The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth 2021932091, 9780192898685

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Te Idea of Semitic Monotheism

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

Te Idea of Semitic Monotheism Te Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth

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G U Y  G .  S T R OUM S A

1

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Guy G. Stroumsa 2021 Te moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932091

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Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

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For Tema and Mark Silk

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

Copyright © 2021. Oxford University Press USA - OSO. All rights reserved. Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

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Acknowledgements Although most chapters of this book were written in Jerusalem, I have used library facilities also in Oxford, Ann Arbor, Chicago, Berlin, and Paris. I started working on it during my Oxford stint, as the frst Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions. My College, Lady Margaret Hall, is located at the end of Norham Gardens, where Max Müller once lived. My original puzzlement at the fact that the Chair had only been established in 2009, rather than in his days, a century-­and-­a-­half earlier, lies at the root of this book. A generous Research Award from the Alexander-­von-­Humboldt-­Stifung, in 2008, permitted the initial research on this project. My intensive involvement with its topic started as I worked on the Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion, which I delivered in the spring of 2013 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. I wish to thank Catherine Hezser for her kind invitation. I did not guess at the time that it would take me so long to transform these lectures into a book. My gratitude also goes to Peter Mack for the Workshop on “Judaism and Islam in the Mind of Europe” that he asked me to organize at the Warburg Institute, of which he was then Director, on June 6, 2013. I am grateful to the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for a Fellowship in 2015, and to the John  U.  Nef Committee on Social Tought at the University of Chicago for a Kohut Visiting Professorship in 2016. I was able to pursue research on this book with the help of remarkable libraries in Ann Arbor and Chicago. I wish to thank Luca Guliani, former Rector of the Wissenschafskolleg zu Berlin, for having extended to me a Fellowship at this remarkable institution in 2017. Te excellent conditions at the WiKo did much to facilitate my research. Te lecture I gave at the reception (jointly with Sarah Stroumsa) of the Leopold-­Lucas Prize in Tübingen on May 8, 2018 provided further incentive to publish my views on the topic (Guy  G.  Stroumsa and Sarah Stroumsa, Eine dreifältige Schnur: über Judentum, Christentum und Islam in Geschichte und Wissenschaf [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020]). I wish to express my gratitude to the Evangelical Teological Faculty at the University of Tübingen for this award.

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

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viii Acknowledgements I am beholden to Rajeev Bhargava (CSDS, Delhi), Corrine Bonnet (Toulouse), Arthur Bradley (Lancaster), Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill and Geofrey Lloyd (Cambridge), Charles Stang (CSWR, Harvard), and Carsten Wilke (Central European University, then Budapest) for having invited me to present parts of this work at a number of workshops and conferences. Over the years, Dominique Bourel (CNRS, Jerusalem) read a number of the chapters in their draf form and discussed their content with me. In acts of true friendship, both Philippe Borgeaud (Geneva) and Maurice Kriegel (EHESS, Paris) read the whole typescript; I am much indebted to them for their important comments. Naphtali Meshel (Jerusalem) and Perrine Simon-­Nahum (CNRS, Paris) kindly agreed to read various chapters. Teodor Dunkelgrün (Cambridge) and Robert Priest (Royal Holloway, London) commented on Chapter six. My own refection on Renan has benefted from almost daily conversations with François Hartog (EHESS, Paris) in Chicago during the fall of 2016, when we were both teaching in the John  U.  Nef Committee on Social Tought at the University of Chicago. A French version of the frst half of Chapter four, published in Asdiwal in 2018, was dedicated to the distinguished Parisian Sanskritist Charles Malamoud, in recognition of his friendship and generosity over the past fve decades. Jacques Le Brun, with whom I discussed various aspects of this book, will not be able to read it: he became a victim of Covid-­19 in early spring 2020. At Oxford University Press, I was lucky to have Tom Perridge as a thoughtful and gracious editor. I am most grateful to the anonymous readers, who called my attention to a number of serious problems in the original typescript. Te reports they produced helped me to clarify and sharpen my thought and to prune my text of many errors and typos. Once more, Sara Tropper’s excellent editing saved me from many oddities and infelicities. I am beholden to Marc Sherman, who compiled the indices with great care. I wish to thank the Centre des monuments nationaux in Paris for allowing me to use their photo of Renan’s study at the Collège de France, as reconstituted in Renan’s native home in Tréguier, for the dust jacket. My gratitude goes to Margo Stroumsa-­Uzan for suggesting this photo. Troughout the years, Sarah Stroumsa has been my frst, last, and toughest reader. My debt to her is infnite. I dedicate this book to Tema and Mark Silk, in gratitude for half a century of constant friendship and intellectual exchange. Jerusalem, January 2021

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

Contents Introduction: Te Study of Religion and the Spirit of Orientalism 1 1. Varieties of Monotheism and the Tree Rings Te Emergence of a Concept A Medieval Legacy

24 24 35

2. Te Enlightenment’s Paradigm Shif and the Tree Impostors Philosophes Comparing Religions Te Abrahamic Eclipse

43 43 56

3. Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars A Romantic Tradition Aryans and Semites Wissenschaf des Judentums and Jewish Orientalism

63 64 72 76

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4. Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis 85 Anquetil Duperron: Go East, Young Man 86 A New Epistemology 101 5. Semitic Monotheism: Renan on Judaism and Islam Monotheism and Race Te Jewish Miracle and Anti-­Islamism

111 112 120

6. A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh? Jesus a Man? Jesus a Jew?

131 131 138

7. Secular Scholarship in France: Catholics, Protestants, and Jews 147 Building Institutions 147 Crossing the Rhine 154 8. From the Quarrel of Monotheism to the Babel–Bibel Controversy 167 Te Quarrel of Monotheism 167 Beyond the Hebrew God 177

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

x Contents

9. Semitic Religion and Sacrifcial Ritual Max Müller and the Birth of “World Religions” Julius Wellhausen on Hebrews and Arabs William Robertson Smith: Te Sacrifcial Turn

191 191 201 207

10. Sacrifce Compared: Israel and India Hubert and Mauss: Sacrifce in Context Jewish Scholars and the Dreyfus Afair Robert Hertz: Becoming the Expiatory Sacrifce Oriental Religions

219 221 226 237 241

Conclusion: Comparing Monotheisms

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Bibliography Selected Name Index General Index

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

245 253 289 293

Les feurs de l’histoire religieuse sont des feurs étranges. [Te fowers of religious history are strange fowers’]

Ernest Renan, Nouvelles études d’histoire religieuse, Preface

Es gelingt dem Gelehrten erst mit Hülfe der Geschichte (aber nicht von seiner persönlichen Erfahrung aus), es gegenüber den Religionen zu einem ehrfurchtsvollen Ernste und zu einer gewissen scheuen Rücksicht zu bringen . . .  [It is only with the help of the study of history (but not from personal experience) that a scholar becomes able to treat religions with a reverent seriousness and a certain shy regard . . . ]

Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 58

Car c’est inouï, la rage des gens d’une religion à étudier celle des autres. [It’s unbelievable, the craze that people of one religion bring to study the religion of others.]

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Marcel Proust, Le côté de Guermantes, Part II, Chapter Two

Wie unfassbar bescheiden sind die Menschen, die sich einer einzigen Religion verschreiben! Ich habe sehr viele Religionen, und die eine, die ihnen übergeordnet ist, bildet sich erst im Laufe meines Lebens. [How incomprehensibly modest are people who only subscribe to one religion! I have a great many religions, and the one towering above them all is constructing itself throughout my life.]

Elias Canetti, Die Provinz des Menschen, Aufzeichnungen 1942–1972

. . . le chercheur, lorsqu’il entreprend d’explorer les rapports entre l’esprit humain et les cultures, fabrique lui-­même des mythes. [. . . the very scholar who seeks to explore the relationship between the human mind and human cultures, concocts myths.]

Charles Malamoud, “Histoire des religions et comparatisme: la question indo-­européenne” (1991)

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

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Introduction

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Te Study of Religion and the Spirit of Orientalism

Tis book is a sequel to A New Science: Te Discovery of Religion in an Age of Reason, where I analyzed new intellectual approaches to religion in early modernity, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.1 In the present work, I study some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion during the long nineteenth century. More precisely, I seek here to understand the implications, in a secular age, which was also the formative period of the new discipline, of a major paradigm shif. Te nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of the taxonomy of religions. According to the traditional model, in place since late antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were cognate religions, all stemming from the biblical patriarch Abraham’s discovery of monotheism. Tis model was largely discarded during the Enlightenment, and would be later replaced by a new one, according to which Christianity, the religion of Europe, essentially belonged to a postulated family of the Aryan, or Indo-­European religions, while Judaism and Islam were identifed as Semitic religions. In the mid-­nineteenth century, Ernest Renan coined the term “Semitic monotheism” to describe the belief in one single God, supposedly emblematic of the Semitic peoples, in contrast to the purportedly polytheistic systems of the Indo-­European peoples. In doing so, Renan was creating a potent scholarly myth that would be espoused for decades by European scholars of religion, only to unravel towards the end of the century and fall by the scholarly wayside. Te myth of Semitic monotheism is intricately associated with important aspects of European religious, intellectual, and social history, and should be understood within the broader framework provided by growing secularization, colonialism, the fowering of the missionary movement, and the rise of the modern university. Trough the prism of Semitic monotheism, I hope to shed light on some fundamental aspects of the modern study of religion in Europe in the long nineteenth 1 Guy  G.  Stroumsa, A New Science: Te Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press (2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0001

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2  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism century, from the sequels of the Enlightenment in the late eighteenth century to the eve of the First World War. In this book, I propose to repurpose this prism, deploying it to decipher how, in this period, traditional categories of religion were radically transformed and new taxonomies invented. Tis transformational passage was even more profound than an apparently simple shif from religious to scientifc categories would imply. Just as the old thought patterns were based on ancient myths, so new myths were forged to establish new patterns. Te nineteenth century, which Jürgen Osterhammel has dubbed the “foundational century” (Gründungsjahrhundert),2 was indeed the foundational period not only of our contemporary, globalized world, but also of no small number of the scholarly disciplines taught in modern universities. Among them is the academic study of religions, alternatively called “science of religion,” “history of religions,” or “comparative religion.” I seek here to identify, in the study of religions, one such foundational myth and to present and analyze some of its abiding consequences. While all branches of knowledge have a history, important features of these histories are ofen obscured from view. It remains a puzzling fact that the history of science, as a discipline, focuses mainly on the natural sciences, in which the past of the discipline matters less to the practicing scientist than in the humanities, where the historical tradition of a discipline has a powerful efect on both the problems tackled and the methods used. Te history of Western scholarship, however, cannot be studied in isolation from its broader societal context; it also forms part of European intellectual and cultural history, and it is as such that it should be approached.3 Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the “science of religion” stood at the very forefront of knowledge. Its claims, which tended to be made in the form of combative statements, had immense implications for society at large. It is this broader, public signifcance of a discipline that today is ofen assessed as arcane, which I hope to showcase in the following pages.4 2 See Jürgen Osterhammel, Te Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014). 3 I concur here with Timothy Fitzgerald, Te Ideology of Religious Studies (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), IX, who criticizes a “mystifying ideology” for attempting to reconstruct a decontextualized, ahistorical phenomenon and divorce it from questions of power. 4  See, for instance, Mircea Eliade’s refection, dating from 1959: Te adventurous and the bold, creative minds are no longer coming to philology, to Orientalism, or to the history of religions as they were in 1870–1880; they are oriented rather towards the physical sciences and mathematics . . . We attract only paltry types who haven’t a virile enough soul to face a world in a state of crisis or risk their career for a daring idea.

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Introduction  3 In A New Science: Te Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason, I sought to call attention to an early chapter in the formation of the modern study of religion, to a time before the academic discipline was established. Taking the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as my focal point, before the birth of scholarly institutions devoted to this study, I demonstrated how individual scholars frst set modern parameters for the non-­theological study of the religions of humankind, past and present. Te present work takes as its point of departure the Enlightenment. In the nineteenth century, the study of religion surfaced as a new discipline, complete with its own institutional frameworks. Tis nascent research feld emerged at the nexus of several existing disciplines, including philosophy and theology, linguistics and philology, Oriental studies and ethnology (or social anthropology, as it would later be called). It could not have emerged without a prolonged, intense, and complex interface between these disciplines. From its inception, the use of comparative methods was integral to this “science of religion,” as it was at the time in a number of disciplines. It can be said that the new mental map of religion, as it materialized during the nineteenth century, amounted to nothing less than a reconstruction of the idea of religion as it had been known since early modernity.5 Oddly enough, the concept of “monotheism,” which one might have assumed to have been around for quite some time, is an early modern invention, attributed to the Cambridge Platonist Henry More and dating from 1660. Moreover, for most of its lifespan, the concept seems to have enjoyed a rather limited popularity. Judging from its written usage in both English and other European languages, even as late as the early nineteenth century the term was relatively rare. Te usage had already reached its peak, however, by the fnal decade of that century, between 1890 and 1895.

Mircea Eliade, Journal II, 1957–1969 (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 1977), 47. 5  Among the studies on the history of the concept of religion, see in particular Ernst Feil’s monumental Religio (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986–2012); the fourth and last volume goes up to the early nineteenth century. See further Michel Despland, La religion en occident: évolution des idées et du vécu (Montréal: Fides, 1979); Daniel Dubuisson, Te Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and Ideology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003) [French original: L’Occident et la religion: mythes, science et idéologie (Paris: Complexe, 1998)]; and Brent Nongbri, Before Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press, 2013); cf. the earlier Eric  J.  Sharpe, Comparative Religion: A History (London: Duckworth, 1975). See further Jonathan Z. Smith, “A Twice-­Told Tale: Te History of the History of Religions’ History,” in his Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004), chapter 16, 362–374.

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4  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Te modern study of religion developed during the nineteenth century, up to the establishment, in its last third, of the frst academic Chairs, journals and conferences exclusively devoted to the new discipline. At that time, the religious systems of newly “discovered” peoples, throughout Asia, the Americas, and Africa, as well as of those from Mediterranean and Near Eastern antiquity, were the main objects of investigation. Tese systems were now analyzed thanks to new philological tools and courtesy of newly unearthed archaeological evidence. In this context, the understanding of polytheistic (or, as in the case of Buddhism, non-­ theistic) systems, approached for the frst time in a non-­polemical fashion, sine ira et studio, played a central role. Medieval Christian societies, both in Byzantium and in the Latin West, knew a single taxonomy of the world’s religions.6 For a full millennium, roughly from the eighth to the eighteenth century, Christian thinkers had divided the world among the religious families of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, side by side with all other religions of humankind, past and present, usually considered under the single category of “heathenism.” As a rule, this fourfold classifcation did not admit of what one may call the later “Triple Alliance” between the monotheistic traditions. Polemics remained the usual medium of communication between them. Christianity (or, more precisely, its orthodox version) was the only true religion (or vera religio in Augustine’s terms), while Judaism and Islam were considered to be false religions (falsae religiones), one upstream and one downstream of Christianity, as it were. From Epiphanius of Salamis, in the fourth century, for whom Judaism was the frst heresy to John of Damascus in the eighth, who considered Islam to be the last—and worst—one, patristic heresiologists could even present these two religions as heresies of sorts.7 In diferent ways, Jews and Muslims were considered inveterate enemies of the true faith. As monotheists, however, they were recognized as profoundly akin to the Christians. To be sure, the scholarly quadripartite classifcation of religions was at times transformed in popular tradition into a tripartite one, in which Muslims were simply presented as pagans, as in the famed Palästinalied of 6  On early Christian taxonomies of religions, see Francesco Massa, “Nommer et classer les religions aux IIe–IVe siècles: la taxonomie ‘paganisme, judaïsme, christianisme,’ ”Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 234 (2017), 689–715. 7  Te transformation of Judaism into a Christian heresy is, of course, less intuitive than the Christian perception of earliest Islam as a heresy. But Epiphanius explicitly called Judaism a heresy, while Justinian’s rulings can be said to treat the Jews as heretics. See Guy G. Stroumsa, “Barbarians or Heretics?,” in his Te Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 175–188.

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Introduction  5 Walther von der Vogelweide, the illustrious lyric poet of Middle High German literature. Te text, written at the time of the Fifh Crusade (1217–1221), refers to Christians, Jews, and pagans (“Kristen, juden und die heiden,” 11) who all consider the Holy Land to belong to them. By “pagans,” Muslims are obviously meant. But even such nomenclature, through its exclusive focus on Jews, Christians, and Muslims, refects a “trinitarian” perception of kinship between the three monotheistic religions. It goes without saying that this kinship did not stop Christians from perceiving the Jews as a generally tolerated but usually reviled (as children of the devil [John 8: 44]) religious community, and the Muslims as simply enemies from without.8 In modern times, Christian encounters with diferent societies and their traditional cultures demanded that the aforementioned classifcation be abandoned, as the category of “heathenism” no longer sufced to encompass the great variety of religions in the world. Tis setting aside of the old taxonomy weakened the centuries-­old family relationship between the three monotheistic religions. When William Jones, speaking in 1786 at the recently founded Calcutta Asiatic Society, announced that he had discovered similarities between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, he was in fact launching a new classifcation of languages and peoples.9 Tis new ethnological taxonomy would fast become the main paradigm, alongside the linguistic one, for a number of disciplines in the nineteenth century. Semites and Aryans now took the traditional place of the ofspring of Shem and Japheth, two of Noah’s three sons.10 Te Semites were imagined through the model of the Hebrews (and the Jews; from the 1880s on, the newly coined term “anti-­Semitism” never referred to the hatred of anyone but the Jews), while the Greeks represented the model of the Aryans. Monotheism would now be conceived as a characteristic of a postulated ancient Semitic religion, 8 Judaism and Islam did not always reciprocate the compliment paid to them by Christianity, as Jewish and Muslim medieval thinkers rarely considered Christianity to be monotheistic. 9  See Bruce Lincoln, “Isaac Newton and Oriental Jones on Myth, Ancient History, and the Relative Prestige of Peoples,” History of Religions 42 (2002), 1–18. Lincoln demonstrates how Jones transformed the old paradigm of Noachide humanity according to Newton, and how his wish to reduce the historical privilege of the Hebrews, in particular over Indians and Iranians, refected a resentment against Israel, with its horrifc ultimate consequences. 10  Troughout history, Ham, Noah’s third son, traditionally identifed with blackness, has remained the incarnation of blacks and slaves. See Benjamin Braude, “Race, esclavage et exégèse entre islam, judaïsme et christianisme,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 57 (2002), 93–125, as well as David M. Goldenberg, Te Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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6  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism while polytheism would be linked to the Aryan religion. Tis new paradigm gave the old taxonomy the coup de grâce. New categories had to be created, and this was one of the major tasks of the fedgling “science of religion.” A Europe whose identity was perceived as torn between the Semitic roots of its religion and the Aryan nature of its languages and ethnicities saw the emergence of a deep ambivalence to monotheism. Tis ambivalence echoed and amplifed those trends in the radical Enlightenment that had grown strongly critical of Christianity beyond the established churches, more broadly of monotheism, and even of the very idea of religion. Te new European discovery of isomorphisms between Sanskrit and most European languages led to the identifcation of families of languages, and also of families of religions, in particular the Aryan and the Semitic religious families.11 Yet, deducing religion (and ethnicity) from linguistics yields a fallacy, a fact vividly underscored towards the end of the nineteenth century by Salomon Reinach in his seminal article “Le mirage oriental.”12 Important European intellectuals now started to identify European languages and peoples as belonging to the Indo-­European (or Indo-­Germanic) or Aryan family. Loath to consider their own religion, Christianity, as related in any signifcant way to Judaism and Islam, the main extant Semitic religions, they preferred to see in it a religious expression of the Aryan race. It is important to bear in mind, however, that pan-­Aryanism hardly represented a leading trend in nineteenth-­century European thought. Most intellectuals in Europe placed little value on this kind of racialism. To trace back the early nature of racialist thought patterns from their radical, murderous consequences in the twentieth century would amount to teleological reasoning. Nevertheless, as the following chapters argue, the Aryan-­Semite taxonomy did play a formative role in the study of religion.13

11 Maurice Olender, Te Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992 [French original: Les langues du paradis. Aryens et Sémites: un couple providentiel (Paris: Gallimard, Le Seuil, 1989)]). Olender discusses some of the fgures we shall encounter in the following chapters, such as Ernest Renan, Max Müller, and Ignaz Goldziher, although the book itself does not focus, as I do here, on the study of religion. 12  Salomon Reinach, “Le mirage oriental,” L’anthropologie 4 (1893), 539–579 and 699. See Chapter 10 in this volume. For another use of this metaphor, see Louis Bertrand, “La réalité et le Mirage oriental,” Revue des Deux Mondes 48: 5 (1908), 139–172. Bertrand later published a novel entitled Le mirage oriental (Paris: Perrin, 1920). 13 See Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-­European Mythology as Ideology and Science (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2006), also on de Lagarde and Chamberlain; cf. Chapter 8 in this volume.

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Introduction  7 Christianity remained paradoxically peripheral to the development of the new discipline. Indeed, while the traditional refection on religion had been the object of theological and philosophical inquiry, the modern study of religion grew mainly at the interface of philology, Oriental studies, and ethnology. Te religion of biblical Israel remained within the purview of Christian theology, while post-­biblical and rabbinic Judaism were set aside, refecting the Christian perception of the decadence that had overtaken the Hebrews following the prophetic period, and certainly since Jesus. Moreover, the historical study of Christianity and the critical, philological approach to the Bible in our period continued to be the province of liberal Protestant theologians; Catholics were still forbidden by ecclesiastical authorities to deal with higher biblical criticism. Te study of Islam, by contrast, stayed mainly in the hands of Arabic scholars. Some of these scholars showed remarkable intellectual curiosity and open-­mindedness and made signifcant achievements in understanding major documents of an alien civilization and religion. At the same time, however, many among these scholars had for centuries displayed a disparaging attitude towards Muhammad, dubbed a false prophet, and to his religion.14 Remarkably, then, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam found themselves, to some extent, ofen outside the core of the new discipline.15 By and large, this important fact has not attracted the attention it deserves in contemporary scholarship. In this book, I frst and foremost wish to appreciate the consequences of this fact on the study of monotheism—and, in particular, on the scholarly approaches to Judaism and Islam, two religions that now came to be perceived as distinctly alien to Christian Europe. Unlike the abstract history of ideas, intellectual history seeks to understand ideas within their full cultural, social, and political context. When dealing with approaches to religion in the nineteenth century, accelerated secularization, growing nationalism, and imperial colonialism provide the immediate context. Te analysis of scholarly discourse on religion must refect the new status of religion in societies that were undergoing intensive 14  On the ambivalence shown by early modern scholarship on Islam, see Stroumsa, A New Science, chapter  6, 124–144 and notes. On perceptions of Islam in the Enlightenment, see Alexander Bevilacqua, Te Republic of Arab Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2018). 15  On the complex relationship between these religions from the perspective of a comparative historian of religions, see Kurt Rudolph, “Juden – Christen – Muslime: Zum Verhältnis der drei monotheistischen Religionen in religionswissenschaflicher Sicht,” chapter  11 in his Geschichte und Probleme der Religionswissenschaf (Studies in the History of Religions, Vol. LIII (Leiden, New York, Cologne: Brill, 1992), 279–300.

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8  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism processes of secularization. On the one hand, with the industrial revolution and the growth of cities, the working classes were learning to free themselves from ecclesiastical control and the churches were losing their traditional grip on Western European societies. On the other hand, powerful thinkers, pursuing the radical Enlightenment onslaught on traditional Christianity, were in search of new forms of spirituality. Concepts such as Hegel’s “spirit of the age” or Comte’s “religion of the future” seduced many, including, for example, the theologian David Friedrich Strauss in Germany and the historian and intellectual Edgar Quinet in France. Te second half of the century saw a signifcant decline in the number of churchgoers, together with the growth of the historical and comparative study of religion.16 Tis did not mean that religion was waning, as many feared, and many others hoped. It meant, rather, that its status and function in society were undergoing a profound transformation. Expressions of religion were increasingly regressing from the public sphere to the private one. Of course, the Christian dimension of European identities was in no way disappearing. Rather, the semiotic range of Christianity shifed, moving from representing Europe’s core religious identity to representing its cultural memory. Tis was perhaps clearest in the case of the Bible in Protestant countries, where it became in the nineteenth century, in its vernacular translations, an essential element of education and culture.17 Even though Christianity did not always embody shared beliefs and practices, it certainly remained at the center of historical consciousness and national identity. For Hegel, this was the transformation, or Aufebung, of Christianity in the fully fedged Geist.18 In his seminal book A Secular Age (2007), the reception and intellectual impact of which has been resounding, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor aimed to analyze the conceptual transformations of religion in the 16  For an analytical description of the period, see Owen Chadwick, Te Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975). As the present book deals with a number of countries, across a signifcant period, it will be impossible to ofer an adequate discussion of the diferent conditions in each case. 17 See Jonathan Sheehan, Te Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); cf. Chapter 3 in this volume, note 8. 18 See, for instance, Jean-­ Claude Monod, La querelle de la sécularisation de Hegel à Blumenberg (Paris: Vrin, 2002). On the relationship between philosophical and theological perceptions of secularization, see Hans Blumenberg, Säkularisierung und Selbstbehauptung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974 [1966]). Blumenberg is reacting to the views expressed by Karl Löwith, in his Meaning in History: On the Teological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1949), according to whom modern European thought amounts to a secularization of Christian ideas about salvation.

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Introduction  9 modern age.19 Taylor, one must note, was not so much interested in ­studying secular society in itself as in understanding the conditions under which religion in general, and Christianity in particular, remains possible in secularizing, modern societies. Secularity, he argued, can be understood in many ways. For example, it can mean the separation of religion and public life. Secularity can also indicate a decline, sometimes drastic, of religious belief and practice. Tus, secularization points to a process rather than to a steady state—a “secular age”—and always remains an unfnished business. Indeed, our societies can by no means be considered as fully secularized, a global fact we have learned the hard way to recognize in the past decades. In other words, one could say that a secular age does not refer to a world from which religion has disappeared, but rather to one in which religious and secular ideas both circulate freely, in a complex, sometimes hidden, but always present dialectic, each one in need of the other. Secularization alone, however, cannot fully explain the transformation of Christianity in European consciousness from representing Europe’s religious identity to encapsulating its cultural capital. An account of this transformation requires a consideration of both the rapid growth of nationalism and the expansion of colonial conquests in the age of imperialism. Such a consideration, however, cannot be attempted here, as nationalism and colonialism played out diversely in various countries, and at diferent times. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the growing feelings of European superiority versus Asian and African peoples and cultures would be expressed in a new key, that of “scientifc racism.” Tis particular expression of disparaging attitudes to foreign peoples and their cultures lef an immediate, potent, and lasting impression on scholarly conceptions. A great deal of research, including, for example, Martin Bernal’s work on Greek antiquity, has shown how the categories forged in nineteenth-­century scholarship refected racist ideas.20

19 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2007). For a similar attempt at identifying major religious transformations in human history, see Robert  N.  Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2011); cf. Guy  G.  Stroumsa, “Robert Bellah on the Origins of Religion: A Critical Review,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 229 (2012), 467–477. 20 In Black Athena: Te Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization. Vol. I: Te Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), Bernal insisted on the major role played by the intensifcation of racism and the central importance of “ethnicity” as a principle of historical explanation. He demonstrated the crucial part they played in the formation of new taxonomies opposing “Aryans” to “Semites.”

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10  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism In one of the paradoxical consequences (and most insidious aspects) of this transformation, Judaism and Islam, which had long belonged, together with Christianity, to the family of the monotheistic religions (although they were perceived, of course, as its parents pauvres), became increasingly seen as inherently foreign to the spirit of Christianity and the nature of Christendom. Tis constituted a major fracture in European identity, yet another crisis of European consciousness, afer the crisis of the Enlightenment, analyzed in such a masterful way by Paul Hazard.21 Te depth of this fracture, as well as its efect on the status of Judaism and Islam in the European mind, has yet to be fully assessed.22 Prior to the Enlightenment, the Near East, which was then generally referred to as simply “the East,” was considered the seedbed of human religious origins. All religions had come from the Ancient Near East, from Egypt to Babylonia, through the lands of the Bible.23 As Christianity was perceived as the quintessential European religion, Judaism and Islam represented for the European mind the two surviving religions from the Ancient Near East. Tis is true notwithstanding the continuing power of both deep prejudices against the Jews, marginalized in the ghettos’ enclave societies, and of persistent animosity (or at the very least contempt) towards, as well as fear of, Muslim societies outside Europe, in particular the Ottoman Empire. Now, however, Judaism and Islam started to be understood as belonging to “the East of the West,” or as “the West of the (deep and true) East,” as it were, that of India and China. Judaism and Islam thus fell between Europe and India, between the two poles of Indo-­European cultural and religious creativity. To be sure, scholars recognized the impressive geographical spread of Islam, and that both Jews and Muslims believed in one God. Yet, all in all, racial prejudice against the Jews (as distinct from traditional religious anti-­Semitism), which had been on the rise since the Enlightenment, and condescending attitudes towards Islam and Islamic societies, entailed a strong devaluation of both Judaism and Islam. At the same time, despite continuing suspicions towards Asian religions such as Buddhism, some literati learned to express a 21  Paul Hazard, Te Crisis of the European Mind 1680–1715 (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013 [French original: La crise de la conscience européenne, 1689–1715 (Paris: Fayard, 1961 [1935])]). 22 Markus Messling, Gebeugter Geist: Rassismus und Erkenntnis in der modernen europäischen Philologie (Göttingen: Wallerstein, 2016). 23  See, for instance, Guy  G.  Stroumsa, “John Selden et les origines de l’orientalisme,” in Quentin Epron, ed., John Selden: juriste européen, Annuaire de l’Institut Michel Villey 3 (2012), 1–11.

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Introduction  11 preference for Indo-­European religious systems and cultural traditions over Semitic religions and cultures. European Christians thus contrived to liberate themselves from the Jewish, Near-­Eastern origins of their religion. Te close relationship of Christianity with European culture, it was claimed, did not abnegate its universal nature, and it was therefore Europe’s duty to promote Christianity throughout Asia and Africa, along the model of its earlier conquests in the Americas. Intellectual perceptions of Judaism and Islam, moreover, are directly related to social attitudes toward Jews and Muslims in European societies—a point which there is surely no need to belabor. In the early stages of Jewish emancipation, a process that had started with the French Revolution, the Jewish presence in Western European societies changed at a rapid pace. Emancipation and reduced exclusion from society at large was accompanied by new tensions. Te traditional forms of Christian anti-­Semitism, which had never quite disappeared, were reactivated in a new, racial key, and fresh forms of prejudice were devised. It is a striking paradox, which merits attention, that at the very time when they were starting to become part of society at large, the Jews began to be experienced as more alien than in the old days, when their liminal existence, on the fringes of Christian society, was anchored as a permanent reminder of the abiding truth of Christianity. Now, with the opening of the ghettos and the invitation to integrate in the mainstream of society, the Jews came to be perceived as an essentially Asian people; in that sense, they were ofen thought of as remaining essentially marginal to Europe, not quite belonging to it. At the same time, Islam was identifed as the religion of Europe’s immediate neighbor, the Ottoman Empire, and that of colonized peoples from the Maghreb to the Indian subcontinent and beyond. As such, Muslims were ofen scorned by Europeans. Of course, signifcant Muslim communities had long been present on European soil, mainly in the Balkans. In southern European imagery, Muslims were ofen portrayed as peaceful traders. Yet, more ofen than not, they remained marginalized in Western European perception. In diferent ways, British, French, Belgian, and German imperialism and colonialism, in Africa, the Near East, South and East Asia only strengthened negative attitudes towards Islam and Muslims and reactivated existing prejudices. Furthermore, as is well known, Orientalist trends in art and literature in the nineteenth century accentuated such negative attitudes towards Islam and Muslims. In the mid-­nineteenth century, the French historian and philosopher Edgar Quinet introduced the phrase “la Renaissance orientale,” by which he

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meant the new European scholarly interest in, and cultural sensitivity to, the civilizations of Asia.24 Since Quinet’s days, European perceptions of the Orient have been a highly loaded topic: witness the fate of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which quickly became a cult classic.25 Tere is no need to revisit here either the book’s important contributions or its various shortcomings.26 One of its features, however, has direct implications for the present inquiry: it dismissed the colossal efort made by courageous scholars to open new vistas to whole civilizations far beyond the borders of Europe. Tese scholars appear to have had boundless intellectual curiosity. Several fne monographs on aspects of nineteenth-­century Orientalism have revealed its rich and complex history, as well as the many links, both obvious (starting with linguistic demands) and implicit, between Orientalism and the study of religion.27 Some recent studies, moreover, have brilliantly surveyed the world of modern Orientalism, showing its embeddedness in intellectual and social history. Urs App’s remarkable work on the intellectual origins of Orientalism, for example, ofers broad perspectives on its beginnings, from Voltaire to Volney.28 On her part, Suzanne Marchand published an outstanding volume on Orientalism in nineteenthcentury Germany.29 App, however, concentrates on the cultures and religions of South and East Asia, and does not deal with Islam and Judaism, whereas the core of Marchand’s book concerns developments that took place during the Second German Reich, that is, afer 1871, leaving most of those occurring elsewhere beyond the scope of her inquiry. From the

24  Edgar Quinet, Du génie des religions (Paris: Charpentier, 1842), 65–77: “De la renaissance orientale”. A century later, the literary scholar Raymond Schwab would use the expression as the title of his masterpiece, La Renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 2014 [1950]) [N.B.: page numbers are diferent from those in the 1950 original publication. English translation: Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)]. 25 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978). 26 Cf. Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: Te Orientalists and their Enemies (London: Penguin, 2006), 3–5. On the vitriolic polemics to which the book gave birth, see, for instance, the exchange between Said and two distinguished Arabists and Islamic scholars, Oleg Grabar and Bernard Lewis, in Te New York Review of Books (12 August 1982). Quite oddly, the polemics continues unabated, more than forty years afer the publication of Orientalism. See, for instance, Adam Shatz, “ ‘Orientalism,’ Ten and Now,” New York Review daily (May 20, 2019), www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/05/20/orientalism-­then-­and-­now. 27  Tese studies will be repeatedly referred to in the chapters that follow. 28  Urs App, Te Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia, PA, Oxford: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 29 Suzanne  L.  Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Washington, Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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Introduction  13 perspective of the present book, a crucial dimension of the study of religion lies in its transnational character. More precisely, only by taking cultural transfers into consideration (in particular, between Germany, France, and Britain, as well as the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Sweden) can one explain the genesis and structure of this study. Hence, any research on one specifc national or linguistic domain is bound to be limited.30 While the study of Islam and that of Judaism form part of the Orientalist enterprise, they obviously also belong to the study of religion. Like Orientalism, the latter expanded in the course of the nineteenth century, eventually becoming a fully fedged scholarly discipline. How and when was the modern, critical study of religion born? Among the branches of humanistic scholarship, the study of religion seems to have particularly sufered from a lack of refexivity concerning its own history.31 In the past generation, however, sophisticated accounts of the history of religion have done much to remedy this sorry state of afairs, shedding new light on the history of the modern study of religion. Tese books naturally focalize the second half of the nineteenth century, the period when the frst university Chairs and scholarly journals were established across Europe. In countries with a predominantly Protestant culture, the study of religion became established in theological faculties. Consequently, as Jonathan  Z.  Smith has shown regarding the religions of late antiquity and the world of Early Christianity, the study of religion long remained entwined with theological conceptions.32 In his Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age, Hans Kippenberg ofers an incisive analysis of major trends in the study of religion at the time of its early development, read in their broader cultural context.33 In doing 30  Te theory of cultural transfers, developed, in particular, in France in the 1980s, at frst focusing on philology and literary studies between France and Germany, but which has now become much more broadly applied. See, for instance, Michel Espagne, Svetlana Gorshenina, Frantz Grenet, Shahin Mustafayev and Claude Rapin, eds, Asie centrale: Transferts culturels le long de la route de la soie (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2016), Introduction, 8–9. On Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of intellectual feld as a system of relations between the agents of intellectual production, see, for instance, Pierre Bourdieu, “Genèse et structure du champ religieux,” Revue française de sociologie 12 (1971), 295–334. 31  Robert Orsi, “Te ‘So-­Called History’ of the Study of Religion,” Method and Teory in the Study of Religion 20 (2008), 134–138: “Te past of religious studies has been until recently largely invisible . . .” (134). 32 Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990). 33 Hans  G.  Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002). Te original version was published as Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Religionswissenschaf und Moderne (Munich: Beck, 1997).

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14  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism so, he explicitly sets out to reintroduce the category of “history” into ­religious studies. Although he starts more broadly, with various views of religion among diferent Enlightenment thinkers, Kippenberg soon hones in on the second half of the nineteenth and on the frst half of the twentieth centuries. Unlike Marchand, he works as a historian of religion rather than of Orientalism, and he deals at length not only with Germany, but also with scholarship in other countries. Moreover, unlike App, his net is cast wide, well beyond the study of the “Asian religions,” although his interest in the study of Judaism and Islam remains rather limited—a refection, no doubt, of mainstream research in the nineteenth century. Tomoko Masuzawa’s Te Invention of World Religions is particularly pertinent to the present discussion.34 Like Kippenberg, Masuzawa mainly tackles the fnal decades of the century—the period in which the new discipline fourished. She rightly notes that her inquiry exposes important aspects of the new European self-­ consciousness and modern European identity. Masuzawa’s focal point is the role played by the new category of “world religions” in the reinterpretation of religious phenomena and historical religions. For her, the nineteenth-­century scholarly European discovery and study of the religions of South and East Asia, principally Buddhism and Hinduism, as well as Confucianism and Shintoism (all terms introduced by European scholars), diverted attention from the religions born in the Near East, frst and foremost Islam, but also Judaism. We see a strikingly diferent approach in the work of Philippe Borgeaud, whose Aux origines de l’histoire des religions inscribes itself defnitively in the longue durée. Borgeaud follows the long and entangled thread from comparative attempts in the refection about religion in antiquity, through the approaches of paganism by the Church Fathers and the early modern perceptions of Christian missionaries, to the establishment of university Chairs devoted to the study of religion in the fnal third of the nineteenth century.35 In this discursive tracking mode, Borgeaud demonstrates both 34  Tomoko Masuzawa, Te Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, IL, London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 35 Philippe Borgeaud, Aux origines de l’histoire des religions (Paris: Seuil, 2004); cf. my review in History of Religions 45 (2006), 257–259. See also Philippe Borgeaud, “Le problème du comparatisme en histoire des religions,” in his Exercices d’histoire des religions: Comparaison, rites, myths et émotions (Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 20; Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2008), 3–20. See further Philippe Borgeaud, La pensée européenne des religions (Paris: Le Seuil, 2021). In this new volume, Borgeaud insists on the comparative nature (either explicit or implicit) of the scholarly study of religion, which starts for him with the comparative study of rituals and myths. He also highlights the fact that such a conception of the comparative method

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Introduction  15 continuities and ruptures in the long history of human interest in the religions of other people. Coming now to the current book, I aim to provide the reader with a critical genealogy of scholarly discourse. In order to do so, I seek to contextualize this scholarly discourse, reading it within the broader framework of social, cultural, and religious transformations during our period. In this sense, my project is something other than traditional disciplinary history. I am seeking here to unveil the unconscious of the discipline.36 By “unconscious,” I refer to implicit, hidden principles that dictate research and the development of the feld. It is no accident that such principles usually remain unexpressed, in the feld of religion perhaps more than anywhere else. If Freud was right in arguing that religion is particularly fraught with repression (Verdrängung), the same may also be true of its study. Taking as its main object the archaeology of the scholars’ conceptual worlds (rather than the history of scholarship itself), the present inquiry amounts to the study of an absence. Why is it, I ask, that nineteenth-­century religious scholarship neglected the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—a form of study that it had inherited from a long tradition? It is true that nineteenth-­century historicism sought to see phenomena as rooted in their cultural and historical context, and to give each nation its due, as Ranke noted. Still, in the fnal decades of the century, comparative scholarship blossomed at the acme of British imperial power. Te colonial enterprise fostered a comparative approach—with the avowed view of claiming the supremacy of European culture over that of other civilizations. Tis inquiry also stands at the confuence of diferent disciplines in current bloom, especially the study of Islam (together with Arabic, Turkic, and Iranian philology) and Jewish studies.37 Jewish scholars play a special role in our story. Tis role refects their peculiar status and self-­perception, as well as a unique aspect of the discipline. Most European scholars of religion identifed, at least culturally, as Christians—the Jewish scholars being the exception. Tese scholars sought to achieve various goals, which were not always compatible with one

excludes the global comparison between religions, which remains always either polemical or apologetical. I wish to thank Philippe Borgeaud for having shared his typescript with me prior to publication. 36  Tis is to be distinguished from the point made by Philippe Borgeaud, Aux origines de l’histoire des religions, 18, on religions representing the unconscious of civilizations. 37  See, for instance, Christian Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Teology in Wilhelmine Germany (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2005).

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16  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism another. For example, some of them aimed to apply philological and ­historical methods to Jewish texts and documents which they considered overlooked or misunderstood by Christian scholars. Moreover, moved as they were by both a sense of belonging to their own traditional Jewish culture and an intense desire to become full members of society at large, they ofen perceived themselves as a bridge of sorts between the cultures and languages of Asia and Europe—that is, as Orientals living in the West. Te scholarly study of Judaism incorporated the multidisciplinary study of post-­biblical Judaism, Jewish history, and Jewish languages and literatures. Tis feld, created more or less ab ovo by Jewish scholars in the nineteenth century, is known as as the Wissenschaf des Judentums. Te specifc contribution of Jewish scholars to the study of religion, however, goes far beyond the study of Judaism.38 Jewish scholars made major advancements to the comparative study of Christianity and Judaism, as well as of Islam and Judaism. Indeed, some particularly gifed Jewish scholars, from Abraham Geiger to Ignaz Goldziher, transformed the European approach to Islam. Moreover, as we shall see, Jewish scholars in various countries made substantial contributions to the philological and historical study of Iranian and Indian religions, as well as to the anthropological approach to religion. One might say that it is as if their identity as belonging to a religious minority had revealed to them their vocation as cultural translators and go-­betweens. Te presence of Jewish scholars, together with the unique relationship of Christian theology to the Hebrew Bible, shaped the singular status of Judaism within the study of religions, where its ambivalence would remain even more marked than that of Islam. By broadening its anti-­clericalism to a critical view of monotheism which included Judaism and Islam alongside Christianity, the radical Enlightenment had actually strengthened the commensurability between the three monotheistic religions. At the same time, Enlightenment authors started taking more seriously than ever before the great cultural traditions of Asia, in particular those of India and China. It is during the Romantic period and the rise of national movements that we witness the real break-­up of the integrative refection on the three monotheistic religions. Tis 38  For a lucid analysis of the signifcant role of French Jews in the study of religion as well as in other humanistic disciplines, see Perrine Simon-­Nahum, Les juifs et la modernité: L’héritage du judaïsme et les Sciences de l’homme en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2018). Simon-­Nahum shows how French Jews play a role of their own in the study of religion, one that is directly related to their religious identity and place in society. See Chapter  7 in this volume.

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Introduction  17 break-­up was fnalized by the combined impact of a traditional scorn towards Islam and a condescending attitude towards contemporary Muslim societies.39 Alongside this aversion to Islam, the new racial anti-­Semitism burgeoned. At the time, the Jews of Europe were starting to leave the ghettos and enter Western European societies—a radical shif in the centuriesold pattern of relationship between Christians and Jews. Te latter soon discovered, however, that this new economic integration was not enough to earn them what Heine called an “entrance ticket” to European society—a ticket which only baptism could truly purchase. Te Jews, as already noted, were perceived as stemming from the Orient, and ofen enough still belonging to it. It is worth mentioning that Jews tended to embrace these Oriental roots with pride. Tis self-­identifcation is refected in the Orientalizing architecture of many nineteenth-­ century synagogues, a style meant to allude to the mythical symbiosis, or convivencia, between Muslims, Jews, and Christians in al-­Andalus; that is, medieval Islamic Spain.40 Te scholarly study of Christianity (in particular early and late antique Christianity), which was gradually disengaging itself from theology (without ever fully succeeding in achieving this goal), represents a special case in the emerging comparative and historical study of religions. As noted above, the appearance, in the fnal three decades of the nineteenth century, of the new concept of “world religions,” fnally broke up the traditional family relationship of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. At this point, Christianity was classifed as a full-­bodied universalist religion, while Islam was granted this status only grudgingly, and Judaism was relegated to the category of racially and ethnically determined religions.41 Signifcantly, the history of scholarship, and even more that of scholarly perceptions and presuppositions, encompasses much more than a list of the achievements of individual scholars; it also covers scholarly institutions, in the framework of which free research and intellectual breakthroughs can happen. Such institutions include universities, but also theological seminaries, scientifc academies, scholarly journals, conference halls, and publishing houses. In contrast to early modernity, when scholarship was largely the 39  A similar phenomenon can also be observed about religions and societies of black Africa, as demonstrated by David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Imperialism and Comparative Religion (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 2014). 40  See, for instance, the discussion of this theme in John Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sefardic (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016). Tis embrace of the Orient would be echoed in the Zionist urge to return to the East, to Palestine. At the turn of the century, art in Jewish Palestine, too, would embrace the Orientalizing trend. 41  See Chapter 9 in this volume.

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personal adventure of gifed and idiosyncratic individuals, from the ­nineteenth century on, research has mainly been carried out within university walls. It is, indeed, the dialectical interaction between individual thinking and institutionalized systems of knowledge that transforms disciplines. Intellectual discourse and scholarly practices are best grasped when their cultural, religious, and ideological background is incorporated into the broader picture. Since their birth in the seventeenth century, the modern humanistic disciplines, just like the natural sciences, have been fascinated by the act of comparison. Importantly, the comparison between languages, cultures, legal systems, scientifc traditions, mythologies, and societies has always refected the efort to detect diferences as much as to seek similarities. Tese modern disciplines were the ofspring of the puzzlement generated by the new cultures and societies revealed by the great discoveries. Te comparative element gathered momentum in the nineteenth century, starting with linguistics, under the impact of Franz Bopp’s seminal studies on the grammar of the Indo-­ European languages, and reached its zenith towards the end of that century.42 Te comparative ethos would then broaden to include other scholarly disciplines, such as those we now call the social sciences.43 Comparison has lain at the heart of the study of religions since the eight­ eenth century. Ever-­present (yet never innocent, as astutely noted by Bruce Lincoln and David Chidester44), comparison is a method fraught with 42  See further ibid. 43  See, for instance, Stefan Collini, “Te Clue to the Maze: Te Appeal of the Comparative Method,” in his Tat Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteenth-­Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 207–246, which discusses at length the approach of the historian Sir Henry Maine, Max Müller’s colleague at Oxford, and his studies of villages in India and Europe. 44  Bruce Lincoln and Christiano Grottanelli, “Teses on Comparison,” in Bruce Lincoln, ed., Apples and Oranges: Explorations In, On, and With Comparison (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 2018), 25–33, esp. 25. See also, in the same volume, “Te Future of History of Religions,” 14–24 (written together with Cristiano Grottanelli). David Chidester, Empire of Religion: Chidester shows how British Imperialism in the second half of the nineteenth century used taxonomies of religions in order to support its colonial conquests in South Africa. See the earlier book of David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville, London: University Press of Virginia, 1996). On comparison in the study of ancient religions, see Claude Calame and Bruce Lincoln, eds, Comparer en histoire des religions antiques (Liège: Presses universitaires de Liège, 2012). For the wise remarks of a Western medievalist puzzled by what she sees in India, see Caroline Bynum, “Avoiding the Tyranny of Morphology; Or, Why Compare?” History of Religions 53 (2014), 341–368. For an attempt to negotiate a path between too much and too little comparison in the study of religion, see Wendy Doniger, “Te Postcolonial and Postmodern Critique of Comparison,” in her Te Implied Spider: Politics and Teology in Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 64–71.

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Introduction  19

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­ itfalls. What do we do when we compare? Te answer depends, of course, p upon one’s goals, perspective, and culture. Social anthropologists, in particular, have refected on the question of comparison between societies, both those broadly similar and those strikingly diferent from one another.45 Remarkably, the study of religion, as a discipline, has never really settled on its own name. Te Germans speak of Religionswissenschaf, the French of histoire des religions, while in Britain, one used to refer to “comparative religion,” in particular at its peak, in the decades leading up to the First World War. Te term “comparative religion” refects the state of the art in the late nineteenth century, during the Victorian age.46 Te fnal three decades of the nineteenth century, which saw the birth of “comparative religion,” also witnessed the emergence of “world religions.” Tese “big” religions in terms of numbers of believers or practitioners were also deemed “great” and comparable, mutatis mutandis, to Christianity in their theological riches, geographical spread, historical span, and civilizational impact. Today, most departments in English-­speaking countries, avoiding any serious discussion on method, use the rather insipid term “Religious Studies.” As cogently argued by Oliver Freiberger, the comparative method, which he calls a “second-­order method,” is not only useful for the study of religion. It might also be constitutive for religious studies if they want to assert themselves as a fully fedged discipline.47

45  About comparison as experimental method, see Philippe Borgeaud, L’histoire des religions (Gollion: Infolio, 2013), 182–185. For a rich volume of studies on comparatism by historians and social anthropologists alike, see Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, Geofrey E. R. Lloyd, eds, Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology (Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 24; Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2018). For an analysis of the diferent kinds of comparatism in anthropology, see in particular in that volume, Philippe Descola, “Anthropological Comparatisms: Generalisation, Symmetrisation, Bifurcation,” 402–417. In 2019–2020, Descola dedicated his last year of teaching at the Collège de France to the question of comparatism in anthropology. In the footsteps of E.  E.  Evans-­ Pritchard, he insists on the fact that comparison is the very essence of anthropology and seeks to distinguish between diferent kinds of comparatism. In this context, it is signifcant that, like the study of religion, modern anthropology dates from the last decades of the nineteenth century. In his Marett Lecture (1950), Evans-­Pritchard had already argued that anthropology should be perceived as a kind of history, and that it properly belongs to the humanities. See E. E. Evans-­Pritchard, “Social Anthropology: Past and Present,” in his Social Anthropology and Other Essays (New York: Te Free Press, 1962), 139–154, esp. 152–154. 46  For a recent synoptic review, see Jörg Rüpke, “Comparative Religion—Past and Present,” in Guy  G.  Stroumsa, ed., Comparative Studies in the Humanities (Jerusalem: Te Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2018), 153–172. See Marjorie Wheeler-­Barclay, Te Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010). 47  See Oliver Freiberger, Considering Comparison: A Method for Religious Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

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20  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Contemporary historiography of the discipline tends to take as its main object Protestant countries in the second half of the nineteenth century. Philippe Borgeaud, for instance, puts his fnger on the pulse of secularization in Protestant countries in the 1870s, while Hans Kippenberg follows the traditional emphasis on Protestant scholarship.48 Until the early twentieth century, the Catholic hierarchy was still battling the critical methods in the study of the Scriptures, and Catholic theological faculties mostly resisted the study of religious phenomena and history in a modern, non-­traditional way. Despite daring attempts, such as those of the Dominicans of the École Biblique in Jerusalem since the days of Marie-­Joseph Lagrange, O.P., Catholic scholars were prohibited from practicing higher criticism until Vatican II.49 As I argued in A New Science, the main Catholic contribution to the study of religion lies not in philology, but in the long tradition of keen ethnological observations made by Catholic missionaries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. It was within Protestant theological faculties in Germany that the new critical approach to the Scriptures was born, and that the progressive theological liberalization was most conspicuous, permitting the study of nonChristian religions, past and present. Fresh scholarly biblical hermeneutics eventually paved the way to the comparative study of religious texts from both the Ancient Near East and the Greco-­Roman Mediterranean—a trend exemplifed by the Göttingen Religionsgeschichtliche Schule in the 1890s.50 Tese ancient texts were now understood as refecting the background, or Sitz im Leben, of the religious ideas expressed in the books of the Old and New Testaments. Te common misperception that the nineteenth-­century study of religion was essentially a Protestant afair, however, is multidetermined. Te massive clef between Protestant and Catholic biblical scholarship also contributed to this fallacy. Te following chapters, which present evidence for 48  See Borgeaud, L’histoire des religions, 134; Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age. Tis is also true for those works calling attention to the high price paid by those reading religious history through confessional glasses. On this issue, Jonathan Z. Smith has shown in his seminal Drudgery Divine how much Protestant beliefs had impacted the study of early Christianity in its Hellenistic background. Mutatis mutandis, a similar argument could be made about ancient Israel and Near Eastern religions. 49  A later, but similarly interesting fgure among Catholic scholars, is that of Franz Joseph Dölger. See Teodor Klauser, Franz Joseph Dölger 1879–1940: sein Leben und sein Forschungsprogramm “Antike und Christentum” (Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, Ergänzungsband 7; Münster: Aschendorf, 1980). 50  On the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, see Gerd Lüdemann, ed., Die “Religionsgeschichtliche Schule”: Facetten eines theologischen Umbruchs (Frankfurt, New York: Peter Lang, 1996). See Chapter 8 in this volume.

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Introduction  21 the major importance of the transmission of knowledge between diferent European countries and the crucial signifcance for the science of religion of ethnological studies, coming at the time mainly from Catholic missionaries, seek to lay to rest this long-­lived misapprehension. We now know that it is as a complex combination of elements stemming from diferent cultural and intellectual traditions that the modern study of religion emerged.51 Te chapters of this book spotlight salient features of the aforementioned problems. It bears mention, however, that in no way do they present a full narrative of the discipline in the period. Te book does not deal, for instance, with the study of Hinduism or Buddhism, or of Greek, Roman, or African religions, which cannot contribute much to the questions at hand. Zoroastrianism, on its part, will be touched upon only obliquely. All these important and fascinating topics have been the object of various studies, some of them referred to above. Instead, the book proposes to follow some major themes that have not yet received the scholarly attention they deserve. Its ten chapters trace, in rough chronological order, a number of motifs related to the idea of Semitic monotheism, its deep and immediate origins, its formation, the developments it stimulated, and its fnal waning. Te chronological order has to remain rough, as the story is an intricate one, pivoting on multiple axes. Moreover, our interdisciplinary journey crisscrosses political, linguistic, and cultural borders, in particular between Germany, France, and England. We recall that Ernest Renan introduced the term “Semitic monotheism,” and is largely responsible for its rapid propagation. Te frst four chapters, then, will lead the reader to Renan’s idea, while the fnal four will showcase some of its efects. As indicated earlier, any history of the discipline must take into account not only the relevant German scholarship, but also the core role played by French scholars. Jewish scholars, too, are a polestar in this narrative. In particular, we will track those who crossed the Rhine, moving from Germany to France in search of academic positions. Chapter 1 refects on historical varieties of monotheism and on the medieval tale of the three rings, each representing one of the three monotheistic religions. In Chapter 2, we shall see how this tale was shattered by the paradigm shif of the Enlightenment and replaced by the story of the three impostors. Chapter  3 introduces the reader to the French renaissance of Oriental studies at the end of the eighteenth century and the frst decades of 51  I reached a similar conclusion about the early modern study of religion, in the seventeenth century, in A New Science.

