835-1935, edited by Samuel J. Kessler, and George Y. Kohler, Jewish Publication Society, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=30841336. Created from buffalo on 2024-06-06 20:43:03. Copyright © 2023. Jewish Publication Society. All rights reserved. of the one God and strive toward sanctification. Sanctification occurs, in part, through spiritual elevation toward God and through the most perfect love of God; in part through neighbor-love, which should reach the same height as self-love, and which should be exercised, in particular, through absolute justice and self-sacrificing charity; and in part through bodily purity, namely abstaining from consuming blood (Gen. 9:4). As for the bearers of Revelation specifically, Israel should be maintained through strict consistency and particular means in order to preserve the Revelation and continuously testify of it. Israel should hold fast to the knowledge of the one God by eternally remembering the happenings prior to and accompanying the giving of Revelation. The spiritual elevation toward God should be buttressed by a distinct set of rituals, enabled by observance of the sabbath and festivals to dissociate from material life at particular times, and to recall to one’s consciousness the process of elevation toward God even through external symbols, such as the sublation of one’s separation from God through the Day of Atonement. Neighbor-love should arise through the exercise of the strongest laws of justice in absolute equality; through fixed but proportional, freely given [portions] for the poor; and through the reversion of inherited property and the remission of debts at appointed times. Purity should be maintained in part through marital and chastity-laws, in part through the avoidance of all dishes that accumulate too much material animal substances; in part through maintaining the most meaningful animal purifications, which have been observed for generations, such as abstention from contact with the dead and the leprous, the latter which poses an awful scourge in the Orient.72 The entire relationship within Revelation should be seen as a covenant into which the young child is brought shortly after birth, through circumcision. 48 eSSentialS oF JudaiSm Modern Jewish Theology : The First One Hundred Years, 1835-1935, edited by Samuel J. Kessler, and George Y. Kohler, Jewish Publication Society, 2023. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/buffalo/detail.action?docID=30841336. Created from buffalo on 2024-06-06 20:43:03.