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22  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism the nineteenth. In Chapter 4, we will track early Jewish scholars and their role in the transmission of knowledge between France and Germany. Renan will be the sole protagonist of Chapter 5, while he will share Chapter 6 with the French Jewish scholar Joseph Salvador. In Chapter 7, we will follow the development of new, secular approaches to the history of religions in Paris. What I propose to call the “Quarrel of Monotheism,” the focal point of Chapter 8, is by nature of European dimensions, although it starts from a discussion of Renan’s vision of Semitic monotheism. Chapter  9 will deal with the birth of the idea of “world religions,” and with scholarship on Semitic religion, in particular that of Julius Wellhausen and William Robertson Smith. Te latter, as is well known, considered sacrifce the core ritual of ancient Semitic religion. Te comparative study of sacrifce, among Emile Durkheim’s collaborators, is analyzed in the tenth and fnal chapter. In the Conclusion, I refect on some twentieth-­century trajectories and the protracted birth of the idea of Abrahamic religions, a hundred years or so afer the close of the period at the core of this book’s inquiry. In a sense, the concept of Abrahamic religions plays today a role similar to that of Semitic monotheism as studied here. Although the bulk of this book takes a historical and descriptive approach, one cannot ignore the contemporary implications of the story about to be told. In this context, I will argue for the ethical value of the comparative approach to the study of religion. Learning about others ofers a path to the recognition of cultural pluralism, through the decentering of one’s own culture. More than any other scholarly method, the comparative approach places the study of other worlds squarely within the purview of humanistic behavior. Trough the individual cases presented in these pages, I seek to signal several specifc, signifcant, points. In the trajectory of modern scholarship on religion, paradigm shifs in systems of knowledge brought about the reconstruction of central cognitive structures. It is important to note that I discuss specifc points, and I trace these points through a particular trajectory. My aims here are decidedly selective and circumscribed; I leave to others a comprehensive treatment of the phenomena at hand. What interests me most is the formation and restructuring of concepts and methods, which modifes felds of study, sometimes profoundly transforming them. Such felds are ultimately related to the construction of the self, in particular when they deal directly with religious identities. Te historical and comparative study of religions, a delicate and interdisciplinary feld of scholarship, has had a considerable impact on both the transmission of knowledge and the transformation of European identities. What was true in the nineteenth century remains true today, as we witness,

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Introduction  23 throughout Europe, and beyond, a burst of Islamophobia and an animated, enduring, ofen strident and sometimes violent public discussion about the ethnic, cultural, and religious implications of the massive immigration from Muslim countries, coming together with a worrisome renewal, in various garbs, of a Judaeophobia (a phenomenon traditionally called anti-­Semitism) we naively thought was on the wane. For a number of reasons, the use of “Semite” and “Semitic” has continued to be profoundly ambivalent, and to this day is ofen problematic. As a term, “anti-­Semitism” was given currency in the early 1880s, by the German journalist Wilhelm Marr, referring to the political movement opposed to the integration of Jews into society.52 Although this misnomer has retained its original connotations to this day, it is ofen argued that Arabs cannot be accused of anti-­Semitism in the sense of Judeophobia, since they too are Semites. Tis is, of course, a very weak syllogism, as has been amply demonstrated. Edward Said made another claim, more relevant to our present inquiry, when he argued that the popular anti-­Semitic animus was transferred from a Jewish to an Arab target, and that this transference was made smoothly, since the fgure was essentially the same (i.e. the Arabs too are Semites, and therefore the same word can be used against them). Tis too is a specious argument, as shown by Bernard Lewis.53 Te word itself, antiSemitism, dates from the late nineteenth century, while according to Said, Orientalist anti-­Arab animus is a much earlier phenomenon. Moreover, anti-­Jewish animus never weakened, let alone disappeared, even with the growth of what is now called Islamophobia. Neither the word “antiSemitism” nor the hatred it refers to can be said to have been transferred from Jew to Arab.54 In the contemporary world, an overlapping between anti-­Semitism and Islamophobia cannot be denied, although it has recently been called “one of ‘the best kept secrets.’ ”55 Post-­Christian societies, as it turns out, do not seem to be quite over their obsession with Muslims and Jews. 52  On the earlier coining of the word and its original meaning, see Chapter 5 in this volume, note 22. 53  Bernard Lewis, Semites and Antisemites (New York, London: Norton, 1986). 54  On this, see Gil Anidjar, “Te Semitic Hypothesis (Religion’s Last Word,” in his Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 13–38. 55  See Gil Z. Hochberg, “ ‘Remembering Semitism’ or ‘On the Prospect of Re-­Membering the Semites,’ ” ReOrient 1 (2016), 192–223, esp. 211. Hochberg points to the scholarly tradition epitomized by Renan as responsible for the deprecatory European perception of the “Semites” Her remark that refering to the “Judeo-­Christian tradition” permits to see only the Arabs, but not the Jews, as “Semites” does not carry conviction, notwithstanding the contemporary use of this locution among right-­wing circles, which is meant to reject the idea of any Islamic dimension to European identity.

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1

Varieties of Monotheism and the Tree Rings

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Te Emergence of a Concept While the idea of Semitic monotheism only emerged in the mid-­nineteenth century as a variegated religious phenomenon, monotheism has a much more ancient history. Te present chapter will frst briefy set forth some of the main stages in the emergence and evolution of monotheism in ancient religious history and discuss the origins of the modern concept of monotheism. It will then follow some of the major approaches to the question of the relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the long Middle Ages. As the new paradigm of the three monotheistic religions refects a rejection of these medieval traditions, this concise review of ancient evidence is necessary in order to fully understand the later developments. Since Constantine and the late antique creation of a cultura christiana, Europe has identifed itself—politically and culturally, as well as religiously—as belonging to the realm of the One God. Te idea of monotheism appeared even earlier, however, in the ancient Near East—not only with the emergence of Judaism from Israelite religion, but also with Akhnaton’s religious revolution in Egypt, the prophecy of Zarathustra in Iran, and Nabonides’ attempt to simplify the Babylonian pantheon.1 Te question whether monotheism frst emerged fully formed or, rather, was the fruit of a 1 On the appearance of monotheism in ancient Israel, the bibliography is, of course, immense. See, for instance, Fritz Stolz, Einführung in den biblischen Monotheismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschafliche Buchgesellschaf, 1996); Mark S. Smith, Te Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Tomas Römer, L’invention de Dieu (Paris: Seuil, 2014); and Bernhard Lang, Monotheism and the Prophetic Minority (Shefeld: Almond Press, 1983), in particular Chapter 1: “Te Yahweh-­Alone Movement and the Making of Jewish Monotheism,” 13–59. On other monotheistic trends in the ancient Near East, see Jan Assmann and Harald Strohm, eds, Echnaton und Zarathustra: Zur Genese und Dynamik des Monotheismus (Paderborn: Fink, 2012). The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press (2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0002

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Varieties of Monotheism and the Three Rings  25 tortuous evolution of religious conceptions, remains an open one, and beyond the present purview. Today, in any case, the scholarly consensus is that biblical monotheism was born of a protracted historical process. In late antiquity, monotheism won the grand battle launched against the old Greco-­Roman polytheist order. In this context, I am not referring only to the victory of Christianity in the Empire, but also to the fact that the idea of a supreme entity, the only one to truly merit the term “God,” had become widespread among late antique Platonic philosophers and, more generally, intellectual elites. Te fourth-­century Neo-­Platonist philosopher Proclus, for instance, noted that all forms of religions and sects accept the existence of a frst cause. Such a “pagan monotheism,” however, difers markedly from the Jewish or Christian belief in the God of Abraham, and there are varieties of late antique monotheism, just as there were difering forms of monotheism in the ancient Near East. Monotheism, it seems, must be declined in the plural. Te long late antiquity, roughly between the birth of Christianity and that of Islam, was a pivotal period in the history of religions. It was this era that witnessed the crystallization of the idea of monotheism. In the frst century, the only religion clearly identifed as monotheistic was Judaism. Since the seventh century, three such religions have vied for the characterization of “true” monotheism, each presenting its rivals as incomplete or distorted versions of the full divine revelation. Moreover, the pull of monotheism during those centuries exerted itself far beyond Jewish and Christian communities. We are witnessing a mounting scholarly recognition of the importance of monotheistic trends among Hellenic thinkers under the Roman Empire.2 During this period, which started as a “world full of gods,” according to Cicero (quoting Tales of Miletus), monotheism eventually became what one may call “the politically correct religious idiom.”3 For 2 See, in particular, three important collections of studies: Polymnia Athanassiadi and Michael Frede, eds, Pagan Monotheism in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999); Stephen Mitchell and Peter van Nufelen, eds, One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and Mitchell and van Nufelen, eds, Monotheism between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity (Leuven, Walpole., MA: Peeters, 2010). For a critique of the concept of pagan monotheism, see Mark Edwards, “Pagan and Christian Monotheism in the Age of Constantine,” in Mark Edwards and Simon Swaine, eds, Approaching Late Antiquity: Te Transformation from Early to Late Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 211–234. See, further, Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, Dio unico, pluralità e monarchia divina: esperienze religiose e teologie nel mondo tardo-­antico (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2010). Te following passages make use of Guy  G.  Stroumsa, Te Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 9–20. 3  See Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: Te Strange Triumph of Christianity (New York, London: Plume, 2001 [1999]). Te expression is from Polymnia Athanassiadi, “From Man to

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26  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism

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Platonic philosophers, in particular, the pyramid of beings culminated in the One, the supreme god. Whether references to Hypsistos Teos (the Highest God), or exclamatory inscriptions like Heis Teos! (One God!) stem from Jewish, Christian, or pagan milieus is still being debated.4 Tis pagan monotheism was a far cry from either Jewish or Christian monotheism, but the Roman world was clearly moving towards monotheism, or at least towards “henotheism” (see further on in this section). Tis might have refected Christian prodding, as it were. What is certain is the confation of Hellenic and Israelite forms of monotheism in the Roman Empire. Late antique religion can be described as an intercultural system in which a dynamic process permitted the transformation of religious conceptualization and practice.5 Scholarly tradition follows cultural habits, inherited from Christianity, in considering monotheism the engine of religious change in late antiquity. In this line of thinking, monotheism constitutes the core of the great clash between pagans and Christians. Yet, in their discussions of monotheism, scholars tend to devalue practice in favor of discourse, and may not take ancient perceptions sufciently into account. For Augustine, for instance, it is forms of worship, rather than theological conceptions, that are the main criterion of religious identity.6 Similarly, Emperor Julian writes: . . . I wish to show that the Jews agree with the Gentiles (tois ethnesin), except that they believe in only one God. Tat is indeed peculiar to them and strange to us, since all the rest we have in a manner in common with them—temples, sanctuaries, altars, purifcations, and certain precepts. For as to these we difer from one another either not at all or in trivial matters . . .7

God, or the Mutation of a Culture (300 bc–ad 762)”, in Anastasia Drandaki, Demetra Papanikola-­Batirtzi, and Anastasia Tourta, eds, Heaven and Earth: Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections (Athens: National Gallery of Art and J. Paul Getty Museum, 2013), 29–43. 4  See, for instance, Stephen Mitchell, “Further Toughts on the Cult of Teos Hypsistos,” in Mitchell and van Nufelen, eds, One God, 167–208 and Nicole Belayche, “Hypsistos: Une voie de l’exaltation des dieux dans le polythéisme gréco-­romain,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 7 (2005), 34–55. 5 Cf. Beate Pongratz-­ Leisten, in her Introduction to Beate Pongratz-­ Leisten, ed., Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011), 38. 6 Augustine, De Civ. Dei, 10.1, quoted by Alfons Fürst, “Monotheism between Cult and Politics: Te Temes of the Ancient Debate between Pagan and Christian Monotheism,” in Mitchell and van Nufelen, eds, One God, 85. 7  Contra Galileos, 306B, 406–407 in the Loeb Classical Library (LCL).

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Varieties of Monotheism and the Three Rings  27 Julian rejected the Christian god of his youth and sought to return to Hellenic tradition. He never quite succeeded, however, in becoming a real polytheist, and his arguments against the “Galileans” reveal him to have remained, at heart, a monotheist. What he reproaches the God of Moses for is not so much his uniqueness as his character: he is jealous (baskanos).8 He is, moreover, “a particular (merikon) god,” while the Hellenes “recognize the God of the All” (ton tōn holōn theon).9 God does not need revelation in order for humans to recognize him, since “the human race possesses its knowledge of God by nature and not from teaching,” a fact proved “by the universal yearning for the divine that is in all men . . .”10 Julian represents the acme of the Hellenic reaction against Christian monotheism. Tis reaction did not die with him. But some kind of hierarchy of the divine world, with the One at its summit, remains implicit in the philosophical tradition. Even for as vocal an advocate of polytheism as Proclus, a century later, “all forms of religions and sects accept the existence of the very frst cause, and all men call it a helping god.” Nonetheless, not all recognize the existence of lower gods, as “Te One shows itself with more evidence than plurality.”11 Te late antique interface between polytheism and monotheism, however, is even more complex.12 While some pagan philosophers were not true polytheists at heart, Christian theologians ofen appeared to believe in more than one god—a perennial accusation found in Jewish and Muslim anti-Christian polemics. I refer here not so much to the Trinity, a belief that was not universal among Christians before the fourth century, as to the hierarchy of two divine beings, namely, God the Father and Jesus Christ. Origen’s Dialogue with Heraclides attests powerfully to the early Christian ambivalence about monotheism.13 Tis striking dialogue demonstrates the complicated way in which third-­century Christian intellectuals grappled with their theology, whose characterization as monotheistic may seem questionable to the outsider. It is worth mentioning that the hierarchical or “vertical” dualism integrating two divine persons in the Godhead was not a  Christian invention. Since Hellenistic times, a number of Jewish texts,

8  Ibid., 93 C, 326–327 LCL; translation emended. 9  Ibid., 148 C, 358–359 LCL; translation emended. 10  Ibid., 52 B, 320–321 LCL. 11  In Tim. III; Diels 153, 6–15, Festugière IV, 195. 12  On the need to study polytheist and monotheist systems together, see Guy G. Stroumsa, “Comparer à travers champs? Polythéismes et monothéismes,” Asdiwal 14 (2019), 65–71. 13 Origen, Dialogue with Heraklides, ed. and transl. Jean Scherer, Entretien d’Origène avec Héraclide (Sources Chrétiennes, 67; Paris: Cerf, 1967), I, 20–II, 20, 54–59.

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28  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism biblical apocryphs, had referred to a second divine fgure, next to God and beneath Him. Enoch was probably the most common such fgure. Te same dualistic structure of the Divinity was retained in various traditions from the rabbinic period, revolving around the fgure of Metatron (perhaps: “he who sits near the Divine throne”) or of another archangel. Various rabbinic sources speak of “two Powers in heaven” (shtei rashuyot ba-­shamayim).14 Such entangled traditions have received some scholarly treatment, but the signifcant split in the Divinity that they refect has not always been adequately appreciated. Unsurprisingly, Jewish scholars have been loath to recognize dualistic trends within “orthodox” Judaism, which claimed to retain the purity of monotheism while confronting Christian “bitheism,” or at least “binarian” monotheism. It might even have been the existence of Christianity, it could plausibly be speculated, that restrained the development of such divine world hierarchies in late antique rabbinic literature.15 Te presence in the early Christian centuries of various stripes of dualist heresies, globally referred to here as “Gnosticism,” probably prevented a more precise scholarly diagnostic about the existence of a dualism within biblical monotheism in general, and Christian theology in particular. Like the Talmudic rabbis, the Church Fathers insisted upon the dualist nature of many of the heresies they were fghting, whitewashing the dualist proclivities inherent within their own belief system. On the other side, Christian apologists wished to leave the impression that they had a monopoly on monotheism. To a great extent, modern scholarship has accepted this emic perception of the matter. Te ubiquity of dualist proclivities in diferent forms of late antique monotheism merits explanation. If it seems that a dualist tension is built into biblical monotheism, it is because this monotheism (unlike pagan monotheism) insisted on the ethical aspect of God, and sought to ofer a theodicy: “Unde malum?” (“Whence evil?”) is the perennial, vexed question. Te ethical dimension, a core component of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, might well be more signifcant than the simple idea of God’s unity. Te Islamicist Henry Corbin has called the necessity for the One to become

14  See Alan F. Segal, Two Powers in Heaven: Early Rabbinic Reports about Christianity and Gnosticism (2nd edn; Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2002) and Peter Schäfer, Zwei Götter im Himmel: Gottesvorstellungen in der jüdischen Antike (Munich: Beck, 2017). 15  See, for instance, Menahem Kister, “Some Early Jewish and Christian Exegetical Problems and the Dynamics of Monotheism,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 37 (2006), 548–593.

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Varieties of Monotheism and the Three Rings  29 multiple in order to be worshipped “the paradox of monotheism.”16 Tere is indeed a paradox inherent to monotheism, in addition to the so-­called “omnipotence paradox” addressed by the Islamic philosopher Averroes (the Latinized name of the twelfh-­century philosopher and legal scholar Ibn Rushd, d. 1198). Monotheism practically entails a split in the divine, transcendent unity. Tis split can take one of the many forms of dualism and trinitarianism. Angelology, other divine hierarchies, and anthropomorphism are all related to this paradox. Late antique Jewish, Christian, Gnostic, and pagan forms of monotheism, then, were never truly “pure.” Tus, in practical terms, it was probably not the desire to confess God’s unity that moved most pagans to convert to Christianity. Pagan monotheism failed because it was at once too exclusive (its teachings were accessible only to a select few) and too inclusive (it did not prohibit the cult of the gods).17 Yet, it would be a mistake to think that there was only one possible trajectory in late antiquity. Marinus of Neapolis (the ancient Shechem and the modern Nablus, in Samaria) succeeded Proclus as the head of the Athenian academy. His disciple Damascius reported: “born a Samaritan, Marinus renounced their creed [doxan] (which is anyway a deviation [kainotomian] from Abraham’s religion [thrēskeias]) and embraced Hellenism.” Abraham, then, was a cultural hero of sorts far afeld of Jewish and Christian communities. In late antiquity, both Jews and Christians identifed as the sole faithful followers of Abraham’s true religion. Te Koran’s claim that Jews and Christians diverged from Abraham’s pure inheritance seems to turn back on its authors the early Christian claim that Jews had perverted Abraham’s true religion.18 Abraham’s religion, indeed, was in late aantiquity broadly perceived as true monotheism—almost as natural religion.19 From Herodotus and Megasthenes on, a long list of Greek authors expressed intellectual curiosity about Eastern peoples with ancient cultures, such as the Egyptians, the Persians, the Indians, and the Jews. In late antiquity, some Hellenic intellectuals, in particular those from the Eastern 16 See Henry Corbin, Le paradoxe du monothéisme (Paris: Herne, 1981), 181: “Le monothéisme est impossible sans l’angélologie.” 17  See Damascius, Te Philosophical History, text, transl., notes by Polymnia Athanassiadi (Athens: Apameia, 1999), 236–237. 18  See, for instance, Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew, a text written before the mid-­second century. 19  See Guy G. Stroumsa, “From Abraham’s Religion to the Abrahamic Religions,” Historia Religionum 3 (2011), 11–22.

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30  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism provinces of the Roman Empire, knew that wisdom could be found not only in the writings of Greek philosophers, but also among the “barbarian” peoples of the East. Te sages of these nations were the keepers of old wisdom traditions every bit as respectable as those of the Greek philosophers. Tese limes intellectuals, as one may call them, such as Numenius of Apamea in the late second century and Iamblichus of Chalcis in the early fourth, knew to look eastward for traditions of wisdom unknown to the Greeks.20 Te priests of the Eastern nations preserved those traditions, which were religious by nature. From now on, and particularly across European intellectual history, the Eastern origin of religious truth would be an accepted truism. Tis notion, that religion comes from the East, re-­emerges in early modernity. John Selden’s work De Dis Syris (1617) springs to mind, but one fnds this idea in many other texts as well. It is in the modern resurgence of the Eastern-­roots-­of-­religious-­truth theme that we fnd a key to the whole Orientalist adventure. For early modern scholars, such as John Selden, the roots of religious truth were obviously to be found in the lands of the Bible, and “the East” essentially referred to the Near East. Te Enlightenment did much to weaken the value of the biblical reference, and from now on, although one would keep looking East in search of these roots, it would be a broader kind of East, much more inclusive. Te biblical East had to share the privilege of representing the original locus of religious truth, frst, with Egypt and Iran, and then with India. China was a diferent case, as it represented in the Enlightenment the possibility of a major civilization and wisdom tradition not established upon religion. European scholars study Oriental languages because texts in those (to Western ears) obscure idioms retain a primal relationship with a primordial Christian revelation. Johann Gottfried Herder, whom we shall meet in later chapters, is perhaps the most eloquent expositor of this long tradition. By Herder’s time, its horizon had been extended through Asia. It is only later, with the Romantic movement in the early nineteenth century, that India became the locus classicus of the Eastern tradition of wisdom, dropping, as it were, the biblical Near East. Here, as we shall see in Chapter 3, Friedrich Schlegel is the main actor. Like all religious systems, monotheism is structurally unstable, given to fux, and even susceptible to radical change. Late antique Abrahamic monotheism was either universalist (Christianity and Islam) or particularist 20 See Guy  G.  Stroumsa, “Eastern Wisdoms,” in his Te Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 97–107 and notes.

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Varieties of Monotheism and the Three Rings  31 (Judaism). For Christians, as well as for Muslims, the same religious truth is shared by all humanity—all individuals and all peoples. Jews, by contrast, thrived on the paradox of a universal God and a chosen people. Early on, the God of Israel had entered into a contractual relationship with His people, Abraham’s true ofspring, transformed by the covenant into a priestly nation and a saintly people. While their national God soon became universal, the Jews insisted on retaining, throughout the ages, the national identity of their religion. With the coming of Islam, the spectrum of possible forms of monotheism was broadened. Muslim polemics against Christianity stressed the ambiguities of Christian Trinitarian monotheism. Indeed, the topic of monotheism was one of the most striking points of agreement in Muslim and Jewish anti-­Christian polemics during the Middle Ages. For both Muslims and Jews, Trinitarian doctrine contradicted notions of “pure” monotheism, making the Christians idolaters in disguise. Notably, while the phenomenon of monotheism has a rather long history, this is not the case regarding the concept itself. It was only in the modern age, just prior to the early nineteenth century, that many concepts dealing with diferent models of divinity were formulated, preparing the stage for the idea of Semitic monotheism. Te age of reason is also when all manner of religious phenomena started to be investigated seriously. Tis investigation was at frst philological, with the edition of texts in the original languages, soon to be augmented by the groundbreaking ethnological work of Catholic missionaries. It makes sense, then, that key terms for the taxonomy of religions were coined in the same period and gained traction during the Enlightenment. Let us briefy review the evidence. Te term “polytheism” (polytheismos), introduced by Philo in the frst century ce, was brought into modern usage in 1580 by Jean Bodin. Tis was followed by Samuel Purchas, who used the word in his 1614 compendium on the religions of the world, Purchas, his Pilgrimage. Te frst appearance of the term “atheism” dates from the sixteenth century,21 and the term “monotheism” frst occurs in the seventeenth century. Te latter word was coined by Henry More, a philosopher generally counted among the “Cambridge Platonists.”22 More also published, in 1653, a work entitled 21 See Francis Schmidt, ed., L’impensable polythéisme: Etudes d’historiographie religieuse (Paris: Editions des archives contemporaines, 1988); see further Stroumsa, A New Science. On “atheism,” see David Wooton in Michael Hunter and David Wooton, eds, Atheism from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 22  Henri More, An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (London, 1660), 62.

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32  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Conjectura Cabbalistica. According to this text, the frst three chapters of Genesis represent a summation of all wisdom. Yet More does not seem to have been familiar with any Kabbalistic work. As Dmitri Levitin has pointed out, like other early modern philosophers, the Cambridge Platonists were preoccupied “with one central religio-­philosophical problem: that of pagan monotheism and its relationship with animism and pantheism.” Levitin further notes that none of the Cambridge Platonists “believed in any great Mosaic wisdom, and all were skeptical of the Cabbala and similar stories of transmission from Jews to Greeks.”23 Together with More, the Dutch ra­tion­ al­ist theologian Balthasar Bekker (1634–1698) was one of the frst authors to speak of “monotheism.”24 It is only in the eighteenth century, thanks to France’s philosophes, that the term “monotheism” gained any real traction, and this in earnest only at the end of the century.25 Te German Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) was responsible for incorporating the term into Christian theology. His Glaubenslehre (1830–1831) identifes three main stages of religious evolution, from fetishism to polytheism, and from the latter to monotheism, best expressed in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Te term “theism” was coined by another Cambridge Platonist, the theologian and Hebraist Ralph Cudworth, in his book Te True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678). At about the same time, in 1677, the English theologian Edward Stillingfeet published A Letter to a Deist, the frst sustained attack on Deism in the English language. For its part, the term “dualism,” both in French and in English, makes its appearance in the mid-­eighteenth century. In the study of religion, it was then used for the description of Zoroastrianism, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism, in particular by the Huguenot scholar Isaac de Beausobre, in the frst half of the eight­ eenth century.26

23  See Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of a New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 126–138. 24 See Balthasar Bekker, De betoverde weereld (1691) [English translation Te World Bewitched (1695)]; cf. Borgeaud, La pensée européenne des religions (Paris: Seuil, 2021) and Jonathan Israel, Te Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477–1806 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 925–930. 25 Of the long bibliography on the topic, see, e.g. Bernhard Lang, “Monotheismus,” Handbuch der religionsgeschichtlicher Grundbegrife, Vol. IV, (1998), 148–165; Åke V.  Ström, “Monotheismus I (religionsgeschichtlich),” Teologische Realenzyklopädie 23 (1994), 233–237, which scans the history of scholarship from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. 26  On de Beausobre and the birth of Manichaean studies, see, for instance, Stroumsa, A New Science, 113–123.

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

Varieties of Monotheism and the Three Rings  33 Te term “pantheism” frst appears, in Latin, at the end of the seventeenth century.27 Pantheism, as an idea, would have a striking Nachleben among the German Idealist philosophers in the fnal decades of the eighteenth century. Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, for example, ignited a scandal about Lessing’s Spinozism, when he claimed that Lessing had told him in conversation, in 1780:

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Te orthodox concepts of the Divinity are no longer for me; I cannot stomach them. Hen kai pan! I know of nothing else . . . Tere is no other philosophy than the philosophy of Spinoza.28

Friedrich Schelling (1775–1854) took the next step in the classifcation of the notions of God when he introduced the concept of “henotheism” in his Philosophie der Mythologie (1842). By Henotheismus, he was referring to a rudimentary form of monotheism, the cult of one ethnic god, which did not insist that there were no other gods. For Schelling, henotheism signaled a historical step, since history as a whole represents the “progressive, gradually self-­disclosing revelation of the Absolute.”29 “Henotheismus” was then adopted by the classical philologist Friedrich Gottlieb Welker (1784–1868) to describe an assumed early kind of monotheism among the Greeks.30 It was Friedrich Max Müller, however, who, under Schelling’s infuence, truly popularized “henotheism,” a term referring to an intermediary stage between polytheism and monotheism, which he thought ft to describe the early religion of Israel, before the exile and the appearance of monotheism.31 Müller also proposed to apply the term “kathenotheism” to Vedic religion, where each god in its turn is considered to be supreme—a term he later abandoned, acknowledging in 1882 that it had not caught on.32 Te 27  In Joseph Raphson, De spatio reali seu ente infnito (1697), pantheismus refers to Spinoza’s doctrine. Te term frst appears in English three years later. See Anne Tomson, Bodies of Tought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 54. 28 Friedrich  H.  Jacobi, Über die Lehre des Spinozas (1785). See Dieter Henrich with David  S.  Paccini, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2003). 29 See Johannes Zachhuber, Teology as Science in Nineteenth-­ Century Germany: From F. C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 69. 30 Friedrich G. Welker, Griechische Götterlehre (three vols; Göttingen: Dietrich, 1857–1862). 31  See Müller’s 1860 review of Renan’s Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques, “Semitic Monotheism?,” reprinted in Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop (New York: Scribner, 1869), 337–374, esp. 347. 32  See Robert Mackintosch, “Monolatry and Henotheism,” in the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. VIII (Edinburgh 1915), 810b–811b, for whom the two terms are essentially identical.

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34  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism term “henotheism” soon came to be used by biblical scholars, from Wellhausen’s days on, to describe the early stages of the Israelite religion. Te Scottish anthropologist Robertson Smith, however, preferred the term “monolatry” to henotheism. More recently, in order to avoid the various pitfalls of this fuzzy terminology, Morton Smith has proposed to speak of the “Yahwe alone” movement.33 We will return to Müller and Smith at a later point in our story. In Germany, the twofold Romantic preoccupation with monotheism and India is aptly refected in Hegel’s conception of an Indian monotheism. Te same idea was developed by the classical philologist Georg Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1858). In his monumental Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen (1810–1812), Creuzer sought to demonstrate that the origins of Greek religion are to be found in India and that, initially, the religion of India—and hence that of Greece—was monotheistic. Original monotheism was preserved as an esoteric doctrine among the priests, and is refected, for instance, in the mysteries of Eleusis, while polytheistic myths were crafed for the populace.34 With Creuzer, the old esoteric wisdom of the early modern era, which Daniel P. Walker has called “Te Ancient Teology,” returned, dressed in new garb. For French Jesuits in the seventeenth century, for instance, the rites and writings of Confucius represented a key testimony of this “ancient theology.”35 Strangely enough, the Romantic idea of an original Indian monotheism or pantheism held its appeal for some time. Tus, the Italian historian of religion Rafaele Pettazzoni (1883–1959) spoke of both monotheism (Brahman) and pantheism (Brahman-­Atman) in India.36 Despite the various scholarly proposals conceiving monotheism as a late step in the evolution of religious ideas, the idea of a primitive monotheism has proven to be a remarkably hardy notion. In the late nineteenth century, the English anthropologist Andrew Lang maintained that monotheism represented the pre-­ ­ animistic form of primitive religion.37 Similarly,

33  See Robert Karl Gnuse, No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel (JSOT, Suppl. Series 241; Shefeld: Shefeld Academic Press, 1997), 132–133 and note 6. 34 See Walter Burkert, Te Orientalizing Revolution: Near Eastern Infuences on Greek Culture in the Early Archaic Period (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 2, who remarks on the futility of Creuzer’s eforts. 35 Daniel P. Walker, Te Ancient Teology: Studies in Christian Platonism from the Fifeenth to the Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 194–230. 36  Rafaele Pettazzoni, Dio: Formazione e sviluppo del monoteismo nella storia delle religioni; Vol. I, L’essere celeste nelle credenze dei popoli primitivi (Rome: Athenaeum, 1922), 2–3. 37  Andrew Lang, Te Making of Religion (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898).

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

Varieties of Monotheism and the Three Rings  35 ­ arie-­ M Joseph Lagrange (1855–1938), the Dominican who founded the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem in order to develop a modern Catholic biblical scholarship, argued that the original Israelite religion had been a rather vague form of monotheism, which later became more clearly defned. In the frst half of the twentieth century, Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954), an Austrian Catholic priest and linguist, published a multi-­volume work showing the nearly universal notion of a benevolent, unitary sky god which preceded the appearance of polytheism.38 His monumental and misconceived oeuvre represents the last eforescence of the original-­monotheism theory.

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A Medieval Legacy Te frst part of this chapter ofered a brief review of the idea of monotheism; of its refection in various religious phenomena in the ancient world and as a concept created in modern religious scholarship and intellectual history. Troughout the long Middle Ages, monotheism constituted the essence of the self-­perception of Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike. Each of these faith communities perceived itself as the sole and true inheritor of divine revelation, and each expressed its relations with the others mainly in the polemical mode. And yet, in those religious times, some Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors recognized that the rival sister religions possessed a conception of the One God comparable, and sometimes similar, to their own. Beneath the thick layer of religious polemics, it is possible to discern a degree of rational comparative eforts between the diferent monotheistic religions. We shall soon see that these Jewish, Christian, and Muslim authors identifed not only diferences, but also similarities, among the three religions. As the present discussion concerns the background to the paradigm shif that took place during the Enlightenment, at a time of increased secularization in European societies, we turn now to Christian views of Judaism and Islam. Christianity was born within Judaism, as it were, while Islam emerged in a milieu of thriving Jewish and Christian communities. A great deal of cultural interaction occurred amongst practitioners of these three religions, the historical development of which naturally became intricately entangled. Such developments thus require a kind of synoptic analysis. Of course, the 38 Wilhelm Schmidt, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee: eine historisch-­kritische und positive Studie (12 vols; Münster: Aschendorf, 1912–1955).

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36  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism genetic connections between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were well known to scholars before the Enlightenment. Yet the modern scholarly study of these religions has shown a remarkable lack of interest in considering the three religions together and in studying them in comparative fashion. Te historical and comparative study of religions, which developed as a discipline in the second half of the nineteenth century, rarely dealt with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the same framework. Consequently, neither the important similarities nor the signifcant diferences among these religions have been adequately treated in the scholarship. As we saw in the Introduction, medieval Christian societies both in Byzantium and in the Latin West essentially knew a single taxonomy of the world’s religions.39 For a full millennium, roughly from the eighth to the eighteenth century, Christian thinkers had divided the world between four main religious families: Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and “the rest,” also known as “paganism.” Although Judaism and Islam were perceived by Christianity to be falsifcations of the true religion, refecting Satan’s activity in history, his aping of God, these two religions remained versions of monotheism (albeit distorted ones). Moreover, in this view, Judaism and Islam preached “too much of a good thing”; their monotheism was too raw, too rigorous, lacking the wondrous complexity of the triune God. As such, together with Christianity, Judaism and Islam were pitched against all forms of paganism. Tis taxonomy refected an acute awareness of the genetic, structural, and historical overlap among Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Such similarities among the three religions retained their cohesive power up until the Enlightenment. Nonetheless, both in the East and in the West, Christian perceptions of Judaism and Islam—as well as Christian attitudes toward Jews and Muslims—have always been marked by a profound ambivalence. Paganism, the fourth category in the traditional taxonomy of religions, was a label assigned to the potpourri of all the other religions of humankind. In early modern times, however, with new knowledge about the various religions of the world spreading widely, the simplistic designation of “pagan” was becoming increasingly unsatisfactory. Te multiplication of religions demanded a richer, more sophisticated taxonomy. With the great European discoveries, both in the New World and in Asia, and the 39  On early Christian taxonomies of religions, see Francesco Massa, “Nommer et classer les religions aux IIe-­IVe siècles: la taxonomie ‘paganisme, judaïsme, christianisme,’ ” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 234 (2017), 689–715.

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Varieties of Monotheism and the Three Rings  37 progressive emergence of knowledge about the religious systems of the Amerindians, the Indians, the Chinese, and the Japanese, “paganism” as an all-­embracing concept started to crumble.40 Tis conviction concerning the fundamental closeness between the elites of the diferent religious and cultural traditions—Muslims, Jews, and Christians—was at once reinforced and complicated in what I propose to call the “Abrahamic triangle.”41 Te recognition of a proximity between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is as old as the appearance of Islam, the third of these religions. Te close genetic bond between Judaism and Christianity had been obvious since at least Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jew in the mid-­second century, and Patristic literature testifes to the fact that Christians, as well as Jews, early on conceived of themselves as the true children of Abraham. Nascent Islam sought to reiterate the argument of the true fdelity to Abraham’s pure religion, original monotheism, in the face of perversion by earlier communities, this time not only Jews, but also Christians. And, in the early eighth century, John of Damascus, the frst Christian polemicist against Islam, is explicit that, for him, Islam was more of a Christian heresy than a true religion.42 As soon as Islam appeared on the scene, the idea of comparing the three cognate monotheisms became both imaginable and imperative. Only a single divine revelation was conceived of as possible, and hence only one true message from God; similarities found in other religious traditions were perceived as proof of their origin in falsifcations of the original message. Te devil, God’s main imitator, was held responsible for the confusing resemblances between falsehood and truth. Hence, the two ideas of a shared truth and of religious imposture are, in fact, two sides of the same coin.43 Te Middle Ages saw the development of a vast web of inter-­religious intellectual exchanges, for the most part expressed in polemical literature:

40  I have dealt with the disappearance of the concept of “paganism” in A New Science. 41 On the perceived kinship with Abraham, see, for instance, Martin Goodman, George H. van Kooten, and Jacques T. A. G. M. van Ruiten, eds, Abraham, the Nations, and the Hagarites: Jewish, Christian and Islamic Perspectives on Kinship with Abraham (Leiden: Brill, 2010). 42  On John’s perception of Islam, see Peter Schadler, John of Damascus and Islam: Christian Heresiology and the Intellectual Background to Earliest Christian-­Muslim Relations (History of Christian–Muslim Relations, 34; Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2011). 43  See Guy G. Stroumsa, “Tree Rings or Tree Impostors? Te Comparative Approach to the Abrahamic Religions and its Origins,” in Adam  J.  Silverstein and Guy  G.  Stroumsa, eds, Moshe Blidstein, assoc. ed., Te Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 56–70.

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38  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Jewish–Christian, Christian–Muslim, and Jewish–Muslim.44 Although much knowledge of the religious other is refected in those texts, such knowledge remained largely imbedded in this polemical framework. Te triadic approach ofers the promise (not always kept) of a less direct polemical attitude, as well as that of a more balanced, comparative approach. Terein lies the importance of such texts, which can be considered to prefgure the modern, comparative study of the Abrahamic religions. Now let us meet some authors who ofered interesting perspectives on the comparison of the three Abrahamic religions. Te parable of three identical rings seems to have appeared for the frst time in an eighth-­century Syriac text that purports to preserve a debate supposedly held in 782 between Timothy, the Nestorian Patriarch from 780 to 823, and al-­Mahdī, the third Abbasid caliph. A rather similar story occurs in Te Proof of the Christian Religion, a theological tract in Arabic written by Abū Rā’it ̣a al-­Takrīt ̣ī, who died no later than 830.45 In the early twelfh century, the Andalusian Jewish thinker and poet Judah Halevi (1075–1141) authored Te Book of Kuzari, “An Apology of the Despised Religion.” Written in Judeo-­Arabic, the Kuzari features a Khazar king who interviews a philosopher, a Christian sage, and a Muslim sage, before moving on to a Jewish sage—who fnally supplies him with satisfactory answers to his spiritual quest. Interestingly, Halevi’s almost exact contemporary, the French Pierre Abelard (1079–1142), has a philosopher instead of a Muslim argue with a Jew and a Christian in his Dialogue of a Philosopher with a Jew and a Christian, a text composed between 1136 and 1139. In this text, the philosopher takes the place of the Muslim, since for medieval thinkers such as Abelard, the only Muslims with whom one could possibly have an intellectual discussion were philosophers.46 Te expectable 44  For an analysis of this phenomenon, see, for instance, Roger Arnaldez, À la croisée des trois monothéismes: une communauté de pensée au Moyen-­Âge (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993). For a contemporary philosophical refection on the nature and status of polemics among the monotheistic religions, see Peter Sloterdijk, Gottes Eifer: Vom Kampf der drei Monotheismen (Frankfurt, Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 2007). 45  For an encompassing study, see Iris Shagrir, Te Parable of the Tree Rings and the Idea of Religious Toleration in European Culture (London: Palgrave, 2019). See also Louis Massignon, “La légende ‘de tribus impostoribus’ et ses origines islamiques,” in Louis Massignon, Écrits mémorables II (Paris: Lafont, 2009), 142–145 [= Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 82 (1920)]; Stroumsa, “Tree Rings or Tree Impostors?” See further Maurice Kriegel, “Not Scepticism, but Certainty: A Diferent Plea for Toleration in Late Medieval Spain,” in Mercedes García-Arenal and Stefania Pastore, eds, From Doubt to Unbelief: Forms of Scepticism in the Iberian World (Oxford: Legenda, 2019), 19–33. 46  See Sarah Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn al-­Rawandī, Abū Bakr al-­Rāzī, and Teir Impact on Islamic Tought (Islamic Philosophy, Teology and Science, Vol. XXXV; Leiden, Boston, MA, Cologne: Brill, 1999), 216 and note 9.

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Varieties of Monotheism and the Three Rings  39 identity of the winner in such texts (the Christian for Abelard, the Jew for Halevi) is less important than the fact that the discussion is presented as a rational one, where the characters of the three religions (or of Christianity, Judaism, and philosophy for Abelard) present philosophical arguments in support of their faith. In the following century, Saʿd b. Manṣūr Ibn Kammūna (d. 1284?) would pen what is perhaps the most remarkable comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Middle Ages, Examination of the Tree Faiths (Tanqīḥ al-­abḥāth l’il-­milal al-­thalāth). Ibn Kammūna was a Jew, but it is as a philosopher that he approached the comparative study of the three monotheistic faiths, starting with a general study of prophecy before moving to a critical examination of each of the three religions. Ibn Kammūna, who was obviously familiar with Halevi’s Kuzari, took a sympathetic stance toward both Jesus and Muhammad. Unlike Ibn Kammūna’s philosophical works, it seems that the Tanqīḥ was quite overlooked by Muslim and Jewish intellectuals. Ibn Kammūna’s works survived only in Arabic (rather than in Judeo-Arabic) manuscripts, and persistent rumors circulated in Arabic historiography about a late-­in-­life conversion to Islam. Such rumors, however, have recently been refuted. In 1284, about four years afer the completion of his comparative work and close to his death, he appears to have barely survived an attempted lynching. Te Muslim reaction to his critique of Islam was thus revealed.47 At about the same time that Ibn Kammūna was writing his Examination of the Tree Faiths, Ramon Llull (ca. 1232–ca. 1315), the inspired Franciscan mystical thinker from Majorca, dubbed Arabicus Christianus, published Book of the Gentile and of the Tree Wise Men (1274–1276). Te book, which was written in Catalan, depicts (in an elaborate literary frame) a pagan asking a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim to describe their religion. Each of these fgures presents his case for the unity of God and for other central tenets of his religion. Notably, in the work, which refects a rather good knowledge of Judaism and Islam, the author does not disclose to which of the three religions the pagan converted. Giovanni Boccaccio (1313–1375) wrote his Decameron around 1353. As is well known, this work ofers (in Day 1, Tale 3) the classic version of the parable of the three rings, more or less as it will appear in Lessing’s play, Nathan der Weise. In this work, Sultan Saladin asks the Jew Melchizedek 47  On Ibn Kammūna, see Reza Pourjavady and Sabine Schmidtke, A Jewish Philosopher of Baghdad: ‘Izz al-­Dawla Ibn Kammūna (d. 683/1284) and His Writings (Islamic Philosophy, Teology and Science 65; Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2006).

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40  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism which of the three religions is the true one, and Melchizedek replies by telling the story of the three rings (two of which are perfect copies of the original one) given by a merchant to his three deserving sons. Lis dou di vrai aniel, a French poem from the thirteenth century, seems to have been the proximate channel through which the legend reached Boccaccio. In any case, the parable would become widespread during the Renaissance. Carlo Ginzburg’s seminal study showed how the story reappears in the mouth of the sixteenth-­century heretical Italian miller Menocchio.48 Renaissance Christian thinkers also dealt with the comparison of the three Abrahamic religions in a further register. In his De pace fdei (XIX), written shortly afer the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Nicolas of Cusa (1401–1464) imagines an inter-­religious dialogue taking place in heaven, the only rational region available. Tere, wise Christians, Jews, and Moslems agree upon a religious concordat. Given full powers, they then meet in Jerusalem, their common religious center, to receive, in the name of all, the single faith (una religio in rituum varietate). Te story ends with them establishing perpetual peace within the city, “in order that in this peace, the Creator of all things be glorifed in all saecula. Amen.” A century later, at the dawn of modernity, two French thinkers, Guillaume Postel (1510–1581) and Jean Bodin (1530–1596), would ofer various refections that can be described as “Abrahamic.” For Postel, a visionary Jesuit who became the frst professor of Hebrew at the newly established Collège Royal (which would later become the Collège de France), God had revealed himself essentially not through one, but rather through two chains of tradition: in parallel to Abraham, the Indian Brahmans represented the second transmission of divine wisdom to humankind. Although Postel is ofen considered a rare “illuminé,” it should be noted that people as diferent as Isaac Newton and the Catholic theologian Pierre-­Daniel Huet (1630–1721) supported the same view. In his Absconditorum Clavis (1547), Postel describes how Jews, Christians, and Muslims, all successors of the law of nature, will equally be saved if they observe the law of Abraham. For him, both Moses and Muhammad had received a part of the divine spirit, fully revealed in Jesus. Jean Bodin seems to have harbored a particular sympathy for Judaism, which he considered to be, among the diferent religions, closest to the law 48  Carlo Ginzburg, Te Cheese and the Worms: Te Cosmos of a Sixteenth-­Century Miller (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) [Originally published as Il formaggio e i vermi: il cosmo di un mugnaio d’el 500 (Turin: Einaudi, 1976)].

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Varieties of Monotheism and the Three Rings  41 of nature. In his Heptaplomeres (assuming the work is indeed his), the Jew Solomon draws a parallel between Jesus, Simon Magus, and Apollonius of Tyana, all three of whom Bodin considers religious impostors. In the same work, Senamy, a religiously indiferent fgure, states that the great number of religions may indicate that they are all equally true. In 1570, the French Franciscan Melchior de Flavin (d. ca. 1580) traveled to the Holy Land, where he preached union between Christians, Jews, and Muslims in order to counter growing atheism. From then on, the comparison of religions in the West would happen within the framework of a religiously complex pluralism, as Jews and Muslims start appearing there as real protagonists. In the Ottoman Empire, matters remained much more traditional. ‘Abd al-­Ghanī ibn Ismā’īl al-­Nabulsī (1641–1731), a scholar from a Palestinian family, wrote a polemical treatise on the religious status of the dhimmīs (i.e. the tolerated religious minorities, essentially Jews and Christians), which refected a remarkably liberal attitude. As Guillaume Postel argued for Jews and Muslims, al-­Nabulsī claimed that Jews and Christians can be saved in the hereafer, even without converting to Islam. It would sufce for them to have faith (īmān) in their hearts. Such a tolerant attitude towards religious minorities may well be less striking on the part of a Muslim than on that of a Christian, yet it seems to have been rare enough to be worthy of note.49 Perhaps the most interesting comparative study of the three religions to emerge from the Enlightenment is Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile and Mahometan Christianity, by the Irishman John Toland (1668–1722).50 Te book, published in 1718, developed ideas already expressed by Toland in a French manuscript of 1710, Christianisme judaïque et mahométan. Toland based his book on the Gospel of Barnabas, an apocryphal text of which a single Italian manuscript is the only witness.51 He set out to provide a historical argument on the Jewish roots of Christianity in order to promote the status of the Jews in contemporary European societies. Along similar lines, in Les lettres persannes (a text frst published anonymously in 1721), Montesquieu refers to Christianity and Islam as two branches of the old Jewish stem.52 It is in this intellectual climate that Lessing revisited the old

49  See Michael Winter, “A Polemical Treatise by ‘Abd al-­Ghani al-­Nabulsi against a Turkish Scholar on the Religious Status of the Dimmis,” Arabica 35 (1988), 92–103. 50 John Toland, Nazarenus, or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity (London: Brown, 1718). 51  See p. 45 below. 52 Montesquieu, Lettres Persannes, Lettre LX; I follow the edition with Introduction, notes, and commentary by Paolo Carile (Paris: Le Livre de Poche, 1995), 187–189.

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parable of the three rings in Nathan the Wise, at the peak of the Enlightenment. In 1781, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise), a play that showcases the medieval “Parable of the Tree Rings.” First performed in Berlin in 1784, the play follows the storyline of the parable, in which a king has three sons—but a single golden ring. Not wishing to favor any one of the princes, the king makes two identical copies of the ring. Only one of the rings is authentic, but there is no way of knowing which of the three it is. Te plotline clearly alludes to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.53 To be sure, Lessing, who was both a radical and much more philosemitic than anyone else among German intellectuals in his generation, is in no way typical of his day, although one may note that philosemitism was not quite unknown in Lessing’s Germany, in particular among Pietists.54 Tis fact, however, does not impinge on the point made here: the parable of the three rings, which frst appears in eighth-­century Syriac literature, was still in currency at the end of the eighteenth century. We shall see in Chapter  2 how, during the Enlightenment, the theme of the three rings (presenting Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as three aspects of the divine revelation) gave way to the idea of the three impostors (Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad), who essentially fed humankind with religious lies.

53  Te bibliography on Nathan der Weise is, of course, huge. For a good introduction, see Peter von Düfel, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan der Weise: Erläuterungen und Dokumente (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006). 54  See, for instance, Peter Vogt, ed., Zwischen Bekehrungseifer und Philosemitismus: Texte zur Stellung des Pietismus zum Judentum (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2007), as well as Philipp Teisohn and Georg Braungart, eds, Philosemitismus: Rhetorik, Poetik, Diskursgeschichte (Paderborn: Fink, 2017).

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2

Te Enlightenment’s Paradigm Shif and the Tree Impostors Chapter 1 ended with Lessing’s classic rendition of the legend of the three rings, which highlighted the close family relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Tis relationship, which had been an obvious one up through the Middle Ages, began to be seen as less evident in the eight­eenth century. Te Enlightenment (or perhaps, rather, the Enlightenments) took many diferent shapes across Europe.1 Te present chapter is devoted to a paradigm shif, one which refects a new historicization of European cultural life, at least in the approach to religious phenomena.2 In France, on which this chapter focuses, the historical transformation started earlier than elsewhere, at the very beginning of the eighteenth century.

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Philosophes Comparing Religions Te crucial (and ofen underrated) role played by France in the modern history of the study of religion stems frst from its religious identity. In contrast to Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and England, the ambient culture in France was frmly Roman Catholic. Te ethnological reports by Jesuits and other Catholic missionaries in China, India, and New France had lef a deep impression on many minds. When the Enlightenment thinkers started to sap the traditional power of the church, an obvious path was to highlight the existence of remote civilizations, older than those of the 1  As demonstrated by Jonathan Israel in his monumental studies; see Jonathan I. Israel, Te Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Jonathan I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Jonathan I. Israel, Democratic Enlightenment: Philosophy, Revolution, and Human Rights, 1750–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 2 See Zachhuber, Teology and Science in Nineteenth-­ Century Germany. As noted by Zachhuber, it is only towards the end of the eighteenth century that the change happened in Germany, on which Chapter 3 will focus. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press (2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0003

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44  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism biblical Near East and established on very diferent religious grounds. Comparing cultures soon became the method of choice. One could compare, in particular, the cultures of the ancient world to those of newly discovered peoples, especially those then called “savages.” Voltaire and other French philosophes had resolved to debunk the historiographical tradition dating from Eusebius in the fourth century, and reafrmed by Bossuet in the seventeenth, for which world history was centered on Christian Europe. Tis brought them to grant Asian civilizations a fresh importance. From Bayle to Voltaire, a new critical approach to the Bible demoted it (and in particular the Old Testament) from its previous supremacy in European culture. As shown a generation ago by Frank Manuel, starting with Fontenelle and Bayle, the time of the Enlightenment was also that of a major reappraisal of paganism.3 In order to grasp the nature of the new scholarly study of religion as it developed through the nineteenth century, we must return to the seeds of the new discipline in this formative period. Since early modernity, the status of religion in Western European countries had been shifing.4 At the risk of oversimplifcation, one might say that the trajectory of the early modern comparative studies of religion refects a passage from ritual as a main focus in the seventeenth century, at a time when the polarization between Catholic and Protestant perspectives was extreme, to the centrality of myth in the eighteenth, when all religious systems, monotheistic and polytheistic, started to be tackled on the same terms. Te term “mythology” became equivalent to that of “religious system,” a fact underlined by the entry “mythology” in the Grande Encyclopédie—an entry perhaps written by Diderot himself. Te results of the major intellectual eforts to decipher the religious traditions of humankind, past and present, soon to be used and reinterpreted by Schelling and Hegel, then became the basis for the Chairs of Oriental studies and the science of religion established from the 1870s on.5

3  See Frank Manuel, Te Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). For the prelude to the topic of this book, see Martin Mulsow, “Te Seventeenth Century Confronts the Gods: Bishop Huet, Moses, and the Daggers of Comparatism,” in Martin Mulsow and Asaph Ben-­ Tov, eds, Knowledge and Profanation: Transgressing the Boundaries of Religion in Pre-­ Modern Scholarship (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 159–196. Mulsow highlights here the slippery slope from comparison to heresy. 4  As I have argued in A New Science, the great discoveries, the Reformation, and the wars of religion transformed religious attitudes in Europe. 5  It is to Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812) that we owe the modern notion of myth. See, for instance, Fritz Graf, Griechische Mythologie: eine Einführung (Zurich: Artemis: 1985) [English translation: Greek Mythology: An Introduction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)]. See further Philippe Borgeaud, “Mythe et émotion. Quelques idées

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The Enlightenment ’ s Paradigm Shift  45 John Toland, whom we encountered at the end Chapter 1, was one of the most original thinkers of his day to deal in a critical way with matters of religious history. Following in Bayle’s tracks, Toland insisted that a correct reading of early Islam should locate it within its original milieu, an admixture of various Jewish and Christian trends. Like Bayle, he did not deem religious imposture a phenomenon unique to nascent Islam, as the phenomenon of false prophecy, in his view, is also to be found in early Christianity.6 Furthermore, Toland was fascinated by early Christian heresies, in particular by the Jewish-­Christian Ebionites, and sought to interpret the few Christian apocryphal texts known at the time, such as the Gospel of Barnabas, in this light. It is only thanks to such texts, he maintained, that one could be exposed to “the original plan of Christianity,” and learn that Jesus did not intend to abolish the Laws of Moses.7 Giambattista Vico’s magnum opus, La scienza nuova (1724), is a central witness to the birth of comparative religion, a science of which Vico thought he had discovered the essential principles. Many of the early modern scholars working on religion belong to those whom Paolo Rossi has dubbed “Vico's great interlocutors.”8 Tese fgures played a pivotal role in the formation of his ideas and are referred to at the start of La scienza nuova. When Vico, like others in the eighteenth century, speaks of mitologia, he does not refer to what we call today mythology but rather, more broadly, to the comparative study of religion in general.9 It is worth mentioning the striking diference in intellectual climate and freedom between Naples and Europe north of the Alps in the frst half of the eighteenth century. Such diferences go a long way in explaining Vico’s odd decision to exclude from his worldwide inquiry the tradition of Israel, together with Christianity. Vico was a man of his time when he sought principles to account for the history of religion in

anciennes,” in Üli Dill and Christine Walde, eds, Antike Medien, Transformationen und Konstruktionen (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2009), 415–131, esp. 417–418. 6 See in particular his Nazarenus: or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity, ed. J. Champion (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999 [1718]), Letter 1, 135. See also, in the same volume, his Christianisme Judaïque et Mahométan, an interesting text never published by Toland, esp. chapter 15, 281: “Vous scavez, monsieur, a quell degrée prodigieux l’imposture et la crédulité agissoient de concert dans les premiers temps de l’Eglise chrétienne.” 7  See p. 41 above. 8  Paolo Rossi, Te Dark Abyss of Time: Te History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 1984); cf. Giambattista Vico, La Scienza nuova [edition of 1744] Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, with an introduction by Paolo Rossi, Vol. I (Milan: Rizzoli, 1977), 1, 128. 9 On myth in Vico, see Joseph Mali, Te Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s “New Science” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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46  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism ancient societies. Israel, for him, had no mythology, a claim that Renan would reformulate and establish on new grounds, and which would nurture a protracted controversy in the second half of the nineteenth century.10 Te publication year of La scienza nuova was a true annus mirabilis, as it also saw the publication of both Les moeurs des sauvages ameriquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps, by the Jesuit Joseph-­François Laftau, a book which has been acclaimed (at least in the French-­speaking world) as the founding study of modern social anthropology, as well as De l’origine des fables, Bernard Fontenelle’s seminal study of mythology.11 It is in the history of the earliest peoples that Laftau found the key to mythology and religion. For him, the present existence of “savage” peoples enabled the erasure of chronology. Tey seemed to emerge from the earliest days of humankind and could hence be compared to peoples from antiquity. Te same diachronical approach to comparatism was also developed by Charles de Brosses (1709–1777).12 Te polymath de Brosses, a French magistrate and aristocrat, belonging to the noblesse de robe, was a well-­known gentleman-­scholar (the great scientist Bufon, whom he met at school, remained his friend for life). Only Voltaire’s contempt prevented him from being elected to the Académie française. Te substance of the book had been presented as a mémoire to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, but the author was disappointed by its reception. It was in this work that de Brosses coined the term “fetishism” (fétichisme), derived from the Portuguese feitiço (charm, spell). Diderot had introduced de Brosses to Hume’s Natural History of Religion, published in London in 1757. Du culte des dieux fétiches is a striking example of Hume’s impact on the understanding of religion. 10  See Chapter 5 in this volume. 11  De l’origine des fables had been written before the end of the seventeenth century but was not published until 1724. Concerning Fontenelle’s signifcance for the modern study of religion, see James S. Preus, Explaining Religion: Criticism and Teory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press, 1987), chapter 3, 40–55. Despite its importance and fame, Laftau’s masterpiece has not been recently fully reprinted. A new edition, by Edna Hindie Lemay (two vols; Paris: Maspero, 1983) oddly omits, precisely, the whole part on religion. See, however, a full English translation, by William N. Fenton and E. L. Moore, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times (two vols; Toronto: Champlain Society, 1974–1977). On Laftau, see now Mélanie Lozat and Sara Petrella, eds, La Plume et le Calumet (Paris: Garnier, 2019). For a comparison between Laftau and Bernard and Picart, see Philippe Borgeaud and Sara Petrella, Le singe de l’autre. Du sauvage américain à l’histoire comparée des religions (Paris: Éditions des Cendres, 2016). 12  Du culte des dieux fétiches, ou Parallèle de l’ancienne Religion de l’Égypte avec la Religion actuelle de Nigritie was printed abroad in 1760 (no name of place) and smuggled into France. I use the new edition of Madeleine V. David (Paris: Fayard, 1988). See further the Italian translation and commentary, with a very rich introduction: Charles de Brosses, Sul culto degli dei fetici, transl., notes Alessandra Ciattini and Stefano Garroni (Rome: Bulzoni, 2000).

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The Enlightenment ’ s Paradigm Shift  47 Indeed, the third section of de Brosses’s book is a translated excerpt from Hume’s Natural History of Religion.13 For de Brosses, the key to all mythology is to be found in the history of the frst peoples, as well as in those studied by Orientalists, provided one frst cleanses this history from “all the cluttered jumble accumulated by the Greeks.”14 Such universal comparatism is based on the law of historical sociology that similar actions are ruled by similar principles.15 Tis law was already accepted by Laftau, whom de Brosses respected.16 De Brosses also referred to Orientalist scholars, such as John Selden. Like Selden, he based on Maimonides his vision of the history of religion in the ancient world, where the cult of stars (called by Maimonides “Sabeism”) around the world had preceded the growth of polytheism.17 Te text demonstrates the breadth of de Brosses’s reading, including ethnological literature on American Indians. It also refects the fact that for him, the Israelite religion as refected in the Bible retains a dominant status for any comparative study of ancient religions. Post-­biblical Judaism, as well as Islam, are, however, barely represented. Nevertheless, the work exemplifes how a non-­theological, comparative study of religion could be attempted in the Enlightenment. Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples, the frst modern multi-­volume encyclopedia of the world’s religions, by Jean-­Frédéric Bernard, with exquisite engravings by Bernard Picart, was published (in the original French as well as in an English translation) between 1723 and 1743.18 Tis remarkable achievement was made possible thanks to a whole library of monographs and synthetic studies on religions. In its turn, Cérémonies et coutumes has been the object of some important studies, which have emphasized its crucial role in the early stages of comparative religion as an intellectual enterprise.19 Cérémonies et coutumes was by far the best-­known 13  See Manuel, Te Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, 184–209, esp. 187. 14  De Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétiches, 7. 15  Ibid., “ ce parallèle nous conduisant naturellement à juger que les mêmes actions ont le même principe . . .,” 17. 16  See, for instance, ibid., 59. 17  On Maimonides as an historian of religion, see Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in his World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Tinker (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), 84–124. 18 See Silvia Berti, “Bernard Picart e Jean-­Frédéric Bernard dalla religione riformata al deismo. Un incontro con il mondo ebraico nell’ Amsterdam del primo settecento,” Rivista Storica Italiana 117 (2005), 974–1001. Berti ofers there a detailed picture of the publication and of its context. 19 See Lynn Hunt, Margaret  C.  Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt, Te Book that Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2010), in particular chapter  7, “Familiarizing Judaism” (169–193)

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48  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism source of popular knowledge in the early 1700s. In order to deal with Judaism, Bernard reprinted Richard Simon’s Comparaison des cérémonies des juifs et de la discipline de l’Église, a text frst published in 1681, which inaugurates the modern study of post-­biblical Judaism.20 In this impressive book, Simon, a Catholic priest and groundbreaking biblical scholar, presented rabbinic Judaism as a religion in its own right, rather than as a fossilized remnant of biblical Israel. His approach was nothing less than revolutionary. Troughout the eighteenth century, however, as the perception of Judaism as an Oriental religion grew in prominence, the obvious genetic links and structural similarities between Judaism and Christianity came to be perceived as less signifcant. It is by comparing Islam to both Judaism and Christianity that the early Orientalists emphasized what they considered to be its weakness. Paradoxically, this comparison would also show them the way to the “rehabilitation” of Islam. In other words, the comparative approach hammered in the similarities as well as the diferences between the three monotheistic faiths. Regarding the study of Islam, the eighteenth century would be that of vulgarization. Te main scholarly achievements of the previous century would now reach much broader circles. On Islam, as in so many other felds, Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique, a seminal work frst published in 1697, was a main source of information for the enlightened elites of Europe.21 In its various editions, the Dictionnaire sought to make good use of contemporary scholarship, duly referred to in marginal notes. Among the vulgarisateurs who carried the new perception of Muhammad to broad circles, the most signifcant is Henri, Comte de Boulainvilliers and chapter 10, “Rehabilitating Islam” (247–269) See, in particular, chapter 7, “Familiarizing Judaism” (169–193) and chapter 10, “Rehabilitating Islam” (247–269), esp. 264: “Te magnitude of Bernard and Picart’s accomplishment in their treatment of Islam.”, See further Lynn Hunt, Margaret  C.  Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, eds., Bernard Picart and the First Global Vision of Religion (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2010). Picart’s engravings have been studied in Paola von Wyss-­Giacosa’s splendid monograph, Religionsbilder der frühen Auflärung: Bernard Picarts Tafeln für die Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Wabern, Berne: Benteli Verlag, 2006). 20  Te text was published anew by Jacques Le Brun and Guy G. Stroumsa, Les juifs présentés aux chrétiens: textes de Léon de Modène et de Richard Simon, introduits et commentés (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1998). See further Stroumsa, A New Science, 68–76 and notes. 21  Pierre Bayle (1647–1706), a Huguenot who spent most of his adult life in Rotterdam, published a second edition of the Dictionnaire in 1702. It was republished a number of times during the eighteenth century. I use Elisabeth Labrousse’s Reprint of the 1740 edition (Hildesheim, New York: Olms, 1982). Bishop Berkeley called Bayle a freethinker, using this term for the frst time.

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The Enlightenment ’ s Paradigm Shift  49 (1658–1722), a polymath French nobleman, at once historian, political thinker, and astrologer, who had in his youth studied rhetoric with the Oratorian Richard Simon. Boulainvilliers maintained an interest, inter alia, in the Old Testament and Jewish history. For him, history was made essentially through conquests, of which he spoke in positive terms. In a study of the nobility’s decadence and its causes, he claimed that the leading elite of a society was inherently (both intellectually and morally) superior to the lower classes.22 Boulainvilliers had been strongly infuenced by Spinoza, whose Ethics he translated, and on whose Tractatus theologico-­politicus he wrote an essay. His Vie de Mahomed, which was published posthumously in 1730,23 would be immediately translated into English (and in 1747 into German), proving highly infuential in its diferent versions. Boulainvilliers, however, was no Arabist, and his knowledge came from secondary literature, such as Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque Orientale (1697), Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (frst edition 1697) or De religione mohammedica (1705, enlarged edition 1717) of the Dutch Orientalist Adriaan Reland, rather than from original sources.24 In Boulainvilliers’s view, as summarized in the Avertissement, the Arabs, in contrast to other “barbarians,” in particular those from northern countries, were, among other qualities, “spiritual, generous, disinterested, courageous, careful.” Te main goal of Islam was in keeping with these inherent Arab traits, and Muhammad’s religious thought was wholly in agreement with reason.25 Despite the Arabs’ essentially positive nature, however, the fanaticism of their religious revolution brought much evil to the world. Boulainvilliers nevertheless maintained that Muhammad was cognizant of 22  Nonetheless, this is not enough to identify him as a precursor of the tradition leading from Gobineau to Alfred Rosenberg, the theoretician of Nazi racism, an accusation made by Hannah Arendt, György Lukács and Michel Foucault; see Claude Nicolet, La fabrique d’une nation: la France entre Rome et les Germains (Paris: Perrin, 2003), 87. 23  Comte de Boulainvilliers, La vie de Mahomed, avec des réfexions sur la religion musulmane et les coutumes des mahométans (London, Amsterdam: P. Humbert, 1730). Te book was probably written in the early 1720s. Te following year, this text was republished in two volumes, together with an Histoire des arabes (Amsterdam: P. Humbert, 1731). 24  Boulainvilliers also published a History of the Arabs. On these, see Stroumsa, A New Science, Chapter 5: “From Mohammedis Imposturae to the Tree Impostors: Te Study of Islam and the Enlightenment,” 124–144, esp. 131–136. See further Philippe Borgeaud’s remarks in Barbara Cassin and Nicolas Ducimetière, eds, Les routes de la traduction, Babel à Genève (Paris, Geneva: Gallimard, Fondation Martin Bodmer, 2017), 222. 25  “[C]onforme aux lumières de la raison.”: Boulainvilliers, La vie de Mahomed, 248–249, quoted by Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 616. See further Jürgen Osterhammel, “Te Ethnology and Politics of Arabic Liberty,” in his Unfabling the East: Te Enlightenment’s Encounter with Asia (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018), 322–326.

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50  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism the principles of Christianity, just as Jesus knew the religion of Moses.26 While Muhammad accused the Jews of having corrupted the text of the Torah, and the Christians of having done the same with the Gospels, he was neither an impostor nor a false prophet. Rather, he is to be considered the legislator of the Arabs, an Arab Moses of sorts, who promulgated a highly rational religion for his people.27 Although, for Boulainvilliers, Islam cannot be said to represent the most perfect possible example of true or natural religion, it comes close to this ideal. Tanks to his infuence, the expression “legislator of the Arabs” would come to replace that of “impostor,” in the second half of the eighteenth century, in reference to Muhammad. La vie de Mahomed would be echoed in various Enlightenment views of Muhammad and Islam.28 It is important to appreciate the true value of the progressive neutralization, or “banalization” of Muhammad, as it were, in the Age of Reason. Te eforts of people like Boulainvilliers to de-­demonize Muhammad and Islam are, of course, related to their wish to debunk Christianity. As the old Christian demonized image of Muhammad was losing some of its power, the study of Islam could now be conducted on a more rational and less polemical ground. Te new, more benign, image of Muhammad indeed had a profound impact on Islamic studies. Te full impact of its transformation, however, was also underlined by the comparison between Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad (a comparison always implicit, and ofen explicit), which placed the founders of the three religions on the same footing. To be sure, Muhammad never became a cultural hero of the Enlightenment. Te negative aspects of the Prophet’s fgure showed remarkable cultural currency. Nonetheless, Muhammad now started to be perceived as a legislator, a founder of religion, like Moses and Jesus. At the same time, Moses, and also Jesus, were perceived as sharing some of Muhammad’s traditional qualities. In other words, they could well have been, like him, religious 26 Boulainvilliers, La vie de Mahomed, II, 222. 27  Henry Laurens, Les origines intellectuelles de l’expédition d’Egypte: l’orientalisme islamisant en France, 1698–1798 (Istanbul: Isis, 1987), 28, argues that Boulainvilliers was probably the frst to see Muhammad as the Arabs’ lawgiver. He notes that the expression would become more common afer 1750, and refers to Turpin, Histoire de la vie de Mahomet, législateur de l’Arabie (1773). 28  In this context, Jonathan Israel refers in particular to Voltaire, but one can also mention Lessing and his Nathan der Weise; see Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 617. See further Fred  O.  Nolte, “Voltaire’s Mahomet as a Source of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise and Emilia Galotti,” Modern Language Notes 1933 (XXX), 152–156. On Boulainvilliers’ infuence on Voltaire’s image of Muhammad, see Djavad Hadidi, Voltaire et l’Islam (Paris: Publications orientalistes de France, 1974), 33–40.

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The Enlightenment ’ s Paradigm Shift  51 impostors. Tus, while the animus against Muhammad was weakening, that against the Church was steadily growing, and anticlerical writers began portraying Jesus in terms until then reserved for Muhammad. Te rejection of revelation by radical Enlightenment thinkers legitimized a single approach to all religions as purely human phenomena, and the application of identical principles to their study. It also permitted a new approach to religious toleration: as all religions were now considered to be equally devoid of divine content, and as their diferent pretensions to truth, based on divine revelation, had been reduced to naught, none could claim a unique value. In other words, toleration no longer meant a generous but condescending attitude towards some religious minorities, as was the case in Islamic societies towards believers of other prophetic religions (or religions of the book, ahl al-­kitāb, i.e. generally, Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians). Rather, the new idea of toleration was predicated upon a general recognition of agnosticism: as no religion had any ontological truth-­value, none could claim supremacy, and all were to be judged solely by their social efects. Te case of Islam, then, reveals a striking phenomenon. Te frst steps of the modern study of Islam (and of Arabic) refected the traditional dislike of the impostor’s heresy. It is the gradual, albeit limited, liberation of Muhammad from his medieval demonic fgure, together with the budding ethnological observation of Islamic societies, that permitted the emergence of modern Orientalism. Moreover, the early modern study of Islam, with its constant comparison between Islam and Christianity, whether explicit or implicit, had a major impact on the formulation of the new, comparative study of religions. What we have just seen for early Arabists as students of Islam is also true of Christian Hebraists who, since Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629) and his Synagoga Judaica (1604; German edition 1603), had learned to take careful note of the Jewish rituals. Although their frst instinct may have been to attempt to convert the Jews, they soon learned to respect the texts of the vast rabbinic tradition. But the Jews were a special case: for European Christians, they were at once insiders and outsiders, tolerated but not easily integrated in society. For Christian learned men, Hebrew was both a sacred tongue and an Oriental language.29

29 On a leading Hebraist, see Anthony Grafon and Joanna Weinberg (with Alastair Hamilton), “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2011).

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52  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism By far the most impressive philosophical approach to religious phenomena and their history in the eighteenth century was devised by David Hume (1711–1776). Hume’s views on the origins of religion can be traced to the fascination with pagan religious history in the Scottish Enlightenment during the early decades of the eighteenth century. More clearly than anyone before him, Hume argued that religion was rooted in human feelings, such as hopes and fears, rather than in the contemplation of nature. According to the title of Section One in his Natural History of Religion (1757), the primary religion of man had long been polytheistic. It is only later, by gradual evolution, he wrote, that monotheistic expressions of religion emerged. Revelation, moreover, was not for Hume a logical necessity to be deduced from natural religion. Other insights of his that resounded across the Channel included an insistence on the independence of morality from religion, as well as a strict distinction between natural and revealed religion. Both the radical and the religious Enlightenments followed in Hume’s footsteps in their criticism of established religion and in their views on the history of religion.30 In the mid-­eighteenth century, Voltaire (1694–1778), the towering fgure of the Enlightenment, was at the very peak of his intellectual power. His vision of religion, or, more precisely, of Judaism and Islam, alongside Christianity, comprises a crucial chapter in our story. Te anticlerical Voltaire was forcefully critical of the established Catholic Church and of religious fanaticism and intolerance. But it is as a Deist (Voltaire preferred to speak of théisme rather than of déisme) that he wrote, not as an atheist, and it is Christianity, not religion per se, that he sought to debunk. He thus attacked the whole idea of the Abrahamic tradition, with revelation and prophecy at its core. In this way, he was highly critical of Judaism and Islam, of their history and of their prophets. In fact, more vitriol fowed from Voltaire’s pen about Moses and Muhammad than about Jesus. Frank Manuel’s remark that the Enlightenment represented not only the trial of 30  David Hume, A Dissertation on the Passions, Te Natural History of Religion, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); cf. J. C. A. Gaskin, “Hume on Religion,” in David Fater Norton, ed., Te Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 313–344. On the background of the Scottish Enlightenment, see Colin Kidd, Te World of Mr Casaubon: Britain’s Wars of Mythography, 1700–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); Anthony Ossa-­Richardson, Te Devil’s Tabernacle: Te Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Tought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); and John Marenbon, Pagans and Philosophers: Te Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). See further Israel, Te Radical Enlightenment, as well as David Sorkin, Te Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005).

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The Enlightenment ’ s Paradigm Shift  53 Christianity, but also that of Judaism and Islam rings quite true in this ­context.31 As we shall presently see, however, Voltaire was also capable of voicing strikingly contradictory views. Te massive Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1756), a treatise of world history with a misleading title, is Voltaire’s longest work, and also his most important text on the history of religions.32 He lavished ffeen years of labor on it before publishing the work, adding corrections and supplements in later years. In the Essai, Voltaire ofers an alternative to traditional Christian historiography, from Eusebius to Bossuet, eroding its biblical foundations together with its European core. Voltaire conceived of his work as a direct answer to Bossuet’s Discours sur l’histoire universelle (1681), which prominently featured the history of the Hebrews. Beyond Bossuet, it is the seventeenth model of the Hebrew Republic that is targeted here.33 Voltaire’s Essai represents one of the earliest afrmations of the need for a worldwide perspective against the ethnocentric bias of the European tradition.34 For Voltaire, the histories of China and India constituted the strongest argument against Christian views of world history. Te oldest religious tradition was that of India, rather than that which stemmed from Abraham. He spared no efort to disparage the idea of Abraham’s religious inheritance. Tus, he noted that Abraham is a common name in Asia, insisted that no society had ever referred to itself as “Abrahamic,” and pointed out that the sole attestations of a patriarch Abraham come from the Jews and the Arabs.35 Basing himself on the apocryphal Ezourvedam, or Ezour Veidam, a famous fake then circulating in Europe, claiming to be the Sanskrit source in translation, he argued that the ancient Brahmans (a name alluding to Abraham), beyond a veneer of superstition, were fundamentally monotheistic.36 It is with tongue frmly in cheek that Voltaire stated that one is obliged to believe

31  See Manuel, Te Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, 166. 32  “. . . nous continuons à voir comment les religions s’établissent.”, 16, in Voltaire’s introduction to his Discours préliminaire, or Philosophie de l’histoire, which opens the whole Essai. Tis text is demarcated from Vico’s Scienza nuova. I use the edition of René Pomeau: Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations, Vol. 1, ed. René Pomeau (Paris: Garnier, 1963). 33 On this tradition, see Eric Nelson, Te Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Tought (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2010). 34  Joan-­Pau Rubies, “From Antiquarianism to Philosophical History: India, China, and the World History of Religion in European Tought (1600–1770),” in Peter Miller and François Louis, eds, Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press), 313–367, here 313. 35 Voltaire, Discours préliminaire, XVI, 55–58. 36  Ibid., 65. On the Ezourvedam, see App, Te Birth of Orientalism, chapter 1, 15–76.

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54  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism the Jewish sources, for which Abraham is the stem of the Hebrews: although we hate them, he said, they are our predecessors and masters.37 While the Indians follow the oldest religion on earth, Voltaire’s preference goes to the Chinese, whose history demonstrates that religion itself is dispensable. Tere is no mention in Chinese history of any “college” of priests ever having had an impact on law.38 For Voltaire, the Chinese tradition of wisdom, 4,000 years old, shows that religion based on divine revelation is not a prerequisite of national culture. In his view, the spirit of the Chinese nation represents the world’s oldest tradition of reason.39 As is well known, Voltaire reserved a special disdain for the Jews, even a virulent hatred of them. In his eforts to vilify them, he claimed that they were originally Arabs, and insisted on the similarities between these two peoples. In Chapter  6 of the Essai, on Arabia and Muhammad, Voltaire noted that Arabs resemble the Jews in their religious zeal and their avidity for plunder, but are infnitely superior to them in their courage, nobility of soul, and generosity.40 Following a line which would become quite common in modern anti-­Semitism, Voltaire held that the Jews lack religious creativity, so that “they took from the Arabs and the Egyptians even their circumcision, as well as their religious abstinence from various meats and their frequent ablutions.” He maintainted that the Jews detest other men.41 And yet, they learned from others what they now claimed to be their own; in particular, they took much from the Greeks.42 Troughout his life obsessed by the Jews,43 Voltaire was by far the worst anti-­Semite among Enlightenment French thinkers; in the Essai, he rehearsed

37 Voltaire, Discours préliminaire, XVI, 56: “. . . mais, puisque les livres juifs disent qu’Abraham est la tige des Hébreux, il faut croire sans difculté ces Juifs, qui, bien que détestés par nous, sont pourtant regardés comme nos précurseurs et nos maîtres.” 38  Ibid., 67. 39  Ibid., 33: “Les Chaldéens, les Indiens, les Chinois, me paraissent les nations les plus anciennement policées,” a sentence in which adding the Chaldeans to the Indians and the Chinese intimates that even within the ancient Near East, the Hebrews were not the oldest people. 40  Ibid., 15: “Les Arabes ressemblent aux Juifs par l’enthousiasme et la soif du pillage, mais sont prodigieusement supérieurs par le courage, la grandeur d’âme, la générosité. On ne voit au contraire dans toutes les annales du peuple hébreu aucune action généreuse . . .”. 41  Ibid., 16: “Les Juifs même, malgré leur horreur pour le reste des hommes, qui s’accrut avec le temps . . .”. 42  Ibid., 177. 43 Manuel, Te Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, 193; “neither Montesquieu nor Rousseau nor Diderot devoted to Jewish writings anything like . . . Voltaire.” See further Frank  E.  Manuel, Te Broken Staf: Judaism through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 206 and Léon Poliakov, Histoire de l’antisémitisme, vol. III: de Voltaire à Wagner (Paris: Calmann-­Lévy, 1968), 103–117.

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The Enlightenment ’ s Paradigm Shift  55 the old Christian claim that it was they who put Jesus to death.44 Tere was no ambivalence whatsoever in his view of Jews, which was thoroughly negative, and he was puzzled by the fact that the Christians, who hate them, nevertheless regard them as their precursors and their masters.45 In his Treatise on Tolerance (1763), Voltaire expressed a similar puzzlement about the Jews, oddest of all nations, at once the most despicable from a political perspective and the most important from a philosophical one. Voltaire gave further vent to his Judeophobia in his Portable Philosophical Dictionary (1764). Tere, he held that the Jews, a small, ignorant, vulgar people, ever deprived of all arts, were latecomers, a people of plagiarists. Tey were, in short, the most abominable people upon earth.46 Te Jewish nation, far from being among the oldest ones, was a nation of upstarts. Asian kingdoms were fourishing before the vagrant Arab tribe called Jews had even a small corner of earth of their own.47 Voltaire’s malevolence towards the Jews is difcult to understand. It has no obvious roots in his personal life to which it may be traced. It does not refect traditional Christian anti-­Judaism, as Voltaire abhorred Christianity. Nor can it be perceived as refecting the modern, racist form of anti-­Semitism, which appeared only in the nineteenth century—although it may well augur it. In that sense, it is deeply revealing of a leitmotiv of the present book: with the dissolution of Christian identity, Enlightenment intellectuals did not always fully abandon their Judeophobic inheritance. In fact, in some cases they only got rid of the limits imposed on it by a religion insisting on the role of Israel in the history of salvation. Voltaire, in this sense, exemplifes the vitality of a Judeophobia detached from moderating Christian theology. We will later encounter further instances of this lethal construct. When writing about the Arabs, Muhammad, and Islam, Voltaire was palpably less caustic than when he wrote about the Jews. Te diference is 44 Voltaire, Discours préliminaire, 169. 45  See note 37 above. Voltaire’s furious anti-­Jewish polemics did not go unanswered. In 1769, the Abbé Antoine Guéné published a lengthy and powerful refutation of Voltaire’s slander against the Hebrews and their land in his Lettres de quelques juifs portugais, allemands et polonais à M. de Voltaire, a work that underwent a number of editions (I use the eighth one, published by Lebel in Versailles in 1817). Te genre of letters written by Jews and polemicizing against philosophers, well known in the eighteenth century, is most famously exemplifed in the Marquis d’Argens’ Lettres juives (1736–1742). 46 Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, ed. Alain Pons (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 26. Of all of Voltaire’s books, this one refects him most clearly. At once, the Dictionary’s publication was a success and created a scandal. Te book was burned in Paris, Geneva, Berne, and Te Hague. 47  Ibid., 44: “. . . tous les royaumes de l’Asie étaient très forissants avant que la horde vagabonde des Arabes appelés Juifs possédat un petit coin de terre en propre.”

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56  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism striking. According to him, Islam was not as intrinsically connected to Christianity as was the religion of biblical Israel. Voltaire further asserted that the Muslims shared the Christians’ deeply ambivalent attitude towards the Jews: “Te Christian and the Muslim religions recognize the Jewish one as their mother; and, through an odd contradiction, they have for this mother both respect and revulsion.”48 For Voltaire, the Arabs—unlike the Jews—possessed manly virtues, and their genius resembled that of the Romans. He discussed Islam and Arab history mainly in Chapter 6 of the Essai, but also in his well-­known drama, Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le prophète. In the work, which was frst performed in Lille in 1741, the Prophet is depicted as an impostor and a lecherous villain, a Tartufe with weapon in hand. Voltaire was familiar with the main studies of Islam and the Koran available in his day, such as Boulainvilliers’s and Jean Gagné’s biographies of Muhammad (published in 1730 and 1732, respectively). Elsewhere, he reiterated the traditional Christian perception of the Prophet as an impostor, adding that Confucius, who required neither revelation nor sword, was superior to him.49

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Te Abrahamic Eclipse Te second decade of the century saw an anonymous tract begin to circulate in Europe, the Traité des trois imposteurs, ou l’esprit de M. de Spinoza. Tis strange book, falsely attributed to Spinoza, is quite diferent from the earlier Latin De tribus impostoribus. In the former work, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad are presented as three religious impostors who, lying to their respective audiences, sought to establish their power in order to keep the whole of humankind under the yoke of false religions. It did not take long before the Book of the Tree Impostors, which had been circulating clandestinely from 1721, became the most popular samizdat of eighteenth-­century Europe. Te pamphlet primarily sought the delegitimization of the Christian churches, but it was still easier to apply this treatment to Judaism and Islam.50 As a slogan of the radical Enlightenment, it was nothing short 48  Ibid., 27: “Les religions chrétienne et musulmane reconnaissent la juive pour leur mère; et par une contradiction singulière, ells ont à la fois pour cette mère du respect et de l’horreur.” 49 Voltaire, Essai sur les moeurs, Chapter VI. See Malise Ruthven’s Introduction to Voltaire’s Fanaticism, of Mahomet the Prophet: A New Translation (Sacramento: Litwin Press, 2013), 1–12. 50  On this book, to which we shall return, see Georges Minois, Te Atheist’s Bible: Te Most Dangerous Book that Never Existed (Chicago, IL, London: University of Chicago Press, 2012)

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The Enlightenment ’ s Paradigm Shift  57 of total blasphemy. Despite the fact that the book has stimulated a great deal of research, much remains mysterious about its contents, its sources, and the circumstances of its appearance. Religious imposture has a long history and must be understood in the context of religious polemics. In the pre-­modern world, the mode of religious interaction between spokesmen representing diferent religious communities was mainly polemical. Beyond the obvious fact that, already in late antiquity, it was useful to know an opponent’s position in order to refute it, both Greek philosophers and Christian theologians conceived of the ex­ist­ ence of a single, deep truth, disguised by the various mythological and religious traditions, but shared by the sages of all camps. In the present context, it is worth mentioning that since antiquity, religious polemics were never devoid of an efort, at times a serious one, to understand other religions, as well as of real hermeneutical contacts between religious intellectuals from all sides.51 In Rome, religion was perceived as a political invention, as noted by Cicero in his De Natura Deorum (I. 118). Livy relates in the tenth book of his History how Numa Pompilius, Rome’s frst mythical king, forged the story of the nymph Egeria’s nightly revelation of the religion he wished to impose on the Romans. He did so in order to tame his barbarian nation, which otherwise would not have accepted his religious laws, thus putting religious imposture in the service of political leadership. For Livy, Numa’s lie is a pious one, and it is legitimate—a lesson that Machiavelli would later take to heart.52 Lucian of Samosata, in the second century ce, supplied a classic example of religious imposture, in the case of Alexander, the false prophet from Abonoteichos. In the monotheistic climate that has prevailed since the Hebrew Bible, religious imposture is ofen perceived as false prophecy. Prophecy ignores established forms of religious authority and claims a direct link to the deity. [French original: Le traité des trois imposteurs: histoire d’un livre blasphématoire qui n’existait pas (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009)]. 51  Far from being a completely modern phenomenon, the comparison of religions thus has a very long pedigree, hailing back, at least, to Herodotus. In antiquity, comparing religions was a common exercise in cultural relativity. To give only one instance, in the interpretatio graeca Herakles was identifed with both the Roman Hercules and the Phoenician Melqart. On all this, see in particular Phillipe Borgeaud, Aux origines de l’histoire des religions (Paris: Seuil 2014), passim. 52  Mark Silk did fascinating work on Numa’s Fortleben in Euroepan intellectual history; see, for instance, Mark Silk, “Numa Pompilius and the Development of the Idea of Civil Religion in Western Tought,” in Giovanni Filoramo, ed., Teologie politiche: Modelli a confronto (Brescia: Morcelliana, 2005), 335–356.

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58  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism In early Christianity, the Second Coming of Christ, the parousia, was to be preceded by the appearance of the Antichrist, a devilish imitator of Jesus Christ. Tis is the background of the nexus between heresy and false prophecy in early Christianity, for instance, in the case of Montanus in the second century, or in that of Mani in the third. Te Jewish perception of Jesus as a false prophet, or the Christian (as well as the Jewish) perception of Muhammad as a false prophet, ought to be viewed through the same lens.53 Sharper than false prophecy or religious imposture, the idea of the three impostors embodies, obviously only afer the birth of Islam, the revolt against prophetic authority within a society identifed as either Christian or Muslim. In his Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul (1516), Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) wrote that the three monotheistic religions afrmed the immortality of the soul only in order to ensure people’s obedience. Imposture was at the core of religious polemics in the second half of the seventeenth century, mainly in England and Holland. In the eighteenth century, however, the three impostors would also be used as a foil, barely masking an essentially anti-­Christian attitude. For the radical Enlightenment, the struggle against the Church was emblematized by Voltaire’s concrete and passionate anti-­clericalism. Te presence of Moses and Muhammad in anti-­religious tracts was ofen meant to camoufage the perception of Jesus as a religious impostor. Like the parable of the three rings, the story of the three impostors goes back to the Middle Ages. While the parable emerged shortly afer the birth of Islam, the theme of three impostors could only develop later.54 Although, as we have seen, the concept of religious imposture has its roots in antiquity, the idea of the three impostors appears of necessity later than the parable of the three rings, as the symmetry between the three related religions must have started with a comparison of their three leading prophets, while their perception as “false prophets” must have been a secondary, later development. For Renan, the three impostors were originally a medieval chimera, born in the mind of theologians shocked by the cohabitation of the three worlds at the courts of Palermo and Toledo.55 Muhammad, of course, had always been considered by Christian and Jewish thinkers alike to have been an impostor. Tis view was repeated at the turn of the eighteenth century in 53  See, for instance, Stroumsa, Te Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity, 59–99, as well as Sarah Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam, 21–36. 54  See Stroumsa, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam, 217. 55  See Ernest Renan, Averroès et l’averroïsme (Paris: Durand, 1853).

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The Enlightenment ’ s Paradigm Shift  59 Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique.56 In the early Muslim world, the problem of religious imposture was also present, for instance, among a number of freethinkers, Ismaili dissidents, and Qarmatians. But for medieval Christian authors, it was Averroes who stood at the root of a religious imposture shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims. According to the Italian theologian Gilles of Rome (1247–1316), Averroes maintained that the religion of the Christians was impossible, that of the Jews infantile, and that of the Muslims made for pigs. According to Gilles, Averroes had claimed: “Quod nulla lex est vera, licet possit esse utilis”—which roughly translates to: “Since no religion is true, religion may at best be useful,” a return to the Roman conception of religion as the cement of civil society, with no truth value. Antiquarians and missionaries alike had refected on the concept of civil religion, which permitted them to understand various patterns of religious belief and behavior across the world without qualifying them simply as “heathenism.”57 Te concept would grow in importance up to the publication of Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762). Te spread of civil religion as an idea demonstrates the centrality of the comparative refection on religions in early modern discourse. While it is commonly thought that early comparative studies of religion were the output of freethinkers, that opinion is not quite accurate. Most early Antiquarians and scholars were good, enlightened Christians, both Catholics and Protestants, who sought to accommodate their religion and their research.58 It was only in the eight­ eenth century that freethinkers and Deists caught onto the subversive power of the new approaches to the religions of the earth, past and present. From now on, the term “religion” used in bonam partem would increasingly refer to natural religion, implying disdain, or worse, towards revealed religions in general, and Christianity in particular. With the discovery of new sources, the tenuous equilibrium that had prevailed between the Bible and Homer for the comparison of religions in antiquity was broken.59 In particular, the legendary fgure of Sankhuniaton, the Phoenician author from the ninth 56 Bayle’s Dictionnaire was frst published in 1697; 2nd edn 1702; English translation 1709. 57 On the antiquarians’ concept of civil religion as a tool for understanding non-­ monotheistic religions, see, for instance, Stroumsa, A New Science, chapters 5 and 7. 58  For a similar view of matters approached from a diferent perspective, see Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of a New Science and Sorkin, Te Religious Enlightenment. 59  See Guy G. Stroumsa, “Homeros Hebraios: Homère et la Bible aux origines de la culture européenne (17e–18e. siècles),” in M. A. Amir-­Moezzi and J. Scheid, eds., L’Orient dans l’histoire religieuse de l’Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 87–100.

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60  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism century bce, whose quotations by Philo of Byblos had been preserved by Eusebius, caught the fancy of many eighteenth-­century readers. Te die was cast: from now on, the primary antiquity of the Bible was no longer absolute, and the aura of utmost antiquity and cultural primacy would move to China and to India. In Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, Saladin’s three sons, each of whom possesses a ring apparently identical to the other two, are called Betrüger, impostors. Indeed, in the play, the parable functions to respond to the story of the three impostors. Similarly, Lessing intended in Te Education of the Human Race (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts), a text dating from 1780, to correct the idea that humankind had been successively deceived by Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. Rather than a series of deceptions, one could read the history of the monotheistic religions as a series of steps in the progressive religious education of humankind. While the origins of the idea of the three impostors is lost to history, what matters to our story is the clear thematic afnity between it and the parable of the three rings. In a remarkable book, Friedrich Niewöhner has argued that “the two traditions were closely associated with the doctrine of religious tolerance . . .” As Niewöhner showed, Lessing, who was at heart a Spinozist, was deeply infuenced by the twelfh-­century Jewish thinker Maimonides in his comparative approach to religion.60 In 1768, the Traité des trois imposteurs was reprinted by Baron d’Holbac (1723–1789), the champion of atheism, and in 1783 it was put on the Index. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the Book of the Tree Impostors disappeared, forgotten as fast as it had appeared in the second decade of the century.61 With the fading, for all practical purposes, of both the themes of the three rings and of the three impostors, the ground was set for a new taxonomy of religions, one from which the centuries-­old idea of the kindred nature of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam had vanished. Until the Enlightenment, then, European intellectuals knew that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were cognate religions, and that the religious history of humankind had to be approached, to a great extent, as the interface of these three religions and their intertwined history. During the Enlightenment, however, thinkers made repeated eforts to elude the traditional trinity of Christianity together with its two moons, Judaism and Islam. Troughout

60  See Friedrich Niewöhner, Veritas sive Varietas, Lessing’s Toleranzparabel und das Buch von den drei Betrügern (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1988). See further Wiep van Bunge, Spinoza Past and Present: Essays on Spinoza, Spinozism and Spinoza Scholarship (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 80–85. 61  See Minois, Le Traité des trois imposteurs, 299.

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The Enlightenment ’ s Paradigm Shift  61 the eighteenth century, Deists and pantheists alike sought to escape the yoke of the God of Abraham. Te Supreme Being (l’Être Suprême) was the usual term of reference for the de-­Christianized divinity. Te afermath of the French Revolution even saw the creation, ex nihilo, of a new religion, le culte de l’Être Suprême. Tis artifcially created religion, which never caught on, was not only the revolutionary expression of civil religion: its syncretistic nature could not hide the fact that it was at once more radical and more traditional than other civil religions. Te same last decade of the century witnessed the publication of the twelve volumes of Charles-­François Dupuis’s L’origine de tous les cultes, a monumental work that interpreted the religious traditions of all peoples as so many transformations of an original cult of the sun.62 For the revolutionary and pantheist polymath Dupuis (1742–1809), the Bible should be interpreted as refecting astronomical conceptions shared by all ancient peoples. Dupuis held the unity of the astronomical and religious myths of all nations. His belief that the origin of all mythologies was to be found in Upper Egypt is partly responsible for Napoleon’s decision to send a scholarly expedition to Egypt. Christianity was for Dupuis an amalgamation of various ancient mythologies, and its true Divinity was actually the sun. Dupuis developed the “Christ myth,” based on the idea that Jesus never existed. A similar claim was made by the philosopher and historian Constantin-­François de Chasseboeuf, count of Volney (1757–1820).63 Volney was the author of Les ruines des empires, a text published in 1791 and soon translated by Tomas Jeferson, which would be of great importance for the development of visions of the Near East in the Romantic age. Like Voltaire and many others both before and afer him, Volney argued that the origins of religion are to be found in India. Te names Abraham and Sarah, in his view, stem from Brahma and Saraswati, while Christ is related to Krishna. Dupuis and Volney taught Condillac’s epistemology. For these fgures, religions emerge from external sensations.64 To be sure, the religion of l’Être Suprême would only shine for a few years before sinking into oblivion, and Dupuis’s solar

62 Charles F. Dupuis, Origine de tous les cultes, ou Religion universelle, 4 vols. (Paris, an III [1794]). An abridged version in one volume, published in 1798, permitted a broader difusion of Dupuis’ ideas; cf. Manuel, Te Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, 259–270. 63  He himself created the name “Volney,” a combination of Voltaire and Ferney (Voltaire’s estate near Geneva). 64  See Michel Despland, L’émergence des sciences de la religion: La Monarchie de juillet: Un moment fondateur (Paris, Montreal: L’Harmattan, 1999), 33.

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62  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism history of religions soon fzzled out. Yet both embody what I propose to call the “Abrahamic eclipse,” the vanishing of the “monotheistic family.” Te “Abrahamic ecplipse” is refected particularly well, in the last decades of the eighteenth century, in the work of the French scholar Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron (1731–1805), a harbinger of what one may call philologia orientalis. Having spent years in India in search of the original text of the Avesta, Anquetil ofered the frst translation of both the Avesta and the Upanishads into a European language. We shall postpone discussing Anquetil to Chapter  4, however, as he introduces the French “Oriental Renaissance” in the frst half of the nineteenth century, which ofers the immediate intellectual background to Renan. As we have seen in this chapter, the leading voices in the French Enlightenment sought to decenter the Jews in the grand scheme of world history, in order to assault Christianity. Simultaneously, the “globalization” of history was fostered by a renewed interest in the great civilizations of Asia, in particular those of India and China. It is within this context that one must interpret the new growth of perceptions of Islam, less disparaging than those stemming from traditional Christian polemics. As a result of these changes, the traditional perception of the relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam began to undergo a deep transformation. In the German lands, to which we shall presently turn, the subversion of the old model went in precisely the opposite direction. In contradistinction with France, the main actors were here theologian-­scholars rather than religiously unafliated intellectuals. It was in order to safeguard Christianity that some among the best of these theologian-­scholars sought to decenter the Jews.

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Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars Te Book of the Tree Impostors circulating during the Enlightenment followed the allegory of the three rings, which had been disseminated over many centuries. Chapter  2 described how, during the Enlightenment, the old “trinitarian” model of what has been called, since the early days of Biblical Higher Criticism, “prophetic monotheism,” had broken down and how the relationship between the three monotheistic religions had become blurred in the process. Te awareness of the proximity of Judaism and Islam to Christianity was nearly lost in the secularization process. Christian afnities with Judaism and Islam ceased to be a matter of evidence, immediately recognizable. More and more, literati started perceiving Christianity as a (or rather the) European religion, while its Near Eastern roots were trimmed far back, or even, in some cases, pulled up entirely. Te globalization of the history of religions encouraged the rise of diferent tendencies. Te frst of these, stemming from ancient Jewish and Christian polemical literature, was to regard an innate monotheism as the frst religious outlook in human societies, later obscured by moral decadence and the appearance of polytheism. Embracing the contemporary recognition of vastly diferent religious systems and traditions throughout Asia, America, and Africa, a second tendency, also rooted in Christian tradition, recognized various forms of polytheism as ubiquitous and native, while monotheism had started at a given time and in a single place: biblical Israel. A third tendency viewed Israelite monotheism as refecting a form of religion innate to the Semitic peoples, which stood in stark opposition to the one common among the Aryan family of peoples. Tis third attitude, purportedly scholarly and scientifc, cast itself as distinct from traditional, religious approaches to religious history. To understand the origins of this third attitude, we must refect briefy on the burgeoning general interest in religions and cultures, and the birth of the modern idea of race during the Enlightenment and the Romantic period. Tis period saw the emergence of a new efort to study Asian languages and cultures, in particular through the application to these languages The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press (2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0004

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64  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism of philological methods used for the study of Greek and Latin literature, and which I propose to call philologia orientalis. Te novelty of postEnlightenment Orientalism, its pronounced diference from earlier Orientalist scholarship, was observed as early as the frst half of the nineteenth century, for instance, by Louis Dussieux, in his important Essai sur l’histoire de l’érudition orientale.1 One of the main trends of this philologia orientalis is directly linked to the new critical study of the Hebrew Bible in its historical and cultural context within the ancient Near East. Te concept of Orientalism itself had already been introduced in 1810 by the father of modern Arabic studies, Silvestre de Sacy.2 Te main focus of the present chapter, however, will be on German scholars and theologians, who were leading the way in highlighting the distinction between Aryans and Semites, thus permitting a decisive break with the traditional taxonomy of religions, in particular the three traditions of revealed monotheism. Although this story is well known, it is necessary to briefy repeat some basic facts here, as this distinction, as it was fashioned by German scholars, provides the direct background for Renan’s thought and religious taxonomy. Te chapter, moreover, presents an overview of the early nineteenth-­century movement of Jewish scholars in Germany who sought to react to derogatory perceptions of Judaism by Christian theologians and philosophers. Te so-­called Wissenschaf des Judentums, indeed, which has no counterpart elsewhere in Europe, also represents the root of the particular involvement of Jewish scholars with the study of other religions. As we shall see in later chapters, the complex interface between these Jewish scholars on the one hand, and Christian theologians and Orientalists on the other, is crucial for understanding the rise and fall of the idea of Semitic monotheism.

A Romantic Tradition Even before the Romantic Era, philologia orientalis was blooming in various parts of Europe. Reference has already been made to the French Anquetil Duperron, to whom we shall return in Chapter  4. In England, Bishop Robert Lowth published in 1787 On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (the

1  Louis Dussieux, Essai sur l’histoire de l’érudition orientale (Paris: Imprimerie de Bourgogne et Martinet, 1842). 2 Michel Despland, L’émergence des sciences de la religion: La Monarchie de juillet: Un moment fondateur (Paris, Montreal: L’Harmattan, 1999), 238.

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Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars  65 Latin original had appeared already in 1758). At roughly the same time, Herder was publishing Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie (1782–1783), a text refecting his abiding attraction to the nations and cultures of the East.3 Herder led the call of the East among theologians and philosophers alike. Unlike Schleiermacher and many other Protestant theologians from Germany, however, Herder held the Hebrew Bible, and in particular the Pentateuch, in great respect.4 Te protean fgure of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) casts the longest and most idiosyncratic intellectual shadow in our story. Utterly unclassifable, Herder strides the Enlightenment, the Sturm und Drang, and Weimar classicism.5 At once a theologian and a philosopher, he was fascinated by the Orient. For Herder, who held high the fag of the German Volk and that of the German language, linguistic communities formed the root of ethnic and national identities. As noted by Frank Manuel, according to him, “the Volk is a primeval historical concept, not a biological one, a crucial distinction.”6 In his views on language, Herder was a harbinger, beyond Wilhelm von Humboldt, of Max Müller. Herder, however, was no runof-­the-­mill German nationalist. For him, national glory was a deceptive seducer. He supported the French Revolution and argued against racism at a time when racial thinking was widespread. He also advocated granting the Jews full civil rights, and contended that they should be helped to regain political sovereignty in their ancient land. Te power of language and the appeal of the East, combined with a deep love of the Bible (the stories of which revealed the Hebrews’ Volkscharakter), brought him to dramatic pathos in his calls to the Orient as the root and origin of the religious history of humankind: “Tere [lies] the Orient, the cradle of the human species, human inclinations, and all religion.”7 Herder’s writings on Hebrew 3  See, for instance, Ulrich Faust, Mythologien und Religionen des Ostens bei Johann Gottfried Herder (Münster: Aschendorf, 1977) and Ulrike Wagner, “Origin as Fiction and Context: Herder’s Reinvention of Religious Experience in Vom Geist der Ebräischen Poesie,” in Stafan Bengtsson, Heinrich Clairmont, Robert E. Norton, Johannes Schmidt, and Ulrike Wagner, eds, Herder and Religion (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2016), 57–71. 4  See, for instance, Klaus Beckmann, Die fremde Wurzel: Altes Testament und Judentum in der evangelischen Teologie des 19. Jarhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 46. On Schleiermacher’s negative stance on the emancipation of the Jews, see ibid., 104–134. 5 For an admirable and still unsurpassed study of the passage from the Auflärung to Romanticism in Germany, its social conditions and consequences, see Henri Brunschwig, La crise de l’état prussien à la fn du XVIIIe siècle et la genèse de la mentalité romantique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1947). 6 Manuel, Te Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, 291. 7  Johann Gottfried Herder, Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind, 1774 (Tird Section, Addenda). I quote the translation of Ioannis  D.  Evrigenis and Daniel

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66  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism resounded deeply, and their echoes can be heard in the writings of German Orientalists as well as in those of the Jewish proponents of modern scholarship on Judaism, the Wissenschaf des Judentums. In countries of Catholic tradition, such as France, ecclesiastical authorities took great pains to ensure that the winds of modernism and of criticism would not reach the biblical text. Hence, theology tended to remain stifed in those places, while innovation ofen took the form of a radical critique of the Church. Elsewhere, however, the Enlightenment would be less antagonistic to religion. Tis was the case, for instance, in England, and especially in some German Protestant theological faculties, where liberal theologians actively attempted to transform attitudes to the Bible through historical accuracy and philological criticism. For these theologian-­ scholars, the Enlightenment was not necessarily hostile to religion, and could accommodate an open-­minded reading of the biblical texts. Trough their work, they promoted a new status for the Bible in a changing cultural atmosphere. Jonathan Sheehan, among others, has shown how Germany was “the most productive laboratory” of this transformation of the Bible into cultural heritage, in the Bildungskultur of the nineteenth century.8 From the 1815 Congress of Vienna to Bismarck’s unifcation of Germany under Prussian hegemony in 1871, the German Confederation was made of almost forty states, either Protestant (mainly Lutheran, but also Reformed) or Catholic. It is among Protestant scholars and institutions in the German lands, more than elsewhere, then, that one must look for the ripest fruits of philologia orientalis in the Romantic era, particularly when dealing with religion. In German universities, the dynamism of philology was felt across faculty boundaries. Teologians worked on Hebrew and Aramaic, Orientalists on Arabic and Persian, and Classicists on Greek and Latin. Te synergy Pellerin (Indianapolis, IN, Cambridge, MA: Hackett, 2004), 74. On Herder and the Bible, see, for instance, Hans W. Frei, “Herder on the Bible: Te Realist Spirit in History,” in his Te Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press, 1974), 183–201. On Herder and Judaism, see Emil Adler, “Johann Gottfried Herder und das Judentum,” in Kurt Müller-­Vollmer, ed., Herder Today (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1990), 382–401. See further Anders Gerdmar, Roots of Teological Anti-­Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2009). 8 See Jonathan Sheehan, Te Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), XIV. See further Sorkin, Te Religious Enlightenment, who points out, for instance, that the French Revolution and Napoleon, establishing a stark distinction between Christianity and reason, ushered out the existing middle way of established church and toleration. Other distinguished historians of the Enlightenment, such as Peter Gray and Anthony Pagden, who highlight its radical and anti-­religious tendencies, tend to ignore or minimize its religious dimensions.

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Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars  67 between these scholars produced unexpected discoveries. Friedrich August Wolf, for instance, the Göttingen classicist whose Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795) would launch research on the Homeric problem, was deeply infuenced by the biblical studies of his colleague Johann Gottfried Eichhorn.9 Te Göttingen tradition of Orientalism began with Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791).10 As a Semitist, Michaelis’s broad interests encompassed the peoples and cultures of the Ancient Near East. For him, the Hebrew Bible was a depository of knowledge about an ancient society and represented the archive of an alien civilization. According to his Mosaisches Recht (1770–1771), which was written under the strong infuence of Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois (1748), Moses’s statesmanship sought to separate the Hebrews from the surrounding heathen societies. Michaelis belonged to the famed Göttingen school of history. Under the infuence of Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs, and using the philological methods developed by the seventeenth-­century Benedictine scholar Jean Mabillon, the school aimed to develop a global approach to world history. In doing so, it translated the spirit of the Enlightenment’s historical turn into a scholarly paradigm shif.11 Michaelis’s ethnological approach led him to perceive the ancient Hebrews as a people akin to contemporary Bedouins. In its turn, this perception permitted a severance of the Jews from their patrimony. Judaism was no longer an ineliminable link between the Hebrew Bible and contemporary Christians.12 Tis new ethnological theory stemmed more from religious concerns than political ones. It was motivated by a notion of the remoteness of the desert peoples (those who would soon be called “Semites”), which insulated them from alien infuences.13 Te new perception of the Jews as an Oriental people, related to the Bedouins, fostered contemporary anti-­ Semitic attitudes resting on race rather than on the Christian anti-­ Judaic tradition. Michaelis himself campaigned against Jewish emancipation. 9  Friedrich August Wolf, Prolegomena to Homer, transl. Anthony Grafon, Glenn W. Most, and James E. G. Zetzel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), Preface, 1. 10  On Michaelis, see Avi Lifschitz, Language and Enlightenment: Te Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 95–142, as well as Anna-­Ruth Löwenbrück, Judenfeindschaf im Zeitalter der Auflärung: eine Studie zur Vorgeschichte des modernen Antisemitismus am Beispiel des Göttinger Teologen und Orientalisten Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791) (Frankfurt-­am-­Main: Lang, 1995). 11  See Zachhuber, Teology as Science in Nineteenth-­Century Germany, 4. 12  See Frank E. Manuel, “Transition to the Enlightenment,” in his Te Broken Staf, 163–173. 13 See Manuel, Te Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, 259; cf. Sheehan, Te Enlightenment Bible, 215.

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68  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Michaelis also stood behind the Danish court’s decision to send a major scholarly expedition to Arabia. Te expedition (1761–1767) visited, inter alia, the Sinai, Yemen, Muscat, Bombay, Shiraz, and Persepolis. By bringing back copies of the cuneiform inscriptions from Persepolis, the expedition buttressed Iranian studies and Assyriology. Of its six original members, only Carsten Niebuhr, the cartographer, made it back alive, and the expedition is ofen called by his name. Members of the Göttingen school were actively involved in devising taxonomies of races. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), Michaelis’s successor, may be considered the father of the German tradition of biblical criticism, thanks in particular to his Einleitung ins Altes Testaments, from his early days in Jena, which reached new levels of scholarly precision in biblical scholarship. Eichhorn also wrote two volumes on Urgeschichte (1790–1793), in which he proposed to divide humankind into three main races, named afer Noah’s sons: the Semitic, the Hamitic, and the Japhetic races. Like the leading medieval taxonomy of the monotheistic religions, this new taxonomy was a tripartite one. Unlike the former, however, it encompassed, at least in theory, the peoples and religions of the whole world, heathens as well as monotheists. We will presently see how this taxonomy would soon be transformed, for all practical purposes, into a binary one, opposing Semites to Aryans. At the time of its inception as a scholarly discipline, Orientalism (here, the term is used in its original, “limited” sense of specialization in the languages and cultures of Asia) coincided with the acme of European colonialism. Today, Orientalism is ofen perceived as the intellectual support of imperialism, sharing with it a disdain for Asian cultures and a belief in the inherent superiority of Europe. While there is some truth to such a view of the matter, most powerfully advocated by Edward Said, it bears mention that many Orientalists were far from champions of European colonialism and of its consubstantial racism. Some were even among the frst to object to the myriad of violent actions perpetrated by their contemporaries against the conquered peoples, rejecting the perception of their own culture as superior to those of the natives. If Göttingen was the main turf of early Oriental studies in Germany, Tübingen was in the Romantic period the leading center of theological liberal scholarship. Te famed Tübinger Stif, which had been the frst breeding ground of Romantic philosophy and poetry, was to a great extent also at the original core of a radical new historical trend in Protestant theology ignited by Ferdinand Christian Baur (1792–1860) and David Friedrich

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Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars  69 Strauss (1808–1874).14 Teir reading of the New Testament as a document of ancient history in need of critical investigation, rather than as revealed Scripture, ushered in the era of New Testament philology. Baur sought to study early Christianity within its broader religious context, whereas Strauss understood the life of Jesus through the categories developed by the modern students of myth, in particular by the Göttingen classicist Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–1812). At the same time, this new approach to the New Testament laid the foundations for the modern study of ancient religions, at least in Germany. Following in Baur’s footsteps, scholars now studied the birth and early developments of Christianity in light of contemporary religious movements in the Mediterranean and Near East, such as Gnosis and Manichaeism. It thus became legitimate, for the frst time, to compare Jesus to pagan holy men of his time. Te frst-­century Apollonius of Tyana, in particular, became a favorite object of such comparisons.15 It should be noted that, unlike Herder, the theologians of the Tübingen school, and Baur in particular, showed little sympathy for the plight of Jews and did not favor their emancipation. Te same tradition of Lutheran anti-­Semitism unites them with the members of the Göttingen Religionsgeschichtliche Schule at the end of the nineteenth century. Rejecting the conventional, orthodox version as presented by the Gospels and the Christian tradition, Strauss insisted on the search for the historical Jesus. In his seminal Das Leben Jesu (1835–1836), he argued that modern Christianity demanded the repudiation of stories, or “myths,” which were necessary in earlier, less intellectually sophisticated times.16 Strauss was proclaiming what Rudolf Bultmann would call, a century later, Entmythologisierung, “de-­mythologization.” For Strauss, Jesus, or more precisely the Palestinian Jewish Jesus, whom we now call the “Jesus of history,” was such a myth. Te Life of Jesus, to be soon translated into French and English, had a major impact in broad circles beyond Germany.17 One could now study Christian origins with the same philological and historical 14 On this movement, see Horton Harris, Te Tübingen School (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). 15  See Ferdinand Christian Baur, Das manichäische Religionssystem, nach den Quellen neu untersucht und entwickelt (Tübingen: Osiander, 1831); Ferdinand Christian Baur, Apollonius von Tyana und Christus, oder das Verhältniss des Pythagoreismus zum Christentum (Tübingen: Fues, 1832); Ferdinand Christian Baur, Die christliche Gnosis, oder, Die christiliche Religions-­ Philosophie, in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung von der ältesten Zeit bis auf die neueste (Tübingen: Osiander, 1835). 16  David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, I, II (Tübingen: Osiander, 1835–1836). 17  On this, see Chapter 6 in this volume.

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70  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism methods as those applied to the study of other religions. Teology, then, may be described as the frst and principal engine of the new history of religions being developed in early nineteenth-­century Germany. Tis fact in no way minimizes the importance of Oriental philology in the Romantic era but recognizes that its impact bore primarily on linguistics and ethnology (families of languages and of ethnic groups), rather than directly on religion. Te new, critical scholarship on the New Testament, especially as echoed later in the century by “liberal” Protestant theologians, revealed a major paradox. While this scholarship sought to situate Jesus and his teachings within the broader historical context, it also attempted to isolate the essence of Jesus’s teachings from their immediate social and religious context, which those theologian-­scholars referred to as “mythical.” Essentially, this “mythical” context was Palestinian Judaism.18 Hegel’s teleological perception of history, as leading to the full expression of the spirit, formed the core of their intellectual framework.19 For Hegel, only Christianity, which had accomplished the Aufebung, or sublimation of Judaism in antiquity, was a wholly universalist religion, while afer the coming of Jesus, Judaism had become a fossil religion, whereas Islamic religiosity was characterized by its fanaticism. Teologians and philologists inclined towards Hegelianism, then, perceived Judaism as a religion steeped in materiality, only the frst step in the direction of the pure religion of the spirit represented by (Protestant) Christianity. While the Hegelian view of Islam is rooted elsewhere, it is certainly no less negative than its view of Judaism. Islamic societies were painted as the antithesis of European modernity, with respect to social as well as scientifc progress—and their basic backwardness was attributed to Islam itself.20 Te German tradition in the history of religions rests on philological accuracy: mastering the languages, publishing the texts in critical editions, identifying the correct meaning of words in their original context. Teology, on its side, is intimately interlaced with philosophy. Te history of religions was born in Germany at the interface between idealist philosophy, New Testament scholarship, and Orientalist as well as classical philology. In

18  In his Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, Hegel deals with Christianity alone in the chapter on “absolute religion.” 19  On Hegel’s conception of world history, see, for instance, Bernard Bourgeois, “Les débuts de l’histoire universelle,” in Norbert Waszek, ed., G. W. F. Hegel und Hermann Cohen (Freiburg, Munich: Karl Alber, 2018), 23–38. 20  On Hegel’s perception of Islam, see, for instance, M.  A.  R.  Habib, “Hegel and Islam,” Philosophy East and West 68 (2018), 59–77.

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Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars  71 France, where, as we saw in Chapter  2, theology remained an intellectual backwater, a role similar to that played by theology and philosophy in Germany was performed during the same decades by Oriental studies.21 From the deep theological interests of his youth at the Tübinger Stif in the 1790s (where he had shared a room with Schelling and Hölderlin), Hegel retained an instinctive rejection of Judaism, which is refected, in ­particular, in some of his early writings, where he opposed Abraham’s tyrannical God to the New Testament’s God of love. Yet Hegel was far from alone among Romantic philosophers in expressing a profound aversion for Judaism, as a religious principle directly conficting with Christianity. Even more forcefully than Hegel, Fichte articulated an anti-­Judaism animus. With respect to him, David Nirenberg speaks about a “science of hating Judaism.”22 Fichte, moreover, seems to have been the frst thinker to question Jesus’s Jewishness. Writing during Napoleon’s invasion of Germany, Fichte also propounded ferce nationalist views in his Addresses to the German Nation (1807–1808), which earned him the Nazis’ deep respect. Nor was such anti-­Jewish bile the sole prerogative of Idealist philosophers. Schopenhauer loathed Judaism, as the principle that had perverted Christianity and infected Europe with optimism and “Jewish realism,” (he spoke of foetor judaicus, the Jewish stench).23 For Schopenhauer, the ZendAvesta (i.e. Zoroastrianism) lies at the root of Judaism, and Jehovah is a transformation of Ormuzd. Te biblical Satan, however, remains for him a subordinate power, while the independent Ahriman refects pessimism.24 Like Buddhism, true Christianity is a pessimistic religion stemming from India, and has nothing to do with Judaism, to which it is diametrically opposed. Calling India “the cradle of the human race,” Schopenhauer added: . . . the fanatical enormities perpetrated in the name of religion are only to be put down to the adherents of the monotheistic creeds, that is, the Jewish faith and its two branches, Christianity and Islamism. We hear of

21  See, in Chapter 4 in this volume, “A New Epistemology.” 22  See David Nirenberg, Anti-­Judaism: Te Western Tradition (New York, London: Norton, 2013), 387–413 and notes, 563–569. 23  Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays from the Parerga et Paralipomena, transl. T. Bailey Saunders (London: George Allen, 1951), para. 177. Te text is essentially that of the 1844 Supplements to Te World as Will and Representation. 24  Ibid., 123–124 (para. 179). Schopenhauer refects here trends in contemporary scholarship that highlight the close relationship between Zoroastrianism and Judaism, for instance the Iranist Friedrich Spiegel (1820–1905).

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72  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism nothing of the kind in the case of Hindoos and Buddhists . . . Polytheist gods, on the other hand, are naturally tolerant.25

Schopenhauer, then, is in two minds regarding the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. Only the denial of their flial relationship can salvage Christianity from being stained by Judaism. As we shall see in Chapter 9, the denial of Jewish roots for Christianity and the adoption of Indian origins and the true nature of Christianity would be replayed for the rest of the century, on both sides of the Rhine.

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Aryans and Semites It is to Max Müller that we owe the use of the term “Aryan” as referring to a broad family of languages and, by extension, of peoples.26 Te term itself had been fashioned in the decades before Müller from Old Persian and Sanskrit cognates (ārya) in Avestic and Vedic texts, as well as from references to “Arians” in Greek literature, from Herodotus to Strabo. As we shall see, Renan’s openly expressed ambition, in opposing Semites to Aryans, was to do for the Semitic languages and religions what Müller had done for Aryan mythologies. Te drawing of a line between Semites and Aryans, however, had been in the air for quite some time before Müller and Renan appeared on the scene. As we have seen, during the Enlightenment, the tripartite division of the earth between Noah’s sons replaced the older tripartite taxonomy of the three monotheistic religions. “Semite” and “Semitic” were originally linguistic terms, referring to a number of kindred languages, such as Hebrew, Ethiopian (Geez), Aramaic, and Arabic. Comparative Semitic linguistics was practiced as far back as the early tenth-­century Jewish grammarian Judah Ibn Quraish, as well as to the aforementioned Jesuit Renaissance scholar Guillaume Postel and the German scholar of Ethiopian languages, Hiob Ludolf (1624–1704). It is worth noting, in this context, that the word

25  Ibid., 36–37. 26  On the coining of “Aryan” by Müller, see Arie L. Molendijk, Friedrich Max Müller and the Sacred Books of the East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 108–115. On the origins of the word in modern scholarship, see Tomas R. Trautmann, “Introduction,” in his Aryans and British India (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 1–27. Here, of course, we are more directly interested in the origins and usage of “Semite” than of “Aryan.”

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Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars  73 “Semitic” is ofen attributed to the German natural philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Gideon Goldenberg has shown that the term “linguae semiticae” or “semiticus” does not occur in Leibniz’s De originibus gentium (1710), although Leibniz had identifed correctly the “Hamito-­Semitic” language family, a family that he preferred to refer to as “Aramaean.”27 Instead, as discussed by Martin Baasten, it was August Ludwig Schlözer (1735–1809) who introduced the expression “Semitic languages.” Schlözer, a versatile historian in Göttingen, did much to establish the modern foundations of Russian history. But he was also deeply interested in the Phoenicians and contributed to promoting world history. Even in 1771, indeed, Schlözer had referred to “die Semiten.” Schlözer also refers to “Japhetic” languages. Te term “Japhetic,” used to describe a linguistic family, was later adopted by the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask (1787–1832). Its only posterity would be the “Japhetic theory” of the Soviet linguist Nikolai Yakovlevitch Marr (1864–1934). In 1781, Schlözer wrote: “In the whole territory between the Euphrates and the Arabic peninsula, only one single language was spoken, . . . which I may call the Semitic one.”28 In fact, as correctly noted by Baasten, it is not always possible to distinguish between the purely ethnological sense of the term and its linguistic application. Around the same time, in 1782, Herder used the terms “Semite” and “Semitic” in his treatise on Hebrew poetry, indicating that these words were beginning to circulate.29 In his Göttingen Inaugural Lecture of 1788, Eichhorn adopted the newly coined term—although he avoided specifc references to Schlözer, thus permitting its broad propagation. It appears, then, that it was within the Göttingen school of history, in the last decades of the eighteenth century that the term emerged as a heuristically helpful concept.

27  See Martin F. J. Baasten, “A Note on the History of ‘Semitic,” in Martin F. J. Baasten and W.  T. Van Peursen, eds, Hamlet on a Hill: Semitic and Greek Studies Presented to Professor T. Muraoka on the Occasion of his Sixty-­Fifh Birthday (Leuven, Paris, Dudley, MA: Peeters, 2003), 57–71. 28  “Vom mittelländischen Meer bis zum Eufrat hinein, und von Mesopotamien bis nach Arabien hinunter, herrschte bekanntlich nure eine Sprache . . . die ich die semitische nennen möchte.” in J. G. Eichhorn, ed., “Von den Chaldäern,” in his Repertorium für biblische und morgenländische Literatur, Vol. VIII (Leipzig, 1781), 113–176, esp. 161. 29  See Maurice Olender, “Between Sciences of Origins and Religions of the Future: Questions of Philology,” Philological Encounters 2 (2017), 201–236. Te entire journal issue was devoted to “Formations of the Semitic,” which traces the term through the nineteenth century. See, for instance, Netanel Anor, “Joseph Halevi, Racial Scholarship and the ‘Sumerian Problem,’ ” Philological Encounters 2 (2017), 321–345, and Céline Trautmann-­ Waller, “Semites and Semitism: From Philology to the Language of Myth,” Philological Encounters 2 (2017), 346–367.

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74  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism In the nineteenth century, the word “Semite” would have a remarkable career, as it became coupled with “Indo-­European” and “Aryan.” Beyond its original linguistic reference, it began to delineate a race, a trajectory to which we will later return. While this coupling is now recognized, thanks to the work of Léon Poliakov and Maurice Olender, a key element of the new paradigm seems to have been overlooked.30 Tis is the passage from a tripartite division of humankind (which drew on the names of Noah’s sons) to a bipartite one, opposing Semites to Aryans, while the Hamites, a cursed race dumped, as it were, in Africa, were almost forgotten as representing peoples with no real impact upon world history and the history of the “great” religions.31 Te idea of an Indo-­European family of languages is ofen attributed to William Jones (1746–1794). In his 1786 address to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, on the occasion of the third anniversary of the Society he had established, Jones indeed called attention to similarities between Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, adding to the comparison Gothic, Celtic, and Persian.32 Jones, however, had been preceded in this endeavor by the Dutch scholar Marcus Zuarius van Boxhorn (1612–1653), who had proposed to speak about a “Scythian” proto-­language, as well as by the Jesuit missionary Gaston-­Laurent Coeurdoux, who had made similar comparisons between Sanskrit and European languages in a mémoire sent to the French Royal Academy of Sciences in 1767.33 Tese two earlier scholars had been more precise than Jones in their formulations, but it ws only afer William Jones that the idea of an Indo-­European family of languages became widely accepted. Te idea of such a family was furthered by Friedrich Schlegel (1770–1829), a major fgure in the Romantic movement. Schlegel studied Indology and comparative linguistics under Antoine Léonard de Chézy, the frst Professor of Sanskrit at the Collège de France. In 1808, he published his seminal tract Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. For Schegel, infected languages, such as Sanskrit and Greek, refected a richer, more subtle mind 30  Léon Poliakov, Le mythe aryen: Essai sur les sources du racisme et des nationalismes (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1971). Olender, Les langues du paradis, developed and publicized some of Poliakov’s important fndings. 31  On the history of attitudes to the “Chamites,” see David  M.  Goldenberg, Te Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003). 32  See Trautmann, Aryans and British India, Chapter 2: “Te Mosaic Ethnology of Asiatick Jones,” 28–61, on Noah’s sons. Trautmann points out that through Noah’s sons, Jones seeks to ofer a rational defence of the Bible, adding: “the unnamed antagonist throughout is Voltaire, who used the new Orientalism . . . to quite diferent ends” (42). 33  On Coeurdoux, see Chapter 4 in this volume.

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Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars  75 than the simpler Semitic languages.34 Tirty years afer Jones, the German linguist Franz Bopp (1791–1867) brought proof for Jones’s assertions. Like Schlegel, Bopp had studied in Paris with de Chézy, as well as with Silvestre de Sacy. In 1816, he proposed, for the frst time, a rigorous comparison between the verbal system of Sanskrit and other Indo-­European languages, a comparison highlighted in his comparative grammar of Sanskrit, a book on which he would work for the rest of his life.35 In the second edition of this book (1863), he stated his preference for the term “Indo-­European” over “Indo-­Germanic,” the term commonly accepted by German scholars; however, his voice was not heeded. In 1847, the Norwegian linguist Christian Lassen (1800–1876), who was teaching in Bonn, published a book in which the term “Indogermanen” was opposed to that of “Semiten.”36 Tis may well have been the turning point in the history of the scholarly opposition between Aryans (or Indo-­Europeans) and Semites. Like others, Lassen slipped easily from linguistics to anthropology, and considered the Semites as lacking the harmonious balance of the Indo-­Germans, and also as lacking philosophy. As he writes: “In his religion, the Semite is egoistic and exclusivist.”37 As we will see later, the thought patterns relating to the new Aryan mythology would be broadly accepted around the middle of the century. It is undeniably to Max Müller that we owe the common use of “Aryan” as the main term referring to the Indo-­European languages and peoples. More and more, European scholars were applying the terms coined by their German colleagues. In particular, the pan-­Indian idea of the origins of religion, as propounded by Schlegel, one of the principle propagators of the Aryan myth, was becoming widely established. Te anthropologist Dan Sperber developed a compelling epidemiological theory of intellectual contagion that accounts for such transmission of ideas across linguistic and cultural borders.38

34  Tis idea of a direct connection between linguistic structures and thought patterns was, of course, systematically developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt; see in particular his Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus und seinen Einfuss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (Berlin: Königliche Akademie der Wissenschafen, 1836). 35  Franz Bopp, Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit (Berlin, 1821). 36 Christian Lassen, Indische Althertumskunde (fve vols; Leipzig, 1847–1862). On “Indogermanen” versus “Semiten,” see Vol. I, 410–411. 37  Ibid.,Vol. I, 414. Quoted by Poliakov, Le mythe aryen, 198. 38  See, for instance, Dan Sperber, “Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations,” Man 20 (1985), 73–89.

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76  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Although these ideas were frst crafed in Germany, it is in France that they were cultivated most seriously during the 1820s and 1830s, thanks to the propagation of the ideas of Herder and Schlegel by some leading intellectual fgures, such as Edgar Quinet and Jules Michelet. Challenging the role and status of Shem’s ofspring in world history was also a way of defying the powerful Catholic Church, recalling Voltaire’s objection to the JudeoChristian vision of historiography.39

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Wissenschaf des Judentums and Jewish Orientalism Beginning in the Enlightenment, European intellectuals tended to perceive the Jews as an Asian people adrif in Europe, where they remained essentially foreign.40 Te emphasis on ethnicity as representing the core of their identity signifed a marked shif away from the stress on their religious identity, which had been dominant in Christian societies since late antiquity. In referring to the Jews, Kant, for example, talked about “the Palestinians among us.” Herder’s complex view of the Jews is here emblematic, as he was in many ways sympathetic to Hebrew language and literature, which denoted for him a call from the Orient.41 Te Jews’ integration or assimilation into European societies, under such conditions, was always a complicated task, ofen deemed improbable, problematic, and, sometimes, undesirable. Jewish intellectuals were of two minds regarding the notion of the Jews as  an Oriental people. On the one hand, it echoed the traditional selfperception of the Jews as ultimately rooted in the Holy Land, from which they were exiled. On the other hand, it both highlighted and reinforced the difculties they encountered in their attempts to enter European societies. While Jews had a vested interest in their integration within liberalizing European societies, they ofen sought to retain their religious and ethnic identity while doing so. Some Jewish scholars decided to build on this interpositioning to present themselves as intermediaries between Asian and European cultures. Rather than simply seeking to distance themselves from

39 See Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-­European Mythology as Ideology and Science (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2006), 91–92 [Original Swedish publication 2000]. 40  See Chapter 4 in this volume, on Anquetil Duperron. 41  On Herder and the Jews, see the pondered analysis of Frederic C. Beiser, “Herder and the Jewish Question,” in Anik Waldow and Nigel DeSouza, eds, Herder: Philosophy and Anthropology (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 240–255.

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Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars  77 the Orient in order to claim new European identities, many among them chose to nurture their double Asian and European singularity by becoming the interpreters of the cultures and religions of Asia. Te secularization process, a phenomenon that was speeding up at this time, signifcantly eroded the wholesale identifcation of European societies as Christian, whether Catholic or Protestant—although in diferent ways and at a diferent pace in each country. Religion was becoming an individual rather than a communal matter. And as noted already in the Introduction, Christianity, which was losing the pre-­eminent status it had held for centuries in collective religious identities, was now becoming part of Europe’s cultural memory.42 Moreover, the nineteenth century saw the rise of nationalism (again, endowed with diferent characters and at various paces among the various peoples of Europe), which added a new dimension to collective identities, further altering the role and status of the traditional Christian Churches in those identities. Te joint efect of secularization and nationalism in European societies proved to be the catalyst for a sea change in the perception of Judaism and Islam. Te complex Jewish reaction to the European perception of them as Orientals has direct bearing on our understanding of the role of Jews in Orientalist scholarship, and their humanistic conception of this scholarship.43 Since the nineteenth century, Jewish historians of religion have made signifcant contributions to the discipline broadly conceived, and not only to the critical study of Judaism by Jewish scholars, or Wissenschaf des Judentums. In particular, Jewish scholars have had a strong impact on various branches of Oriental studies, such as Arabic, Iranian, and Indian studies. Oriental studies and the history of religions overlap signifcantly, starting with the required linguistic equipment. In our period, Jewish Orientalists (who were ofen also historians of religion) played a distinct and important role, both in France and in Germany. Notably, the nature of this role varied between these countries, refecting the signifcant religious, cultural, and political dissimilarities between them.44 42  On the status of religion in a secularizing world, see in particular Taylor, A Secular Age, for instance, 512. On religion and cultural memory, see Jan Assmann, Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis (Munich: Beck, 2000). Assmann, however, does not tackle our present problem. 43  For a later expression of this appreciation, see Shlomo Dov Goitein, “Te Humanistic Aspects of Oriental Studies,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 9 (1987), 1–13. On Goitein himself, see Steven M. Wasserstrom, “Apology for S. D. Goitein: An Essay,” in Adnan A. Husain and Katherine Fleming, eds, A Faithful Sea: Te Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200–1700 (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 173–198. 44 Tis was also true in other countries. On Hungary, see, for instance, Carsten Wilke, “From Talmud Torah to Oriental Studies: Itineraries of Rabbinical Students in Hungary,” in

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For Jewish Orientalists, Islam and Judaism were kindred religions, just as Arabic and Hebrew were kindred languages, and Arabs and Jews kindred peoples. More generally, as noted, some Jewish Orientalists believed that their own ambiguous status in Europe, between East and West, prepared them to become a natural bridge between Europe and the cultures, religions, and peoples of Asia.45 Tus, Jewish scholars started to accentuate their regained Oriental identity, in particular through a nostalgia for the “golden age” of Islamic Spain (al-­Andalus), according to which Jews and their culture had fourished in peaceful coexistence and cross-­pollination with their Muslim neighbors. For these scholars, Orientalism could in no way be conceived as an attempt to draw attention to fundamental diferences between Europe and the East.46 Te birth and development of the Jewish scholarly study of Judaism, the so-­called Wissenschaf des Judentums, has received comprehensive treatment.47 Scholars have also begun to consider the role of Jewish scholars in the early development of Orientalism. Yet the signifcant and complex role played by Jewish scholars in the formation and growth of modern scholarship on the history of religions, beyond the emphasis on Judaism and its history, still awaits its scholarly due. Hence, we now turn to the work of Jewish scholars on other religions, and their rather singular and successful eforts to connect cultural areas and felds of knowledge—eforts which were directly related to their interstitial social status.

Tamás Turán and Carsten Wilke, eds, Modern Jewish Scholarship in Hungary: Te “Science of Judaism” between East and West (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2016), 75–98. 45  For an excellent collection of studies, see Michel Espagne and Perrine Simon-­Nahum, eds., Passeurs d’Orient: Les Juifs dans l’orientalisme (Paris: L’Éclat, 2013). 46  See for instance Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sefardic. My perspective here difers from that of Yossef Schwartz, “Jewish Orientalism Premodern and Modern: Epochal Variations of Cultural Hybridity?” in Ottfried Fraisse, ed., Modern Jewish Scholarship on Islam in Context: Rationality, European Borders, and the Search for Belonging (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2019), 31–59. Schwartz calls attention to the fact that important Jewish communities existed both in Europe and in Muslim lands, from Morocco to Iran. Tis fact impacted the approach of Jewish scholars. Tis is certainly true. But the same logic could apply to the significant Christian communities in the lands of Islam and the attitudes of Christian Orientalists. See further Dario Fernandez-­ Morera, Te Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain (Wilmington, Del: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2016). 47  For introductory essays, see, for instance, Kerstin von der Krone and Mirjam Tulen, “Wissenschaf in Context: A Research Essay on the Wissenschaf des Judentums,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 58 (2013), 249–280. See also Kurt Wilhelm, “Zur Einführung in die Wissenschaf des Judentums,” in Kurt Wilhelm, ed., Wissenschaf des Judentums im deutschen Sprachbereich: ein Querschnitt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1967), 1–58.

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Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars  79 Until the unifcation of Germany in 1871 and the full political emancipation of German Jews, Jewish scholars were not usually welcomed as professors in German universities. Moreover, a long tradition of religious anti-­ Semitism had lef post-­ biblical Judaism a scholarly stepchild. For Christian theologians, Judaism was a decadent religion which had become fossilized afer the coming of Jesus; having accomplished its task, it played no further role in the history of salvation (Heilsgeschichte).48 Tis lack of interest in post-­biblical Judaism was the background to the creation by young Jewish scholars, around 1820, of new structures for the study of Judaism. Eventually, these young Jewish intellectuals, who were also protesting the Christian theological approach to the Old Testament, would coalesce into the Wissenschaf des Judentums. When a leading member of this movement, Leopold Zunz, proposed to Berlin University, in 1848, the establishment of a Chair for the study of Jewish literature and history, the answer was that the preparation of Jews for the rabbinate was not in the university’s purview.49 In 1819, barely a generation afer the death of Moses Mendelssohn, the Jewish paragon of the Auflärung, Jews were violently attacked—frst in Würzburg, and then in other German cities. Te wave of pogroms, known as the “Hep-­Hep” (Hierosolomyta est perdita)! riots, lef a profound impact on German Jews, just as they lef a deep mark on the young Joseph Salvador, in France, spurring him to abandon his medical studies in order to become a historian of the Jews.50 Tat very same year, a small coterie of young Jewish intellectuals under the leadership of Eduard Gans, and including Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) and Heinrich Heine, established in Berlin the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaf der Juden.51 Tose were the days of 48 For a superb monograph on this topic, see Christian Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Teology in Wilhelmine Germany (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2005). 49  On Zunz, see Ismar Schorsch, Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), as well as Céline Trautmann-­Waller, Philologie allemande et tradition juive: le parcours intellectuel de Léopold Zunz (Paris: Cerf, 1998), which describes the anti-­Jewish animus of both professors and students in the German universities, explaining how this animus formed an obstacle to the emancipation of the Jews. See further Ismar Schorsch, “Drei Vorträge zur Wissenschaf des Judentums (Leopold Zunz—Abraham Geiger—Moritz Steinschneider),” in Cord-­ Friedrich Berghahn, ed., Wolfenbütteler Vortragsmanuskripte, Vol. 24 (Wolfenbüttel: Lessings-­Akademie, 2018), 11–45. 50  On Salvador, see Chapter 6 in this volume. 51 Te Verein’s establishment had been preceded by that of the Wissenschafszirkel, a group of twenty-­three scholars, including Eduard Ganz, Leopold Zunz, Moses Moser, and Israel Wohlwill. Tis ephemeral Zirkel functioned from November 1816 to July 1817. See Trautmann-­ Waller, Philologie allemande et tradition juive, 70. On Heine’s identifcation as a Jew, see the fne

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80  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Romantic philosophy, when Schelling and Hegel were at the height of their fame. Indeed, Eduard Gans, the Verein’s leading member at its inception, was under the strong infuence of Hegel, whose student he had been in Berlin. Te Verein’s ofcial goals, as expressed in Immanuel Wolf ’s seminal article “Über den Begrif einer Wissenschaf des Judentums,” refect this Hegelianism. One should add that the idea of modern, philological scholarship on Jewish texts also represented a powerful attempt to reject the traditional hermeneutics of rabbinic education. To a great extent, this attempt mirrored contemporary Christian theological scholarship, even though the young Jewish scholars rejected the Protestant scholars’ perception of Jewish classical literature. Te Verein was short-­lived; its members disbanded in 1823 following Gans’s conversion to Christianity for professional aims. Gans’s friend, Heine, would soon convert as well. But the seeds planted in the Verein would not remain fruitless.52 Te rabbinic scholar Leopold Zunz and the philologist Abraham Geiger (1810–1874) led the next generation of Jewish scholars. While the research of Zunz and of the historian Heinrich Graetz (1817–1891) focused on internal Jewish phenomena, Geiger was from the outset committed to demonstrating that Jesus and Muhammad had been marked by Jewish teachings. Geiger, who later became the leader of the Jewish Reform movement, had started to work in that direction already in his 1833 doctoral thesis, Was hat Mohammed aus dem Judenthume aufgenomen? Tis frst signifcant fgure among the Jewish students of Islam in Germany thus also belonged to the frst leaders of the Wissenschaf des Judentums. Geiger’s book was hailed by theologians and Orientalists alike, and soon became seminal in the study of earliest Islam.53 Geiger also sought to understand Jesus in his Jewish milieu, but here, theologians were less analysis of Bernd Witte, “Das ‘Volk des Buches’: Heinrich Heines Entdeckung der Schreibweise der Moderne aus dem Geiste des Judentums,” in his Moses und Homer: Griechen, Juden, Deutsche: Eine andere Geschichte der deutschen Kultur (Berlin, Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2018), 135–164. 52  See Ismar Schorsch, “Breaking into the Past: Te Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaf der Juden,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 33 (1988), 3–28, reprinted in Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: Te Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 205–232. 53  On Geiger’s approach to Christianity and Islam, see Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See further Susannah Heschel, Jüdischer Islam: Islam und jüdisch-­deutsche Selbstbestimmung (Fröhliche Wissenschaf; Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2018). On the question of Jewish infuence on early Islam, see further Aaron  W.  Hughes, “Abraham Geiger and Problems with the ‘Larcenous’ Paradigm,” in his Shared Identities: Medieval and Modern Imaginings of Judeo-­Islam (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 46–50.

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Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars  81 happy. Te New Testament scholar and distinguished Hebraist Franz Delitzsch (1813–1890), who was deeply involved in the Judenmission and was widely perceived as philosemitic (or even of being of Jewish descent), for example, remarked that claiming similarities between Jesus and the Pharisees was “ten times more horrifc than the crucifxion.”54 Despite its short life, the Verein would spark a real intellectual transformation in German Jewry. It represented only the frst episode in the long saga of a movement of intellectual renewal of Judaism, through the modernization of its study; that is, mainly by the use of modern historiography and philology. While some of its practitioners sought to develop a decidedly non-­religious Jewish identity, others worked on reforming ritual, so that the Wissenschaf des Judentums would rapidly become closely linked to the new rabbinic seminaries, in particular to the one in Breslau. At the same time, those scholars directly involved in the movement were seeking legal and cultural acceptance in German society. In the wake of the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, their aim was twofold: on the one hand, they sought to foster the Jews’ mastery of their own, traditional culture; on the other, they wished to highlight this culture’s part in the universal patrimony of humanity. Hence, the movement was rather apologetic in nature. As a topic of teaching and research, religion mainly belonged to theological faculties, where (post-­biblical) Judaism was set in contradistinction to Christianity.55 Tis traditional theological opposition helps to account for the development, by Jewish scholars, of the Wissenschaf des Judentums, which throughout our period, had no real place in German universities. From Geiger’s days on, a series of studies penned by Jewish scholars would seek to underline the ethical character of Jewish monotheism, a topic that would eventually become pivotal to the thought of the Neo-­Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen (1842–1918). At the same time, the young Jewish intellectuals from the Verein, who had hoped to rejuvenate Judaism from within and to foster a new approach to Jewish history and religion from 54  Cited by Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, 196. In 1877, Delitzsch had published an acclaimed Hebrew translation of the New Testament, to be used for proselytizing among the Jews. In 1886, the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum was established at the University of Leipzig, where Delitzsch had taught, in order to train missionaries to the Jews. 55  In German universities, Chairs for Religionswissenschaf were established rather late. In Leipzig, for instance, such a Chair did not exist before 1912; see Kurt Rudolph, “Leipzig und die Religionswissenschaf,” in his Geschichte und Probleme der Religionswissenschaf (Studies in the History of Religions LIII; Leiden, New York, Cologne: Brill, 1992), 323–339. In my review of this book, I called attention to the desideratum of a study on the relationship between the Religionswissenschaf and the Wissenschaf des Judentums; see Jewish Quarterly Review 81 (1996), 508–509.

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82  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism without, felt the need to develop an apologetic vision. Tis, in turn, led them to insist on the ethical character of biblical monotheism, for them an essential component of traditional (rabbinic) Judaism. In this, they were challenging the Christian characterization of Judaism as a national and particularist religion. Jewish ethical monotheism, moreover, contained a  universal dimension that refuted the Christian insistence on Jewish particularism.56 Few Jews studied in the philosophical faculties of early nineteenthcentury German universities. Most Jewish university applicants had received the traditional religious education ofered in yeshivot (Talmudic schools) and lacked any knowledge of Greek or Latin—at the time a requirement in the faculties of philosophy. Oriental faculties, on the other hand, were happy to accept students who already had a serious background in two Semitic languages, Hebrew and Aramaic. Adding Arabic to the mix was a fairly easy task. Some among the most talented eventually became fully fedged Semitists, Arabists, or Islamicists.57 In Germany, at the time, Protestant scholars taught in evangelical theological faculties and Catholics in their own theological faculties, while Jewish scholars, who were unable to teach in the existing academic institutions, were usually employed as rabbis. Eventually, Jews came to the conclusion that they needed their own academic institutions. Tus, in 1854, the Jewish Teological Seminary (Das Jüdisch-­Teologische Seminar, or Fraenkel’sche Stifung) was established in Breslau. Te Talmudic scholar Zecharias Frankel (1801–1875) served as the Seminary’s frst president, while the historian Heinrich Graetz and the classicist Jacob Bernays belonged to its faculty. Te central aim of the institution was the modernized formation of rabbis, and its curriculum emphasized both a broad cultural background and the critical study of traditional texts. Tis was the institutional context in which the Wissenschaf des Judentums was born and developed. Te active interest of Jewish students in various forms of religious scholarship, however, went far beyond the study of Judaism. Te remarkable role played by Jewish scholars in various branches of early Orientalism in 56 On the Jewish scholars’ perception of ethical monotheism, see Wiese, Challenging Colonial Discourse, 239–248. Wiese points out (240) that the terminology “ethical religion” was coined by Abraham Kuenen in 1875. On Kuenen, see Chapter 9 in this volume. 57  On Jewish scholars of Islam, see Heschel, Jüdischer Islam; Martin Kramer, ed., Te Jewish Discovery of Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Centre, 1999). See further Dirk Hartwig, Walter Homolka, Michael J. Marx, Angelika Neuwirth, eds, “Im vollen Licht der Geschichte:” Die Wissenschaf des Judentums und die Anfänge der kritischen Koranforschung (Ex Oriente Lux, 8; Würzburg: Egon Verlag, 2008).

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Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars  83 Germany, especially in the study of Islam, has been widely recognized. Te presence and impact of Jewish scholars were out of all proportion to the overall number of Jews in German society, which did not amount to more than one percent of the population. For instance, of the ffy-­nine scholars who in 1845 established in Leipzig the Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaf, twenty were Jews. About one-­third of the doctoral students of Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer (1801–1888), the great Leipzig Arabist (who had himself studied in Paris, then the Mecca of Oriental studies, under Silvestre de Sacy, the founder of modern Arabic and Persian studies) were Jews.58 One sees a similar phenomenon in Syriac language and literature, felds in which a signifcant proportion of the doctoral dissertations were written by Jews.59 Perrine Simon-­Nahum, who has referred to these scholars as “passeurs d’Orient,” has argued that the European perception of these scholars as “Orientals” spurred their sympathy for Oriental peoples and cultures.60 Teir wish to be accepted in European societies coincided with their self-­identifcation as an Oriental people. From Abraham Geiger to the Hungarian Jewish scholar Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921), one can trace a line of Jewish scholars who made important contributions to Islamic studies.61 Since her early work on Geiger, Susannah Heschel has advanced the study of Jewish scholarship in Germany and its cultural background. In a synthetic study, she reviewed the Jewish study of Islam in the German world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.62 Heschel has convincingly argued that for those Jewish scholars, the study of Islam was directly related to their own search for a new Jewish identity in the age of Emancipation. For them, in her terms, Islam functioned as “a  template for presenting central Jewish ideas, such as monotheism,

58 Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 119. Fleischer would become de Sacy’s most famous student; see Sabine Mangold, Eine “weltbürgerliche Wissenschaf”: Die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), 41. On the establishment of Islamic studies as an academic discipline, see Mangold, ibid., 256–273. 59  Tis is particularly striking since Syriac literature was usually taught in theological faculties. See Yonatan Moss, “Te Jewish Contribution to Syriac Studies and the Syriac Contribution to Judaism: Te Case of Germany, 1870–1920,” in Te Future of Syriac Studies and the Legacy of Sebastian P. Brock (Sigtuna, Sweden: forthcoming). On the entrance of Jews in German universities, see Monika Richardz, Der Eintritt der Juden in die akademischen Berufe: Jūdische Studenten und Akademiker in Deutschland 1678–1848 (Tūbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1974). 60  Perrine Simon-­Nahum, “Le mort saisit le vif. La place des Juifs dans les études orientales aux XIXe et XXe siècles,” in Espagne and Simon-­Nahum, eds, Passeurs d’Orient, 49–65. 61  On Goldziher, see Chapter 8 in this volume. 62 Heschel, Jüdischer Islam.

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84  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism rejection of anthropomorphism, and religious law as divine revelation.”63 Asking about the Jewish interest in Islam, Heschel rightly answers that for many of those scholars, there was a natural family connection between Islam and Judaism.64 In her view, however, Jewish Orientalists ofen used the study of Arabic and Islam as a ploy, in order to claim their own European identity while at the same time denying the Asian roots and identity that were ofen predicated upon them. In other words, they were distancing themselves from Muslims in general (and Arabs and Ottoman Turks in particular), hence behaving as typical “Orientalists” in the sense discussed by Edward Said.65 It seems to me, however, that European Jewish scholars, who had an instinctively negative reaction towards Christianity, stamped in their psyche by centuries of persecution and humiliation, had a very diferent perception of Islam, which represented for them, unlike Christianity, a true, fully fedged form of monotheism. Until the fnal decades of the nineteenth century, such Jewish scholars were unable to secure real positions in German universities, and therefore ofen traveled abroad to fnd employment. Crossing the Rhine and moving to Paris was for many the simplest and most obvious decision, as we shall see in Chapter 7. Focusing on Germany during the frst half of the nineteenth century, this chapter has dealt in turn with (usually disparaging) attitudes towards Jews and Judaism during the Romantic era, with the crystallization of the opposition between Semites and Aryans, and fnally with the rise of modern scholarship on religion among the Jews. In Chapter  4, we shall return to France, to learn how the main concepts of the modern study of religion took root there.

63  Susannah Heschel, “Constructions of Jewish Identity through Refections on Islam,” in Andrea Sterk and Nina Caputo, eds, Faithful Narratives: Historians, Religion, and the Challenge of Objectivity (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 2014), 169–184, here 169. See the earlier Susannah Heschel, “German Jewish Scholarship on Islam as a Tool for De-­ Orientalizing Judaism,” New German Critique 39:117 (2012), 91–107; cf. Heschel, Jüdischer Islam. See further Susannah Heschel, “Te Rise of Imperialism and the German Jewish Engagement in Islamic Studies,” in Ottfried Fraisse, ed., Modern Jewish Scholarship on Islam in Context: Rationality, European Borders, and the Search for Belonging (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 61–92. 64  See, for instance Heschel, Jüdischer Islam, 16. On the connection between Jewish and Islamic studies, see Ismar Schorsch’s excellent study, “Converging Cognates: Te Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth-­Century Germany,” Leo Baeck Yearbook 55 (2010), 3–36. 65 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978).

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4

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Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis As we saw in Chapter 3, the synergy between Romantic philosophy, liberal (Protestant) theology, and philological accuracy in the best universities of the German Confederation sparked interest in the history of religions during the frst half of the nineteenth century. In these universities, religion (i.e. Biblical studies, Church history, and Christian theology) was traditionally the turf of Protestant and Catholic theological faculties, while the new study of religions other than Christianity and ancient Judaism usually remained split between the philosophical and oriental faculties. It is under patently diferent conditions that the academic study of religion was undertaken on the other side of the Rhine. In France, the negotiation between religious and national identity had been strongly polarized between religious traditionalists of the Catholic party and secularist inheritors of the revolutionary agenda. Furthermore, unlike in the German lands, which shared no capital city, the new felds of study were mostly concentrated in Parisian scholarly institutions, whereas little of scholarly signifcance occurred in most provincial universities. Finally, the role and status of Jews in the study of religion in France difered strikingly from their parallel role and status in Germany.1 A prominent reason for this diference, of course, was the non-­ theological character of most scholarly institutions, even before the fnal suppression of the Faculty of Teology at the Sorbonne in 1885. Before we turn to the story of the French study of religion in the frst half of the nineteenth century, however, we must pick up from the heritage of the Enlightenment in this matter, nowhere better expressed than in the remarkable case of Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron, a man whose major work on Indian and Iranian texts announces the “Abrahamic eclipse,” 1  See, in particular, Perrine Simon-­Nahum, Les juifs et la modernité: L’héritage du judaïsme et les Sciences de l’homme en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2018), especially chapter 5, “La science des religions et le traitement des langues,” 117–136. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press (2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0005

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

86  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism which I dubbed, at the end of Chapter 2, “the harbinger of philologia orientalis.” Te paramount importance of Anquetil Duperron for our project lies in his focus on the Zoroastrian scriptures; that is, on the religion of an Aryan people with striking connections to that of biblical Israel. Anquetil Duperron was thus brought to refect on the idea of an Ur-­monotheism on the eve of the Romantic opposition between Aryans and Semites.

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Anquetil Duperron: Go East, Young Man Te “Quarrel of the Avesta,” largely forgotten today, preoccupied some of the best minds in the Republic of Letters during the fnal decades of the eighteenth century. Tis dispute recalls the “Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns” which had infamed the European literary scene a century earlier. It also represents a signifcant chapter of the great battle of minds during the Enlightenment.2 Te “Quarrel of the Avesta” points to the origins of what the versatile French historian and philosopher Edgar Quinet called in 1842, in his Génie des religions, “la Renaissance orientale.” Te literary scholar and intellectual historian Raymond Schwab borrowed this expression, entitling his seminal book on the multiform impact of India on nineteenth-­century Europe Te Oriental Renaissance. Tis work’s frst protagonist, Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron (1731–1805), was an emblematic fgure and a fascinating personality, a pioneer of philologia orientalis, the study of Asian languages and literatures. Duperron was at once a trailblazing scholar, a courageous intellectual, and a remarkable humanist.3 For Edgar Quinet,

2  See Schwab, La Renaissance orientale, 97. 3  Te French original version of the following pages was published as: Guy  G.  Stroumsa, “Anquetil Duperron et les origines de la philologie orientale: l’orientalisme est un humanisme,” Asdiwal 13 (2018), 128–140. Said, Orientalism, 76–77, holds rather positive views about Anquetil as compared to William Jones. He describes him as “an eccentric theoretician of egalitarianism, a man who managed in his heart to reconcile Jansenism with orthodox Catholicism and Brahmanism, and who travelled to Asia in order to prove the actual primitive existence of a Chosen People and of the Biblical genealogies.” On Anquetil, see, in particular, Raymond Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-­ Duperron, suivie des usages civils et religieux des parses, with a preface by Sylvain Lévi, and two essays by Dr Sir Jivanji Jamshedji Modi (Paris: Leroux, 1934). For some aspects of Anquetil’s work, see further Jean-­Luc Kiefer, Anquetil-­Duperron: L’Inde en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1983); cf. Lucette Valensi, “Éloge de l’Orient, Éloge de l’Orientalisme: le jeu d’échecs d’Anquetil,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 212 (1995), 419–452, as well as Pierre Sylvain Filliozat, “Anquetil Duperron, un pionnier du voyage scientifque en Inde,” Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-­Lettres 149 (2005), 1261–1280. Jacques Anquetil, Anquetil Duperron, premier orientaliste français. Biographie, with a preface by Jean

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Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis  87 Marcilio Ficino’s humanism remained limited, crippled prior to Anquetil Duperron, whom he referred to as “an eighteenth-­century Marco Polo,” comparing him to Lascaris and other Byzantine refugees in the Latin West.4 It was Anquetil’s 1771 publication of the frst European translation of the Avesta that kindled the “Quarrel of the Avesta.” Published in three volumes, Zend Avesta, Ouvrage de Zoroastre represented the very frst translation into a European language of a literary monument from a civilization outside the Greco-­Latin world and that of the Abrahamic religions. Anquetil may well have spoken the truth when he boasted of being the frst and only person in Europe who knew Zend and Pahlevi—although his translation was based on the Persian version used by the Zoroastrian priests, rather than the original. According to Raymond Schwab, the author of the frst monograph dedicated to Anquetil, the publication of Anquetil’s Zend Avesta marked the beginning of the Oriental Renaissance. In his words, it was only afer 1771 that “the earth really became round.”5 In his preface to Schwab’s book, the great Indologist Sylvain Lévi wrote of “a new era in the history of human intelligence.”6 Te historian Arnaldo Momigliano, on his side, has called attention to the importance of Anquetil’s generation for the transformation of historical thinking.7 Mutatis mutandis, one may liken the symbolic importance attributed by Schwab to 1771 to that given by Dame Frances Yates to 1614, the date of Isaac Casaubon’s De Rebus Sacris et Ecclesiasticis Exercitationes XVI. In this book, Casaubon was the frst to recognize the pseudepigraphical character of the Hermetic treatises. According to Yates, 1614 was the watershed year separating the symbolic thought of the Renaissance from the philological method of modern times.8 Opposition to Anquetil’s ideas had begun to surface prior to his publication of the Avesta. In a mémoire dating from 1769, Anquetil announced his discovery to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. He had Leclant (Paris: Renaissance, 2005) is not fully reliable. See further Jürgen Osterhammel, Unfabling the East, 263–267. 4  See Schwab, La Renaissance orientale, 36, and Edgar Quinet, Du génie des religions (Paris: Charpentier, 1842), 52–54. 5  See Schwab, La Renaissance orientale, 36. 6  Sylvain Lévi, “Preface,” in Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-­Duperron, 5. 7 Arnaldo Momigliano, “Two English Works on Vico”, in Arnaldo Momigliano, Sesto Contributo alla storia degli studi classici et del mondo antico I (Rome: Edizione di Storia e letteratura, 1980), esp. 220–226. 8 See Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1964); cf. Anthony Grafon, “Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus”, in his Defenders of the Text: Te Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 259–270.

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88  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism returned to France from his Indian sojourn having endured six long years of danger, as he was searching for, and then translating, both the Avesta and the Upanishads.9 Back in Paris, he immediately deposited the precious manuscripts he was carrying at the Royal Library. It was only in 1763, with the English victory over the French during the third Carnatic war, that the battle for supremacy in India was decided. National bitterness adding to scholarly rivalry, Anquetil had attacked Tomas Hyde (1636–1703), the distinguished English author of the Historia religionis veterum persarum eorumque magorum, which had been published in 1700.10 Although he did not have frst-­hand documents at his disposal, Hyde, who was professor of Hebrew and Arabic at Oxford, and Bodley’s Librarian, had written a remarkable book, the frst serious monograph on Zoroastrianism. William Jones (1746–1794), a young English scholar who would have an illustrious future as the herald of Indo-­European studies, was ofended by Anquetil’s remarks about his compatriot, and immediately replied, in an anonymous pamphlet written in French. Te sarcastic Lettre à A*** du P*** disparagingly rejected Anquetil’s views on Zoroaster’s life and works. Te following year, Anquetil answered in the Journal des scavants, insisting on Jones’s bad faith.11 Te “Quarrel of the Avesta” thus started with a skirmish between two brilliant young scholars, on either side of the Channel. Te polemic spread fast: that same year, in 1772, Friedrich Grimm attacked Anquetil in his correspondence with Diderot. On his side, the latter also rejected Anquetil’s discoveries in his entry on Persians in the Encyclopédie: for him, Zoroaster was hardly a historical fgure. Mediocre style, lack of precision, verbosity: all these weakened Anquetil’s stance. Philosophers rejected his claim of having found the Prophet of Light’s ipsissima verba. Diderot and Voltaire, for instance, both rebufed Anquetil for his rejection of their anticlerical reading of religion of the “Guèbres” (as the Zoroastrians were called in the Enlightenment). Anquetil and Voltaire, indeed, seem wholly at odds. Teir common interest in the wisdom traditions of the East, and in particular those of India, stemmed from opposite poles. Tese Oriental wisdom traditions supported Voltaire’s anticlericalism, 9  In the introduction to the translation of the Zend Avesta, Anquetil describes quite vividly his many adventures in India. 10  On Hyde and his book, see Stroumsa, A New Science, 101–113 and notes. 11  On Jones, his conception of early religion as pure monotheism, and his 1784 foundation of the Asiatick Society in Calcutta, see Urs App, “William Jones’ Ancient Teology,” Sino-­ Platonic Papers 191 (2009), 1–125. On the polemic, see further Claire Gallien, “Une querelle orientaliste: la réception controversée du Zend Avesta d’Anquetil-­Duperron en France et en Angleterre,” Littératures classiques 81 (2013), 257–268), non vidi.

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Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis  89 his unceasing efort to weaken the Bible’s status, while they served to broaden and bolster Anquetil’s Christian conviction. Yet Anquetil did have some supporters in the Republic of Letters. Friedrich Kleuker (1749–1827), for instance, published in Riga a German translation of Anquetil’s Zend Avesta.12 Herder was so taken by this translation that he expressed the wish to contact the author. Tis Orientalist dispute, which ignited polemics throughout Europe, would end only in 1826, when the Danish Orientalist Rasmus Rask demonstrated the authenticity of the manuscripts used by Anquetil—an authenticity confrmed in 1833 by Eugène Burnouf, the great Sanskrit scholar of the Collège de France.13 Who was this upstart Anquetil? Born in Paris to a family with Jansenist leanings, the young Abraham Hyacinthe soon expressed enthusiasm for Hebrew (the study of which was quite rare in Catholic milieus). He studied theology and Oriental philology in Utrecht, and then at the Seminary of the “Old Catholics” in Amersfoort, where he also started to learn Arabic and Persian. Back in Paris, stumbling upon four pages of an Oxford manuscript of the Avesta, he determined to head for India to search for Zoroaster’s original texts among the Parsees. According to his own testimony, he joined the Compagnie des Indes, boarding a boat together with former convicts, taking with him only a Hebrew Bible and Montaigne’s Essays. For the leading French Orientalist and translator of the Avesta, James Darmesteter (1849–1894), these two books precisely characterized Anquetil, a man who, in his view, straddled the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries.14 Anquetil, indeed, stood before Jones and the great divide between Semitic and Indo-­European languages. As mentioned, it was from a Persian version, rather than from the Sanskrit original, that he translated the Upanishads.15 12 Johann Friedrich Kleuker, ed., Zend Avesta. Zoroasters lebendiges wort . . . nach dem französischen des herrn Anquetil du Perron (Riga: Hartnock, 1777–1786). On Anquetil’s impact on nineteenth-­century scholarship, see Suzanne Marchand, “Dating Zarathustra: Oriental Texts and the Problem of Persian Prehistory, 1700–1900,” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 1 (2016), 203–245, esp. 221–227. 13  See Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language (New York: Scribner, 1869), 206. 14  James Darmesteter, “L’orientalisme en France,” in his Essais orientaux (Paris: Lévy, 1883), in particular 1–15. Darmesteter notes (2) that Anquetil’s discovery of the Zen Avesta in 1758 “ouvre l’ère des grandes trouvailles . . .”. 15  Anquetil frst prepared a French translation of the Upanishads, which remained unpublished, and published his Latin translation as Oupnek’hat (id est, secretum tendendum) Opus ipsa in India rarissimum, Adverbum, e Persico idiomate, Samskrehitis, vocabulis intermixto, in Latinum conversum (two vols; Argenteuil: Levrault, 1802). Tis translation exerted a major infuence on many, including Schopenhauer. See Urs App, Te Cult of Emptiness: Te Western Discovery of Buddhist Tought and the Invention of Oriental Philosophy (Paris: UniversityMedia, 2012), 2.

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90  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism While he could have learned Sanskrit during his long Indian stay, his sights were set on discovering the text of the Avesta and translating it. During the six years he spent in India, from 1755 to 1761, in territories under both French and English domination, he was involved in various adventures (including shooting a jealous husband to death in a duel) about which he himself attests. Te entire journey was a perilous one, during which he exhibited real courage. Anquetil’s courage was moral as well as physical. Imbued with deep antiracist sentiments, he counts among the very frst anti-­colonialists—a fact which in itself is enough to call into question the perception, quite common in the wake of Edward Said, of European Orientalists as champions of colonialism. About America, for instance, Anquetil wrote: “It is the Europeans who are the true barbarians.” And, in portraying the efects of colonization, he spoke of a crime against humanity (“un crime de lèse-­humanité”), accusing “educated authors” of “minimizing the ghastly character of an invasion marked by the seal of the most atrocious barbarity.”16 In his book on India and Europe (L’Inde en rapport avec l’Europe), Anquetil sought to highlight the political and commercial importance of India for Europe, and in particular for France. Tere, he notes “the unjust and violent behavior of the European nations,” adding: “the immensity of British India is a scandal and a shame for Europe.”17 Oriental Legislation (La législation orientale) is a long pamphlet against the idea of “Oriental despotism,” an idea introduced by François Bernier, who had spent some time in India in the seventeenth century, which was picked up by Montesquieu.18 In 1789, on the occasion of the Declaration of Human Rights (Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen), Anquetil asked for both the abolition of slavery and freedom for the Jansenist Church. In 1804, Anquetil and Silvestre de Sacy (1801–1879), the renowned master of Arabic and Persian studies in Europe, were the only members of the

16 Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron, Considérations philosophiques, historiques et géographiques sur les deux mondes (1780–1804), Edizione, Introduzione e Note di Guido Abbattista (Pisa: Scuola Normale Superiore, 1993). 17  Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron, L’Inde en rapport avec l’Europe, Vol. I: Sur les intérêts politiques de l’Inde (two vols; Paris: Lesguillez, An VI [1798]), I, 15. 18  Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil Duperron, Législation orientale, ouvrage dans lequel, en montrant quels sont en Turquie, en Perse et dans l’Indoustan, les principes fondamentaux du gouvernement . . . (Amsterdam: Ray, 1778). On the roots of the concept, from Bayle to Montesquieu, and on the context of Anquetil’s work, see Franco Venturi, “Oriental Despotism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963), 133–142, esp. 136–137.

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Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis  91 French Institute to resign, refusing to swear loyalty to the emperor.19 In his last years, Anquetil, like an Indian sannyasi, voluntarily lived as a pauper, renouncing the world, having “neither wife nor children,” and claiming his total freedom in his yearning towards the Supreme Being.20 Anquetil, moreover, was not only a curious mind and a daring man. He was also a prolifc author. Between 1780 and 1804, he labored on Considérations philosophiques, historiques et géographiques sur les deux mondes, a book in which he dealt with North America, a continent he never visited. Te book begins with this lapidary sentence: “Man has a natural inclination for humiliating his fellow man.” His Indian experience opened his eyes to the brutality of the European conquest: “One shivers at the account of the conquerors’ cruelty. Carried by passion, fanaticism and cupidity, they were destroying the human species.” And contemporary intellectuals who partake in the times’ prejudices also receive their due: “Here, it is the Philosophers who cold-­bloodedly deny the Americans, as it were, their human nature.”21 Te historian of antiquity Dieter Metzler has shown how Anquetil called attention to the striking synchronicity of Zarathustra, Pythagoras, and Confucius.22 It is to Anquetil, then, rather than to the German philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), that we owe the idea of an “axial age” in world history. In 1949, Jaspers noted that around the middle of the frst millennium bce, a time that he called Achsenzeit, a number of intellectual and spiritual leaders independently appeared in diferent civilizations.23 Each initiated in his own society a transformation of traditional patterns of thought and behavior. Jaspers mentioned the Pre-­Socratic philosophers, the prophets of Israel, Zarathustra, the Buddha, and Confucius. Since the 1970s, various studies have picked up the concept of axial age, analyzing its

19  “Je ne jure ni ne jurerai fdélité à l’Empereur,” wrote Anquetil in his resignation letter. Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-­Duperron, 122–123, fully quotes Anquetil’s remarkable Declaration. De Sacy, who like Anquetil was born into a Jansenist family, would become the executor of Anquetil’s will. 20 Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-­Duperron, 129. Introduction to Oupnek’hat. 21  Ibid., 49–50. On Anquetil as representative of the Enlightenment, see Siep Stuurman, “Cosmopolitan Egalitarianism in the Enlightenment: Anquetil-­ Duperron on India and America,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (2007), 255–278; cf. Anthony Pagden, Te Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 203–204. 22  Dieter Metzler, “A. H. Anquetil-­Duperron (1731–1805) und das Konzept der Achsenzeit” in his Achaemenid History VIII, Trough Travellers’ Eyes (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 123–133. 23  Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1949).

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

92  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism diferent aspects and defning its parameters.24 Tis idea, however, has hardly achieved scholarly consensus. Jan Assmann, who expressed scepticism about the heuristic value of Jaspers’s concept, studied the trajectory of the idea of an axial age among nineteenth-­century scholars such as the Sinologist Jean-­Pierre Abel-­Rémusat (1788–1832), Ernst von Lassaulx (in 1865), and Victor von Strauss (in 1870).25 Anquetil, it seems, was the frst to express this idea (although without making explicit reference to an “axial age”). Anquetil refers to the remarkable synchrony of leading fgures in ancient societies in a single text. In the long introduction to his translation of the Avesta, he claims that Zoroaster was born about the mid-­sixth century bce:

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Let us have a look at the state of the world at the beginning of that century, which should be perceived as a singular era of humanity. A revolution of sorts happened then in nature, which created in various areas of the world Geniuses who would set the pace to the Universe.26

Anquetil’s route through history includes Egypt and the laws of Pharaoh Menes, Greece in the times of Lycurgus and Solon, Rome before the Empire, dualist Persia, India and the emergence of Buddhism (“Fo’s dogmas”), China, divided in various kingdoms, and idolatrous Israel, where the wise were disdained and prophecy was about to end. Anquetil goes on: “It is in these times that three men appeared upon earth, totally changing its face.” Besides Zoroaster, Anquetil names Pherecydes of Syros, Pythagoras’s teacher, who had been taught by the Phoenicians, and Confucius, who ­re-­established moral purity in China and simplifed the cult of the Primal Being. Te nature of Confucian teaching, for him, is a return to the ­Ur-­tradition of perennial wisdom. Such a return is the very defnition of revolution. With Pythagoras, Greek philosophy teaches the immortality 24  On this topic, see two important volumes: Johann P. Arnason, Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock, eds, Axial Civilizations and World History, Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture, 4 (Leiden: Brill, 2005); Robert N. Bellah and Hans Joas, eds, Te Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2012); cf. Eckhart Otto, “Jenseit der Achsenzeit: Das Achsenzeit-­Teorem im Ausgang und mit Blick auf Max Webers Wirtschafsethik der Weltreligionen,” Zeitschrif für Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte 25 (2019), 55–92. 25  Jan Assmann, Achsenzeit: Eine Archäologie der Moderne (Munich: Beck, 2018). See, in particular, chapter  1 on Anquetil-­Duperron, 28–41 and notes, 297–298. See also Assmann, “Cultural Memory and the Axial Age,” in Bellah and Joas, Te Axial Age and Its Consequences, 366–407. 26 Anquetil, Zend Avesta, I, 2:6.

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis  93 of the soul, thus paving the way for the Gospel. Zoroaster, too, teaches the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body, explaining that:

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. . . the cause of moral good and evil through that of the upheaval in Nature. He does more: he perpetuates through an external religious cult the truths he is preaching to his Homeland. His laws are acknowledged from the Euphrates to the Indus; and the Brahman Tchengregatcha, together with his own Disciples, spreads them up to the far end of India. So is the Lawgiver whose actions I shall report.27

Anquetil also presents Zoroaster as having been the teacher of both Pythagoras and the Brahmans. According to him, it is in Babel that Pythagoras was initiated into Zoroaster’s mysteries and that Hindustani Brahmans learned philosophy. Zoroaster’s teaching, then, is the single source of all wisdom traditions, from Europe as well as from Asia. Zoroaster’s doctrine is thus pivotal to world history, as its impact is felt both in the East and the West. Intriguingly, such a vision of the world history of religions strongly resembles that of Mani. Indeed, in the Manichaean Kephalaia, Zarathustra, and Mani afer him, come from the world’s central areas, while Jesus preaches in the countries of the West, and the Buddha in those of the East.28 Anquetil thus ofered two diferent models, seemingly vacillating between them. Te frst afrms the chronological coincidence of apparently independent phenomena. Here, it is the idea of a revolution “in nature” which explains synchronicity. In the second model, synchronicity is explicated by causality: the teaching of Zoroaster is the direct origin of the other “geniuses” of humankind, both East and West. Te idea of synchronic revolutions represents a dramatic change in the question of origins. In the world hierarchy of cultures, “older” traditionally meant “truer.” By claiming that various world views in diferent civilizations go back to foundational fgures having appeared at the same time, Anquetil aimed to undermine the traditional criterion for ranking cultures.

27  On all this, ibid., 8. Tis Tchengreghatcha remains unidentifed to my Indologist colleague David Shulman (personal communication, 2018). Could Anquetil be referring here to the Indian ruler Chandragupta Maurya (321–297 bce)? 28  See Jean-­Daniel Dubois, “Mani, le prophète de l’humanité entière,” in Jean-­Christophe Attias, Pierre Gisel and Lucie Kaennel, eds, Variations sur une fgure juive (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2000), 195–212.

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

94  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism In his introduction, Anquetil drew the great lines of Zoroaster’s biography. He is “the Persians’ Lawgiver” and “a frst-­rank genius, an extraordinary man.” Te great qualities of this “sublime mind” do not prevent him from sometimes acting as an impostor, in order to better propagate his religion—even through persecution. Zoroaster, indeed, must contest with other sects in Iran, and it is under these conditions that he fashions the rituals and dogmas of his own religion. Tese dogmas, Anquetil added, “will look more interesting if they seem to belong to a very ancient Law.”29 Notably, Anquetil referred explicitly to world revolution. In a letter to a friend from his seminary days, written in 1762, upon his return from India, he had already spoken of revolutions, in the plural:

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Dealing in depth with the history of ancient peoples, combining the revolutions of both countries and languages, visiting undiscovered lands, in which art retains the nature of primal times: perhaps you vaguely remember, lamenting my follies, that these topics always caught my attention.30

Tis sentence encapsulates, in nuce, Anquetil’s entire ethnological and philological program: his special interest in ancient history, in the languages and peoples still unknown to Europeans and also in “combining the ­revolutions”; that is, using the comparative method in order to fully conceive a universal history. Te idea of revolution was fashionable in the Enlightenment. Tus, d’Alembert mentions, in his “Preliminary address” to the Encyclopédie, “one of those revolutions which give the earth a new face” in order to emerge from barbarism.31 Here, the term “revolution” is to be understood in its etymological sense: a return of things to their departure point, to their origin. Rousseau’s vision of an original justice and its degeneration in history is emblematic of the times. A similar pattern characterizes religion, where original monotheism eventually crumbled, giving birth to idolatry. For Anquetil, the spiritual revolution of the sixth century bce permitted the rejuvenation of religious conceptions and their return to their original clarity. What is Asia’s place in this scheme? According to Anquetil, “the largest part of Asia ofers an entirely new spectacle.” Te continent is “an 29 Anquetil, Zend Avesta II, 1, 6.80. 30  For the text of this letter, see Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-­Duperron, 18. 31 D’Alembert, “Discours préliminaire,” in Frédéric Lichtenberger, ed., Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, Vol. I (Paris: Sanchez and Fischbacher, 1877), XX. I quote according to the text online, in the ARTFL project of the University of Chicago.

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis  95 uncultivated land, that we, Europeans, neglect, although this is where humanity stems from.”32 From his perspective as an Orientalist, the intellectual tradition of the Renaissance remained rather meagre. According to “the presumptuous science of the Europeans,” as we fnd it, for instance, in Bossuet’s Universal History, little is essential, or of real interest outside the Greco-­Roman and Biblical traditions. For Anquetil, as he remarked in the Preface to his Zend Avesta, the history of the Jews, like that of the Greeks, the Romans, and the Europeans, is already deciphered, and one now needs to look elsewhere.33 For Anquetil, a primeval universal religion existed before the Law was revealed to Moses on Sinai. Te “revolution of sorts” triggered by Zoroaster, Pythagoras, and Confucius represents a return to the roots of humankind. Alongside the Avesta, the frst goal of his expedition, Anquetil thus hoped to translate also Vedas, that other representative of the true primeval religion of humanity. Anquetil continued:

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I have discovered a rivulet, Zoroaster’s manuscript, and three other books, almost as old, written in the same language. I shall search for the Wedes (i.e., the Vedas), of which I hope to provide a translation. But why shouldn’t one send a scholar to Siam, another one to Bali, another one to Ceylon . . . yet another one to Tartary, to the Lamas, and another one to the mountains of America. As to me, I will visit them all in their missions.34

Anquetil refers here to his dream, since his return to Paris, of creating a corps of “travelling scholars,” in an Academy endowed with a truly universal vocation, whose members would study the languages, literatures, and mores of all civilizations. As a good philologist, Anquetil insists upon the crucial importance of learning Oriental languages. Europeans travelling East without learning the languages of the peoples they call on remain unable to read their sacred writings in the original text, thus making serious mistakes when interpreting their doctrines. As they do not know “the true theological system of the Indians,” for instance, they believe them to be polytheists.35 Before they undertake their mission, Anquetil’s “travelling scholars” should know “Hebrew and a few modern languages . . .”36

32 Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-­Duperron, 61. 33 Anquetil, Zend Avesta, I, X. 34  Text from 1759, quoted in Schwab, Vie d’Anquetil-­Duperron, 61. 35 Anquetil, Législation orientale, V. 36 Anquetil, Zend Avesta, I, XII.

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

96  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism On various occasions, Anquetil outlined his scientifc method—which was that of an anthropologist as well as of a philologist (or, more precisely, in his words, a philologist “on the ground”). In the Preface to his Zend Avesta (1771), he commented that he frst thought of an Academy of “travelling scholars” in Surat, in 1760, adding that one needs: . . . to seek the original texts, to learn the languages in which they were written, to date them, to search for variant readings and for inscriptions (on stone or on any other support) referring to them, and for the peoples whose Law they were.37

Te “travelling scholar” is thus also an ethnologist and a historian, a person who pays proper heed to everything. Like Anquetil himself, such a scholar takes note of every feature in order to depict the reality he observes: “Academicians will write grammars and dictionaries of the languages attributed to them. Tis history will always refer to what we call ancient history.” Anquetil concludes: “Te historian must be careful to note everything. Each religion has its hidden points.”38 He is under no illusion, however, that such an Academy will ever be established:

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Vain hope, chimerical project! My Academy will never exist . . . and men, used to their errors or frightened by the work needed for such research, feed themselves with systems, with phantasy portrayals, and will keep studying everything, knowing everything, except man.39

Even in foreign lands, a scholar never works entirely alone. Anquetil’s letters reveal how, in his insatiable curiosity, he contacted European scholars (in particular some Jesuit missionaries in India) as well as Indian literati in order to better understand languages, cultures, and peoples. For instance, his long correspondence (from 1768 to 1773) with Father Coeurdoux, a Jesuit from Pondichéry, deals with the anteriority of the Avesta and the Vedas to the Bible, parallels between the Bible and Indian mythology, similarities between Christ and Krishna, and intertwined symbols from various religions.40 He wanted to know about everything and everyone. Among the 37  Ibid., IX. 38  Ibid., XIV. 39  Ibid., XVI. 40  Anquetil Duperron, “Correspondance avec le Père Coeurdoux, Jésuite, de Pondichéry,” Manuscrits Anquetil Duperron, cote NAF 8871, Vol. 15 (Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale de France, 1768–1773). On the capital importance of Coeurdoux’s work in the beginnings of modern Indology, see Sylvia Murr, L’Inde philosophique entre Bossuet et Voltaire. Vol. I: Mœurs

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis  97

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Parsees, in particular, he took meticulous notes, observed their rituals, and even insisted on taking part in the fre ritual reserved for the members of the community.41 In Kerala, he displayed a special interest in Christian and Jewish communities. In 1757–1758, he stayed in Cochin with Elikh, a Jewish trader, son of Rabbi Ezekiel. Elikh showed him a chest in which various Hebrew books, printed in Europe, were kept. Anquetil copied ancient Tamil inscriptions onto copper tablets, which specify royal privileges granted to Jews centuries ago, and which were still valid. He also mentioned the existence of Judeo-­Tamil texts (Tamil texts written in Hebrew characters), as well as bilingual prayer books, which include literal translations of the Hebrew hymns.42 In Te Birth of Orientalism, Urs App perceives Anquetil as the heir to the tradition of philosophia perennis inherited from early modern times, a tradition upon which, as he cogently argues, modern Orientalism is established, starting with the Enlightenment and Romanticism.43 Indeed, the frst early modern histories of philosopy corroborate App’s argument.44 Even by 1842, Louis Dussieux had raised the question of the continuity of Orientalist

et coutumes des indiens ((1777): un inédit du Père G.-L. Coeurdoux, S. J.; Vol. II: L’indologie du Père Coeurdoux: Stratégies, Apologétique et scientifcité (Paris: Publications de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême-­Orient 146, 1987) . On the writings of Coeurdoux published by Anquetil and the description of their correspondence, see Vol. II, 28–30. I should like to thank Charles Malamoud for having called my attention on this book. Coeurdoux, the author of a Tamil– French–Sanskrit dictionary, was the frst to point out, before Sir William Jones, the linguistic similarities between Sanskrit and most European languages, in a Mémoire sent in 1767 to the Académie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres. For Max Müller, Coeurdoux was the father of comparative philology. On the sustained intellectual exchange between Anquetil and Coeurdoux, see Jacques Anquetil, Anquetil-­Duperron, Premier orientaliste français, 66–75. 41 In Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (London: Palgrave, 2001), Mohamad Tavakoli-­Targhi studies the ethnological curiosity of early modern European travelers to the Orient. 42 Among Kerala Jews, a Judeo-­ Malayalam literature is well attested. Ophira Gamliel (University of Edinburgh) suggested, in a personal communication (March 15, 2018), that Anquetil’s reference may well be to Judeo-­Malayalam texts. She added that even Kerala Jews can still refer to Malayalam as to Tamil. Malayalam as a name for the language of West Coast South India was coined by Hermann Gundert in the nineteenth century. 43 App, Te Birth of Orientalism, 363–439. 44 Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1655–1662) and Jacob Brucker’s Historia Critica Philosophiae (1742–1757) represent leading examples of such histories of philosophy. Tese works, like others, start with lengthy discussions of “barbarian philosophy.” App further refers to the Patristic theory of a pristine monotheism, from the frst days of humankind, having preceded the revelation of the Law on Sinai. It is later that this original monotheism degenerated into idolatry, before being reinstated by the Christian tradition; cf. Stroumsa, A New Science, 157, note 15. For a remarkable study of this tradition of history of philosophy in early modern England, see Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science.

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98  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism philology.45 Eugène Burnouf recommended Dussieux’s study to the historian Michelet as the best work on the topic. According to Dussieux, Oriental philology, in its various branches, marks a new beginning, afrming its independence from the Hebraist and Arabist tradition of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It might appear that, today, App ofers an opposing thesis to that proposed by Dussieux, the former insisting on continuity in the presuppositions of modern Orientalist philology since the Renaissance and the latter underscoring the novelty of its epistemological foundations. Tere is more than meets the eye, however, on this point: a new methodology does not necessarily imply giving up on meta-­philological traditions about the very foundations of philology. Indeed, the idea of an Oriental wisdom (or of Oriental wisdoms), of a philosophia perennis of sorts coming from the wise men of Eastern nations, but in agreement with the best in the Western philosophical tradition, can already be found in late antiquity. Such an idea is attested both in the writings of Hellenic philosophers such as Plotinus and Philostratus of Athens, and in those of the Church Fathers, as early as the second century with Clement of Alexandria. In these texts, the Indian brachmanoi are the most renowned representatives of barbarian wisdom.46 Anquetil, at once a modern and an ancient, as it were, inherits both these traditions: his embrace of Oriental philology and its new methods retrieves the age-­old tradition about the wisdom, or the wisdoms, coming from the East. Te philosophers’ traditional humanism was limited to Greco-­Roman culture and the Judeo-­Christian tradition. Anquetil opposed to this his perception of a global humanism, whose kernel is found in the great religious texts of Asia, which are ofen earlier than the Bible, and always independent of it. Tis global humanism is also a theological posture. One chapter of an unpublished manuscript of Anquetil, “Te Teologian,” deals with the universalism expected from a true Christian theologian.47 App argues that Anquetil had already planned his trip to India by the end of 1753, at least eighteen months before his departure and prior to viewing pages of the Avesta. At the time, the Ezour Vedam was all the rage in Europe. As we now know, this text, purportedly translated from Sanskrit, was a fake, composed in French by Jesuit missionaries. In this work, universal foods,

45 Dussieux, Essai sur l’histoire de l’érudition orientale. 46  See Stroumsa, Te Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity, 97–107 and notes. 47 App, Te Birth of Orientalism, 363–364.

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Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis  99 mentioned at least in four passages, entailed fresh starts for humankind.48 In actuality, App concludes, Anquetil was afer the Vedas rather than the Avesta.49 Yet, the desire to discover the authentic Vedic original texts could easily have been coupled with a desire to seek other foundational texts of Oriental religions. Nothing in Anquetil’s writings casts doubt on the sincerity of his eforts to approach the Parsee community and its wise men. Among all Indian texts, Anquetil would eventually translate the Upanishads, rather than the Vedas, and as in the case of the Zend Avesta, it is from a Persian version that he would do it.50 Te young Anquetil had already heard about the famous Vedas in Europe. Tis could certainly have triggered his wish to depart for India. Such a desire might well have concretized at the moment he glimpsed the Avesta pages. Anquetil’s motivation may well have been multidetermined. Te idea of an “Ur-­monotheism” to be found among some of the most ancient civilizations, in particular in Asia, goes back to antiquity, and App rightly refers to Eusebius of Caesarea.51 Te young Anquetil would probably have read the Evangelical Preparation and the Evangelical Demonstration in the Jansenist seminary he attended. Another source than Eusebius, however, is possible. As noted above, Tomas Hyde was Anquetil’s great precursor in the study of Zoroastrianism. Now, Hyde was a devoted reader of Maimonides (1135–1204). He even ofered to prepare a critical edition of the Guide of the Perplexed, in the original Judeo-­Arabic, on the basis of manuscripts and fragments in the Bodleian Library. Te press of Oxford University, however, was unwilling to pay Hyde for his work and rejected his proposal. In Hyde’s magisterial book on Zoroastrianism, the most important source on the universal religion of the Urzeit was Maimonides. Te capital importance of Maimonides (in particular of his Guide of the Perplexed) for early modern intellectual history is well known. Te identifcation of the Noachide laws with natural law made by John Selden, and established upon his reading of Maimonides, lef a deep impact, up to 48  On Voltaire and the Ezour Vedam, see App, Te Birth of Orientalism, chapter 1, 15–76 and notes, esp. 52. 49 App, Te Birth of Orientalism, 406. 50 In 1657, the Mughal prince Dara Shukoh fnished his Persian translation of the Upanishads (as Sirr-­e-­Akbar, “the greatest Secret”), a translation intended to open their study to Muslims. Tavakoli-­Targhi, Refashioning Iran, 20–22, shows that Anquetil’s translations had been made possible thanks to the translations of Sanskrit sacred texts ordered by Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605). 51  App refers to Jörg Ulrich, Euseb von Caesarea und die Juden: Studien zur Rolle der Juden in der Teologie des Eusebios von Caesarea, Patristische Texte und Studien, 49 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), see especially 57–73.

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100  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Herder and the Enlightenment.52 In his De legibus ritualibus Hebraeorum (1684), the Hebraist John Spencer (1630–1685) applied Maimonides’s conception of the Sabeans.53 For Maimonides, the Sabeans were a religious community that in Abraham’s time was spread over the whole ecumene. Te last Sabeans, wrote Maimonides, could still be found in his days, from the far North, among the Turks, to the far South, among the Indians, and included the Zoroastrians. Arab historiographers such as al-­Masʿūdī and ­al-­Shahrastānī also knew of the Sabeans, but only with Maimonides did they become a generic term, integrated within the biblical historia sacra.54 Trough Hyde, in particular, Anquetil was heir to such medieval traditions on the Sabeans—which, being a historian of a new kind, he transformed. While most Enlightenment philosophers remained faithful to the inheritance of the Western Christian tradition, Anquetil revolutionized historiography—and in particular religious historiography—by adding the Orient. But he did more than return to medieval traditions on the Sabeans or to Patristic traditions on the true religion of the Urzeit. As an enlightened intellectual who knew that some Oriental wisdoms predate the Hebrew Bible, he historicized these traditions. Tis is the context of his idea of a worldwide revolution having allowed, in the middle of the frst millennium bce, a return to the primitive purity of human origins. He does not develop this idea, nor does he explain it. But he knows that it is anchored in the unity of the human race, refecting a profound equality between cultures. His contemporaries, however, could not partake of these concepts as they remained unwilling to cross the boundaries of traditional Western culture. It is a new humanism, then, that Anquetil incarnated, an Orientalist humanism, at once deeply religious and truly universalist. Tis humanism is carried by the new Orientalism, which alone, according to its proponents, could open the gates to the recently discovered cultures of the world, including the most ancient and exotic, and of their foundations in the universal religion of the Urzeit. In the modern world, only a truly ecumenical Christianity can ofer access to this universal religion, to this pure cult of the Supreme Being. Te time of the Enlightenment was also that of the colonial conquests, predicated as they were an intense perception of superiority, on the part of Europeans, over the other cultures of the world. Tis sense of 52  In particular in Herder’s Schrifen zum Altes Testament; cf. Stroumsa, A New Science, 111. 53  On Spencer and his book, see Stroumsa, A New Science, 95–100. 54  Moses Maimonides, Guide of the Perpexed 3, 29; Shlomo Pines, transl. (Chicago, London: Chicago University Press, 1963), 515. See Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World, chapter 4, 84–124, esp. 90–91.

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Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis  101 cultural superiority, coupled with colonial conquests, was anathema to Anquetil, and the idea of a universal revolution, through all cultures, was born of a revolt against the horror of the violence inficted by Europe on other continents. Unsurprisingly, it was at the end of the Second World War that the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, disgusted by the violence perpetrated by “the people of poets and thinkers” (das Volk der Dichter und Denker), also returned to the idea of an Achsenzeit. One ofen tends to see in this idea an explicit rejection not only of a Europe-­centric vision of the intellectual and spiritual history of humanity, but also of a Christian-­centric vision of this history.55 But such rejection, as we have seen here, is far from obvious. As the case of Anquetil demonstrates, by the end of the eighteenth century, Oriental philosophy was at the forefront of international scholarship in France, England, and Germany. Orientalists studied languages and literatures that were unfamiliar to Europeans, and many among them considered themselves cultural ambassadors, arguing for tolerance alongside cultural and religious recognition. Tey insisted on examining foreign cultures with the same tools they used for the study of Christianity. In that sense, at least, disregarding their own religious beliefs, they stood on the front lines of intellectual secularization. For them, indeed, Orientalism was a form of humanism. In Raymond Schwab’s words, “with the foundation of Orientalist studies, a wholly new meaning of the word man was born.”56 We shall now turn our gaze to the new epistemology then taking root in France during the frst half of the nineteenth century. Tis epistemology, heir of the turn to the Orient refected in Anquetil’s case, also refected major transfers of knowledge between Germany and France.

A New Epistemology In the early nineteenth century, the religious maps of France and Germany had rather distinct contours. In 1685, the Edict of Fontainebleau had

55  See, for instance, Björn Wittrock, “A Contemporary Classic: Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt’s Research Program in Its Context,” in Benjamin  Z.  Kedar, Ilana Friedrich Silver, and Adam Klin-­Oron, eds, Dynamics of Continuity, Patterns of Change: Between World History and Comparative Historical Sociology (Jerusalem: Te Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Te Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 2017), 11–45, in particular 26. 56  Cf. Schwab, La Renaissance orientale, 12: “Avec la foundation des orientalismes, a commencé une toute nouvelle acceptation du mot homme.”

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102  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism revoked the Nantes Edict of Toleration (1598), and the French population had been essentially Catholic ever since. Like Jews, the Calvinists, or Huguenots, were a tiny minority in France.57 At the same time, the revolutionary, anti-­ecclesiastical spirit was well entrenched in French society, which to a great extent remained polarized throughout the century on the question of the relationship between the Catholic Church and the state. Te intellectual weakness of the faculties of theology meant that the impact of the Catholic Church on intellectual life, moreover, expressed itself quite differently from that of the Lutheran Church in Protestant theological faculties in the German states, where each university had its own religious favor.58 Te development of religious studies in nineteenth-­century France constitutes a complex and fascinating episode which remains understudied in the broader context of the history of religious studies.59 Te ground for the dramatic changes that took place in the fnal three decades of the century had been prepared by the new epistemology that emerged during the frst half of the century, an epistemology informed by Enlightenment Orientalism. It is from the spirit of Orientalism that the study of religion was born in France, where theology was a much less salient force than it was in German universities. Unlike in the German lands, in France the new approach did not refect a synergy between philosophy and theology. Te French conception of Oriental studies goes back to the Enlightenment, and to the new perspectives ofered by the discovery of cultures, religions, and languages totally disconnected from the history of European Christianity. Te pioneering fgure from the days of the revolution, Count Volney (ofen referred to as “l’idéologue Volney”), who wrote a long exposition on Islam,60 is here exemplary, as is the revolutionary polymath Charles Dupuis, with the twelve volumes of his massive comparative study of cosmologies and religions, and the translator of the Avesta and the Upanishads, Anquetil Duperron, whom we just met. Oriental studies, which had started in earnest before the end of the eighteenth century, with the “discovery” of Sanskrit by William Jones, was being launched with panache in Paris in the early nineteenth century. In 1822, the Société Asiatique was founded by a number of towering 57  It is only in 1787 that the Edict of Versailles ofcially recognized freedom of religious practice to Calvinists, Lutherans, and Jews. Te Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen would enact full religious freedom for all in 1789. 58 In the nineteenth century, in Germany as elsewhere, the Catholic hierarchy did not authorize biblical criticism. 59  François Laplanche, ed., Les sciences religieuses: Le XIXe siècle, 1800–1914 (= Dictionnaire du monde religieux dans la France contemporaine) (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996) is very useful here. 60  On Volney, see App, Te Birth of Orientalism, 440–480.

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scholars, such as Silvestre de Sacy, its frst president,61 and Jean-­Pierre Abel-­ ­ Rémusat (1788–1832), its secretary.62 Jean-­ Francois Champollion, who had deciphered the hieroglyphs,63 and Eugène Burnouf also counted among its frst members.64 Te impulse given by Burnouf, who would become Renan’s mentor, to the history of religions in France cannot be overstated.65 A hub of Oriental studies in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Paris was a beacon for the brightest, who were focking from various corners of Europe. Students from Germany, in particular, a signifcant number among them Jews, came to learn at the feet of the pre-­eminent scholars of the day. Not a few German intellectuals, moreover, feeing autocracy and political repression at home, settled then in Paris. Intellectual transfers, of course, are ofen bidirectional. It is through the introduction of idealist philosophy that German thought made a real mark in France. “Germany is the great lab of Oriental studies;”66 James Darmesteter’s celebrated characterization of Germany as the main locus of European Orientalism, which comes at a later date, refects the French 61  De Sacy was the professor of Persian at the Collège de France, an institution of which he became the Administrateur. He was also Professor of Arabic at the École des Langues Orientales. See further Annick Fenet, “Silvestre de Sacy, premier président de la Société Asiatique (1822–1829 et 1832–1834),” in Michel Espagne, Nora Laf, and Pascale Rabault-­ Feuerhahn, eds, Silvestre de Sacy: le projet européen d’une science orientaliste (Paris: Cerf, 2015), 155–189. On the history of the École des Langues Orientales, see Pierre Labrousse, ed., Langues O’, 1795–1995: Deux siècles d’histoire de l’École des Langues Orientales (Paris: Hervas, 1995). 62  On Abel-­Rémusat, see Markus Messling, Gebeugter Geist: Rassismus und Erkenntnis in der modernen europäischen Philologie (Göttingen: Wallerstein, 2016), 216–189. 63 On Champollion, see Markus Messling, Champollions Hieroglyphen: Philologie und Weltaneignung (Berlin: Kadmos, 2012). 64 On Burnouf, see Katia Bufetrille and Donald  S.  Lopez, Jr, “Introduction to the Translation,” in Eugène Burnouf, Introduction to the History of Indian Buddhism (Chicago, IL and London: Chicago University Press, 2010), 1–31. On the study of Buddhism in the nineteenth century, see Roger-­Pol Droit, Le culte du néant: les philosophes et le Bouddha (Paris: Seuil, 1997). From 1832 to 1852, Burnouf held the Chair of Sanskrit language and literature at the Collège de France. On Sanskrit studies in France in the frst half of the nineteenth century, see Jérome Petit, Le sanctuaire dévoilé: Antoine-­Léonard Chézy et les débuts des études sanskrites en France, 1800–1850 (Paris: Geuthner, 2019) (non vidi). 65  See, for instance, Laplanche, ed., Les sciences religieuses, Introduction, V; cf. François Laplanche, La Bible en France entre mythe et critique (XVIe–XIXe siècle) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 150–152. 66  “L’Allemagne est le grand laboratoire des études orientales.” James Darmesteter, Essais orientaux (Paris: A. Lévy, 1883), 4. Te book is dedicated to Renan, “maître des études orientales en France.” On Darmesteter and his intellectual milieu, see for instance Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1997), 65–67. Te young Darmesteter had been encouraged by Renan and read a moving obituary of Renan at Te Société Asiatique. See James Darmesteter, Notice sur la vie et l’oeuvre de Renan ([Extrait du Journal Asiatique] Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1893). Rather oddly, Strenski calls Darmesteter “un Renan juif ” in his Teology and the First Teory of Sacrifce (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2003), 119.

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104  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism intellectual curiosity about, or even jealousy of, the novel patterns of German universities. Tese patterns were following a model devised by Wilhelm von Humboldt for combining teaching and research at the university established in Berlin in 1810, at a time when the Sorbonne was still locked in frozen traditions. Darmesteter (1849–1894) was following here in the footsteps of his mentor Renan, who had learned from German Protestant theologians the critical approach to the Bible.67 Germany had been a “great lab” since the beginning of the century. In the frst half of the century, several French philosophers and scholars had made the pilgrimage there. Te transmission of knowledge was facilitated by the philosopher Victor Cousin (1792–1867). Te young Cousin, who would become a leading intellectual fgure in France, had met Hegel in Heidelberg in 1817, and Schelling in Munich the following year. In the second half of the century, growing numbers of French scholars and scientists would travel to Germany in order to observe in situ the modern methods of scientifc and scholarly investigation of German universities, and apply at home what they learned. Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) was a prominent public fgure who, since the French Revolution, had straddled the worlds of politics and culture. Born in Lausanne to a Huguenot family, he studied in Nuremberg as a young man, also spending time in Edinburgh. In his fnal years, he worked on a major opus on religion and its history, of which the ffh and fnal volume would be published posthumously. Despite its encompassing title, De la religion focuses on polytheism, both ancient and modern (the religions of the “savages”), and deals with monotheism only indirectly.68 Te book, rooted in both the intellectual tradition of the French Enlightenment (Montesquieu’s L’esprit des lois forms its avowed model) and German idealism (in 1803, in Weimar, Constant had met Schiller, Goethe, Wieland, and Herder), ofers a philosophical history of religion, and, like Schleiermacher, locates feeling at the core of religion. Constant explicitly acknowledged the infuence of Laftau and de Brosses, as well as of Herder and Creuzer.69 Seeking to construct a taxonomy of polytheistic religions, he insisted on the radical diference between sacerdotal religions, of which priests are an

67  See Chapter 2 and chapters 5 and 6 in this volume. 68  See the new edition: Benjamin Constant, De la religion, considérée dans sa source, ses formes et ses développements, texte intégral présenté par Tzvetan Todorov et Etienne Hofmann (Paris, Arles: Actes Sud, 1999). 69  Georg Friedrich Creuzer (1771–1858), a classicist from Marburg and Heidelberg, had published his highly infuential Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen in 1810–1812.

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Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis  105 essential characteristic, and non-­sacerdotal religions, which he referred to as “free.” Whenever they can, priests play the role of an intermediary between humans and the divine, preventing the free development of religious feelings. Moreover, priests tend to interfere with the political life of their societies, seeking to render religion “useful” but thus hampering again the free development of religious identities. Sacerdotal religions thus are at the root of evil in history—an attitude echoing Enlightenment views of religious imposture, although Constant showed no special interest in either Judaism or Islam. Inscribing himself in the Teistic tradition, Constant perceived the decline of polytheism accompanying human progress, which he viewed in the framework of Protestantism, the most tolerant form of Christianity. He rejected the two major attempts from the age of the Revolution, that of Dupuis and that of Volney, to present comprehensive models of the world history of religion. Both were followers of Condillac’s epistemology, for whom religion is born from external sensations, as well as advocates of the Christ’s myth (i.e. rejecting the historical existence of Jesus). Rather than seeking a single principle operating in all civilizations, Constant preferred to compare religious systems in their historical contexts. He showed a predilection for sacrifce, understood as a contract between man and the divinity, and the dialectics of religious feeling and ritual, of the personal and collective dimensions of religion. We will return to the crucial role of sacrifce in later scholarship.70 Te purifcation of this feeling is equivalent to spiritual progress. Constant’s impressive book, which was admired by the historian Jules Michelet, introduced a liberal approach to the history of religions, and announced modern sociological approaches such as Durkheim’s. It was soon forgotten, however, since it did not ft with the ferce battle that raged throughout the nineteenth century between partisans and opponents of the Catholic Church and its active presence in French society.71 Constant’s foreign origins, coupled with his international education, permitted him to propose an original synthesis, but at the same time prevented him from leaving a real impact on the development of French scholarship. Te years starting with the end of Napoleon’s empire and the 1848 revolution (the Restoration, followed by the July Monarchy) saw intense 70  On sacrifce, see, for instance, Constant, De la religion, II. 2, 107: “L’idée du sacrifce est inséparable de toute religion”; cf. Chapters 9 and 10 in this volume. 71 Tis argument is developed by Todorov his introduction to Constant, De la religion, 9–19. See further René Maunier, “Benjamin Constant, historien des sociétés et des religions,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 102 (1931), 93–113.

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106  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism intellectual activity for Oriental and religious studies. Michel Despland, in particular, has highlighted the importance of the July Monarchy (1830–1848) for the development of religious studies in France, underlying the true epistemological shif happening then.72 Following the establishment in 1795 of a school for Oriental languages, the Société Asiatique was founded, as mentioned above, in 1822. Its frst president, Silvestre de Sacy, studied Semitic languages and taught mainly Arabic and Persian to students coming from all over Europe, but also worked on Pahlevi inscriptions. In 1806, he was elected to the Chair of Persian at the Collège de France. Te two volumes of his unfnished Exposé de la religion des Druzes (1838) are his main contribution to the study of religion.73 In its early years, the Société Asiatique counted fgures such as Jean-­Pierre Abel Rémusat, who since 1814 had taught Chinese at the Collège de France, and Eugène Burnouf, who held the Chair of Sanskrit at the same institution, but had also deciphered Avestan manuscripts brought back from India by Anquetil Duperron. Febrile Parisian activity in Oriental studies forms the background of Edgar Quinet’s contribution to the study of religions. Quinet (1803–1875), a highly versatile and prolifc French intellectual, was at once a historian, a philosopher, and a poet. Fascinated by German Romantic philosophy, the young Quinet learned German, and translated Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. In Heidelberg, where he spent some time, he met Creuzer, whose Symbolik he admired. While he was under the strong infuence of German scholarship, Quinet deemed the latter incapable of drawing from its philological work all the consequences on the social and historical development of peoples and considered Germany to be a Christian East of sorts, an Asia within Europe. As in Asia, pantheism grew in Germany. More precisely, the Germans transformed Asian pantheism, and this, in turn, preserved them from atheism. Tis pantheism is the obverse of what may be called the “Oriental renaissance.”74 In a sense, Quinet symbolizes the reconciliation between the eighteenth and the

72 Despland, L’émergence des sciences de la religion, 11. For Despland, the new paradigm for the study of religion inserts it into the broader context of the study of humanity as a whole (ibid., 41). 73  On Silvestre de Sacy’s oeuvre and its impact, see Espagne, Laf, and Rabault-­Feuerhahn, eds, Silvestre de Sacy. 74 Quinet, Du génie des religions, 65–74. See Madeleine David, “Edgar Quinet (1803–1875) et l’histoire des religions,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 144 (1953), 151–171. For an older introduction to Quinet, see Charles-­Louis Chassin, Edgar Quinet: sa vie et son oeuvre (Paris: Pagnerre, 1859).

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Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis  107 nineteenth centuries.75 Upon his return to Paris, he was present at Benjamin Constant’s funeral. In 1841, he was appointed to the Collège de France, to a Chair of Southern European Languages and Literatures, only to be fred in 1852 for his ferce anti-­clerical and republican convictions, as well as for his support of Constant’s theory about the determining power of religion in society. He went into voluntary exile in Brussels, returning only in 1870. From his youth, Quinet had displayed a deep interest in religion and in the progress of humanity. His frst publication, Les tablettes du juif errant (1823) dealt with the idea of progress. In his early work on religion, De l’origine des dieux (1828), he sought to formulate a global theory of religion, arguing for the chronological primacy of pantheism, which was only later followed by monotheism and polytheism. In 1838, he composed, in the Revue des deux mondes, a robust reply to David Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu. In later years, Quinet’s interest in religious history was expressed in his 1857 study on the Jesuits and Ultra-­Montanism. Tis work, which coincided with a central interest in the public sphere, would soon be translated into English, German, Italian, and Dutch. In 1842, Quinet published Du génie des religions, a work of haute vulgarisation which would have an immediate and major impact on intellectual history.76 Much more than a synthesis of the main results of Orientalist research in the feld of religion, the book represents a fresh vision of the role of religions in world history. Faithful to his frst teacher, Herder, Quinet saw in the history of religions the key to a new alliance between art, philosophy, and religion. In true Saint-­Simonian fashion, he aimed to uncover “the elements of a new faith” (3), and the “itinerary of the peoples to God” (5). For Quinet—as well as for many of his contemporaries—Hebrews and Hellenes were the two peoples of Western antiquity that would have the most powerful and sustained impact on Western religious history. But, again in agreement with Herder and the Zeitgeist, Quinet perceived the East as the core and origin of religious history. He thus added India to the equation. For him, the Indians and the Iranians, “those twin peoples,” are the two oldest peoples in history (34). All religion was born in Asia; only later, when the original sources had dried up, did religion move to Europe (19). Hence, the 75  See David, “Edgar Quinet,” 152. 76  Its title obviously “responds” to Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme, a book frst published in 1802. I quote according to the text published in Quinet’s Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Pagnerre, 1857; reprinted London: Forgotten Books, 2018). See the book’s review by A. Lèbre, Revue des Deux Mondes 30 (1842), 201–228, which sketches the intellectual background of Quinet’s views.

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108  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Vedas and the Bible can be compared to one another (120), something that the Enlightenment thinkers had eagerly sought to establish, as they were looking in the East for a rival society to the Hebrews (51). Overall, Du génie des religions provided a trajectory of the spirit in world history, the spiritual genesis and evolution of humanity, or, in his words, “the annals of the Eternal incarnated in time” (14). It is only within such a global frame that one would be able to assess the function and value of each religious system, from that of India to Christianity, and from Christianity to the new faith of the future. Quinet sets forth his design in the very frst sentence of the book: “to draw civil society from religious institutions, this is the question I am seeking to solve.”77 In his view, religion has always explained politics throughout history, rather than the other way around. Religion “is the ideal reigning upon any civilization” (99). Quinet’s point was that religion, which had been in the past (certainly during the Enlightenment) an explanandum, had now become an explanans.78 For Quinet, this drastic shif in the epistemic status of religion was an outgrowth of the dramatic boost in the study of Asian languages. As mentioned above in this chapter, it is in this book that he coined the expression “la Renaissance orientale.” By this, he meant that the contemporary encounter with the languages and literatures of Asia was comparable to the discovery of classical literatures at the time of the European Renaissance. Modern Orientalism and, in particular, the history of religion, represented the rediscovery of what Quinet called “the Oriental tradition” (47). In the Orient, this Oriental tradition is a religious revelation, becoming “tradition” in Europe: “Asia has the prophets, Europe has the doctors” (47). Quinet’s evocative expression itself, the Oriental renaissance, would have a long, signifcant Nachleben. As noted, Raymond Schwab adopted it a century later as the title of his own magisterial book on the seduction exerted by the East (and in particular by India) across Europe in the long nineteenth century.79 Like Herder, Quinet considered the Orient as essentially one single entity (274), but also referred to three main human races, stemming from the three sons of Noah, Sem, Ham, and Japheth (33). Te Hamitic race having 77  “Déduire la société civile de l’institution religieuse, c’est la question que je cherche à résoudre.” Quinet, Du génie des religions, 1. 78 Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age, 112 and note 58, points out that this is how Walter Burkert described, in 1980, the transformation of the status of myth in the nineteenth century. 79 Schwab, La renaissance orientale.

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Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis  109 been relegated early on to Africa, it becomes bracketed, as it were, condemned to the backstage of world history. For all practical purposes, then, there remain the sons of Sem and those of Japheth. Te Japhetic race is itself divided into two main families, the Celts and the Germans, a duality representing the dual genius of the West (34). As to the sons of Sem, they lived “under the tent of Abraham and on the boats of Tyre: in the desert and on the sea.” It is this race “that carries Jehovah and Christ in its lap” (35). Quinet added that the migration of the Hebrews and that of the Hellenes were more or less simultaneous (39). Te Bible, that most Western of all Asian books (47), constitutes the link between Asia and Europe. Israel frst, then Christianity, would be the two covenants between the Orient and the Occident (49). Old Judea and mysterious Egypt are “the nuptial bed between East and West.” It is only by leaving the East, moving West to Europe, that Christianity was able to resist the spiritual attraction of Asia (17). Te East is indeed the cradle of religions. In particular, the Western part of Asia, “the great Arabian desert, [which is] almost insignifcant on the map, means almost everything in history . . . Te naked, incorruptible desert is the frst temple of the spirit” (16). As Quinet summarized: “Nomadic Islam brings with it everywhere the genius of the desert.”80 In Chapter 5, we will see how Renan repeated this idea in quite similar words (but without making any attribution to Quinet). Like Renan afer him, Quinet perceived the Jews as “an anachoretic people, living alone and alone carrying the covenant with the Invisible” (17). “Te true miracle in the history of the Hebrew people lies in the fact that though they were driven into slavery, their slavery was only one of the body, not of their spirit, which remained free” (181). “Trough Christ, the Hebrews would eventually give birth to the God of the Future” (39). With this birth, however, they would die. Here again, Renan, in his conclusion to the fnal volume of his Histoire d’Israël with the birth of Christ, seemed to be quoting Quinet, almost verbatim. In Islam, however, we can follow another transformation of the Hebrew God, which now becomes an abstract God with no chosen people. Islam “breaks as a remnant of idolatry, the national spirit within which God remained prisoner in Judea” (314). Tis chapter has dealt with Orientalist studies in France during the frst half of the nineteenth century and the deep impact they lef on the growing interest in the history of religions. Trough the emblematic fgures of

80  “L’Islamisme nomade porte partout avec lui le génie du désert.” Ibid., 17.

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110  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism

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Anquetil Duperron and Quinet, we were able to follow the complex, ­two-­sided transmission of knowledge between France and England on the one hand, and France and Germany on the other. During this period, monotheism was discussed, as we saw, in the context of the growing distinction between Aryans and Semites. Quinet’s vision of religious history as the development and eforescence of the divine spirit across peoples through history is resoundingly Hegelian. Te fliation of religions provides us with the elements of the new faith waiting to be born in modern Europe, and then to conquer the world. Here too, we are very close to Renan’s conception of the status and role of the history of religions within the human sciences, to which we shall presently turn.

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5

Semitic Monotheism Renan on Judaism and Islam

In L’avenir de la science, written in his youth as a reaction to the events of 1848, but published only in 1890, two years before his death, Ernest Renan wrote:

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Te comparative study of religions, when it will be fully established on the solid basis of criticism, will form the most beautiful chapter of the history of the human mind, between the history of mythologies and that of philosophies.1

As a young seminarist fresh from his native Tréguier, a fshermen’s village in Brittany, Renan became convinced that the scholarly study of the Bible refuted the Catholic interpretation of Scripture. His lost faith would form the fulcrum of his life’s work.2 A meteoric career brought him, at the early age of thirty-­seven, to the Chair of Hebrew at the Collège de France, then as now the acme of any academic career in France.3 Renan, however, was never satisfed with Semitic philology, or content with a life of pure scholarship. He authored major historical works, philosophical refections, autobiographical texts, and even literary pieces. Never quite entering the political arena, he ofen expressed himself in the public one. He soon became a leading personage in France, not only writing on a broad spectrum of 1  “L’étude comparée des religions, quand elle sera défnitivement établie sur la base solide de la critique, formera le plus beau chapitre de l’histoire de l’esprit humain, entre l’histoire des mythologies et l’histoire des philosophies.” Ernest Renan, L’avenir de la science, in Henriette Psichari, ed., Oeuvres complètes, Vol. III (Paris: Calmann-­Lévy, 1949), 945. 2  See Chapter 7, note 40. See further Laudyce Rétat, Religion et imagination religieuse: leurs formes et leurs rapports dans l’oeuvre d’Ernest Renan (Lille: Université de Lille III, 1979). 3  On Renan’s life and times, see Jean Balcou’s Ernest Renan: une biographie (Paris: Champion, 2017). See also Jean-­Pierre van Deth, Ernest Renan: simple chercheur de vérité (Paris: Fayard, 2012). See further Perrine Simon-­Nahum, “Renan passeur: De la science des religions à l’histoire des religions,” in Henry Laurens, ed., Ernest Renan: la science, la religion, la république, Travaux du Collège de France (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012), 265–279, as well as François Hartog, La nation, la république, l’avenir: sur les traces d’Ernest Renan (Paris: Gallimard, 2017). The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press (2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0006

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112  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism scholarly topics, but also penning philosophical and literary texts, as well as scholarly reports. Moreover, he expressed ideas about education and science that had a signifcant impact, as well as on the idea of the modern nation— on which he wrote a pamphlet that would eventually become his most celebrated essay.4 In today’s terms, Renan was a “public intellectual,” always eager to express views on the problems of the hour. Afer Victor Hugo’s death in 1885, he was the most visible public fgure in fn-­de-­siècle France, becoming a living icon of the Tird Republic. Although Renan presented himself as a philologist, he was clearly writing in a register diferent from that of the German biblical scholars he admired. His work, less technical and meticulous than theirs, was broader in scope. For him, a good philologist reaches beyond textual criticism and acts as a historian, and even a philosopher. Paradoxically, the multidimensionality of Renan’s oeuvre has made it difcult to appreciate his major contribution to the study of religion. Notably, few Orientalists or historians of religion have published major studies of his work.

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Monotheism and Race Renan’s image has long sufered from the double accusation of anti-­Semitism and Islamophobia. Tus, let us briefy examine his attitudes towards both Judaism and Islam, and how he perceived the relationship of these two religions to Christianity. Te young Renan learned Hebrew with passion, as well as Aramaic, Syriac, Geez, and Arabic. His frst major work won him the Volney prize, named afer the famed Orientalist. It would later become his Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques, a book which he published in 1855.5 Renan, who held the linguist Franz Bopp (1791–1867) in high esteem, sought to do for the Semitic languages what Bopp had done for the Indo-­European ones.6 He also studied with Eugène Burnouf, the scholar responsible for establishing the modern study of Buddhism. Renan 4  Ernest Renan, Qu’est-­ce qu’une nation? (Paris: Association scientifque de France, 1882). 5  First edition 1855, with multiple later editions. One of the earliest published pieces of Friedrich Max Müller was a review of Renan’s book. 6  In a lecture at the Sorbonne in 1878, he declared: “La méthode de M. Bopp, c’est la vérité même, c’est la méthode absolument scientifque.” Renan, Oeuvres complètes [henceforward OC] VIII, 1251–1216. Te ten volumes of the Oeuvres Complètes, edited by Henriette Psichari, were published by Calmann-­Lévy between 1947 and 1961; cf. Markus Messling, Gebeugter Geist: Rassismus und Erkenntnis in der modernen europäischen Philologie (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), 353.

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Semitic Monotheism  113 viewed Burnouf as his mentor and dedicated his book to him as a token of his regard.7 More than a linguist, however, Renan perceived himself primarily as a historian of religion—the scholarly discipline that he considered of greatest signifcance in the nineteenth century.8 It is challenging to single out from the many texts in which he dealt with religion one that is representative of his approach. Yet, chapter ffeen of L’avenir de la science ofers what may fairly be considered a summary of his views on religion and its history. For Renan, religion is philosophy in a diferent key, emerging from the primitive age of humankind, and the true history of philosophy is the history of religion. He tried to provide a taxonomy of religions, noting that the universal religions, such as Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, are all established upon a sacred text and precise dogmas. For him, Asia was the fatherland of religion, while Europe was that of rational and refexive thought (i.e. philosophy and science). In the future, he maintained, science would become the new religion of the modern peoples.9 It was Renan, among others, who was responsible for the perception of a chasm between Christianity—the religion of Europe—on the one hand, and Judaism and Islam—which belonged to the Semitic Orient—on the other. It was this chasm that hampered the joint study of these three religions at the peak of the comparative study of religions. Assessing Renan’s views on Judaism and Islam, as well as his perception of Jesus, for him the central character of the religious history of the world, will help us to make some sense of this bafing fact. Since his youth, Renan had been an ardent supporter of German biblical scholarship, which had been at the forefront of the feld since the late eight­ eenth century: “I thought I was entering a temple,” he wrote when describing his discovery of this scholarly literature.10 Had he been born a Protestant, 7  Renan also dedicated to Burnouf L’avenir de la science. 8  See Perrine Simon-­Nahum, “L’Orient d’Ernest Renan: de l’étude des langues à l’histoire des religions,” Revue germanique internationale 7 (2008), 157–168 [= Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn and Céline Trautmann-­Waller, eds, Itinéraires orientalistes], who remarks that the Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1855) represents, more than a study of the Semitic languages, a refection on the historical forms of the emergence of languages. In his Introduction to this work, Renan follows almost verbatim Christian Lassen’s Indische Altertumskunde, Vol. I (Leipzig: Kittler, 1847), 414–417. See Stefan Arvidsson, Aryan Idols: Indo-­ European Mythology as Ideology and Science (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2006 [2000]), 93. 9  In a letter to his friend Marcelin Berthelot, written in 1863, he speaks of the day when humanity will be a perfect God, and not a God in feri (“in becoming”). 10  “Je crus entrer dans un temple . . .” “Lettre à M. Strauss (13 septembre 1870),” in La réforme intellectuelle et morale, OC, Vol. I (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1871), 438.

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114  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism he believed, he would have been able to study the Scriptures in a scholarly way without losing his faith and without fear of censorship. For him, open-­minded German Protestant theologians were able to write critically about biblical matters, while this was quite impossible in Roman Catholic France.11 David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835–1836), which denied the divine nature of Jesus, had a life-­changing impact on him.12 “Longtemps l’Allemagne avait été ma maîtresse,” wrote Renan, tongue in cheek, in his Réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France, a text from 1871.13 His enthusiasm for Germany, indeed, cooled in the wake of the Franco-­Prussian war of 1870–1871. He then initiated a public exchange of letters with Strauss on the cultural and political diferences between the two countries.14 In the Preface to his Histoire du peuple d’Israël (the frst volume of which was published in 1887, and the last, posthumously, in 1893), Renan wrote that if death prevented him from completing the immense task he had set for himself, one could instead translate one of the many German scholarly books dealing with ancient Israelite and Jewish history. He had in mind Wellhausen’s Prolegomena, which had been frst published in 1878, as well as the work of other German biblical scholars—in particular that of Ewald, Michaelis’s successor in Göttingen, to whose history of ancient Israel Renan had already devoted a long review article.15 Te relationship between Renan’s philology and his views on race is rather intricate. Markus Messling, who has invested serious efort in understanding this relationship, writes of a “debated question” (Streitfrage). Te racial aspect of Renan’s thought is, of course, central to any understanding 11  Cf. Renan, La réforme intellectuelle et morale. 12  Te novelty and importance of Strauss’s book was quickly and widely recognized; Émile Littré published a French translation in 1839, and George Eliot an English one in 1846. 13 Renan, La réforme intellectuelle et morale, Préface; cf. Émile Buré, Renan et l’Allemagne (New York: Brentano’s, 1945), 18–28. 14  For Nietzsche, Renan, as a typical representative of the “Latin races,” in which even free thinkers refect a deep attachment to Catholicism, stands at his own antipodes: “Es ist so artig, so auszeichnend, seinen eignen Antipoden zu haben!” (Beyond Good and Evil, para. 48). I quote according to Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, eds, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Zur Genealogie der Moral (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999), 70. Beyond Good and Evil was frst published in 1886. 15  See Renan’s review of Ewald’s Geschichte des Volkes Israel: “Du peuple d’Israël et de son histoire,” in Revue des deux mondes (1855), 10–12. In this article, Renan also deals with Abraham Kuenen (1828–1891), a Dutch biblical scholar and historian of religions from Leiden, who was also a distinguished Arabist. Kuenen was also a good friend of William Robertson Smith and of Julius Wellhausen, as refected in Julius Wellhausen’s Briefe, ed. Rudolf Smend, with Peter Porzig and Reinhard Müller (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). On Kuenen, see Chapter 9 in this volume.

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Semitic Monotheism  115 of his posture towards Judaism and Islam, as well as towards Jews and Muslims. He knew well Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), the founder of modern racist theory, whose Essai sur l’inégalité des races began to be published in 1853. Gobineau spelled out and radicalized old mental attitudes, presenting them as borne out by contemporary science.16 In 1864, the two men spent time together in Greece, as the latter was the French Minister in Athens. An original thinker and gifed stylist, Renan also remained a man of his time. As such, he makes in his writings rather generous use of the term “race.” From writing about Semitic languages, Renan moves much too easily to referring to “the Semitic race.” Tis expression was repeated ofen enough to earn him the accusation of racism. Messling quotes a number of texts, written on various occasions, which highlight the centrality of racial terminology in his thought. As Messling correctly notes, however, it is important to distinguish between racialism and racism.17 Early on in his career, Renan had been infuenced by Max Müller’s work on Indo-­European/Aryan languages and mythologies. He sought, in particular, to develop an approach to the Semitic religions parallel to that of Müller to Aryan mythologies. It appears that his failure to do so can be attributed to his ambivalence (widely shared by his contemporaries) regarding the peoples, religions, and cultures of the Near East. For him, European identity was primarily defned by the “Aryan” character of its languages, rather than by the “Semitic” origin of its religion. A border line, sometimes barely visible but always inviolate, separated Christianity, identifed as the religion of the

16  One should note, however, that the Jews found grace in Gobineau’s writings, and that he is not guilty of any anti-­Semitism. On Gobineau, see further Chapter 8 in this volume. For a recent study analyzing the relationship between secularization and racism in Great Britain and the United States during our period, see Nathan Alexander, Race in a Godless World: Atheism, Race, and Civilization, 1850–1914 (Manchester, New York: Manchester University Press and New York University Press, 2019). 17  For a thorough discussion of Renan on race, see Messling, Gebeugter Geist, 352–405; cf. my review in Romanische Forschungen 130 (2018), 122–125. I concur with Messling’s assessment, according to which Renan shows anti-­Islamism rather than what we call anti-­Semitism. On Renan’s racism, see another recent analysis: Robert  D.  Priest, “Ernest Renan’s Race Problem,” Te Historical Journal 58 (2015), 309–330. For the broader context, see Jane E. Goldstein, “Toward an Empirical History of Moral Tinking: Te Case of Racial Teory in Mid-­Nineteenth-­Century France,” Te American Historical Review 120 (2015), 1–27. See further Regina Pozzi, “Alle origini del razzismo contemporaneo: Il caso di Ernest Renan,” Rivista di Storia Contemporanea 14 (1985), 497–520. Pozzi emphasizes Renan’s ambivalence. Te philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah proposes to use the term “racialism” as a value-­neutral term in his In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

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“Aryan” peoples of Europe, from Judaism and Islam, the religions of the two main surviving Semitic peoples, the Jews and the Arabs.18 For Renan as for Müller, Aryans (or Indo-­Europeans) and Semites were the two main races of humankind. Like Müller, with whom he struck up a friendship, Renan insisted that his use of the terms “Aryans” and “Semites” ought to be understood metaphorically, and objected to a literal, racist reading of them. Nevertheless, they retained an ambivalence from which he was unable (or unwilling) to extricate himself. In this, he was refecting the infuence of Schegel’s ideas, which had been percolating for a generation.19 Tis perception had a major impact that went well beyond the history of religions.20 Renan dealt with Aryans and Semites in many texts, and, to some extent, he modifed his conceptions over time. Te term Antisemitismus, which is ofen thought to have been coined by Wilhelm Marr, had frst been introduced by Moritz Steinschneider, a renowned Jewish scholar and bibliographer of Judaism and Islam, precisely in order to describe Renan’s approach, and in response to his theories.21 For Steinschneider, “Antisemitismus” referred to Renan’s depreciation of all Semitic peoples and of their contributions to civilization.22 It is only since Marr and the 1880s that the term has referred to Jews alone. In La réforme intellectuelle et morale de la France, an essay prompted by the French defeat in the Franco-­Prussian war and written in an efort to expose the intellectual assumptions that drove it, Renan showed prophetic awareness of the perils in store for Germany, as German scholars and 18  “Les peuples indo-­européens ont adopté la religion sémitique . . . Nous l’avons profondément modifée.” Ernest Renan, De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation. Discours d’ouverture du cours de langues hébraïque, chaldaïque et syriaque au Collège de France, in OC, Vol. II (Paris: Calmann-­Lévy, 1948), 317–335 [here 331–332]. 19  See Chapter 3 in this volume. 20  See Olender, Les langues du paradis, 75–111. See further, Arvidsson, Aryan Idols. 21 On Steinschneider’s important accomplishments, see Paul  B.  Fenton, “Moritz Steinschneider’s Contribution to Judaeo-­Arabic Studies,” in Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal, eds, Studies on Steinschneider: Moritz Steinschneider and the Emergence of the Science of Judaism in Nineteenth-­Century Germany (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2012), 363–382. 22  Steinschneider’s coining of the term, however, had practically no impact, as it was published in an obscure scholarly journal. He writes in 1860 (in the Hebrew and German journal Ha-­mazkir/Hebräische Bibliographie, III, 16), that Renan expresses “antisemitische Urteile,” anti-­Semitic judgments. He does that in his discussion of Hermann Steinthal’s article “Zur Charakteristik der semitischen Völker. Auf Anlass von E. Renan, ‘Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère des peuples sémitiques,’ ” Zeitschrif für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaf 1(1860), 328–345. See Chapter 8 in this volume. I owe the reference to Steinschneider’s article to Maurice Kriegel. On the early history of the term “anti-­Semitism,” see Maurice Kriegel, “Words and Tings: On the Rise of the Antisemitic Movements and the History of the Term ‘Antisemitism’, 1879–1894,” Zion 85 (2020), 375–390 [in Hebrew].

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

Semitic Monotheism  117 intellectuals seemed unable to use “race” in a ­metaphorical way. Too radical a division of humanity into races, he wrote, can only lead to wars of extermination.23 Yet, in the same text, Renan referred to the Chinese “race of workers,” the “Negro race of land workers,” and the “European race of masters and soldiers.” Tis reads as a rather clear hierarchy of human races. He also wrote of “the two great races which, in a sense, made humanity: the Indo-­European and the Semitic races.” In the Preface to his Études d’histoire religieuse, Renan wrote:

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As the unity of the Indo-­European race, in its opposition with the Semitic race, is now acknowledged in the feld of religion as well as in that of language, it will in the future become the basis of the history of religions in antiquity.24

For Renan, families of languages and families of “races” run in parallel in history, although, he noted, such a formulation is true only if “race” is understood metaphorically.25 And he used the term, “race,” he clarifed, only for lack of a better word. It is worth mentioning that, in the nineteenth century, the semantic reference of “race” was much broader than it would become in the twentieth century. Tus, its use does not necessarily point to what we refer today as racism. In L’avenir de la science, Renan remarked that religion is not a matter of race.26 For him, “race” did not quite denote physiology. Te concept of Semitic religions refers to those religions born among Semitic peoples, namely, peoples who spoke Semitic languages. According to him, therefore, it did not make sense to consider Western European Jews, educated and “assimilated” to their ambient milieu, as “Semitic.” Yet, most Islamic peoples (Turks, Iranians, Malays, etc.) who do not in any way belong to the Semitic 23  La réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris: Perrin, 2012), 164–165; quoted by Messling, Gebeugter Geist, 369. 24  “L’unité de la race indo-­européenne, en son opposition avec la race sémitique, reconnue dans les religions comme dans les langues, servira désormais de base à l’histoire des religions de l’antiquité.” Ernest Renan, Études d’histoire religieuse, suivies de Nouvelles études d’histoire religieuse (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 15. Like Renan, the positivist Hippolyte Taine viewed world history, to a great extent, as that of the Aryan and Semitic races. 25  “Entendue avec ces restrictions, l’idée de race reste la grande explication du passé.” In Ernest Renan, “Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère général des peuples sémitiques et en particulier sur leur tendance au monothéisme,” Journal asiatique 13 (1859), 214–282 and 417–450 (here 449–450). We will return to this important text in Chapter 8 below. 26  L’avenir de la science, 933–968 [here 953–955].

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118  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism race, or ethnic family, have accepted, with Islam, a Semitic religion. It is indeed non-­Semitic nations, such as the Iranians, that produced the best fruits of Islam. Religions do not die, and it is modern science, not another religion, which would eventually defeat Islam and its fatalism. Finally, Renan conceded that the fundamental discovery of the Semites, the idea of God’s unity, would become the foundation for the religious future of humankind. Tat said, Renan clearly did not hold the Semites in high esteem. For him, they were an inferior race, coming from arid areas, where nature is as poor as that of India was rich in forests, rivers, and mountains. As a result, they had developed neither a mythology nor a philosophy. Te physical conditions, in the desert climate in which they had lived since the dawn of time, were so monotonous as to prevent the development of any complexity in their imagination, in their creativity in felds as diverse as politics, mythology, or the arts. Although his much-­publicized remark that the Semites have no mythology (“les sémites n’ont pas de mythologie”) was only made in Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (1855), one can fnd in earlier writings a real rif between Judea and India.27 According to Renan, religion represents the Semitic equivalent of mythology among the polytheist Aryans. Te Semites’ contribution to humankind was limited to religion—and only to a very specifc kind of religion, namely, monotheism. Te sole insight of the Semites (albeit an important one) was the idea of the one God. In this context, Renan wrote of a “psychisme du désert,” which he contrasted to the “psychisme de la forêt.” It is quite possible that Renan’s idea of the absence of mythology among the Semites refects the infuence (perhaps not a direct one) of Vico. We know that Renan had read Vico even in his youth, as traces of Te New Science can be found not only in L’avenir de la science, but also in his early works on linguistics, such as the Essai sur la formation du langage and De l’origine du langage.28 As is well known, Vico argued in his Scienza nuova, a book frst published in 1724, that myths were a universal phenomenon, existing among all peoples of the ancient world—excepting Israel. Te absence of myths in ancient 27  See for instance “La liberté de penser,” a text from 1849. I owe this precision to Domenico Paone, from the Institut des textes et manuscrits modernes of the Centre National de la recherche scientifque (personal communication, July 9, 2019). Paone’s monograph Ernest Renan et la fabrique des sémites is forthcoming. 28  I wish to thank Domenico Paone for confrming my suggestion on Renan’s knowledge of Vico.

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Semitic Monotheism  119

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Israel, implied, of course, the historical truthfulness of the Bible—a view that probably spared Vico a great deal of ecclesiastic ire.29 According to Domenico Paone, Renan had already read Vico by 1847–1848.30 Moreover, we know that Vico had a signifcant impact on other French intellectuals in the mid-­nineteenth century, in particular on Michelet, himself a serious reader of Renan.31 And yet, there remained for Renan a deep abyss, at once racial, cultural, and religious, between Christianity (i.e. Europe) and Judaism and Islam, the two other faiths birthed in the Levant. Tis perceived abyss prevented him from studying these three religions side by side. Renan was fully equipped with all the necessary tools to initiate the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which we call today the Abrahamic religions. If he did not do so, it was for reasons profoundly rooted in contemporary perceptions. One might mention, however, that he did show a certain willingness to entertain comparative approaches for Jewish and Islamic themes.32 Renan thus showed a distinctly dual-­edged attitude regarding race. Tis duality is refected in his posture towards Jews.33 According to him, the prophets of Israel were actually preparing the transformation of the biblical religion into Christianity, a pure and universal religion, one of the three truly universal religions: Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam.34 Remarkably, he could thus write: “We, the French, for instance, are Romans through our language, Greeks through our civilization, and Jews through our religion.”35 29  On Vico’s conception of myth, see Mali, Te Rehabilitation of Myth. 30 Vico’s La science nouvelle (Paris: Renouard, Charpentier, 1844) can be found among Renan’s books in the Bibliothèque nationale de France (Fonds Renan; Z Renan). I am indebted for this information to Maurice Gasnier, the editor of Renan’s Correspondence (personal communication, July 10, 2019). 31 See Rocco Rubini, “Te Vichian ‘Renaissance’ between Giuseppe Ferrari and Jules Michelet,” Intellectual History Review 26 (2016), 9–15. In 1864, Michelet would respond to Renan’s Life of Jesus by writing La Bible de l’humanité. On Michelet, see chapter 8 in this volume. 32  For Renan’s comparative study of Abraham’s saga in Jewish and Islamic traditions, see Ernest Renan, Légendes patriarchales des Juifs et des Arabes, cours professé au Collège de France, 1888–1889, transl., introduction and notes by Laudyce Rétat (Paris: Hermann, 1989). On Renan’s approach of the Bible in its context, see Tomas Römer, “Renan et l’exégèse historico-critique,” in Laurens, ed., Ernest Renan, 145–162. 33  On the dual character of Renan’s thought, see Hartog, La nation, la religion, l’avenir. On Renan’s approach to ancient Israel and to contemporary Jews, see Laudyce Rétat, L’Israël de Renan (Berne: Peter Lang, 2005). 34  Renan acknowledges the universal character of Islam as a sociological fact, which does not entail, of course, a positive evaluation of this religion. 35  “Nous autres Français, par exemple, nous sommes Romains par la langue, Grecs par la civilisation, Juifs par la religion.” Ernest Renan, L’islamisme et la science, lecture read at the Sorbonne on March 29, 1883 (Paris: Calmann-­Lévy, 1883).

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Te Jewish Miracle and Anti-­Islamism Te prophets of Israel were the true founders of Christianity, and Jesus was the last of the prophets.36 For Renan, the Jews represented a unicum in world history, and there is in history only one equivalent to the coming of Jesus among them, namely, the discovery of philosophy among the Greeks. For him, “Christianity is originally a Jewish fact” (“le christianisme est primitivement un fait juif ”).37 Afer Jesus, Judaism lost its raison d’être and became a sect rather than a fully fedged religion. While Christianity might well have been (at least to some extent) a religion born from Judaism, contemporary Europe, even before it had freed itself from its Christian shackles, had little in common with these Near Eastern origins. Although Renan maintained that, with the coming of Jesus, the Jewish people had concluded its historical role in human history, and that this people was directly responsible for the death of Jesus, he considered scandalous the continued persecution of Jews. In this regard, the accusation of anti-­Semitism ofen hurled at Renan is patently misplaced.38 His ambiguous intellectual legacy, which explains the accusation, in no way justifes it.39 At the beginning of the Second Empire, the young Renan, who tended to refrain from expressing himself publicly on political matters, objected loudly when a ministerial decree sought to prevent Jews from applying to the École Normale Supérieure.40 In a number of cases, Renan raised his voice to speak publicly against anti-­Semitism. Together with Victor Hugo, for instance, in 1881 he signed a public protest against anti-­Jewish pogroms in Eastern Europe and in the Russian Empire. His own publisher, Michel Lévy, was a 36  “Le premier fondateur du christianisme, c’est Isaïe . . .” Ernest Renan, Le judaïsme comme race et comme religion, lecture at the Cercle Saint-­Simon, January 27, 1883 (Paris: Calmann-­ Lévy, 1883); cf. Ernest Renan, Le judaïsme et le christianisme: identité originelle et séparation graduelle, lecture at the Société des Études Juives, May 26, 1883 (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1883). 37 Renan, L’avenir de la science, 951; cf. “If the neologism ‘Judeo-­Christian tradition’ has a spiritual father, it is the Breton scholar Renan.” Manuel, Te Broken Staf, 308. Tis is a problematic statement, in view of Renan’s belief that Judaism raison d’être disappeared afer the coming of Jesus. 38  Te words of Nathalie Richard: “le racisme antisémitique de Renan n’est pas chose limpide” (Nathalie Richard, La Vie de Jésus de Renan: La fabrique d’un best-­seller (Rennes: Presse Universitaires de Rennes, 2015), 64) are not precise enough. In his obituary of Renan, Neubauer defended him strongly against accusations of anti-­ Semitism: Adolf Neubauer, “M.  Ernest Renan,” Jewish Quarterly Review 52 (1893): 200–204. I owe this reference to Teodor Dunkelgrün. 39 See Priest’s excellent analysis of the question in “Ernest Renan’s Race Problem,” esp. 322–323, where he convincingly refutes Zeev Sternhell’s claim about Renan’s racism in Sternhell’s Les anti-­lumières: du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide (Paris: Fayard, 2006). 40  See Richard, La Vie de Jésus de Renan, 65.

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Semitic Monotheism  121 Jew. And yet, he retained a deep ambivalence towards Judaism and the Jews. Indeed, as François Hartog has aptly put it, no idea is simple for Renan; nothing is unidimensional, his attitude is always dual.41 For him, every concept, every phenomenon should be understood in two diferent ways. Tis fundamental duality, as argued by Hartog, is rooted in Renan’s complex— and ofen ambivalent—perception of reality, as befts a proponent of the comparative method in the study of both linguistics and religion. As a careful historian who sought to situate Jesus in his original Jewish milieu and to make judicious use of all known existing sources, Renan noted the need to take into account the rabbinic sources, which he qualifed as “bizarre.”42 He acknowledged here his debt to Abraham Geiger. As mentioned previously, Geiger, emboldened by the success of his thesis regarding the Jewish origins of Islam, then sought to do the same with Christianity.43 Renan’s approving reference to Geiger is all the more signifcant as Geiger’s thesis regarding the Jewish infuence on Christianity, as noted, had been met with ferce opposition and even slurs on the part of Protestant theologians in Germany (the same people who had wholeheartedly accepted his remarks on the Jewish infuence on Muhammad).44 Clearly, Renan was not afraid of going up against the communis opinio, and was willing to raise the fag of the importance of the post-­biblical Jewish sources for an adequate understanding of Jesus in the historical context of his original milieu. For the most part, Renan’s contemporary readers probably accepted the categories he was using (and sometimes creating) at face value.45 Some, however, were taken aback by his approach and his claims. No wonder, then, if, in the midst of the applause generated by the Vie de Jésus outside clerical circles, the book’s treatment of ancient Judaism also encountered criticism from Jewish scholars. In a letter to Renan, dated July 5, 1863, the Orientalist Joseph Derenbourg (1811–1895), who would come second, afer Salomon Munk, as a candidate for Renan’s succession at the Collège de France, rebuked him for having imagined a gulf between Jesus and the

41 Hartog, La nation, la religion, l’avenir, passim. 42  Vie de Jésus, “Introduction,” OC, Vol. IV, 48–49: “Je pense, comme M. Geiger, que la vraie notion des circonstances où se produisit Jésus doit être cherchée dans cette compilation bizarre.” 43 In his Urschrif und Übersetzungen der Bibel in ihrer Abhängigkeit von der inneren Entwicklung des Judenthums (1857); see Chapter 3 in this volume, esp. note 53. 44  See Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus. 45  On Gobineau’s and Renan’s views of race, see Priest’s article referred to in note 39 above. See further Goldstein, “Toward an Empirical History of Moral Tinking.”

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122  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Judaism of his time.46 More bluntly, Isaac Lévy, the rabbi of Lunéville, remarked in the Archives Israélites that the book showed how much Renan remained, fundamentally, a Christian writer, someone who “still feels the Christian blood in his veins.”47 Among Renan’s noteworthy turns of phrase, his reference to “the Greek miracle” has enjoyed particular popularity. “Le miracle grec,” in his Prière sur l’Acropole, became a key concept signaling the utter inimitability of the major intellectual, literary, and artistic creations in ancient Greece. What is ofen overlooked, however, is that Renan could meaningfully speak of a “Greek miracle” only because he had previously identifed a “Jewish miracle.” Here is the immediate context in which this comment appears: And now suddenly there arose for me, by the side of the Jewish miracle the Greek miracle, a thing which has only existed once, which had never been seen before, which will never be seen again, but the efect of which will last for ever, an eternal type of beauty, without a single blemish, local or national.48

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Te Greek miracle parallels the Jewish one and becomes manifest through their comparison. For Renan, the Jewish miracle was the frst miraculous experience of humankind: the religious destiny of the Jewish people until the coming of Jesus.49 Anti-­Semitism was rife in Europe in the 1880s; it was 46  See Michael Graetz, Les Juifs en France au XIXe siècle: de la révolution française à l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paris: Seuil, 1989 [original Hebrew edition 1982]), 346 and note 141, quoting a letter from Derenbourg to Renan dated July 5, 1863; cf. Robert  D.  Priest, Te Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-­Century France (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 145–146. 47 Priest, Te Gospel According to Renan, 145. 48  Ernest Renan, Recollections of my Youth (London, 1897; emended). Te original reads: Or voici qu’à côté du miracle juif venait se placer pour moi le miracle grec, une chose qui n’a jamais existé qu’une fois, qui ne s’était jamais vue, qui ne se reverra plus, mais dont l’efet durera éternellement, je veux dire un type de beauté éternelle, sans nulle tache locale ou nationale. Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse (1883), quoted according to Jean Pommier’s edition (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), 44; cf. E.  Renan, “Les juifs sous la domination grecque,” Revue des deux mondes 116 (1893), 241–256, esp. 246, where the Jewish people is described as “un unicum dans l’histoire.” Te Prière had already been published independently in 1876. See further Chapter 6 in this volume, note 36. 49  On Renan’s juxtaposition of the Greek and the Jewish miracles, Miriam Leonard aptly remarks that it represents “as much evidence of the theologizing of the secular classics as of the secularization of theology.” Miriam Leonard, Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism from Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud (Chicago, London: Chicago University Press, 2012), 179; cf. her whole section on the “Prayer on the Acropolis,” 177–182.

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Semitic Monotheism  123 in 1879 that Wilhelm Marr established the Antisemiten-­Liga. In this historical context, a phrase like “le miracle juif ” stands out, as does the incongruity of branding its author as anti-­Semite. In a lecture delivered at the Société des Études Juives in 1883, Renan spotlighted the major contribution of the Jewish people, through its prophets, to the extirpation of idolatry from the ancient world. In a sense, the “pure” religion of the future, he noted, would be a return to that of Isaiah. He also declared the opening up of the ghettos to be a task of the nineteenth cen­ tury.50 In the future, the Jews, together with all liberal forces in Europe, would contribute to the social progress of humankind. “Te Bible is your true Parthenon,” he concluded, mirroring his own parallel between the Jewish miracle and the Greek one.51 Troughout his career, Renan maintained ties with Jewish scholars, including epistolary exchanges with leading scholars of the Wissenschaf des Judentums, such as Heinrich Graetz and Abraham Geiger in Germany, and Samuel David Luzzatto in Italy. Some of these contacts involved ongoing collaborative projects. Unlike most contemporary scholars, and despite the fact that his knowledge of rabbinic literature remained mediocre at best, Renan showed an interest in later Jewish history. For instance, he collaborated with Adolf Neubauer, a Jewish scholar from Hungary living in Paris at the time, on various aspects of late ancient and medieval Jewish history. Neubauer, who published his Géographie du Talmud in 1868, also collaborated with Renan on the publication of Les rabbins français du commencement au XIVe siècle.52 With Salomon Munk, his successor at the Collège de France, Renan seemed to have developed a real rapport.53 Te cordiality of the relationship, however, did not rule out intellectual polemics. At a session of the Académie 50 Renan, Le judaïsme comme race et comme civilisation, 220. 51  “Votre vrai Parthénon, c’est la Bible!” in Renan, Le judaïsme et le christianisme: identité originelle et séparation graduelle, 26. On Renan on Jews and Judaism, see further Maurice­Ruben Hayoun, Renan, la Bible et les Juifs (Paris: Arléa, 2008). 52 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1877). On Renan’s collaboration with Neubauer, see Teodor Dunkelgrün, “Dating the Even Bohan of Qalonymos ben Qalonymos of Arles. A Microhistory of Scholarship,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 7:1 (2013), 39–72 at 60–61. Neubauer would later settle down in Oxford, where he worked at the Bodleian library, eventually becoming Reader in Rabbinic Hebrew at the university. 53  See Graetz, Les Juifs en France au XIXe siècle, 310. On Munk, see Moïse Schwab, Salomon Munk, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Leroux, 1900). See further David Cohen, La promotion des Juifs en France à l’époque du Second Empire (1852–1870) (two vols; Aix en Provence, Paris: Université de Provence, Honoré Champion, 1980), 168–172. On Munk as Renan’s successor, see Dominique Bourel, “Succéder à Renan: Salomon Munk et Philippe Berger,” in H. Laurens, éd., Ernest Renan: la science, la religion, la République, 297–309.

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124  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres in 1859, in particular, Munk confronted Renan, criticizing his conception of Semitic monotheism, according to which the idea of God’s unity had been the (sole) contribution of the Semitic peoples to humankind. Tis important polemical exchange and its implications will be discussed at length in Chapter 8 of this volume.54 Although Renan conceded that without Israel there would have been no Christianity, it seems that, for him, Judaism’s true inheritor was Islam. Renan’s Hebrew was better than his Arabic, a fact that makes the intellectual quality of Averroès et l’Averrroïsme (1852), a book he published when he was only twenty-­nine years old, rather remarkable. Tere, Renan ofered vivid descriptions of the multi-­religious cultural milieu of medieval Islamic Spain (al-­Andalus), as “Christians, Jews, and Muslims spoke the same language, sang the same songs, took part in the same literary and scientifc studies.”55 Te Andalus of Averroes was, for Renan, where the comparative refection on the three monotheistic religions had frst taken place. Tere, the Jews, rather than the Muslims, preserved Averroes’s philosophical teaching afer his death. Furthermore, he claimed, it was the Jews who took Arabic philosophy seriously.56 Medieval al-­ Andalus, reckoned Renan, provided the ground for a complex and rich interaction between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and for the comparative study of these three religions. It is there that he sought the roots of the Livre des trois imposteurs, notorious in the Enlightenment for its denigration of the three main monotheist religions.57 When dealing with Islam and Muslims, however, Renan’s characteristic ambivalence all but evaporated. Like most of his contemporaries, Renan despised Islam—although he tried hard to understand it as a religion. His view of Islam is deeply deprecatory: “Islam is indeed the product of a lower, or mediocre combination of human elements.”58 Markus Messling has cogently observed that Renan’s anti-­Semitism is, in fact, anti-­Islamism.59 54 See, for instance, Renan, Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère général des peuples sémitiques. 55  Ernest Renan, Averroès et l’averroïsme (Paris: Durand, 1852), 25. 56  “La philosophie arabe n’a réellement été prise bien au sérieux que par les juifs.” Renan, Averrroès et l’Averroïsme, 145. On the interaction between Jewish and Islamic philosophy in Andalus, see Sarah Stroumsa, Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019). 57  See Chapter 2 in this volume. 58  “L’islamisme est évidemment le produit d’une combinaison inférieure, et pour ainsi dire médiocre, des éléments humains,” in “Mahomet et les origines de l’islamisme,” Revue des Deux Mondes, nouvelle période, 12 (1851) [Reprinted in Ernest Renan, Études d’histoire religieuse (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 168–220 [here 217]. 59 Messling, Gebeugter Geist, 401: “Renan’s Antisemitismus ist ein Antiislamismus.”

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Semitic Monotheism  125 His striking identifcation of Islam with the essence of Semitic religion appears early, in his essay on Muhammad and the origins of Islam. In this text, he claimed that Arabia was entirely devoid of mysticism and mythology, immediately adding that Semitic peoples were never able to imagine complexity in God’s personality.60 Tis identifcation of Islam and “Semitism” was further accentuated in his inaugural lecture (or Discours d’ouverture) at the Collège de France, on February 21, 1862, when he maintained that today, the necessary condition for the propagation of European civilization is “the destruction of the Semitic thing par excellence, the destruction of the theocratic power of Islam, hence the destruction of Islam [. . .] Islam is the most total negation of Europe. Islam is fanaticism.”61 In order to appreciate such views, one must recall that France had since 1830 been deeply involved in the conquest of Algeria. Afer Emir Abdelkader’s surrender (1847) and the annexation of Algeria to the French Republic in 1848, colonization and constant military campaigns of “pacifcation” against Arab and Berber revolts were carried hand in hand, and would go on throughout the century, and beyond. For most French intellectuals, Renan and Victor Hugo among them, the conquest of Algeria was perceived as part and parcel of the mission of Europe, meant to bring civilization to Africa. Te origins of Islam, according to Renan, are better known than those of any other religion—hence, their importance for the comparative study of religion. Tat Islam is the last of the great religions to have appeared on the scene of history does not earn it any points in his book. On the contrary, in terms of inherent value, Renan insists, “Islam was the last religious creation of humankind, and to a great extent, it is the least original one.”62 For Renan, Muhammad was a political leader rather than a real prophet, and, in its earliest stages, Islam was a religious movement only in the loosest sense of that term.63 Te birth of Islam and its early growth owed little to religious faith, and specifcally to the spirit of pantheism or mysticism, the true core of religious faith, wrote Renan in his study on Muhammad and the origins of Islam, published in 1851.64 He somewhat concurred with the traditional Islamic self-­perception of Islam as a religious reform, going back 60  See note 79 below. 61  De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation, 27–28. 62  “L’islamisme a été la dernière création religieuse de l’humanité et, à beaucoup d’égards, la moins originale.”, in “Mahomet et les origines de l’islamisme,” 217. 63  “. . . le mouvement musulman s’est produit presque sans foi religieuse,” ibid., 198. 64  Ibid., 179.

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126  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism to the original religion of Abraham, rather than as an Arab response to Judaism and Christianity: “Muhammad was not totally wrong in presenting Islam as a return to Abraham’s religion.”65 Tis view of Muhammad as mainly a political leader is, of course, not peculiar to Renan, and was indeed rather common at the time. As we saw in the Introduction, it was already circulating in the eighteenth century. For example, Boulainvilliers’s Vie de Mahomet (1730), one of the best-­known Enlightenment-­era books on Muhammad, presents Muhammad as the frst major political leader of the Arabs.66 Rather than the frst fgure of Islam, claimed Renan, Muhammad represents the last manifestation of the old Arab religious attitude: “Te Arab genius fnds its deepest expression in Muhammad.”67 For him, although Muhammad, who believed in his own mission, was not an impostor, his attitude remained particularly simple, or rather, simplistic. Despite his profoundly negative assessment of Islam, Renan viewed the religion as “the second event of world history” (i.e. afer Christianity).68 He seems to have vacillated between the traditional Christian perception of the Prophet as a charlatan (or a false prophet) and a more positive attitude towards him. In any case, what counted most for him is Islam’s essential lack of religious creativity. Hence, Renan could write: “Te dogmatic aspects of Islam presuppose creativity even less than its legendary ones.”69 Islam, which Renan deemed, at best, a mediocre religion, had for him something “sordid” and repulsive, which it carried wherever it went—for instance, to nineteenth-­century Palestine.70 Renan here inscribed himself on a long list of nineteenth-­century travelers and pilgrims to the Holy Land who were shocked by the condition in which they found it, attributing the desolation to “Islam” rather than to the Ottoman imperial administration (or rather, taking “the Turk” as a representative of “Islam”). Renan’s dismal assessment of Islam and of its prophet were formed early: as noted, his lengthy article on Muhammad and the origins of Islam had been published in 1851. Nonetheless, his mission to the Levant could only have reinforced

65  “Mahomet n’avait pas complètement tort de présenter [l’islam] comme un retour à la religion d’Abraham.” Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère général des peuples sémitiques et en particulier sur leur tendance au monothéisme, 37. 66  On Boulainvilliers, see Chapter 2 in this volume. 67  “Le génie arabe trouve en Mahomet sa dernière expression.” Renan, “Mahomet et les origines de l’islamisme,” 202. 68 Renan, Vie de Jésus, 51. 69  “La partie dogmatique de l’islamisme suppose encore moins de création que la partie ‘légendaire.’ ” “Mahomet et les origines de l’islamisme,” 209. 70  Vie de Jésus, 124.

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Semitic Monotheism  127 his negative attitude. His party reached Beirut, by sea, in October 1860, in times of intense fghting between Druzes and Maronites. Just a few months before his landing, in May 1860, thousands of Christians had been slaughtered, forcing France and England to send a squadron to assist refugees from the massacres. In April 1861, he wrote from Tyre to his friend Marcelin Berthelot about the fanaticism of ardent monotheism, adding that one understands here the scope of the calamity called Islam.71 Renan underlined what he conceived as the confict between Islam and science in L’islamisme et la science, the notorious text of a lecture delivered at the Sorbonne in 1883.72 As a religion, Islam, he argued, has always persecuted science and philosophy, any kind of free thought.73 For Renan, Muslim peoples (among whom he includes the Ottoman Turks, who, he noted, were not racially Semites) were incapable of either science or progress. Using caustic words, he alleged the contemporary inferiority of Muslim countries, explaining it by the “intellectual nullity” of the “races” whose culture and education was essentially Islamic. For him, Islam was “the heaviest chain humanity has ever borne.” In Arabic philosophy or Arabic science, only the language of the texts is Arabic; their content remains purely Greek. For Renan, of all the peoples having adopted Islam, only the Iranians, who, he said, may be described as really more Shi’ites than Muslims, were able to preserve their intellectual and spiritual identity.74 Most objectionable in Islam, for Renan, was what he perceived as its incapacity to separate spiritual from temporal power. It was this incapacity, he stated, that explained Islam’s perennial persecution of philosophy and science. Islam had quashed free thought more efectively than other religious

71  C’est ici que le fanatisme musulman est porté à son comble . . . C’est ici que l’on ­comprend quel malheur a été l’islamisme, quel levain de haine il a semé dans le monde, combien le monothéisme exalté est contraire à toute science, à toute vie civile, à toute idée large. Ce que l’islamisme a fait de la vie humaine est chose à peine croyable; l’ascétisme du Moyen Âge n’est rien en comparaison. Tis text is quoted by van Deth, Ernest Renan, 261. I thank Carsten Wilke for calling my attention to the radicalization of Renan’s attitude towards Islam afer the events of 1860 and his trip to the Levant. 72  L’islam et la science, 2. 73  “L’islamisme, en réalité, a toujours persécuté la science et la philosophie.’ ” Ibid., 16. Sadly, this approach to Islam has not disappeared among scholars, as noted by Guillaume Dye, “Les Grecs, les Arabes et les ‘racines’ de l’Europe: réfexions sur ‘l’afaire Gougenheim’,” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 87 (2009), 811–835, esp. 828–829. 74 Tis preference for Shi’ite Islam is already found in Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World, as noted by Hunt, Jacob and Mijnhardt in the introduction to their Te Book that Changed Europe, 11.

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128  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism systems, he asserted. In consequence, Islam “has transformed the countries it conquered into ‘a feld closed to the rational culture of the mind.’ ”75 As a Semitic religion, Islam was essentially intolerant. For Renan, indeed, Islam was “the most complete negation of Europe.” To sum up, Renan’s attitudes to both Judaism and Islam must be understood against the backdrop of his notion of the two main races of humankind, the Semitic and the Indo-­European, an idea which he had already developed in his early work on the Semitic languages and which continued to inform his thought throughout his life. In Renan’s view, the Semites represented a lower combination of human nature.76 As we have seen, they had for him no mythology, no epics, no science, no philosophy, no fction, no plastic arts, no civil life . . .77 In other words, the Semites did not develop any of the felds that the Europeans understand as integral to a true living culture. In religion, the lack of myths (due to the monotony of their native deserts) meant a paucity of gods. Hence, the Semitic cults “never really overgrew simple patriarchal religion, a religion without mysticism, without a refned theology, which is almost, among the Bedouins, an absence of faith.” Tere remained one thing, and only one, for the Semites to invent, and to uphold: monotheism, and its corollary, prophecy.78 Prophecy and monotheism refect an essentially revolutionary character and are the fruit of an original intuition. Renan’s perception of monotheism, the purest example of which is expressed in Islam and is quite lacking in sophistication, refects an oversimplifcation of the richness of deep religiosity: “the Semitic nations . . . never understood variety, plurality and gender in God.”79 Although Renan insists that the “Semitic race” retains the glory of having founded “the religion of humankind,” the “Semitic mind” (l’esprit sémitique)

75  “Il a fait des pays qu’il a conquis un champ fermé à la culture rationnelle de l’esprit.” Ibid., 19. 76  Histoire Générale, 4. Like Müller, Renan was less interested in peoples and religions of East Asia, such as “Turanians” or Chinese. 77  Ibid., 16. Renan’s categories of Aryan versus Semitic, and his claim that the Semites had no philosophy, were long-­lived, a fact refected in the title of a book by Léon Gauthier, Introduction à l’étude de la philosophie musulmane. L’esprit sémitique et l’esprit aryen: la philosophie grecque et la religion de l’Islam (Paris: Leroux, 1923). 78  See also Renan, L’avenir de la science. 79  L’Arabie manque complètement de l’élément qui engendre le mysticisme et la mythologie. Les nations sémitiques, celles au moins qui sont restées fdèles à la vie patriarcale et à l’esprit ancien, n’ont jamais compris en Dieu la variété, la pluralité, le sexe. Le mot déesse serait en hébreu le plus horrible barbarisme. De là ce trait si caractéristique, qu’elles n’ont jamais eu ni mythologie ni épopée. Renan, “Mahomet et les origines de l’Islamisme”, 179.

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Semitic Monotheism  129 is the most distant one from pantheism, as well as from mysticism.80 Neither Jews not Muslims are able to appreciate Jesus’s “delicious theology of love.” 81 From time to time, Renan clarifed and qualifed his views. Nonetheless, his systematic attempt to disengage Christianity from its Judeo-­Semitic origin remained a constant in his thought.82 Although Jesus, unlike Muhammad, was born a Jew, the more direct inheritor of Judaism is Islam, not Christianity, which refects a major clef between Christianity and its mother religion. In a sense, then, it is Islam, rather than Christianity, that constitutes “the continuation of Judaism.”83 As the last prophet, Jesus represented the fnal step in the development of prophecy, in religious inwardness. Later in life, Renan would write a multi-­volume Histoire du peuple d’Israël—a history ending, precisely, when Christianity began. We are then entitled to characterize Renan’s ambivalence towards Judaism as refecting the traditional Christian theological distinction, since the Church Fathers of late antiquity, between Hebrews (hebraioi), the (biblical) Jews in bonam partem, preceding Jesus’s coming, and the (Rabbinic) Jews (ioudaioi) in malam partem, afer Jesus’s earthly life—although he obviously did not explicitly use these terms. More precisely, Christianity was for Renan the spiritual ofspring of biblical prophecy, while Islam, according to him, eventually inherited the spirit of rabbinic legalism. Since the coming of Christ means the end of Israel’s mission, and since Islam constitutes a lower kind of religion, for Renan it was Christianity that would transform itself into the religion of the future. Like Jesus, who lef behind traditional religion, Renan also lef his old Christian beliefs for the new faith in science, the future religion of Europe. In L’avenir de la science, he stresses that Christianity will transform itself into humanism, and that the latter will be the religion of the future. Christianity will thus be transformed into “the religion of humankind” (la religion de l’humanité).84 Te latter thus represented for him the gif of the Semitic race to humankind. It is difcult to evaluate the reaction of contemporary Muslim intellectuals to Renan’s ideas, as there were at the time few Muslim scholars active in Europe. Telling, however, is the well-­known polemic between Renan and 80  Ibid., 235. 81  “Ni le juif, ni le musulman, n’ont jamais compris cette délicieuse théologie d’amour” [i.e. of Jesus]. Renan, Vie de Jésus, 161. 82  See Masuzawa, Te Invention of World Religions, 189–191. 83  “La continuation du judaïsme n’est pas [le] christianisme, mais [l’]islamisme.” 84  But Renan also writes that it is Jesus who founded the “religion de l’humanité,” which is also “la religion absolue.” Vie de Jésus, 418 and 419. Te reader will recall that “La religion de l’humanité” is a Comtian concept.

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130  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism one of those few Muslim scholars, the Iranian Jamal al-­Din al-­Afghani (1838/39–1897). Al-­Afghani, a Muslim modernist intellectual and activist, had been trained in traditional Islamic scholarship at al-­ Azhar University in Cairo.85 In the 1800s, while traveling across Europe to promote a modern approach to Islam, he and his disciple Mohammad Abdouh founded an Arabic journal. On May 18, 1883, al-­Afghani published in the Journal des Débats a spirited refutation of Renan’s misperceptions of Islam and bias against Muslims. Tese debasing views, originally read as a lecture at the Sorbonne, L’islam et la science, were published that same year as a pamphlet. While admitting that contemporary Islam did not promote science, al-­ Afghani argued that this was true of all religions. Moreover, he argued, this attitude was not inherent to Islam. Indeed, in the Middle Ages it was thanks to Arabic translations that Greek science and philosophy had been saved from oblivion and later transmitted to Christian Europe. Finally, al-­Afghani contended that the negative attitudes to science currently found among Muslims must be seen within the historical and cultural milieu in which they had been developed and would be overcome in Islamic societies of the future. Renan’s views on Judaism and Islam, and on the Semites in general, are fully in line with those of Quinet, as discussed in Chapter 4 of this volume. While such views did not go unchallenged by contemporary Jewish scholars, most of these fgures, particularly in Germany and Central Europe, remained outside of academia and thus on the margins of the scholarly world. Examples include Salomon Munk and his aforementioned debate at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, and Daniel Chwolsohn, the author of Die Sabier, the most important early book on the mysterious Sabians.86 Together with other rejoinders triggered by Renan’s views on the idea of Semitic monotheism, Munk and Chwolsohn’s retorts will be discussed in Chapter 8 of this volume. For Renan, then, the fgure of Jesus lay at the heart of the world history of religions. While Renan’s views of the Semites certainly elicited strong reactions on the part of Jewish and Muslim scholars, we shall now turn the tables and observe how Renan’s own thinking about Jesus can be best understood in the context of contemporary Jewish scholarship.

85  On Al-­Afghani and other Islamic modernists, see Monica M. Ringer, Islamic Modernism and the Re-­Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). 86  Chwolsohn, a Russian Jew educated in Germany, eventually converted to Christianity in order to obtain an academic position in Russia.

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6

A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh?

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Despite the early loss of his Christian faith, Renan held onto a lifelong belief in the incommensurability of Christianity with Judaism and Islam. Tis entailed, as we have seen in Chapter 5, his perception of an unbridgeable chasm between Christianity and the two “Semitic religions.” Such insistence originated in his understanding of Jesus as a unique fgure, one who stood at the very core of the world history of religions. It is in his Life of Jesus that he expressed most clearly his views on the founder of Christianity. First published in 1863, Renan’s Vie de Jésus would swifly become, in the original as well as in its multiple translations, a nineteenth-­century international best seller. Unsurprisingly, countless monographs have been dedicated to this remarkable book.1 Let us now reassess the roots of Renan’s project, as well as its impact.

Jesus a Man? Renan’s Jesus is a paradigmatic fgure, bearing the inherent duality detected by Hartog in Renan’s thought patterns.2 Although the erstwhile seminarist

1  Two such studies were published in 2015: Robert D. Priest, Te Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-­Century France (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015) and Nathalie Richard, La Vie de Jésus de Renan: La fabrique d’un best-­ seller (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). To those, one should add Jean Balcou, Ernest Renan: une biographie (Paris: Champion, 2017), 189–214: “La bombe Vie de Jésus (24 juin 1863),” which describes very vividly the circumstances and multiform impact of this publication. Starting in the Renaissance, there is a long tradition of Lives of Jesus, written by theologians in Latin as well as in French. Tese Lives, meant to educate, convince, or exhort to prayer, have been studied by Eric Suire, Les vies de Jésus avant Renan: Editions, réécritures, circulations entre la France et l’Europe (fn XVe–début XIXe siècle) (Paris: Droz, 2017). Te late Jacques Le Brun called my attention to this last item. 2  See p. 121 and n. 41 above. Tis chapter is based on material in my “Renan on Jesus: Salvator nuper salvandus?” Storia del cristianesimo e storia delle religioni: Omaggio a Giovanni Filoramo,” Humanitas 72:5–6 (2017), 716–732. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press (2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0007

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132  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism had lost his faith, he would spend the rest of his life announcing the advent of the religion introduced by Jesus, the true religion of humanity in the age of science. For Renan, duality was already inscribed in the fgure of Jesus, a man so superior to all others that he could be called divine. In his Life of Jesus, Renan sought to understand the fgure of Jesus within the culture of his youth. Jesus was for him the spiritual ofspring of the prophets of Israel, but he was, at the same time, barely Jewish. Jesus had lost his Jewish faith as a young man, in Galilee, when he was flled with “revolutionary ardour.” And while he never sought to preach beyond the people of Israel, it is “the religion of humankind” (“la religion de l’humanité”) that he was establishing. Unlike the Pharisees’ conception of religion, Jesus’s was all interiority. Although a Jew, Jesus owed nothing to Judaism. In one of his notebooks, Renan could thus write: “Au fond, Jésus n’avait rien de juif.”3 Similarly, Christianity refects a profound transformation of Jewish monotheism, its passage into an “Aryan” culture. Here again, Renan discloses the intricate approach and acute ambivalence that he brings to his research topics. For Renan, Christianity might well have been a religion born within Judaism. Contemporary Europe, however, even when it had not yet freed itself from its Christian shackles, did not have much in common with these Near Eastern origins. For him, Protestant Christianity was even more foreign to Judaism and to the Semitic mind than Catholic Christianity. According to Robert Priest, “by the early 1860s, Jesus’ Judaism was the enduring problem that prevented Renan’s historico-­philological framework from accounting for his most important historical fgure.”4 Maurice Olender, for his part, has maintained that Renan’s Vie de Jésus was, in a sense, an attempt to rescue Jesus from Judaism.5 Prima facie, both of these claims seem surprising, as Renan took great pains to place his Jesus among the religious and intellectual developments of frst-­ century Palestinian Judaism as he understood them. Yet, the perceptions of Priest and Olender shed light on some hitherto neglected aspects of Renan’s approach to Jesus. Renan had spent many years meditating on the fgure of Jesus before he penned his biography. While he ultimately lef the seminary, as he was no longer able to submit to its prohibition of free inquiry into the text of the Scriptures, his love for Jesus survived that departure. For him, Jesus would 3  See Olender, Les langues du paradis, 96 and note 43, with a reference to Prosper Alfaric, Les manuscrits de la “Vie de Jésus” d’Ernest Renan (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1939), 61–62 and 29. 4 Priest, Te Gospel According to Renan, 52. 5  See Olender, Les langues du paradis, 98: “à ce Jésus sauvé du judaïsme . . .” (in his chapter on Renan, “Entre le sublime et l’odieux,” 75–11).

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A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh?  133 always be the most impressive fgure in world religious history. Renan perceived him mainly in the light of comparatism and approached him more from the psychological viewpoint than that of philology.6 As founders of religions, Zarathustra, Muhammad, and in particular the Buddha, could be compared to Jesus, but Renan saw in the latter something that distinguished him from all other prophets.7 Te pure religion of Jesus went not only beyond Judaism, but also beyond the established churches, both Catholic and Protestant. It would form the kernel of the religion of the future, one based on science.8 Renan took the opportunity of his archeological and epigraphical mission to the sites of ancient Phoenicia, in 1860–1861, to visit Palestine as well.9 Calling the Holy Land “the ffh Gospel,” he was endlessly fascinated by the place. Te great diferences between Jerusalem and the Galilee, in particular, drew his attention. While the Holy City struck him as stark and somber, the Galilee ofered smiling landscapes. Tis was Jesus’s true country: open, green, and full of light. It represented a counterpoint to Jerusalem, a place of tragic history. In a letter to Max Müller, from 1861, he wrote:

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Te north of Palestine really spoke to me. Tere, the Gospel as a real book had its perfect commentary. Te distinguished personality and character of Jesus appeared to me with much intensity.10

6  See François Laplanche, La Bible en France entre mythe et critique (XVIe–XIXe siècle) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 157. On Jesus and the history of religions for Renan, see also Perrine Simon-­Nahum, “Ernest Renan: Histoire du christianisme et histoire des religions,” in Yves-­Marie Hilaire, ed., De Renan à Marrou: l’histoire du christianisme et les progrès de la méthode historique (1863–1968) (Lille: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 1999), 35–45. 7  See Ernest Renan, “Les historiens critiques de Jésus,” in his Études d’histoire religieuse, suivies de Nouvelles études d’histoire religieuse (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 116–167, here 142. Tis text had originally appeared, signed only E. R., in La liberté de penser, 15 March and 15 April 1849. It is reprinted in Renan, OC, Vol. VII, where Joseph Salvador is discussed on 151–154. 8  Renan had already expressed such opinions in his L’avenir de la science, in Henriette Psichari, ed., OC, Vol. VIII (Paris: Calmann-­Lévy, 1949), 712–1121. 9  In 1847, Renan presented a report on Sanchuniaton at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-­Lettres, to which he had been elected the preceding year. In 1860, the Emperor sent him on a mission to the Levant, to search for traces of ancient Phenicia. His beloved sister Henriette, who accompanied him, would die in the Lebanon. On this mission, see Christian Julien Robin, “La mission d’Ernest Renan en Phénicie,” in Henry Laurens, ed., Ernest Renan: La science, la religion, la République (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2013), 125–154, as well as Corinne Bonnet, “Renan et les paradoxes de la mission en Phénicie,” in Laurens, ed. Ernest Renan, 101–120. 10  OC, Vol. X, 331, cited in transl. of Priest, Te Gospel According to Renan, 54. On Nazareth versus Jerusalem in Renan’s mind, see Halvor Moxnes, Jesus and the Rise of Nationalism: A New Quest for the Nineteenth-­Century Historical Jesus (London, New York: I.  B.  Tauris, 2012), 121–147.

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134  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Soon afer his return from the Levant, Renan was ofered the Chair of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac at the Collège de France. His appointment, supported by the liberals, had been decried from the start by the clericalists. Even earlier, Renan’s name had triggered powerfully polarized feelings of disavowal as much as of support. Te clergy and its supporters vociferously condemned him and continued to do so well afer his death. Demonstrations and counter-­ demonstrations accompanied Renan’s inaugural lecture (“On the contribution of the Semites to civilization”), delivered on February 21, 1862. Te 800-­seat amphitheater was packed. Many more, perhaps up to 3,000, both supporters and opponents of the young scholar, were lef standing outside.11 Renan had chosen his words with care.12 One single sentence, however, would cost him the Chair to which he had just been appointed. It is worth quoting this line in full:

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A matchless man—so grand, that although here all must be judged from a purely scientifc point of view, I would not gainsay those who, struck with the exceptional character of his work, call him God . . .13

Te clericalists, who were already vehemently opposed to Renan’s nomination, were incensed.14 Under unremitting pressure from the ecclesiastical authorities, and afer the publication of the text of the lecture in the Journal des débats, the emperor, who himself was rather sympathetic to Renan’s ideas, suspended his teaching. Renan’s appointment at the Collège was fnally revoked in 1864, and Salomon Munk was chosen to replace him.15 11  See Jean-­Pierre van Deth, Ernest Renan: simple chercheur de verité (Paris: Fayard, 2012), 271–283. 12  Te lecture was published as a separatum: Ernest Renan, De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1862). 13  I quote the English translation, Ernest Renan, “Te Share of the Semitic Peoples in the History of Civilization,” in Charles Dudley Warner, Library of the World’s Best Literature (New York: International Society, 1917) [for a digitized version of the actual publication, see https:// archive.org/stream/libraryofworldsbv21warn#page/12180/mode/2up]. Te original text reads: “Jésus, un homme incomparable, si grand que bien qu’ici tout doive être jugé du point de vue de la science positive, je ne voudrais pas contredire ceux qui, frappés du caractère exceptionnel de son oeuvre, l’appellent Dieu . . .” OC, Vol. II, 229–230; cf. Ernest Renan, La Vie de Jésus, XXVIII: “Cette sublime personne, qui chaque jour préside encore au destin du monde, il est permis de l’appeler divine . . .” OC, Vol. IV, 370. Inspired by Renan, the Islamic modernist Syed Ameer Ali considered the Prophet Muhammad as “the Incomparable Man.” See  M.  Ringer, Islamic Modernism and the Re-­ Enchantment of the Sacred in the Age of History, 142–146. 14  For decades aferward, Renan was anathema to the Catholic Church. 15 Renan, De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation. See further Ernest Renan, Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère général des peuples sémitiques et en particulier

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A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh?  135 Renan must have known that, in implying the human nature of Jesus, he was putting his neck on the line. It would have been hard for anyone, however, to foresee the mayhem that ensued. Renan’s clerical foes ascribed to him the proposition that “Christus est deus aut impostor”: denying the divinity of Jesus would at best put him on a par with all other prophets, religious leaders, and reformers, and at worst could become tantamount to attributing to him religious imposture. In this context, it seems relevant to ofer an observation. Renan’s explosive sentence may not have emerged ex nihilo, as it were, from his pen. In fact, it echoes rather remarkably the Testimonium Flavianum—a point apparently overlooked in the scholarship. Tis brief passage on Jesus in Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews reads:

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About that time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man (eige andra auton legein chrē). For he was one who performed surprising deeds . . .16

Te similarity between the two sentences is striking, one mirroring the other. In both, Jesus was a man so singular in his nature and in his deeds that he crossed the line between humanity and divinity. For Renan, as well as for his audience, this remark refected Josephus’s authentic perception of Jesus. Renan acknowledges drawing heavily on Josephus’s text for his Life of Jesus.17 He took along the works of Josephus (“among fve or six books”) with him to Ghazir, the “Maronite shaf” in the Lebanon to which he had retired in the summer of 1861 and where he had furiously drafed the bulk of what would become his Life of Jesus.18 It is difcult to imagine that Renan, who enjoyed inserting literary allusions into his writing, did not have the

sur leur tendance au monothéisme (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1859); cf. Chapter  8 in this volume. 16  Josephus Flavius, Antiquities 18.3.3. Te fact that this passage is probably spurious, at least in its current form, is not relevant to the present argument. From the ocean of scholarly literature on the Testimonium Flavianum, one may at least mention Alice Whealey, Josephus on Jesus: Te Testimonium Flavianum Controversy from Late Antiquity to Modern Times (New York: Peter Lang, 2003) and James Carleton Paget, “Some observations on Josephus and Christianity,” Journal of Teological Studies N.S. 52 (2001), 539–624 (an article which is a little book in itself). I thank Teodor Dunkelgrün for calling my attention to these two items. See further John Curran, “To Be or to Be Tought to Be: Te Testimonium Flavianum (Again),” Novum Testamentum 59 (2017), 71–94. 17  See Renan’s Introduction to his Vie de Jésus, 66. 18  See, in the 1st edn of the Vie de Jésus, pp. LIII–LIV.

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136  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Testimonium Flavianum in mind when sketching his own description of Jesus’s identity.19 Discharged from teaching (although still ofcially holding his professorship), Renan could now engage fully with a book that he had long been contemplating and which he had drafed during his research trip to the Levant: a biography of Jesus. Afer a year of intensive work, the Vie de Jésus was published in 1863 by Michel Lévy. Ten thousand copies of the hefy and expensive book were printed in the frst edition (there would be twelve editions before the end of 1864). Although Renan wrote mainly for a French audience and a Francophone readership, the book skyrocketed to international fame. Eighty-­four translations into at least twelve languages would eventually appear.20 At the time in France, only Victor Hugo earned more from royalties. Success brought the author, encouraged by his publisher, to publish in 1864 a shorter, popular version, to which we shall return below. With his Life of Jesus, Renan consciously joined the new trend of critical biblical scholarship emerging from Protestant German universities, and quite unknown in Catholic France at the time. By far the most important scholarly work on Jesus was David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesus, kritisch bearbeitet, a book published in 1835 and translated into French by Émile Littré in 1856.21 Renan mentions this work (with which he had already dealt at length in his 1849 article “Les historiens critiques de Jésus”) in the introduction to his Life of Jesus. For Strauss, much of the Gospels, including the miracles efected by Jesus, consisted of mythical additions to a true kernel of the historical Jesus—a view that earned him much abuse in German theological circles, where some even classifed his positions as the “Iscariotism of our days.” Renan saw a direct line leading from Friedrich August Wolf ’s Prolegomena ad Homerum (1795), which had been the frst

19  On the importance of Josephus as a source to this book, see Alfaric, Les manuscrits de la “Vie de Jésus” d’Ernest Renan, XXXIV. For another example of Renan’s predilection for literary insertions, see, for instance, Pierre Courcelle, “Une source imprévue de la “Prière sur l’Acropole,” les “Confessions” de Saint Augustin,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 153 (1958), 215–234. “Tard je t’ai connue, beauté parfaite . . .”; cf. “Sero te amaui, pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam noua, sero te amaui.” (Conf. X. 27). See further Henriette Psichari, La prière sur l’Acropole et ses mystères (Paris: CNRS, 1956). 20  See Perrine Simon-­Nahum, “Le scandale de la Vie de Jésus de Renan: du succès littéraire comme mode d’échec de la science,” Mil Neuf Cent: Revue d’Histoire Intellectuelle 25 (2007), 61–74. 21  An English translation, by George Eliot, had already appeared in 1846. Another im­por­ tant German work that exerted a major infuence on Renan was Heinrich Ewald’s Die Geschichte des Volkes Israel (eight vols; Göttingen: Dieterich, 1843–1859), a work ending with an account of Jesus.

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A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh?  137 to cast doubt on Homer’s historicity, and the “mythological school” attached to Strauss’s name. In addition to Strauss, Renan refers in his Introduction to a long list of scholarly works on Christian origins, mainly—but not exclusively—German books. For the reader’s beneft, he also ofers a list of recent French publications (both original and translations).22 And yet, it is mainly in order to highlight the radical diference between Jesus’s conception of religion and the traditional Jewish beliefs and rituals that Renan is interested in the Jewish background of Jesus:23

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Jesus did not speak against the Mosaic law, but it is clear that he saw its insufciency and let it be seen that he did so . . . A pure worship, a religion without priests and external observances, resting wholly on the feelings of the heart, on the imitation of God, on the close communion of the conscience with the Heavenly Father, were the result of these principles. Jesus never shrank from this bold conclusion, which made him an indomitable revolutionary in the very heart of Judaism . . . Even tradition, a thing so sacred for the Jews, is nothing compared with pure feeling. Te hypocrisy of the Pharisees, who, as they prayed, turned their heads to see if they were observed, who gave their alms with ostentation and put marks upon their garments, that they might be recognized as pious men, all these afectations of false devotion roused his disgust.24

22 “Introduction,”, Vie de Jésus, OC, Vol. IV, 48–49; cf. Alfaric, Les manuscrits de la “Vie de Jésus” d’Ernest Renan, XLVI–XLVII. A similar discussion of recent studies of Jesus and the Gospels is found in the Preface to the 13th edition. Side by side with many German scholars, Renan mentions some French and English names. About the latter he writes: “les pays lourdement raisonnables comme l’Angleterre sont dans l’impossibilité d’y rien comprendre.” [about the religious world of Christian origins] OC, Vol. IV, 31. 23  “Jésus a fondé la religion absolue . . .” Vie de Jésus, Ch. XXVIII, OC, Vol. IV, 363. 24 Ernest Renan, Life of Jesus, transl. with an Introduction by William  G.  Hutchinson (London, 1897), 55–56. Te original text reads: Jésus ne parlait pas contre la loi mosaïque, mais on sent bien qu’il en voyait l’insufisance, et il le laissait entendre . . . Un culte pur, une religion sans prêtres et sans pratiques extérieures, reposant toute sur les sentiments du Coeur, sur l’imitation de Dieu, sur le rapport immédiat de la conscience avec le Père céleste, étaient la suite de ces principes. Jésus ne recula jamais devant cette hardie conséquence, qui faisait de lui, dans le sein du judaïsme, un révolutionnaire au premier chef . . . La tradition même, chose si sainte pour le juif, n’est rien, comparé au sentiment pur. L’hypocrisie des pharisiens, qui en priant tournaient la tête pour voir si on les regardait, qui faisaient leurs aumônes avec fracas, et mettaient sur leurs habits des signes qui les faisaient reconnaître pour personnes pieuses, toutes ces simagrées de la fausse dévotion le révoltaient. Vie de Jésus, Ch. V, OC, Vol. IV, 138–139.

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138  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Tis passage is one among many in which Renan locates Jesus in direct opposition to contemporary Palestinian Judaism. For him, Jesus was a man of Galilee, with its intoxicating landscapes,25 while Judea, with Jerusalem at its core, refected the rigorous aridity of Jewish law. Renan, in short, does not want Jesus to have been a Jew.26 Referring to the traditional, though probably false, etymology of the title gelil ha-­goyyim (Is. 8:23), “the circle of the Gentiles,” Renan notes that the population of Galilee: . . . was quite mixed, to the extent that it is impossible to know the origin of the blood running in Jesus’ veins, who may not have even been a Jew by race.27

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Te gulf that for Renan distanced Galilee from Judea matches that separating what he described as Aryans and Semites. Renan does not develop his questioning of Jesus’s Jewishness, but he does impart a sense of doubt as to the “racial” identity of his hero. Renan, we have learned, made frequent recourse to the concept of race,28 while insisting (at times) that he used the term metaphorically. A Gentile Savior, perhaps even an Aryan one—from the second half of the nineteenth century on, this would become the leitmotiv of an entire school of theologians and Orientalists. Trough Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, it would have an appalling future, eventually becoming a trademark of Nazi theologians.29

Jesus a Jew? Objections to Renan’s book came from many diferent quarters. In August 1863, Ernest Havet, Professor of “Latin eloquence” at the Collège de France, 25  “[C]e joli pays” (Vie de Jésus, ch. IV, OC, Vol. IV, 126), “Jésus vivait et grandissait dans ce milieu enivrant” (ibid., 127); and see text referred in n. 10 above. 26  See Mireille Hadas-­Lebel, “Renan et le judaïsme,” Commentaire 62 (1993), 369–379. 27  “Il est impossible de soulever ici aucune question de race et de rechercher quel sang coulait dans les veines de celui qui a le plus contribué à efacer dans l’humanité les distinctions de sang.” On gelil ha-­goyyim, see Mark  A.  Chancey, Te Myth of a Gentile Galilee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 28  On Renan’s dubious assessment of Gobineau’s racialist theory, see Priest, “Ernest Renan’s Race Problem,” esp. 312–313. 29  Paul Haupt, for example, who was Germany’s leading Assyriologist, would read at the Tird International Congress for the History of Religions (Oxford, 1908), a paper entitled: “Te Aryan Ancestry of Jesus.” References in Susannah Heschel, Te Aryan Jesus: Christian Teologians and Nazi Germany (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2010), 57. See further, Jean-­Paul Demoule, Mais où sont passés les Indo-­européens? Le mythe d’origine de l’Occident (Paris: Le Seuil, 2014). On Chamberlain, see Chapter 8 in this volume.

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A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh?  139 published a lengthy review of Renan’s book in the Revue des Deux Mondes. Havet pours praise on the author, arguing that as a Breton, he was in France the equivalent of a Galilean in Palestine, and could have thus developed an immediate understanding of Jesus.30 He also lauds Renan’s eforts to tap into Talmudic literature, since there is no mention of Jesus in non-­Christian contemporary sources (he rejects the authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum). But Havet also ofers some keen criticism. In particular, he rejects Renan’s positioning of Jesus in stark contrast to his Jewish milieu, demanding for the Jews a sympathy that he did not fnd in Renan’s book: “Enfn, je demande grâce pour les Juifs, et mieux que grâce.”31 Here, we get a glimpse of Havet’s impression that Renan’s view of the Jews refected traditional prejudice more than it did scholarly investigation. According to him, while Renan rejected the idea of deicide (since for him, in any case, Jesus was no God), he was unable to free himself from it altogether.32 Furthermore, Havet rejected Renan’s claim that it is to the Jews, rather than to the Christians, that one owes the invention of intolerance.33 Havet emphasizes the great merit of the Jewish people, a people who sufers continual oppression without ever acquiescing to it. He concludes that the Jews have taught humankind “these two great things, martyrdom and charity.”34 In March 1864, less than a year afer the publication of the frst, full version of his book, Renan published, with the same publisher, a more popular version, simply called Jésus, from which the chapters on the Jewish background of Jesus had disappeared. Jesus had now become a pure and truly universal fgure, with no ethnic blemish. Renan obviously wished to make his book easily accessible to a broader, popular readership, by lowering its price, shortening its text, and omitting all footnotes.35 He seeks here to appeal directly and immediately to his contemporaries, and to draw a Jesus fgure with whom everyone might easily identify, beyond all historical and

30  Ernest Havet, Jésus dans l’histoire: Examen de la Vie de Jésus par M.  Renan (2nd edn; Paris: Ferdinand Sartorius, 1863), 25 (originally published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, August 1863). 31  Ibid., 65. 32  “. . . mais son imagination n’y échappe pas tout à fait.” Ibid., 65. 33  “L’intolérance n’est pas un fait chrétien, mais un fait juif.” Ibid., 66. Intolerance is for Renan a direct consequence of monotheism, as he notes at the onset of his Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (8th edn; Paris: Calmann-­Lévy, 1928 [8th ed.]), 7. 34 Havet, Jésus dans l’histoire, 67. For another critical, scholarly review of Renan’s book, see Albert Réville, La Vie de Jésus de M. Renan devant les orthodoxies et devant la critique (2nd edn; Paris: Cherbuliez, 1864). In 1880, Réville would become the frst incumbent of the Chair of History of Religion at the Collège de France. See Chapter 7 in this volume. 35  See Simon-­Nahum, “Le scandale de la Vie de Jésus de Renan,” 61–74.

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140  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism cultural gaps. In a preliminary note, he explains how, as a historian, he had painted in his original book:

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. . . a Christ who had the traits, the color, the physiognomy of his race. Now, it is a Christ in white marble that I present to the public, a Christ sculpted in a stainless rock, a Christ simple and pure as the feeling that created him.36

Te frst Jesus, then, had been a Jewish one, at least outwardly, in his physical appearance. He certainly looked Jewish, Oriental, colored: he looked like a Semite. Te new one is white and pure, as “clean of local or national blemish” as the Greek miracle. In the shortened version, Renan systematically pruned those chapters that had ofered a historical background into the life of Jesus, starting with chapter one in the original version: “Jesus’ Place in World History.” He also expunged the footnotes and references to ancient texts, in particular to rabbinic literature. True to his belief that individuals count more than ideas in the history of religions, Renan wished to draw a universal Jesus. Such a goal entails, of course, excising all elements of Jewishness in Jesus. In a sense, Renan’s de-­historicization, or Enthistorisierung, of Jesus is analogous to what Rudolf Bultmann would later call Entmythologisierung, since in Bultmann’s parlance, “myths” referred to religious beliefs and conceptions in frst-­century Palestine. Georges Pholien dedicated a full monograph to a comparison of Renan’s Life of Jesus and his Jesus.37 In the latter, while Pholien correctly noted Renan’s omission of references to the Jewish background of Jesus, he seems to have misunderstood the erasure. According to him, it was motivated by Renan’s desire to avoid antagonizing his Jewish readers by emphasizing the clash between Jesus and the Judaism of his time.38 Yet, the Jews who would

36  Pour être historien, j’avais dû chercher à peindre un Christ qui eût les traits, la ­couleur, la physionomie de sa race. Cette fois, c’est un Christ en marbre blanc que je présente au public, un Christ taillé dans un bloc sans tache, un Christ simple et pur comme le sentiment qui le créa. Vie de Jésus, Avertissement, V. 37  Georges Pholien, Les deux Vie de Jésus de Renan (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1983). 38  Dans Jésus, Renan cherchait à gagner aussi les faveurs de la fraction israélite du grand public. Certes, il ne dissimulait pas son admiration pour Israël dans la Vie de Jésus . . . Mais les suppressions opérées dans Jésus témoignent de son souci de ménager dadvantage les susceptibilités de ses lecteurs juifs . . . Pholien, Les deux Vie de Jésus de Renan, 79.

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A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh?  141 have been ofended by the frst version of Renan’s Jesus would probably not have been mollifed by the second one. Furthermore, the aforementioned omission allowed Renan to put aside any clash between Jesus and the religion of his contemporaries in Jewish Palestine. But drawing a fully de-­Judaized Jesus went much further, advancing the idea of a universal Jesus.39 If the “Jesus of white marble,” a Greek statue of sorts, did not have to distinguish himself from contemporary Palestinian Judaism, it is because he was essentially a hero for all seasons, and did not in any signifcant sense belong to Jewish Palestine. In his second, shortened book, Renan made a giant stride towards the Aryan Jesus, an infamous idea developed, in France, by Émile-­Louis Burnouf, before its twentieth-­century greater leap to popularity across the Rhine.40 Renan’s deep ambivalence about Jesus’s Jewish identity is refected in the diferences between the two versions of his book. While the frst one is a serious attempt at an historical biography, the second, relinquishing all historical context, retreats into hagiography, portraying a saint (an almost divine one at that) with whom anyone can sympathize (in the strong sense of the word). Renan’s universalized Jesus is also a de-­Judaized one, who carries to new levels the strong traditional rejection of his Jewish religious (although not ethnic) identity. In writing a non-­theological biography of Jesus, Renan was claiming to ofer to the French-­reading public something new; indeed, to craf a new literary genre. But a look at another character in our broader story may make us wonder. Joseph Salvador (1796–1873), born in Montpellier to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, was a highly original and prolifc author, quite forgotten today.41 As noted in Chapter 3 of this volume, he had been studying medicine when, shocked by an article about the 1819 “Hep-­Hep!” pogroms in Germany, he decided to devote his life to the study of Jewish history. Salvador soon gained a reputation for his Loi de Moïse,

39 “L’avenir est à l’Europe. Notre religion deviendra de moins en moins juive,” declares Renan in his inaugural lecture. Similarly, Islam is for him the “perfect negation” of Europe, as he points out in the same text. 40  Émile-­Louis Burnouf, La science des religions (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1872). Tis Burnouf was the cousin of the great scholar of Buddhism Eugène Burnouf, who had been Renan’s revered teacher; cf. Heschel, Te Aryan Jesus. See further Chapter 8 in this volume. 41  On Salvador, see Gabriel Salvador, Joseph Salvador, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1881) and James Darmesteter, Joseph Salvador (Versailles, 1881) [originally published in the Annuaire de la Société des Études Juives, 1880]; on “Jésus-­Christ et sa doctrine,” see in particular 69–175. See further Eugène Fleischmann, Le christianisme “mis à nu”: la critique juive du christianisme (Paris: Plon, 1970), chapter 2, 19–69.

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142  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism ou système religieux et politique des Hébreux (1822). Also as mentioned in Chapter 3, this publication did not go unnoticed; Benjamin Constant commended it as one of the fnest works on the law of Moses.42 Salvador further developed the ideas of that frst book in his Histoire des institutions de Moïse et du peuple hébreu (1828). For Salvador, the political and social order advocated by the Mosaic Law was admirable. Hebrew “nomocracy” (a neologism which he preferred to “theocracy”) constituted one of the major political and moral revolutions of humankind.43 Hebraism—a term he used to refer to ancient Judaism—represented a powerful reaction against Oriental order, as the small Jewish people, he thought, did not really belong to the Orient.44 Hebraism needed schools in order to proselytize the new doctrine throughout the earth. Jesus and Muhammad became the lieutenants of Abraham and of Moses, with the word as well as with the sword. Trough Christianity, and then also through Islam, the essential elements of the Hebrew monotheistic revolution would then be transmitted to most peoples, in order to bring to all nations the idea of a covenant, eventually leading to the awakening of Hebraism and the establishment of happiness and peace upon earth.45 As is well known, this scheme represents, in a nutshell, Maimonides’s view of religious history; yet, there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Salvador had read Maimonides.46 In 1838, Salvador published his two-­volume Jésus-­Christ et sa doctrine: Histoire de la naissance de l’Église, de son organisation et de ses progrès pend­ ant le premier siècle.47 In 1836, his inquisitive mind led him to ask a correspondent about Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, which had been published the previous year, and he referred to the book in his Preface.48 Like Strauss, Salvador valued Protestantism, which represented for him a step ahead in the preparation of the Christian world to the awakening of Hebraism.49 Unlike Strauss, however, Salvador did not deny the authenticity of the Gospels, but rather sought to read them anew, without obliterating their Jewish background. According to Salvador, indeed, it is a new school of Judaism, rather than a new religion, that Jesus had established.50 42  De la religion (1824–1831). Reference in Salvador’s Preface to Jésus-­Christ et sa doctrine: Histoire de la naissance de l’Eglise, de son organisation et de ses progrès pendant le premier siècle (Bruxelles: Société Belge de Librairie, Hauman and Co., 1838), VIII. 43 Salvador, Jésus-­Christ, 69. 44  Ibid., 104; cf. Chapter 3 in this volume. 45 Salvador, Jésus-­Christ, 139. 46  See Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim 11.4. 47  Bruxelles: Société Belge de Librairie, Hauman et Co. A new edition would be published in 1864–1865 by Michel Lévy Frères in Paris. 48  See Salvador, Joseph Salvador, 499. 49 Salvador, Jésus-­Christ, XVIII–XXI.    50  Ibid., 142.

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A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh?  143

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Renan knew Salvador’s writings well and discussed his book at length in “Les historiens critiques de la vie de Jésus,” where he wrote: “Le livre de M. Salvador (1838) est l’expression la plus élevée de la critique juive relativement à la vie de Jésus.” Renan also approved of the way in which Salvador had dealt with the origins of Christian doctrines.51 Later, he explicitly recognized Salvador as having been the frst in France to probe Christian origins.52 By the same token, Renan expressed serious reservations about Salvador’s scholarship:53 he was not critical enough of his sources, wrote Renan, and he fell short of the philological precision found in German scholarship. In 1860, Salvador’s Paris, Rome, Jérusalem, ou la question religieuse au XIXe siècle was published by Michel Lévy, who, we recall, was also Renan’s publisher. For the author, Rome represented the past, Paris the present, and Jerusalem the new city to be built in the future.54 Te future Hebraism would owe much to the propagation of monotheism across the earth by the followers of Jesus and Muhammad, alongside those of Moses. Reviewing the work, Renan called it “one of the most original books to have appeared in recent years.”55 Renan, however, rejected what he considered an attempt, under the infuence of Saint Simon, to unite the temporal power with the spiritual one. For Renan, such a union of the two powers would lead to a renewal of theocracy, while liberalism insisted on the separation of these two powers. About Salvador himself, he wrote: “M. Salvador est vraiment un original, un rénovateur religieux,” adding that it was in the seventeenth

51  “Les historiens critiques . . .” Ibid., 151 and 153. See further Francesca Sofa, “Gerusalemme tra Roma e Parigi: Joseph Salvador e le origini del cristianesimo,” Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi 21 (2004), 645–662. I wish to thank Cristiana Facchini for calling my attention to this article, which I read afer the completion of my own text. It corroborates my argument on Salvador and Renan. 52  Ernest Renan, L’avenir religieux des sociétés modernes, in OC, Vol. I, 233–281, here 236 [originally published in the Revue des deux mondes (October 15, 1860]. Salvador is also the frst Jew to have ofered a scholarly study of Christian origins. See Fleischmann, Le christianisme “mis à nu.” 53  “Malheureusement, l’auteur, qui mérite un rang distingué comme philosophe et comme écrivain, laisse quelque chose à désirer sous le rapport de l’érudition et de la critique historique.” In “Les historiens critiques de Jésus,” 151; cf. L’avenir religieux des sociétés modernes, 238, where he qualifes Salvador as “médiocre historien.” 54  In this context, Salvador has sometimes been called a “proto-­Zionist.” See Paula Hyman, “Joseph Salvador: Proto-­Zionist or Apologist for Assimilation?” Jewish Social Studies 34 (1972), 1–22. Fleischmann, for his part, insists on his Saint-­Simonianism. 55  “un des livres les plus originaux qui aient paru depuis des années.” In Ernest Renan, “L’avenir religieux des sociétés modernes,” Revue des deux mondes (October 15, 1860), 233–281, esp. 235–242.

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144  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism century, rather than in the nineteenth, that he should have lived, with fgures like Spinoza and Uriel d’Acosta. On Salvador’s book on Jesus and Christian origins, (“the frst in France” noted Renan), Renan wrote that it refected talents attributable to the author’s Jewishness, to his “Semitic” identity.56 While unaccomplished as a historian, Salvador had a gif for making fruitful conjectures and proposing new historical connections. Renan, however, could not accept Salvador’s vision of a future religious reform established on a return to the essence of Hebraism.57 For him, Hebraism had no future, as the Jews had long since accomplished their historic mission. Afer the coming of Jesus, their only remaining task was to be the Bible’s keepers.58 Once the Jews had taught Hebrew to Reuchlin and Luther, they had nothing else of signifcance lef to do.59 If the religious future of humankind cannot be a return of sorts to the spirit of Hebraism, this is because Christianity represents, rather than the continuation of Judaism, a reaction against its dominant spirit.60 Te coming of Jesus was the fnal signifcant deed of Jewish history. Indeed, the last chapter of Renan’s Histoire du peuple d’Israël (Book X, Chapter XVIII) is entitled: Finito libro, sit laus et gloria Christo, while its very last sentence, describing the fnal state of humanity at the Endzeit, afer the demise of Christianity, afer Judaism, reads:

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With the necessary reserves, the Jewish program will be accomplished: without compensating heavens, justice will really exist upon the earth.61

Here, Renan appears to align with the Jewish reformers (and also with Salvador himself!): the essence of Judaism lies in the ethical nature of the prophets’ message, and remains therefore on today’s agenda, pointing to a better future.

56 “Il y portait un don de race . . .” Ibid., 237. “M.  Salvador se montre un vrai sémite.” Ibid., 241. 57  Ibid., 239. 58  One is reminded here of Augustine, for whom the Jews had become “librarii nostri.” Ennarrationes in Psalmum, 56.9, ed. E. Dekkers and I. Fraipont (Turnhout, 1956 [CCSL 39]), 699; cf. Sermo 5 (PL 38, 52). 59  Renan, “L’avenir religieux des sociétés modernes.”    60  Ibid., 240. 61  Tis last sentence refers to the future, when Christianity, too, will disappear, yielding its place to socialism, just as Judaism had been replaced by Christianity: “Ni le judaïsme ni le christianisme ne seront donc éternels. . . le judaïsme et le christianisme disparaîtront . . . Le judaïsme et le christianisme représentent dans l’antiquité ce qu’est le socialisme dans les temps modernes.” Te very last sentence reads: “Avec d’inévitables réserves, le programme juif sera accompli: sans ciel compensateur, la justice existera réellement sur la terre.”OC, Vol. VI, 1518. I thank Maurice Kriegel for having called my attention to these fascinating sentences.

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A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh?  145 Renan, then, was fully aware of Salvador’s book on Jesus, and recognized its important place in French scholarship on the topic. Although he voiced misgivings about Salvador’s scholarly acumen, he was able to appreciate the originality of his work. Te question then arises: where is Salvador in the Life of Jesus? Renan’s silence, it seems to me, speaks volumes. It cannot be explained away as refecting his scholarly dispute with Salvador, since Renan certainly discussed other scholars with whom he disagreed. I suggest that he was simply unable to admit, in his Life of Jesus, a text written for the general public, that the author of the frst modern biography of Jesus in French was a Jew. As a liberal, Renan welcomed the Jews as co-­actors in modern society. But for him, the study of Christian origins was to remain the domain of Christian scholars, their “chasse gardée,” and, in this area, Jews and Christians must retain their separate identities.62 I think that this is also how one should understand the following disturbing sentence (and not only as refecting the polemics between Saint Simonians and liberals): “Mr. Salvador wants to unite. As liberals, we would like everyone to have his own symbol.”63 Moreover, Renan adds, “the Orient never created anything as good as we did.”64 Jesus may well have been born a Jew, or at least have lived among Jews, but just like Muslims, Jews, throughout the centuries, remained unable to fully understand Jesus’s religion, or the relationship between Jesus and His divine Father.65 Here, Renan’s essential duality is revealed: the true Jesus is not the Jewish one. He belongs to the cultural capital of the Christians,66 not of the Jews. It appears, then, that Renan wrote the Vie de Jésus as a counterpoint to Salvador’s Jésus-­Christ et sa doctrine. In the last two chapters, I have focused on Renan’s idea of Semitic monotheism, which represents the epicenter of this book. Tese chapters sought to study its formation within the immediate context of Renan’s views of Judaism and Islam, and also of his deep ambivalence about the Jewish identity of Jesus. In the following chapters, I shall follow the ascendancy and eventual waning of the idea of Semitic monotheism in the second half of the century.

62  Renan’s occultation of Salvador here may also refect something of Renan’s character: on other occasions, too, he attributed to himself what was not really his; see Chapter 9 in this volume, note 1. 63  “M.  Salvador veut unir. Nous autres libéraux voudrions que chacun eût son symbole.” Renan, “L’avenir religieux des sociėtés modernes,” 241. 64  Ibid., 242. 65  La vie de Jésus, 161. 66  Tis is true also of nominal Christians: “En ce sens, nous sommes chrétiens, même quand nous nous séparons sur presque tous les points de la tradition chrétienne qui nous a précédés.” Ibid., XXVIII; OC, Vol. IV, 364.

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146  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism

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Renan’s impact on French scholarship in the second half of the nineteenth century would be difcult to overstate. Furthermore, he had a foundational infuence on leading Jewish scholars, from Sylvain Lévi to James Darmesteter. Chapter  7 will examine the role that these Jewish scholars played in the study of religion as an emerging discipline.

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7

Secular Scholarship in France Catholics, Protestants, and Jews

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France, of course, was far from an intellectual autarky. While academic contacts with countries such as Italy or Spain, where the sway of Catholic authorities was overwhelming, remained marginal, those with Germany, in particular, were momentous. Between the French and German worlds of knowledge, a complex movement of cultural and intellectual transfers retained capital importance, from Voltaire’s days at the court of Friedrich II in Potsdam to Heine’s Parisian years, and beyond. On the French side, such contacts in the study of religions can ofen be traced to the activity of Protestant and Jewish scholars. Te French-­speaking Protestant theologians, including those in Geneva and in the Huguenot “Refuge” in Holland, sought to emulate liberal Lutheran theologians in the leading German universities, developing daring new approaches to Scriptural interpretation, while many Jewish scholars moved from Germany to France in search of academic posts.

Building Institutions French society difered from the German one not only regarding the standing of the Catholic Church, but also in the prolonged clash between two diametrically opposed attitudes to national identity, the one rooted in religious tradition and the other established on secular principles—something absent from the German scene.1 Although it was only in 1905 that the legal separation of Church and State in France was consummated, this move had been prepared for more than a century by a series of arguments. Yet, it is only afer the Second Empire, in the days of the Tird Republic, that the secularizing trend picked up momentum. In the present context, the focus will be on the secularization of institutions of higher learning and their 1 Te Kulturkampf in Bismarck’s Prussia during the 1870s focused on a diferent issue altogether—the status of the Catholic Church in national identity. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press (2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0008

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148  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism opening to new ways of studying religion. Since the French Revolution, and in sharp contrast to societies of Protestant culture, French society was deeply divided between its traditional Catholic identity and strong, thriving anticlerical trends. Earlier and more radically than in any other European country, these trends led to the secularization of the public space, and in particular of the universities. If France was dominant in the development of the new discipline of the religious sciences (usually called in France the “history of religions”), this is due to a combination of factors, chief among them the bearing of Protestant and Jewish scholars.2 More precisely, it was the creation, in the fnal third of the century, of new academic institutions where scholars from all religious backgrounds worked together, using the same methods, and with no theological presuppositions, which allowed an original, non-­ theological approach to religious history to germinate and bloom. In France, the conjunction of scholars from diferent religious backgrounds and new, secular institutions devoted to the study of religions forged a reality unknown elsewhere.3 It is hard to imagine today, as stressed by Jacques Le Brun, the intensity of intellectual fermentation in all aspects of the study of religion, from 1870 to 1914, in France as elsewhere. Te question of the origins of religion, in particular, felt to be the key to understanding the nature of religion, was the focus of this fermentation, and expressed itself at once in scholarly monographs and in works of “haute vulgarisation.”4 In this regard, it bears mention that French Protestant theologians and scholars developed close and natural contacts with the new trends in German Lutheran theology and scholarship. Tis development took place, in particular, through theological studies in Germany and in countries such as the Netherlands, where German intellectual trends were leaving a clear mark. Te traditional historiographical focus on Germany, whatever its merits, leaves aside an aspect of the growth of the new discipline of religious history which, despite being less obvious, is a vital piece of the full picture.

2  On the special dynamic and social, political, and intellectual alliances created by the Jews and Protestants in French society across the centuries, see Patrick Cabanel, Juifs et Protestants en France, les afnités électives, XVIe–XXIe siècles (Paris: Fayard, 2004). 3  Te heritage of the nineteenth century is felt down to our own days, and it is still the case that few national traditions of a purely secular approach to the study of religions exist outside the French cultural orbit. Tis important phenomenon and its causes tend to be overlooked by historians of the discipline. 4  Jacques Le Brun, “De l’Histoire critique du Vieux Testament à Totem et tabou: l’invention de l’origine (XVIIe–XXe siècles),” in his La jouissance et le trouble: Recherches sur la littérature chrétienne de l’âge classique (Geneva: Droz, 2004), 561–611, esp. 595f.

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Secular Scholarship in France  149 In this context, it is worth noting that in 1873, the frst academic Chair devoted specifcally to the study of religion was established in Frenchspeaking Geneva, rather than in any of the German universities.5 In ­ Calvinist Geneva, as in the German Lutheran faculties, it is in the tradition of biblical criticism that we fnd the roots of the systematic and comparative study of religious phenomena, both in the ancient world and in exotic cultures. In Switzerland more than elsewhere, the transmission of knowledge between German-­speaking and French-­speaking theologians was relatively natural and easy. Altogether, French-­speaking Calvinist scholars were the carriers of the new learning coming from Germany, transforming Geneva into a nexus for intellectual transfers in the discipline of religion between Germany and France. Like their Swiss colleagues, French Protestant scholars were attuned to the new voices emerging from Germany. Some among them developed a serious interest in the non-­theological study of religion and would play a leading role in the institutional foundations and early phases of the new discipline during the fnal decades of the nineteenth century. It is thanks to these French-­speaking Protestant theologians that both the methods and results of German scholarship were made available in France. As shown by François Laplanche, for instance, biblical historical hermeneutics, a typically German specialty, was a key factor in the constitution of modern, critical religious scholarship in nineteenth-­century France.6 More precisely, we shall see how it was the meeting of Protestant and Jewish scholars that made possible the transmission of German scholarly methods across the Rhine. Tis passage meant that in the fnal three decades of the century, France was becoming, as much as Germany, and perhaps more so, a leading laboratory for the study of religion. Te presence in Paris of Protestant and Jewish scholars familiar with the philological critical methods developed in Germany, however, was not in itself sufcient to bring about the birth of a new spirit. Te fnal push for this spirit to be born came from the establishment of new institutional structures, which sought

5  On the history of the study of religion in Geneva, see Philippe Borgeaud, “L’histoire des religions à Genève: origines et métamorphoses,” Asdiwal 1 (2006), 13–22. On the study of religion in a theological and philosophical context in Alemannic Switzerland, see, for instance, about Basel, Andreas Urs Sommer, Der Geist der Historie und das Ende des Christentums: Zur “Wafengenossenschaf” von Friedrich Nietzsche und Franz Overbeck. Mit einem Anhang unpublizierter Texte aus Overbecks “Kirchenlexicon” (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997). 6 See François Laplanche, La Bible en France entre mythe et critique (XVIe–XIXe siècle) (Paris: Alin Michel, 1994).

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150  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish scholars alike to teach—using identical methods—the history of religions. Tus, thoroughly novel conditions for scholarship on religion and its history were created in Paris. In their attempt to emulate their German colleagues, French scholars accomplished—perhaps not quite intentionally—something utterly innovative. Tis remarkable achievement difered from what existed in Germany, and better suited the study of religious phenomena from across the world and throughout history. Tese scholars’ work endowed the study of religion with a new signifcance. Teology, by contrast, was fast losing its place in the state’s academic system under the Tird Republic. Te weakening of Christian theological discourse also meant that Judaism and its study were becoming less controversial. At the same time, however, it was moving to scholarly backwaters, as other domains of investigation were coming to the fore. Only in Paris was the study of religion conducted within wholly secular, cutting-­edge academic institutions. While their world was certainly not free of religious tensions, scholars from diferent persuasions used the same methods and accepted the same assumptions: religions were to be studied as social and historical facts, without explicit or implicit reference to divine revelation. In 1879, the Collège de France decided to establish its frst Chair devoted to the history of religions, and Albert Réville (1826–1906), who was elected to this Chair, started teaching the following year.7 At the time, Renan, soon to become (in 1883) the Collège’s Administrateur, was actively involved in changing the designation of various chairs.8 In all likelihood, he was highly instrumental both in the decision to establish the Chair and in the election of its frst holder. Réville, who had been educated in Geneva, Strasbourg, and Tübingen, served as pastor in the Wallon Reformed church of Rotterdam from 1851 to 1873.9 In 1859, he published an article that exposed

7  For his inaugural lecture, see Albert Réville, Leçon d’ouverture du cours d’Histoire des religions au Collège de France (2 février 1880) (Paris: Fischbacher, 1880). Réville published his lectures during the frst year of his tenure as Prolégomènes de l’Histoire des religions (4th edn; Paris: Fishbacher, 1886). See further Patrick Henriet, “La création de la chaire d’histoire des religions au Collège de France (1880). Rapports de Jules Soury et d’un savant anonyme identifé comme Ernest Renan,” Revue de Synthèse 141 (2020), 189–238. I thank Patrick Henriet for having shared with me the typescript of his convincing article. 8  See Antoine Compagnon’s Preface to Wolf Feuerhahn, ed., La politique des chaires au Collège de France (Paris: Collège de France, Belles Lettres, 2017). See further André Tuilier, ed., Histoire du Collège de France, Vol. I (Paris: Fayard, 2006). 9 On Réville, see Jacques Marty, Albert Réville, sa vie, son oeuvre (Cahors et Alençon: Coueslant, 1912). Réville dominated the study of religion in France for the last two decades of

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Secular Scholarship in France  151 the weakness of French scholarship on religion.10 His claim was that the revocation of the Nantes Edict was primarily responsible for the absence of the scholarly, critical study of religion in France.11 Réville even made reference to an intellectual “sterility” reigning in France since, at the end of the seventeenth century, a hermetic border had been established between the sacred and the profane, between faith and science.12 Tis exclusion of the sacred from the domain of critical thought persisted throughout the eight­eenth century, an era with little sensitivity for religion; only in the past generation, he argued, was it possible to discern any intellectual novelty in French scholarship on religion. Réville’s remarks betray the anger experienced by French Protestants following the expulsion of the Huguenots. But the intellectual context of these comments is also revealing. For Réville, the new approach started with the dramatic changes following the 1848 revolution; only then, he wrote, can one speak of the real start of the nineteenth century—a century as signifcant for the transformation of knowledge, he added, as the ffeenth century had been. Réville also became the frst editor of the Revue de l’Histoire des Religions. He launched this journal in 1879, together with Maurice Vernes (1845–1923), another Protestant scholar, who was working on the Hebrew Bible and ancient Near Eastern religions, and with the fnancial support of Émile Guimet, an industrialist from Lyon and generous patron of Asian arts. Te new journal quickly took the lead in the development of the discipline.13 In 1871, afer the defeat in the war against the Prussians and the bloody events of the Paris Commune, the combined fear of atheistic socialism and of secular education led to the Ralliement of French Catholics to the newly established Tird Republic and to a religious revival, as well as to the rise of religious socialism. It is in this broader context that the new intellectual activism of Protestant scholars ought to be understood. Réville became, the nineteenth century until his death in 1906; see Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifce: Religion, Nationalism, and Social Tought (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2002), 125. 10  Albert Réville, “De la renaissance des études religieuses en France,” in his Essais de critique religieuse (Paris-­ Geneva: Cherbuliez, 1869), 361–421 [= Revue des deux mondes, (November 1, 1859), 68f.]. On the crucial role of Protestant scholars in the establishment of research institutions in France, see Patrick Cabanel, “L’institution des ‘sciences religieuses’ en France (1879–1908),” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français 140 (1994), 33–79. 11  Réville, “De la renaissance des études religieuses en France,” 369. 12  Ibid., 377. 13  On those years, see Michel Despland, “Les sciences religieuses en France, 1880–1886: des sciences que l’on pratique mais que l’on n’enseigne pas,” in his Comparatisme et christianisme: Questions d’histoire et de méthode (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002).

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152  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism along with other Protestant and Jewish intellectuals, a promoter of laïcité in France.14 Réville, primarily a historian of Christianity, and Maurice Vernes, a biblical scholar, both sought to cultivate a scholarship uninhibited by theological tradition. Even more importantly, scholarship on Christianity and its Scriptures was to follow the same rules as in any other branch of the history of religions.15 In the years following Réville’s election, Paris became a prominent center for the study of religion in Europe, in terms of both scope of thought and original insights—just as it had been the capital of Orientalism in the frst half of the century. In Quinet’s footsteps, Réville pointed to the strong correlation between contemporary Orientalism and the history of religions. It is through the study of Asian languages and literatures that a new “emic” approach of Oriental cultures and religions, their appreciation on their own terms, would emerge. Réville echoed Dussieux when he suggested that the French mind, able to meld form and content, and at once less idealist than the German mind and less positivist than the English one, was called to guide the new scholarly approach to the history of religions.16 Equally signifcant to the study of religions was the establishment of a secular institution devoted to the historical study of religious phenomena in all societies and cultures. Te École Pratique des Hautes Études (ÉPHÉ), where education was essentially provided through the direct example of research rather than by lectures ex cathedra, had been established in 1868, at the recommendation of an ofcial report that had observed the modern, scientifc approach in German universities.17 Intellectual curiosity grew afer the defeat in the 1870–1871 war with Germany, when traumatized French scientists and intellectuals tried to uncover the deep causes of the 14  On Réville and his role, see Arie L. Molendijk, “Les premiers congrès d’histoire des religions, ou comment faire de la religion un objet de science?,” Revue germanique internationale 12 (2010), 91–103. 15  On Vernes and his complex attitude towards comparative religion, see C. E. Goblet d’Alviella, “Maurice Vernes et la méthode comparative,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 12 (1850), 170–178. 16 On Dussieux’s study, see pp. 97–98 above. One fnds the same echo in Frédéric Lichtenberger, ed., “Preface,” in his Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, Vol. I (Paris: Sanchez and Fischbacher, 1877), VII. Lichtenberger had taught at the Faculty of Protestant Teology in Strasbourg. As he mentions in the Preface (VI), the model for his opus was the Real-­ Enzyklopädie fur protestantische Teologie und Kirche (1854–1868). 17  Te report had been written by Karl Hillebrand (1829–1884), a German intellectual then living in Paris. Victor Duruy, the education minister, had sent him to Germany to investigate the possible application in France of the German academic model. See Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, “La construction d’une référence culturelle allemande en France: genèse et histoire (1750–1914),” Annales ESS 42 (1987), 969–992, esp. 984. See further Dominique Bourel, “La Wissenschaf des Judentums en France,” Revue de Synthèse 2:4 (1988), 265–280.

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Secular Scholarship in France  153 German victory. In 1886, almost twenty years afer the establishment of the ÉPHÉ, a Fifh Section, devoted to the “Sciences Religieuses,” was established within it, replacing the Sorbonne’s Faculty of (Catholic) Teology, which had been suppressed in 1885.18 Réville became the frst president of the Section of Religious Sciences at the ÉPHÉ, while Vernes was elected vice-­president. Te comparative impetus, however, was not to everyone’s taste. Vernes was a French “Protestant d’État” in times of Kulturkampf between the Republic and the Catholic Church. Having failed in his eforts to introduce the teaching of comparative religion (a discipline he liked to call “hiérographie”) in French schools, Vernes argued forcefully against the comparative method in the study of religion, in particular in the study of the Semitic religions. His main objection concerned eforts to teach Israelite monotheism in the context of ambient Near Eastern forms of polytheism.19 Similarly, the German journal Archiv für Religionswissenschaf, which would become a leading journal in the feld, was established in 1898 as a reaction to Max Müller’s approach to comparative religion.20 Te Fifh Section at the ÉPHÉ was dedicated to research on all religious phenomena, ancient as well as contemporary. Tese phenomena were to be analyzed according to philological and historical methods, independent of any theological assumptions. Modeled on the German example, the seminars were meant to introduce the students to research. Texts were read in the original language and jointly deciphered by the teacher and his students. Te same method was used to study the sacred texts of all religions, including Christianity. Te road was initially rocky, however, as the Catholic clericals abhorred the idea of equal treatment for all religions.21 Nevertheless, the Section, whose Chairs would fast grow in number, became a unique institution worldwide, and has remained so to this day.22 The unique 18  On the conditions of its creation, as well as on Renan’s fears that it would promote clerical infuence on scholarship, see Alain Rauwel, “Un sanctuaire laïc pour les sciences religieuses,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 237 (2020), 11–123, reviewing Patrick Henriet, ed., L’École Pratique des Hautes Études: Invention, érudition, innovation de 1868 à nos jours (Paris: Somogy, 2018). See further Patrick Henriet, “Les premières générations de l’ÉPHÉ.” 19  Maurice Vernes, L’histoire des religions, son esprit, sa méthode et ses divisions; son enseignement en France et à l’étranger (Paris: E. Leroux, 1887); cf. Goblet d’Alviella, “Maurice Vernes et la méthode comparative,” 170–178. 20  See Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 230. In the 1930s, the journal’s thorough Nazifcation lead to its closing afer the war, and to the establishment, in 1993 of the Zeitschrif für Religionswissenschaf, and in 2000 of the Archiv für Religionsgeschichte. 21  See Marcel Fournier, Marcel Mauss (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 87–93. 22  On the occasion of its centenary, its Directeurs d’Études published a collective book, Problèmes et méthodes d’histoire des religions (Paris: ÉPHÉ, Presses Universitaires de France,

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

154  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism role of French scholars in the new discipline rapidly gained international recognition.23 Refecting this recognition, in 1900, Paris was chosen as the locus of the First International Congress for the History of Religions.24 Rather expectedly, Catholic milieus were less than pleased with the transformations taking place in the scholarly approach to religion. Troughout the nineteenth century, the Catholic clerical party in France tried to thwart free research in biblical scholarship—as well as, of course, the unhampered history of religions.25 Some daring Catholic scholars, however, did attempt to emulate the new historical approach to the Scriptures proposed by Protestant scholars. In 1890, in Jerusalem, the Dominican Marie-­ Joseph Lagrange founded the École Pratique d’Études Bibliques (later to become the École Biblique et Archéologique Française). Tis remarkable institution aspired to allow Catholic scholars, like their Protestant counterparts, to study the Bible with the tools and the approach of cutting-­edge philology and archaeology.26 Te École Biblique, as it would be widely known in the twentieth century, was not an especially favored institution in the Catholic world. For the Vatican, for example, it was long tainted with suspicions of “modernism.”27

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Crossing the Rhine Te presence of Protestant scholars working side by side with their Catholic counterparts and the establishment of new, secular institutions were two crucial factors in the development in France of a new approach to the 1968), which ofers a historical portrait of the section’s diferent disciplines. See further Morris Jastrow, Te Study of Religion (London: Walter Scott, 1901). Te work is dedicated to Cornelius Petrus Tiele. In Appendix I, Jastrow discusses the program of the Section des Sciences Religieuses at the ÉPHÉ. For a history of the whole École Pratique, see P. Henriet, ed., L’École Pratique des Hautes Études. See further Céline Trautmann-­Waller, ed., De la philologie allemande à l’anthropologie française: les sciences humaines à l’É.P.H.É., 1868–1945 (Paris: Champion, 2017). 23 For one example of this recognition, see Morris Jastrow Jr’s “Review of Hartwig Derenbourg’s La science des religions et l’islamisme (1886),” Hebraica 3 (1887), 270–272, esp. 270: “A most gratifying testimony to the importance which the young science of religion has assumed is furnished at Paris, already so rich in its provisions for higher studies in all departments of research, of a special school for the sciences religieuses.” 24 Te Congress was held in Paris (September 3–8) on the occasion of the Exposition Universelle. See Molendijk, “Les premiers congrès d’histoire des religions.” 25  See note 56 below. 26  See Marie-­Joseph Lagrange, O.P., La méthode historique. La critique biblique et l’Église (Paris: Legofre, 1903). On Lagrange, see Bernard Montagnes, O.P., Le Père Lagrange (1855–1938). L’exégèse catholique dans la crise moderniste (Paris: Cerf, 1995). 27  See François Laplanche, La crise de l’origine, la science catholique et l’histoire au XXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2006).

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Secular Scholarship in France  155 history of religions, unknown in Germany and elsewhere. Te third and no less signifcant element was that of Jewish scholars seeking academic employment. In Germany, Jewish scholars could entertain little hope of an academic career in the felds related to the study of religion. But in France, the Jews had acceded to full civil rights as early as 1791. A number of Jewish Orientalists and Jewish scholars of religion therefore came to France from Germany, not only in search of an education (Paris, then the hub of Oriental studies, remained a pole of attraction for foreign students), but also in the hope of a scholarly career. Te specifc conditions under which the study of religion developed in the France of the early Tird Republic during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, as we have seen, permitted original contributions and even intellectual breakthroughs, in an atmosphere more or less freed from the shackles of religious orthodoxies. Jewish scholars working side by side with their Catholic and Protestant colleagues showcased the immense difference between German and French scholarship. Naturally, Jewish scholars in Europe defned their identity in terms diferent from those used by their Christian colleagues. As shown by Perrine Simon-­Nahum, modernity was formulated variously for Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. Among Jewish intellectuals, identity was now expressed through modernity. Tis approach, in its turn, allowed Jewish scholars to infuence the formation of the human sciences.28 In the study of religion, this diference had a signifcant bearing upon the topics studied, the methods used, and the questions asked. In different countries, however, questions of identity were formulated in diferent ways, and the various formulations each had an efect on the scholarly milieus at large. Some gifed Jewish scholars, having moved to France from Germany, hoped that in their adoptive country they would be able to obtain academic positions. Many among the Jewish scholars of religion, who had frst been trained as Orientalists, were working on various aspects of either Jewish history or literatures, and on the relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Teir active intellectual presence permitted the creation in France of Jewish (post-­biblical) studies, modeled on the Wissenschaf des Judentums on the other side of the Rhine, but which soon grew local traits.29 28  Simon-­Nahum, Les Juifs et la modernité. For the history of religion, see esp. 94–95. 29 See Perrine Simon-­ Nahum, “Émergence et specifcité d’une ‘science du judaïsme’ française (1840–1890),” in Frank Alvarez-­Pereyre and Jean Baumgarten, eds, Les Études juives en France: Situation et perspectives (Paris: Éditions du CNRS, 1990), 23–32, as well as D. Bourel, “La Wissenschaf des Judentums en France.” See further Évelyne Patlagean’s Introduction to

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156  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism

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Others focused on diferent aspects of Oriental languages, cultures, and religions.30 Salomon Munk, Jules Oppert, and Michel Bréal eventually became professors at the Collège de France (respectively of Hebrew, Assyriology, and Comparative Grammar). Others, like the rabbinic scholar Joseph Derenbourg, taught at the ÉPHÉ, or became members of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres.31 Te Orientalist Joseph Halévy, a polymath born in Adrianople (Edirne) but who had spent part of his youth in Vienna, is a special case.32 Tese scholars lef an indelible impression on French Orientalism. At the same time, Jewish scholars coming from Germany or born in France provided a signifcant impulse to Jewish studies in France. All the aforementioned fgures, together with French-­born colleagues, such as the Islamicist Hartwig Derenbourg (Joseph’s son), the Iranist James Darmesteter, the Judaist Israël Lévi,33 and, of course, Salomon Reinach, whose interests went far beyond his education as a classicist, insisted on studying Jewish topics within the broader framework of the history of religions. In that sense, these scholars spearheaded an approach to the study of Judaism that was seldom seen in Germany. Jewish scholars produced a serious body of scholarship on various aspects of Jewish studies, from biblical and Talmudic literature to the study of medieval Jewish philosophy and of the Ethiopian Jews. And yet, there was no French equivalent to the Germanic Wissenschaf des Judentums. Like Israël Lévi, Le ravissement du Messie à sa naissance et autres essais, ed. Évelyne Patlagean (Paris, Louvain: Peeters, 1994), 7–29. Te complex relationship between Jewish studies and the history of religions is a topic that still awaits its scholarly due. 30  On German Jewish scholars in France, see Michel Espagne, Les juifs allemands de Paris à l’époque de Heine: la translation ashkenaze (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996). In the past generation, a number of remarkable studies on intellectual and cultural transfers between Germany and France were published by Michel Espagne, Jacques Le Rider, and their colleagues. See, in particular, Michel Espagne, Les transferts culturels franco-­allmands (Paris: Pressees Universitaires de France, 1999). 31 On Derenbourg, see Wilhelm Bacher, Joseph Derenbourg, sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Durlacher, 1896). 32 On Halévy and Oppert and their involvement in Assyriological controversies, see Jerrold  S.  Cooper, “Sumerian and Aryan: Racial Teory, Academic Politics and Parisian Assyriology,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 210 (1993), 169–205. See further Netanel Anor, “Joseph Halévy, Racial Scholarship and the ‘Sumerian Problem,’ ” Philological Encounters 2 (2017), 321–345. Anor notes that in attacking the “Sumerists,” Halévy was in fact trying to reject anti-­Semitic approaches such as that of Renan, but that he did so “within the boundaries of the racial discourse.” (345). See further Chapter 8 in this volume. 33 Hartwig Derenbourg sought to study Islam as an historian of religions; See Hartwig Derenbourg, La science des religions et l’islamisme: deux conférences (Paris: Leroux, 1886). On Israël Lévi, see Évelyne Patlagean’s Introduction to her collection of Lévi’s papers, Le ravissement du Messie à sa naissance et autres essais, 7–29.

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Secular Scholarship in France  157 their German colleagues, scholars of Judaism in France sought to ofer a critical reading of literary and historical sources. Unlike them, however, they did not perceive their mission as laying the intellectual foundations for a reformed cult, along the lines of the Reform movement created by Abraham Geiger and his disciples in Germany. Tis was partly due to the institutional context of the Jewish community, with, at its core, the Consistoire Central des Israélites de France. Te Consistoire, established by Napoleon in 1808 in the wake of his summoning of the Great Sanhedrin, remained, for almost a century, the only ofcial representative of French Jews. Until the separation of Church and State in 1905, there was no possibility of founding a reformed synagogue, on the German model, which would compete with the orthodox Consistoire. Troughout our period of interest, the sole institution for rabbinical training remained the Séminaire Israélite de France (or École centrale rabbinique de France), which was established in Metz in 1829 but had moved to Paris in 1859. Moreover, unlike the German case, the number of individuals engaged in Jewish scholarship in France was small, not really amounting to a signifcant sociological milieu within which such a scholarly interest could thrive.34 Te lack of competing rabbinical seminaries also stifed research. It is elsewhere that the specifcity of the contribution of French Jewish scholarship should be sought. In paradoxical fashion, the weakness of Jewish studies in France also became the source of their strength: Jewish literature, thought, and history were rarely studied there in isolation from their broader cultural and historical contexts, a phenomenon less evident in Germany. In France, Jewish scholarship had to demonstrate its relevance to more general topics. Furthermore, the notion of the universal dimensions of Jewish scholarship was melded with the impulse of French Jewish scholars to identify as citizens and moderns. In France more than elsewhere, Jewish identity was perceived as demanding full social absorption. Among Jewish scholars of religion in nineteenth-­ century France, Salomon Munk (1803–1867) stands out. In his life and career, one sees how a brilliant young Jew from Germany could succeed in the French academic world. Munk was born in Gross-­Glogau, in Silesian Prussia.35 He received a 34 On the French study of Judaism in the nineteenth century, see in particular Perrine Simon-­Nahum, La cité investie: la “Science du Judaïsme” française et la République (Paris: Cerf, 1991); on this point, see esp. 16. 35  On Munk, see Moïse Schwab, Salomon Munk: sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Leroux, 1900), as well as Chiara Adorisio, Dialectics of Separation: Judaism and Philosophy in the Work of Salomon Munk (Boston, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2017). See further Paul  B.  Fenton,

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158  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism traditional Jewish education before going to Berlin, where he studied with Hegel and Bopp, and where he befriended Leopold Zunz. In Bonn, Munk briefy studied Arabic with Georg Freytag, as well as Sanskrit with Christian Lassen. In 1828, he moved to Paris, where he was employed at the Royal Library, in charge of Hebrew, Syriac, and Arabic manuscripts. A man of vast knowledge and broad intellectual interests, Munk devoted the bulk of his eforts to medieval Arabic philosophy, Jewish as well as Islamic. Taking an intensively integrative approach, he studied Jewish alongside Muslim philosophers and showed that a proper understanding of medieval philosophical texts demands their contextual study. One example of this was his demonstration that the Latin text Fons Vitae, ascribed to a certain Avicebron, was a translation from the original Arabic of a treatise written by the eleventh-­century Jewish Neo-­Platonic philosopher Ibn Gabirol.36 In 1864, Munk was asked to replace Renan at the Collège de France. His most enduring contribution to scholarship was his critical edition of Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed in the original Judeo­Arabic and its French translation, a colossal achievement on which he was still working afer he lost his eyesight, at the age of forty-­fve. Although he dedicated himself to scholarship, Munk remained throughout his life deeply involved in the afairs of the Jewish community, where he was known as a generous, kind, and humble individual. In 1840, when thirteen leading members of the Jewish community were accused of murdering a Christian monk in what later became known as the Damascus Afair, he joined Adolphe Crémieux and Sir Moses Montefore in a delegation to Sultan Abdul-­Majid in Egypt in an efort to secure legal protection for the Jews of the Ottoman Empire. Adolphe Franck (1810–1893), who was born in a village in Lorraine, was elected to the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques (when he was only thirty-­six), and eventually taught ancient philosophy and then law at the Collège de France. Deeply infuenced by Victor Cousin, Franck was a “Salomon Munk and the Franco-­Jewish Discovery of Orientalism,” in Ottfried Fraisse, ed., Modern Jewish Scholarship on Islam in Context (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2018), 267–290. In this article, Fenton rightly stresses the odd fact that the crucial role of scholars from France in the study of the early period of Jewish studies remains too ofen unrecognized. He also emphasizes Munk’s positive attitude towards Islam, for him (as later for Goldziher) a rational religion having exerted a “consolidating efect on Judaism” (285). 36  See Salomon Munk, Mélanges de philosophie juive et arabe (Paris: Vrin, 1988 [1857]). On pages 156–157, Munk notes that in the medieval Islamic world (just as in the Christian world), Jewish scholars plunged into the world of ideas in order to forget the sad reality of their exclusion from public life and of the hatred expressed by the ruling religion. One is lef with a feeling that Munk speaks here en connaissance de cause.

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Secular Scholarship in France  159 philosopher of law and religion, not a philologist or historian of religion. Nonetheless, he maintained a strong interest in the study of religious phenomena, as attested by his Études orientales and Nouvelles études orientales.37 In these works, one gets a sense of the breadth of Franck’s unquenchable intellectual curiosity, in particular of his intense interest in Judaism and Jewish history. He wrote long articles, ofen in the form of book reviews, on the Talmud, on early Christianity, and on French rabbis in the Middle Ages. It is his early book on Kabbala, however, that would become his true intellectual legacy.38 Tis work, which represents a major efort at a rational and historical presentation of Jewish mysticism, remained the best introduction to the subject until the publication, in 1944, of Gershom Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Franck and Salomon Munk were lifelong friends. In France, both Protestant and Jewish scholars became important contributors to the budding discipline. Tose Jews who had emigrated from Germany had brought with them pioneering historical and philological methods. Protestant theological education had incorporated the same research ethos. Tese scholars were thus able to play according to the new, secular rules of religious scholarship somewhat earlier than their Catholic colleagues. Tey could also adapt themselves faster to the new potential created by the secularization of religious studies in the Tird Republic.39 Te impact of Protestants and Jews went far beyond their numbers in the French population. In diferent ways, Jewish and Protestant scholars acclimatized and transformed the research tools, the methods, and the scholarly ethos of German universities. Tis was most striking in the study of the Bible, post­biblical Judaism, and medieval Judaism and Islam. Te presence of these scholars, moreover, hastened the establishment of new institutions for the non-­theological study of religion. We have seen how a distinct approach to the historical study of religions was developed in France. Yet, not everyone supported and applied the

37  Adolphe Franck, Études orientales (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1861), as well as Adolphe Franck, Nouvelles études orientales (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1896). On Franck and his thought, see Jean-­Pierre Rothschild and Jérome Grondeux, eds, Adolphe Franck: philosophe juif, spiritualiste et libéral dans la France du XIXe siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). See there, in particular, Perrine Simon-­Nahum, “Philosophie et science du judaïsme: la place d’Adolphe Franck dans le paysage intellectuel français du XIXe siècle,” in Rothschild and Grondeux, eds, Adolphe Franck, philosophe juif, spiritualiste et liberal dans la France du XIXe siècle, 185–193. 38 Adolphe Franck, La Kabbale, ou la philosophie religieuse des Hébreux (Paris: Hachette, 1843). 39  See Laplanche, La Bible en France entre mythe et critique, 188.

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160  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism comparative method as a passe-­partout. For some scholars, it smacked of the traditional Catholic, ahistorical approach to religious diversity. Tis skepticism was voiced by thinkers such as Eugène Burnouf, who argued in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, in 1833, that France had entered a period of renewal and transformation in the study of religion. Burnouf hailed comparative grammar (for instance, the comparison between Avestan and Sanskrit). But he also warned of the unbridled comparatism of traditional Catholic scholars, which had no regard for cultural or historical context. In 1880, Albert Réville would make the same claim about comparatism in his own inaugural lecture at the same institution.40 Te religious and cultural diversity among French historians of religions permitted a plurality of approaches unequaled elsewhere. Specifcally, it fostered the rejection of both the Catholic and the Protestant paradigms of religion. Te Catholic paradigm supported ahistorical comparatism, whereas Protestants, who had been trained in biblical criticism, insisted on historical contexts. Te Protestant paradigm, on its side, maintained that the core of religion, consisting in faith, was essentially interior, while the Catholics traditionally emphasized the centrality of ritual. On the former point, Jewish scholars tended to stand with their Protestant colleagues, on the latter, with their Catholic ones. A fruitful dynamism thus developed which produced a rich range of approaches. In this respect, the personal religious attitude of the scholars involved mattered less than their (usually implicit) cultural ones. Simon-­ Nahum has identifed a “methodological indecision” among French historians of religion.41 Although one can fnd a plurality of methods in many settings, of course, this seems to have been particularly marked in French scholarship. Tis specifcity is due in great part to the fact that French historians of religions labored to keep research free of theological or apologetic overtones. Of course, French scholars did not all share the same religious beliefs. Working in the same institutions and making use of the same principles, however, permitted—and even generated—such a plurality of methods. Te “methodological indecision” in French scholarship, then, points to a greater interface of scholarly approaches in France than in 40  See Burnouf ’s leçon d’ouverture (“De la langue et de la littérature sanscrite,” extract from La revue des deux mondes (February 1, 1833), 1–15). On Réville’s skepticism about comparatism, see Laplanche, La Bible en France entre mythe et critique, 151–152. 41  Perrine Simon-­Nahum, “L’histoire des religions en France autour de 1880,” Revue germanique internationale 17: Références juives et identités scientifques en Allemagne (2002), 177–192.

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Secular Scholarship in France  161 countries where scholars from diferent religious backgrounds worked in segregated institutions. During the second half of the nineteenth century, France witnessed increasing demands of secularization, as well as attempts by the clerical party to maintain Catholic supremacy over scholarship in the battle on the proper approach to religious history. Te crowds who cheered Renan on or, alternatively, booed him down during his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France give us a good sense of the situation. Te clash between the old and the new ways of studying religion was taking place in broad daylight. Under such conditions, both Jewish and Protestant scholars, having a clear, concrete sense of belonging to small religious minorities, had a vested interest in embracing the new rules. Hence, they were among the frst to accept both the secularized approach to the history of religions and the new institutional frameworks. More than elsewhere, these frameworks allowed the presence of scholars coming from diverse religious traditions and cultural backgrounds in a common intellectual space.42 It was as catalysts, then, that Protestant and Jewish historians of religions seem to have functioned, transfguring the French scholarly scene into one of the most dynamic and modern in Europe. Te overall containment of this new dynamism to the capital has to do with the centripetal character of French political and intellectual tradition. In order to understand the peculiar nature of the French case, one must consider the complex interface in France between Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish scholars working side by side, on equal terms, and with the same methods. It is to this triangular combination that the “French school” of the study of religions owes its specifc character.43 Such conditions of intellectual freedom and intermingling were sui generis, permitting the growth of a secular school of history of religions. French scholars formulated diferent questions than their German (or English) colleagues. By and large, the latter remained limited by the Protestant paradigm, which insisted on the core of faith—that is, interiority—in its understanding of religion. For both Jewish and Catholic scholars, 42  Tis observation about the ofen implicit but nonetheless signifcant connivance between Protestant and Jewish scholars does not mean that Protestant scholars did not usually show a lack of sympathy towards Judaism and the Jews. 43  “La section compte en efet dans son sein des catholiques, des protestants, des israélites, et,—je ne dirai pas des ‘libres penseurs’, car nous avons tous la prétention de penser librement,—je dirai des hommes qui n’appartiennent à aucune société religieuse défnie.” Albert Réville, “Avant-­Propos,” in Études de critique et d’histoire, 2e Série (Bibliothèque de l’ÉPHÉ; Paris: Leroux, 1896), XII.

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162  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism by contrast, phrasing questions through the centrality of ritual—religious praxis—made the social function of religion easily recognizable. French laïcité, as expressed in the legal separation of church and state in 1905, represents the culmination of social and political processes, and also of an intellectual evolution. Tese processes and this evolution are also refected in the new secular frames for the study of religion. As we saw in Chapter 6 in this volume, it was a Jew, Joseph Salvador, who authored the frst critical French study of Christian origins. Renan, a lapsed Catholic, later wrote what remains to this day the most widely read and translated biography of Jesus, and polarized France when he called Jesus a man. Post-­Renan French scholars remained fascinated by the fgure of Jesus. Alfred Loisy (1857–1940) is probably the most interesting of these fgures. A Catholic priest who was excommunicated in 1908 for “modernism,” Loisy was elected the following year to the Chair of the history of religions at the Collège de France, inaugurated in 1880 by Albert Réville. In his inaugural lecture, Loisy argued for free, methodical, and impartial research in the study of religions, adopting Renan’s Witz on faith and the study of religions: in order to write the history of any religion, it is useful to have believed in it, so as to know it better, but it is also necessary not to believe in it anymore, in order to evaluate it freely.44 Against the Berlin Lutheran theologian Adolph Harnack, Loisy rejected the idea that the history of religions must remain, like philosophy for the medieval scholastics, theology’s servant, ancilla theologiae. In his evolutionary and progressist view, humanity should eventually become educated through and by religion. Loisy painted a powerful fgure of the Christian savior, arguing that Réville’s Jesus, in becoming a universal fgure of the religion de l’ humanité, had lost all Jewish color.45 Together with 44  “Pour faire l’histoire d’une religion, il faut ne plus y croire, mais il faut y avoir cru.” (“Les religions de l’antiquité,” in Études d’histoire religieuse, 38. Cited by Perrine Simon-­Nahum, “Renan passeur: de la science des religions à l’histoire des religions,” in Henry Laurens, ed., Ernest Renan: la science, la religion, la république, Travaux du Collège de France (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012), 265–279. Tis remark is ofen mistakenly attributed to Salomon Reinach. In Renan’s case, of course, this is only true in respect to Christianity. 45  See Alfred Loisy, Leçon d’ouverture du cours d’histoire des religions au Collège de France, 24 avril 1909 (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1909); cf. Annelies Lannoy, “Le Jubilé Loisy de 1927: Entre histoire des religions et histoire du christianisme,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 229 (2012), 503–526. Lannoy refers there to the tense religious atmosphere in France during the institutionalization phase of the history of religions. See further Corinne Bonnet and Annelies Lannoy, “Penser les religions anciennes et la ‘religion de l’humanité’ au début du vingtième siècle: Le dialogue Loisy-­Cumont,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 234 (2017), 797–822. It is only afer the redaction of this book that I was able to consult Annelies Lannoy’s splendid monograph, Alfred Loisy and the Making of History of Religions: A Study in the Development of Comparative Religion in the Early Twentieth Century (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2020).

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Secular Scholarship in France  163 the study of Asian religions, (as well as, somewhat later, the anthropology of peoples without script), the study of Christian origins belonged to the core of the study of religion in late nineteenth-­century France. Te dialectic relationship between these distinct domains of inquiry provides yet another key to the originality and richness of the modern French study of religion. Te most signifcant contributions to the study of religion in this period were those made by Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) and his disciples, the équipe united around the l’Année sociologique at the turn of the twentieth century. Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert, in particular, whom we shall meet again in Chapter 10 in this volume, would have a seminal and enduring impact on the anthropology of religion. From Renan to Loisy and Mauss, one can trace a continuous line of enthusiasm for the comparative method.46 Some scholars, however, sought to cool this keenness to compare religious phenomena, or at least to limit it. From diverse viewpoints, and with diferent arguments, both Darmesteter and Vernes, for instance, expressed skepticism about the usefulness of broad comparatism, which smacked of comparative mythology, an approach fashionable under the Second Empire but that quickly lost its lustre under the Tird Republic.47 Like Renan, Loisy was a “cultural Catholic.” For both fgures, the comparative impulse stemmed from the reorientation of a long Catholic tradition. As he had insisted in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Loisy maintained that it was comparison, and comparison alone, that was the appropriate method for studying religious phenomena. In France as elsewhere, comparatism maintained its pride of place for the science­­­­­­­­­­­ of religions. Salomon Reinach’s comparative preoccupation had eclectic roots, including Max Müller’s infuence, as well as the spell of W. Robertson Smith’s totemism and James Frazer’s comparative folklore. Lannoy’s book sheds much light on the issues discussed here, in particular on the relationship between Loisy and Reinach, and on the deeply diferent attitudes of Loisy and Harnack on Jesus and Judaism. On Loisy, see further Chapter 10 in this volume. 46  On Loisy and the comparative method, see Oscar Cullmann, in Problèmes et méthodes d’histoire des religions, 173: “L’école dite ‘comparatiste,’ qui a été représentée, en France, d’une façon brillante par . . . Alfred Loisy, a placé les idées religieuses du Nouveau Testament dans le cadre de l’histoire des religions, avant tout des religions de l’hellénisme.” One may note here the lack of reference to Judaism as the cradle of Christianity. Te full recognition of the new faith’s Jewish dimensions would remain a task for the future. 47 See François Laplanche, “L’histoire des religions en France au début du XXe siècle,” Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome: Italie et Méditerranée 11 (1999), 623–634, here 625 (for Darmesteter) and Laplanche, La Bible en France, 197 (for Vernes). See further Goblet d’Alviella, “Maurice Vernes et la méthode comparative,” where it is argued that Vernes, who referred to the study of religion as “hierography,” advocated the establishment of a “chaire d’hiérographie générale,” only meant it for “vulgarisation scientifque.”

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It was arguably Reinach (1858–1932) who introduced in France the work of the British anthropologists.48 For him, comparatism was the obverse of universalism. And for Reinach, as for Darmesteter, universalism, not particularism, was the true nature of Israel’s monotheism, as proclaimed by the prophets.49 Reinach’s Orpheus, histoire générale des religions, published in 1909, was a major attempt at haute vulgarisation scientifque, as the author himself acknowledged. It was written, he wrote, “for young ladies,” and meant to ofer a basic education in a feld totally neglected by the French secular educational system.50 Reinach’s ambition to write for the general public proved a wise wager: Orpheus was widely read in both the original and in fve other languages.51 Freud, who considered Reinach, alongside Wundt and Frazer, an authority on totemism, held him in high esteem.52 In the book, Reinach argued that Christianity should be studied within the general framework of the universal history of religions, and with the same methods as other religions. Indeed, this work has indeed been dubbed a “cathechism of the comparative method.”53 Yet, the scholarly reception of Orpheus remained reserved. Despite its popularity, or perhaps because of it, the book was given short shrif in some scholarly milieus. Durkheimians, in particular, were not fans of the work— in spite of the fact that Durkheim and Reinach take similar approaches to

48  In 1911, Reinach noted that when he started, under the infuence of Smith and Frazer, to publish in 1900 on taboos and totemism, no one in France understood these words: “Esquisse d’une histoire de l’exégèse mythologique;” in Salomon Reinach, Cultes, Mythes et Religions, ed. Hervé Duchêne (Paris: Robert Lafont, 2000), 29. On British anthropology, see Chapter 9 in this volume. 49  See, for instance, Simon-­Nahum, Les Juifs et la modernité, 218–222. 50 See Salomon Reinach, Orpheus: histoire générale des religions (Paris: Picart, 1909), 591–592 and Salomon Reinach, “De bello orphico,” in his Cultes, Mythes et Religions, Vol. IV (Paris: Leroux, 1912), 471. 51  A German translation appeared in 1910, an Italian one in 1912, and an English one in 1930. On Reinach on the “Aryan” question, see Chapter 8 in this volume. 52 See Jacques Le Rider, “Freud, lecteur de Salomon Reinach,” in Sophie Basch, Michel Espagne, and Jean Leclant, eds, Les frères Reinach: Colloque réuni les 22 et 23 juin 2007 à l’AIBL (Paris: AIBL—Difusion de Boccard, 2000), 339–346, esp. 341–343. See further Guy G. Stroumsa, “Myth into Novel: the Late Freud on Early Religion,” in Ruth Ginzburg and Ilana Pardes, eds, New Perspectives on Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism,” (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), 203–216; republished in Guy G. Stroumsa, Religion as Intellectual Challenge in the Long Twentieth Century: Selected Essays­­­­­­­­ (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), chapter 3. 53  See Seymour de Ricci, “La méthode comparative dans l’histoire des religions et l’oeuvre de Salomon Reinach,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 55:110 (1934), 5–28. See further Hervé Duchêne, Introduction, in Salomon Reinach, Cultes, Mythes et Religions (Paris: Robert Lafont, 1999), LXII. For another, contemporary defence of the comparative method, in opposition to a strictly historical or chronological approach, see Arnold van Gennep, “Totémisme et méthode comparative,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 29 (1908), 34–76.

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religion.54 And Orpheus drew immediate fre from the Catholic camp, where its implicit rejection of the traditional status of Christianity as a religion apart from all others was not welcomed.55 Te sharpest criticism of Orpheus, indeed, was issued by the Dominican Marie-­Joseph Lagrange, who objected to Reinach’s “detestable” defnition of religion and to his use of the comparative method, to which he opposed the historical one. In Lagrange’s view, Reinach sought to pave the way for secularization and the replacement of traditional religions by the “religion of social duty,” a term that was introduced by Reinach and that resonates now as strikingly Durkheimian. For Lagrange, Reinach’s rationalism blocked any possibility of sympathy for Christianity.56 Loisy, too, was critical of the book, speaking about “the execution of the Orpheus.” Reinach’s response to his Catholic critics was that they disliked the simplicity and the universality of his conception of religion, as founded on the double illusion of animism and magic (a conception accepted by Jane Harrison, he added), since it dealt with Christianity precisely alongside other religions.57 On the whole, French historians of religions were sensitive to new trends in the social sciences. For example, they were open to British social anthropology, which also bore directly on the understanding of religion in archaic or “primitive” societies. Te singularity of social thought in French intellectual history, from the heroic days of Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville,

54  See Ivan Strenski, “Reinach’s Modernism, Durkheim’s Symbolism, and the Birth of the Sacred,” in his Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 1997), 53–81. 55  See, for instance, Joseph Bricout, L’histoire des religions et la foi chrétienne: à propos de l’”Orpheus” de M. Salomon Reinach (Paris: Bloud, 1910). Tis polemical work attacks Reinach’s “Voltairian” outlook and refects a deep fear of Modernism. Bricout was the Director of the Revue du Clergé français. See further Joseph Bricout, ed., Où en est l’histoire des religions? (two vols; Paris: Letouzay and Ané, 1911–1912). Volume I is devoted to non-­Christian religions and volume II to Judaism and Christianity. Implicitly for this formulation, then, Judaism is considered to be a Christian religion! Remarkably, however, the chapter on Judaism ends there with the beginnings of Christianity, while totally ignoring rabbinic and medieval Judaism. 56 See Marie-­Joseph Lagrange, O.P., Quelques remarques sur l’Orpheus de M.  Salomon Reinach (Paris: Gabalda, 1910), esp. 2, 6, 9, 66. “La religion du devoir social” (2): Lagrange refers here to Orpheus (91). Lagrange, however, recognizes that much is correct in Orpheus; for instance, the critical view of Islam, unlike those who praise the Islamic Enlightenment in contrast to the darkness of the (Christian) Middle Ages (76). Tis attitude recalls the reactions of German Protestant theologians to Geiger’s understanding of Muhammad and Jesus, praising the former while repudiating the latter. One should perhaps add that Reinach’s vocal engagement in favor of Dreyfus did not endear him to many Catholics, who were instinctively anti-­Dreyfusards. 57  Reinach, “De bello orphico,” 438–483, esp. 469. Reinach mentions other Catholic scholars who object to Orpheus, such as Battifol and Abbé Bricout, dismissing the latter’s criticism “insignifcant.”

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and later Saint Simon (1760–1825) and Auguste Comte (1778–1857), may help to account for this fact. Renan’s conception of the future religion of humanity, a religion grounded in the search for truth in science rather than in God, for instance, refects Comte’s stimulus.58 Te reverberations of Comte on religious scholarship would continue to be felt until the early twentieth century, as we will learn later in our story.59 Sociology of knowledge must take into account both institutions and persons. Tis was the aim of this chapter, which focused on the second half of the nineteenth century in France, at the zenith of Renan’s fame. More than anyone else, Renan lef his imprint on a whole generation of scholars of religion, in France and across Europe. Many accepted his idea of Semitic monotheism, as well as the fundamental opposition between Aryans and Semites in which it was grounded. A signifcant number of scholars, however, rejected this idea. We now turn to a major scholarly controversy occasioned directly by Renan’s Semitic monotheism, which seems, oddly enough, to have remained largely ignored in historical scholarship.

58  For an example of how the academic history of religion was approached in France before World War I, see René Dussaud, Introduction à l’histoire des religions (Paris: Leroux, 1914). Tis book was the frst in a new series edited by Dussaud and Paul Alphandéry (both were the editors of the Revue de l’Histoire des Religions). Te chapter on sacrifce refects Robertson Smith’s theory and Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss’s Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifce (Paris, 1898), on which, see Chapter 10 in this volume. 59  See Bonnet and Lannoy, “Penser les religions anciennes et la ‘religion de l’humanité’ au début du 20e siècle.”

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8

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From the Quarrel of Monotheism to the Babel–Bibel Controversy Having followed developments in France up to the last decades of the cen­tury, we will now reverse direction, going back a bit in time to ponder the massive international impact of Renan’s views on Semitic monotheism. Tis impact, spread across linguistic, religious, and political borders, enduringly echoed the idea of Semitic monotheism. At the same time, it triggered a series of polemical responses that questioned the truth value of the idea. Later in this chapter, we will review new developments among German historians of religion in the last decades of the nineteenth century on the approach of biblical monotheism. In particular, we will focus on another major scholarly afair, which took place at the turn of the century, around a scholarly school that sought to discredit the idea of the Israelite origins of monotheism. Tese developments, I argue, must be understood in the context of the growing racial anti-­Semitism in society at large, and in the academic world in particular. Te signifcant role of Jewish scholars in both affairs, in which the status of ancient Israelite monotheism was questioned, will also be surveyed. Te chapter’s fnal pages will deal with the most radical rejections of Israelite monotheism, as articulated by racist authors following in Gobineau’s footsteps. According to them, Moses had been an Egyptian, not a Hebrew. In dialectical fashion, such far-­fetched views, which prima facie epitomize the very opposite of the idea of Semitic monotheism, may be perceived as its last, dark aferglow—and the harbinger of even darker conceptions: the fnal elimination of the Jews, with that of the Hebrew god.

Te Quarrel of Monotheism In 1859, Renan’s mémoire on the Semites and the origins of monotheism was read and debated at the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press (2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0009

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(AIBL).1 Te exchange of views around the mémoire, which extended over a period of several sessions, makes for fascinating reading. It represented only the coup d’envoi of a major polemic on the nature of monotheism, which would rage across Europe, and which can rightly be called a fully fedged Monotheismusstreit, or Querelle du monothéisme.2 During the following two decades, scholars throughout Europe threw themselves into this polemic. As noted by Céline Trautmann-­Waller, it stimulated a number of Orientalists to formulate anew some methodological questions, and to discover fresh felds of research.3 George Williamson, on his side, argued that: “Renan helped to spark a broader, Europe-­wide discussion on the nature and value of monotheism.”4 Te stakes were indeed as high as they were diverse, ranging from the signifcance of monotheism, the role of the Jews in history, and the very nature of religion, to the changing status of the Jews in a secularizing Europe, where traditional theological prejudice was fast being translated into racial theory. Tis remarkable and protracted polemic, which is directly related to the growth and transformation of anti-­Semitism at the turn of the century, is emblematic of the broader European context in which the idea of monotheism was inscribed. It is during the fnal decades of the nineteenth century that the idea of universal or world religions became prominent in the taxonomies of religions and replaced monotheism as displaying the highest religious 1  Ernest Renan, Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère général des peuples sémitiques et en particulier sur leur tendance au monothéisme (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1859). Te mémoire, as well as the summary of the long discussion that followed throughout many sessions can be read online: www.persée.fr/doc/crai_0065-­0536_1859_num_3_1_66188. Renan remained for years very active at the AIBL. In 1867, for instance, he launched there a major cooperative project of publication of all the inscriptions in Semitic languages and Semitic characters. On this project, see Françoise Briquel-­Chatonnet and Catherine Fauveaud-­Brassaud, “Ad majorem scientiae fructum: Le Corpus Inscriptionum Semiticarum dans les correspondances conservées à l’Institut de France,” in Corinne Bonnet and Véronique Krings, eds, S’écrire et écrire sur l’Antiquité: l’apport des correspondances à l’histoire des travaux scientifques (Grenoble: Jérome Millon, 2008), 215–228. 2  On the proceedings of these discussions, see Moïse Schwab, Salomon Munk, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Leroux, 1900), 201–222. On the history of the concept of monotheism in modern European biblical scholarship, see, for instance, Nathan MacDonald, Deuteronomy and the Meaning of “Monotheism” (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), chapter 1, 5–58. 3  See Céline Trautmann-­Waller, “Du ‘caractère des peuples sémitiques’ à une ‘science de la mythologie hébraïque’ (Ernest Renan, Heymann Steinthal, Ignác Goldziher),” Revue germanique international 7 (2008), 169–184, where the author highlights the fertile character of this polemics, and describes the years 1840–1860 as “a true Franco-­German Orientalist drama” (170). See further Céline Trautmann-­Waller, “ ‘Semites’ and ‘Semitism’: From Philology to the Language of Myth,” Philological Encounters 2 (2017), 346–367. 4  George S. Williamson, “Myth and Monotheism in the Unifcation Era, 1850–1880,” in his Te Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004), 211–233, and notes, 358–364; here, 225.

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FROM THE QUARREL OF MONOTHEISM  169 ideas. Alongside universalism, however, monotheism continued to provide a linchpin for the study of religion in the second half of the nineteenth century. Judaism was widely considered by biblical scholars, who in this matter adhered to traditional Christian attitudes, a national, particularistic religion, in contrast to Christianity, which was perceived as a universal religion. For Jewish scholars, but also, of course, for some leading Christian biblical scholars, such as Heinrich Ewald (Michaelis’s student and Wellhausen’s teacher in Göttingen), monotheism had been specifcally a Hebrew rather than a Semitic invention, and represented Israel’s unique contribution to the history of religion.5 Moreover, this pure monotheism was for such scholars essentially ethical, and hence universal in nature, as was argued, for instance, by the religious philosopher Adolphe Franck. James Darmesteter also contributed to this debate through his book on the prophets of Israel, who represented for him the universal aspirations of Judaism—unlike the priests, in charge of the daily functioning, through the sacrifces at the Temple, of the national aspect of Israelite religion.6 Such views, which refect the powerful impact of the Christian attitude towards the religion of ancient Israel, would reappear in Henri Bergson’s Les deux sources de la morale et de la Religion, a book frst published in 1932. When presented by Jewish scholars, there is little doubt that this stance carried an apologetic purpose. For these fgures, Judaism represented the earliest and the purest form of universal monotheism.7 In the days of imperialism, universal or world religions were deemed suitable for the modern world, and hence viewed positively, while national and ethnic 5  Heinrich Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel (3rd edn; Göttingen: Dieter, 1863–1865); see esp. Vol. II, “Die reine Gottherrschaf.” On Ewald, see, for instance, John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London: SPKP, 1984), 91–103. Rogerson points out (103) that Ewald, whose relationship with Genesius was marked by signifcant rivalry, remained a lone fgure. 6 James Darmesteter, Les prophètes d’Israël, preface by Salomon Reinach (Paris: Rieder, 1931). On Judaism being perceived as a universalist religion by Jewish scholars, see Simon-­ Nahum, La cité investie, 96, and Simon-­Nahum, “Émergence et spécifcité d’une ‘science du judaïsme’ française (1840–1890),” 27–28. On both Franck and Darmesteter, see Chapters 7 and 10 in this volume. 7 For the leading practitioners of the Wissenschaf des Judentums, the in-­built tension between universalism and particularism represented a major axis of Judaism. See Céline Trautmann-­Waller, Philologie allemande et tradition juive: le parcours intellectuel de Léopold Zunz (Paris: Cerf, 1998), 145–158. Te argument about a deep chasm between universal and “particular” religions continued to preoccupy scholars into the twentieth century. In 1928, the Indologist Sylvain Lévi wrote: “Les religions universelles ne difèrent donc pas en substance des religions particulières; ells n’en sont que des cas élargis, amplifés.” Sylvain Lévi, “Religions universelles et religions particulières,” in his Shūkyogaku (Tokyo, 1928) [Reprinted in Mémorial Sylvain Lévi (Paris: Paul Harmann, 1937), 126–132]. On Lévi, see Chapter 10 in this volume.

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170  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism religions were considered to be only partially developed and ft for the past, rather than the future. To speak about the universal and ethical character of Judaism meant to see it in synchrony with the hopes about the religion of humanity, those that the Saint Simonians and Auguste Comte had presented as the goal of history.8 Furthermore, the universalism of the Hebrew prophets suited the self-­perception of the Tird Republic, and it is in this new republican context that one should understand the argument about the universalism of Judaism. In this self-­perception, the Jews were not only good citizens of the French republic, which aforded them equal rights: they were also the depositories of this republic’s original ideals. As we have seen, Renan explicitly stated that, in contrasting Semites to Aryans, he aimed to do for the Semitic languages and religions what Max Müller had done for Aryan mythologies.9 Clearly, the counterposing of Semites and Aryans was in the air. In 1847, the Norwegian Lassen, who was teaching in Bonn, published a book in which he discussed the terms “Indogermanen” and “Semiten.”10 In 1860, Müller, who was on friendly terms with Renan, published a long review article entitled “Semitic Monotheism?” on the latter’s mémoire.11 In this piece, Müller argued that there is no such thing as a Semitic monotheistic instinct that would have been lacking in the “Aryan race,” the other “principal actor in the great drama of world history.”12 Müller had a hard time believing that the Jews, a small and uncouth people in antiquity, would have invented a concept of such importance for world history. Similarly, Eduard Zeller, a historian of Greek philosophy belonging to the Tübingen school, sought to show that monotheism had also developed before

8  On the role of Saint-­Simonian Jewish scholars in France, see Michael Graetz, Les Juifs en France au XIXe siècle: de la revolution française à l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paris: Seuill, 1989), chapter 6, 220f. 9  On the coining of “Aryan” by Müller, see Chapter 3 in this volume; cf. Arie L. Molendijk, Friedrich Max Müller and the Sacred Books of the East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 108–115. 10  Christian Lassen, Indische Althertumskunde (fve vols; Bonn: Koenig, 1847–1862). On “Indogermanen” versus “Semiten,” see Vol. I, 410–411. See further Chapter 3 in this volume. 11  Friedrich Max Müller, “Semitic Monotheism?,” Journal Asiatique (1859) a review of both Renan’s Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (2nd edn, Paris: 1858) and his Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère général des peuples sémitiques et en particulier sur leur tendance au monothéisme. Te Journal Asiatique article was reprinted in Müller’s Chips from a German Workshop, Vol. I (New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co., 1874), 337–374. On this text, see further Chapter 9 in this volume. 12  Friedrich Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion: Four Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution, with Two Essays on False Analogies, and the Philosophy of Mythology (London: Longmans Green, 1873), 103. For Renan’s mémoire, see note 1 above.

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FROM THE QUARREL OF MONOTHEISM  171

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polytheism among the early Greeks.13 Diverging from Renan, Müller claimed that “theism,” or rather “henotheism,” represented the frst intuition of God, and must have preceded polytheism.14 Tis original form of monotheism was “the birthright of every human being.” Incidentally, Müller, a liberal Christian, seemed to have been unaware that this view of polytheism as a degeneration of the earliest, pure religious conception of God, stemming from an old Jewish conception refected in Paul’s Letter to the Romans (1: 18–23), remained the traditional perception of paganism throughout the Patristic tradition.15 Te year 1860 saw a second review article on Renan’s mémoire. Signed by Hermann Steinthal, the piece was published in the very frst issue of a journal launched and edited by Steinthal together with his friend and future brother-­in-­law, Moritz Lazarus.16 Steinthal and Lazarus were gifed scholars, polymaths who established Völkerpsychologie as a discipline.17 Both taught at the University of Berlin (Steinthal linguistics, Lazarus philosophy)— although their Jewish identity prevented them from being appointed to full professorship, or being elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences.18 Later, 13  See Eduard Zeller, “Die Entwicklung des Monotheismus bei den Griechen,” in his Vorträge und Abhandlungen geschichtlichen Inhalts (Leipzig: Fues, 1865 [1862]), 1–29. On Zeller, see Horton Harris, Te Tübingen School (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 55–77. 14 Darmesteter followed Müller’s thesis about a supreme god common to the Indo-­ Europeans, called Zeus in Greece, Jupiter in Italy, Varuna in India, and Ahura Mazda in ancient Iran; cf. Henri Pinard de la Boullaye, S.J., L’Étude comparée des religions, Vol. I (Paris: Beauchesne, 1929), 363. 15  See Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 347. Müller also expressed these views later in life. See the text of his Hibbert Lectures, “Lecture VI: On Henotheism, Polytheism, Monotheism and Atheism,” in his Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, as Illustrated by the Religions of India (London: Williams and Norgate, 1878). Actually, the idea of a primitive henotheism must go back to David Hume’s Te Natural History of Religion (1755), as noted by Konrad Müller, Die seit Renan über einen israelitischen Urmonotheismus geäusserten Anschauungen disziplingeschichtlich dargestellt (Breslau: Korn, 1911), 1f. 16 Hermann Steinthal, “Zur Charakteristik der semitischen Völker. Auf Anlass von E.  Renan, ‘Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère des peuples sémitiques,’ ” Zeitschrif für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaf 1(1860), 328–345. 17  Te direct infuence of the new discipline is refected, for instance, in Rudolf Friedrich Grau, Semiten und Indogermanen in ihrer Beziehung zu Religion und Wissenschaf. Eine Apologie des Christentums vom Standpunkte der Völkerpsychologie (Stuttgart: Liesching, 1864). 18  On Steinthal and his scholarly achievements, see Céline Trautmann-­Waller, Aux origines d’une science allemande de la culture: Linguistique et psychologie des peuples chez Heydmann Steinthal (Paris: CNRS, 2006). See further, focusing on our present topic, Céline Trautmann-­ Weller, “Du ‘caractère des peuples sémitiques à une ‘science de la mythologie hébraïque’ (Ernest Renan, Heymann Steinthal, Ignác Glodziher),” Revue germanique internationale 7 (2008), 169–184, as well as Williamson, Te Longing for Myth in Germany. Lazarus published a text on the idea of the nation, Moritz Lazarus, Was heisst national? (Berlin: Dümmler, 1879), where he defned it in terms very close to those which Renan would later use in his much better-­known lecture entitled “Qu’est-­ce qu’une nation?,” which he delivered at the Sorbonne in 1882.

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172  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Steinthal would return to the topics dealt with in his review of Renan’s thesis, further pursuing his arguments. Steinthal accepted Renan’s idea that races represent permanent, unchangeable categories in history. He sought to show, however, that Renan did not follow his intuition to its logical conclusions. As all peoples are essentially similar, there is no fundamental diference between the Jews and other Semitic peoples. But since most Semitic peoples of antiquity are known to have been polytheists, the Israelites too must have passed through a polytheistic stage before becoming monotheists.19 In another long article, published two years later, Steinthal would argue for an early, polytheistic stage among the Israelites.20 If this is the case, far from being the natural religion of earliest humanity, monotheism is the result of a protracted maturation. It appeared frst among the Israelites, and through them subsequently reached other peoples. In this way, the Jews brought religious progress to humankind. Trough his study of Samson’s saga and other biblical stories, Steinthal intended to reclaim the centrality of the Bible for contemporary scholarship on the history of religion, as the major gif of the Jews to civilization.21 It is by the prophets, as a creation of the individual spirit (Geist), that the “drama” of monotheism would eventually come to the fore of the historical scene, as Steinthal claimed later in life.22 In yet another study on the place of the Semites in world history, Steinthal argued that Semitic culture dated earlier than that of the Indogermanen (the common term in German for “Aryans”).23 In his view, the Semites are ultimately “more serious” (ernster) than the Aryans (Indogermanen). Among all peoples, said Steinthal, the Greeks were the ultimate “players.” It

19  Steinthal, “Zur Charakteristik der semitischen Völker,” 331. In 1872, Jules Soury published a long article in the Revue des Deux Mondes with a similar argument for early polytheism among the Hebrews. He was soon answered by J.-M. Rabbinowicz in a separately published pamphlet of twenty-­three pages, titled, La religion nationale des anciens Hébreux (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1873). For another scholar discussing Hebrew monotheism in the context of Semitic polytheism, see Friedrich Baethgen, Beiträge zur semitischen Religionsgeschichte: Der Gott Israels und die Götter der Heiden (Berlin: Reuthers, 1888). 20 Hermann Steinthal, “Die Sage von Simson: Heidnische Reste im monotheistischen Bewusstsein,” republished in his Zu Bibel und Religionsphilosophie (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1895), 35–77; cf. Hermann Steinthal, Mythos und Religion (Berlin: Lüderich, 1870). 21  As Williamson noted, in an era of rising anti-­Semitism, the Bible constituted for Jews in Germany “a key cultural battleground.” (Te Longing for Myth in Germany, 232–233). 22  See Hermann Steinthal, “Die Frage vom Ursprung des Monotheismus,” in his Zu Bibel und Religionsphilosophie (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1895 [1891]), 25–34. 23 Hermann Steinthal, “Die Stellung der Semiten in der Weltgeschichte,” Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur, 4, 64f. [Reprinted in Hermann Steinthal, Über Juden und Judentum (Berlin: Boppelhauer, 1906), 105–125], here respectively 108, 113, 116.

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FROM THE QUARREL OF MONOTHEISM  173 is temperament, or character, that mainly distinguishes the “irritable” Semites from Aryans. Prophecy is a consequence of this Semitic character, constituting the “sole diference” between Semites and Aryans. It is a complex response, then, that Steinthal ofered Renan, and his recurrence to the question reveals its centrality for him. Steinthal strove to refute Renan’s thesis on the essential intellectual poverty of Semites, compared to the richness of Aryan imagination and creativity, although he did so without calling into question Renan’s categories themselves. We shall see how this scenario will repeat itself in the work of other scholars. In the early 1870s, two more leading scholars joined the debate. On February 8 and 20 in the year 1871, Daniel Chwolson read at the Imperial Academy of Science in Saint Petersburg a long paper on the Semitic peoples, which was published the following year.24 Chwolson (1819–1911), a Jewish Orientalist from Vilno who studied in Leipzig, had been appointed to a Chair in Saint Petersburg afer his conversion to Christianity. Like individuals, stated Chwolson, nations and races possess their own native and immutable character and inclinations. Rather than religion, legal system, or political regime, it is this character that determines their actions. As to Renan’s perception of the Semites in his Nouvelles considérations, Chwolson contended that it was not quite convincing: if Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were born among Semitic peoples, this must refect vital forces that Renan was unable to detect. Moreover, his idea that religious intolerance is a direct consequence of Semitic monotheism is patently false, as it is also found among the Aryans. Chwolson identifed three main characteristics of the Semitic peoples: their sober disposition, their sharp personality, and their exalted mind. From these characteristics, one can deduce the nature of Semitic religion: the Semitic God is clearly distinct from the world, in sharp contrast to the pantheism and polytheism typical of Aryan religions. Today, pantheism and polytheism strike us as quite distinct systems. Nineteenth-­century scholars, though, tended to take a diferent view. Te Vedanta, in particular the Upanishads, was ofen presented as pantheistic, and for Max Müller showed a clear afnity with the doctrine of Spinoza.25 Prophets and prophetic institutions occur almost exclusively among the 24  Daniel Chwolson, Die semitischen Völker (Berlin: Duncker, 1872). An English translation appeared in the United States two years later, a fact that shows that echoes of the debate had crossed the Atlantic: Daniel Chwolson, Te Semitic Nations, transl. E. M. Epstein (Cincinnati: Bloch and Co., 1874). 25 See, for instance, Friedrich Max Müller, Tree Lectures on the Vedânta Philosophy (London, New York: Longsman Greens, 1894).

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174  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Semites. Further distinctions, however, are questionable: the kernel of the moral and intellectual talents of the Hebrews is also to be found among other Semitic nations, just as the kernel of Greek talents exists also among other Aryan nations. While the essential attribute of the ideal Aryan king is bravery, it is by his wisdom, his justice, and his piety that the perfect Semitic king is characterized. Towards the end of his essay, Chwolson acknowledged his own “Semitic” identity. Tis was a rather surprising use of the term and indicates that his conversion to Christianity in order to follow an academic career did not cause him to deny his ethnic roots (he was a relentless fghter against anti-­Semitism).26 Chwolson concluded the piece with the statement that modern culture, which is based upon the integration of Semitic and Aryan culture, will lead to a peaceful future. Te year 1871 also saw the renowned Semitist Teodor Nöldeke’s (1836–1930) essay on the Semites.27 Te historian’s task of characterizing entire peoples is indeed an arduous one, he afrmed, adding a caveat against the temptation to use contemporary European Jews as embodying, as it were, the ancient Semites. All in all, Renan’s perception of the Semites was convincing to Nöldeke: for him, the religious spirit of those he calls the Indogermanen Culturvölker is richer than that of the Semites. In accentuating the tendency towards asceticism and monasticism among the Semites, and their democratic inclinations, though, Chwolson in Nöldeke’s view, had gone a step too far. And Renan’s argument that the Semites had no gif for politics was somewhat exaggerated. Nöldeke agreed, however, that the Semites’ monotheism and views on creation are not rooted in philosophical refection. In the arts, too, the Semites are less gifed than the Indo-­German peoples, although one cannot say that they totally lack talent. Altogether, Nöldeke’s essay strikes the reader as rather bland: amending here, correcting there, ofering few novel insights. Te most sustained Jewish response to Renan’s denunciation of the Semitic peoples and their creative abilities was ofered by the Hungarian Jewish scholar Ignaz Goldziher (1850–1921), the most prominent among Jewish scholars of Islam, who would eventually become one of the greatest European scholars in this feld, together with Teodor Nöldeke and the Dutch Christiaan Snouk Hurgronje (1857–1936).28 In Leipzig, where he 26  Daniel Chwolson, “I Am Myself a Semite,” in his Te Semitic Nations, 54. 27 Teodore Nöldeke, “Zur Charakteristik der Semiten,” Neues Reich 2 (1872), 881f. [Reprinted in Teodore Nöldeke, Orientalische Skizzen (Berlin: Paetel, 1892)]. 28 On Goldziher, see especially the excellent collection of essays edited by Céline Trautmann-­Waller et al., Ignác Goldziher: un autre orientalisme? (Paris: Geuthner, 2011), with

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

FROM THE QUARREL OF MONOTHEISM  175 had studied Islamic law with Fleischer, Goldziher became the frst Jew to be named Privatdozent. He had also been deeply marked by Geiger and the whole German scholarly tradition.29 Like many other Jewish scholars of Islam, Goldziher showed sympathy for a religion that, he felt, had a strong kinship with Judaism and was possessed of impressive moral standards. In Goldziher’s view, thanks to its pure monotheism, Islam was the true engine of world history. Indeed, the young Goldhizer was so taken by the ethical character of Islam that he considered conversion, ultimately deciding to remain a Jew in order to help Judaism rise to the other’s ethical standard.30 As a youth, Goldziher had traveled to the Middle East, and was the frst non-­Muslim to be admitted as a regular student at al-­Azhar University in Cairo. Tere, he became friendly with young Muslim intellectuals, including Jamal al-­ Din Al-­ Afghani (1837/8–1897), and sympathized with their demands for spiritual renewal and political independence.31 During his stay in Cairo, Goldziher wrote in his Journal:

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By monotheism, I termed Islam, and I did not lie when I said I believed the prophecies of Mohammed. My copy of the Koran can testify how I was inwardly turned toward Islam. My teachers seriously expected the moment of my open declaration.32

a detailed bibliography. On Goldziher’s views on the ethical level of contemporary Judaism and Islam, as expressed in his Tagebuch, see Suzanne Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 326. On Goldziher’s complex and peculiar “scholarly persona,” see Henning Trüper, “Dispersed Personae: Subject-­Matter of Scholarly Biography in Nineteenth-­Century Oriental Philology,” Asiatische Studien 67 (2013), 1325–1360. 29 See Ismar Schorsch, “Beyond the Classroom: Te Enduring Relationship between Heinrich  L.  Fleischer and Ignaz Goldziher,” in Hans-­Georg Ebert and Toralf Hanstein, eds, Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer: Leben und Wirkung (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013), 75–114. As we saw in Chapter 2, Fleischer had been, like Renan, a student of Silvestre de Sacy. On Fleischer and his Jewish students, see also Chapter 3 in this volume. 30  On Goldziher as a scholar of Jewish and Islamic monotheism, see Ottfried Fraisse, Ignać Goldzihers monotheistische Wissenschaf: Zur Historisierung des Islam (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). Fraisse shows how Goldziher applies the same historical method, inspired by Maimonides, to analyze the evolution of monotheism in both Judaism and Islam. See further Ottfried Fraisse, ed., “Introduction,” in his Modern Jewish Scholarship on Islam in Context: Rationality, European Crisis, and the Search for Belonging (Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2018), 1–29. 31  Tagebuch 68. See Chapter 2 in this volume. Goldziher wrote the entry on al-­Afghani in the Encyclopedia of Islam (1st ed). Cf. Josef van Ess, “Goldziher as a Contemporary of Islamic Reform,” in J. van Ess, Kleine Schrifen, ed. Hinrich Biesterfeld (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 497–511. 32 See Raphael Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and his Oriental Diary (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 27. On Goldziher’s views on the ethical level of contemporary Judaism and Islam, as expressed in his Tagebuch, see Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 326.

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176  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Later in the same Tagebuch, Goldziher stated:

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I truly entered in those weeks into the spirit of Islam to such an extent that ultimately I became convinced that I myself was a Muslim and judiciously discovered that this was the only religion that, even in its doctrinal and ofcial formulation, can satisfy philosophical minds. My idea was to elevate Judaism to a similar rational level. Islam, my experience taught me, was the only religion in which superstition and pagan elements were proscribed, not by rationalism but by Orthodox doctrine.33

For Goldziher, refuting Renan would turn out to be a lifelong preoccupation. He repudiated both Renan’s stance on the Hebrews and Judaism and his stance on the Arabs and Islam. In 1876, when he was still studying with Fleischer in Leipzig, he published Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und seine geschichtliche Entwicklung, a book-­length refutation of Renan’s idea that, due to their lack of imagination, the ancient Semites had no mythology. Tere, Goldziher showed that the Bible and apocryphal literature indeed indicated the presence of myths in ancient Israel. In Chapter 8, he explicitly rejected Renan’s theory about a monotheistic instinct among the Semites, as well as the idea of a primordial monotheism, which would have later dissolved in polytheism.34 Tere seems to have been little direct contact between the two great scholars, but Goldziher wrote at least two letters to Renan, whom he also met once in Paris, in 1883, upon his return to Budapest from the Orientalist congress in Leiden. Like the aging al-­Afghani, but in much more sustained fashion, the young Goldziher replied to Renan in the name of his own people and religious community. And, like 33 Patai, Ignaz Goldziher and his Oriental Diary, 59. On Goldziher’s biography, see Peter Haber, Zwischen jüdischer Tradition und Wissenschaf: Der ungarische Orientalist Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921) (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 2006). 34 Ignaz Goldziher’s Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und seine geschichtliche Entwickelung (Leipzig, 1876). One may point out that Goldziher and his translator dedicated the English translation, published in 1877, to Heinrich  L.  Fleischer, Friedrich Max Müller, and Ármin Vámbéry, “the pioneers of Semitic, Aryan and Turco-­Tataric philology”; cf. Julius Popper, Der Ursprung des Monotheismus: Eine historische Kritik des hebräischen Altertums, insbesondere Ofenbarungsgeschichte, Kritik der Patriarchengeschichte (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1879), in particular 46f. on mythology (1850–1931). See Trautmann-­Waller, “Du ‘caractère des peuples sémitiques’ à une ‘science de la mythologie hébraïque,’ 169–184. In Ignać Goldzihers monotheistische Wissenschaf: Zur Historisierung des Islam, Ottfried Fraisse argues that Goldziher’s perception of Islam was inspired by Maimonides’s views on the history of religions. For Goldziher, Islam is the engine of the human history of culture. Such an approach is diametrically opposed to that of Renan. On Goldziher and Renan, see further Trautmann-­Waller, “Semites and Semitism: From Philology to the Language of Myth,” 346–367.

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FROM THE QUARREL OF MONOTHEISM  177 Al-­Afghani, Goldziher sought to rebut Renan’s low opinion of the Semitic mind, and in particular its lack of mythopoiesis. In 1894, at the request of the Hungarian Academy, he published a memorial article on Renan as an Orientalist.35 Te long controversy on the origins of monotheism, of which we have followed here some of the main episodes, did not disappear with the close of the century. Afer World War I, the Italian historian of religion Rafaele Pettazzoni published a three-­volume overview of the idea of monotheism in which he identifed monotheistic trends in all the religions of the world. Pettazzoni’s scholarly feat, however, carried little weight among his colleagues.36 Te most ambitious project on a global study of monotheism is the twelve-­volume Der Ursprung der Gottesidee, the maximum opus of the Viennese ethnologist (and Catholic priest) Wilhelm Schmidt.37 As is well known, Pater Schmidt, who was also Freud’s nemesis, renewed there, with ethnological “evidence” from all sides, the Patristic tradition about original monotheism. But Schmidt’s work and the responses it elicited came too late to fall within the frame of the present investigation.

Beyond the Hebrew God

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Te new comparative approach to early Christianity, embodied by Baur in the frst half of the century, found its origin in the philological method for

35  Ignaz Goldziher, Renan als Orientalist: Gedenkrede am 27. November 1893, transl. Peter Zalán, ed. Friedrich Niewöhner, (Zurich, 2000), 37–40 [originally, Renan mint orientalista: emlékbeszéd (Budapest, 1894)] . See further Lawrence I. Conrad, “Ignaz Goldziher on Ernest Renan: from Orientalist Philology to the Study of Islam,” in Martin Kramer, ed., Te Jewish Discovery of Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis (Tel Aviv: Dayan Center, 1999), 137–180. See further Sabine Mangold, “Ignác Goldziher et Ernest Renan—Vision du monde et innovation scientifque,” in Céline Trautmann-­Waller et al., Ignác Goldziher: un autre orientalisme? (Paris: Geuthner, 2011), 73–88. 36  See Rafaele Pettazzoni, Dio: Formazione e sviluppo del monoteismo nella storia delle religioni Vol. I: L’essere celeste nelle credenze dei popoli primitive (Rome: Athenaeum, 1922) [Vol. II: Il Dio supreme nelle religioni politeistiche; Vol. III: Il Dio unico nelle religioni monoteistische]. For a summary of the book’s main thesis, see Rafaele Pettazzoni, “La formation du monothéisme,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 88 (1923), 193–199, being the text of a lecture at the Congrès des religions held in Paris in 1923. For Pettazzoni the polemic between Andrew Lang and Wilhelm Schmidt on the original form of religion (animist or monotheistic) is bound to remain sterile, as the original form of monotheism is for him the idea of a celestial being, a personifcation of the heavens. For him, one may also speak of an Indian monotheism or pantheism. 37  Wilhelm Schmidt, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee: eine historischkritische und positive Studie (Münster: Aschendorf, 1912–1955).

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178  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism

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biblical research launched in Göttingen during the Enlightenment. Tis approach, which German scholars further developed during the nineteenth century, reached its peak in the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule. Tis new movement, too, was inaugurated in Göttingen, in the 1890s. Its promoters aspired to accentuate the Near Eastern and Greco-­Roman religious background of the Old and New Testament.38 Tis represented a new efort to study both Testaments of the Bible within their broader historical and religious contexts. Te school, then, was at once historical and comparative in nature. Methodologically, this involved drawing a complex religious picture of the late Hellenistic and Roman worlds in order to detect possible infuences on the religious ideas of the New Testament. Mutatis mutandis, the same methods were then applied to the broader religious worlds of the ancient Near East within which the texts of the Hebrew Bible were composed. Te Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, which looked for sources outside Judaism, may appear as an attempt (albeit perhaps not always a fully conscious one) to circumvent Judaism as the main source of early Christianity.39 In 1903, Wilhelm Bousset, a pioneer of this approach, published a book on Judaism in the time of the New Testament

38  On the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, see, for instance, Carsten Colpe, Die religionsgeschichtliche Schule. Darstellung und Kritik ihres Bildes vom gnostischen Erlösermythus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1961). See further, with bibliography, Gerd Lüdemann and Alf Özen, “Religionsgeschichtliche Schule,” in Teologische Realenzyklopädie 28 (1997), 618–624. Ioan Petru Culianu, Psychanodia I: A Survey of the Evidence Concerning the Ascension of the Soul and its Relevance (Leiden: Brill, 1983) argues (in chapter 2, pp. 16–24) against the exclusive insistence on Iranian and Babylonian origins for what Wilhelm Bousset called “die Himmelsreise der Seele.” See W. Bousset, “Die Himmelsreise der Seele,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaf 4 (1901), 136–169. A monograph on all aspects of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule remains a real desideratum. 39  Typical here is Carl Clemen, Religionsgeschichtliche Erklärung des Neuen Testaments: Die Abhängigkeit des ältesten Christentums von nichtjüdischen Religionen und philosophischen Systemen (Giessen: Töpelmann, 1924 [1909]), which as early as 1912 appeared in English translation under the title: Primitive Christianity and Its Non-­Jewish Sources. For a more balanced perspective, see Hermann Gunkel, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des Neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1903). Te Alttestamentler Gunkel proposes to see earliest Christianity as stemming from “syncretistic Judaism,” a religious trend which was already refecting the transformation of monotheism through its meeting with pagan religions. See further Hermann Gunkel, Die Religionsgeschichte und die alttestamentliche Wissenschaf (Vortrag; Berlin: Protestantischer Schrifenvertrieb, 1910). On Gunkel and the Religionsgeschichte, see Paul Humbert, “Hermann Gunkel: un maître des études hébraïques,” Revue de Téologie et de Philosophie 82 (1932), 5–19. As noted by Hans Kippenberg, Gunkel thought that Christians should not believe that anything of real religious value could come from Israel. See Hans Georg Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002) [transl. from Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Religionswissenschaf und Moderne (Munich: Beck, 1997)], 213, note 17.

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FROM THE QUARREL OF MONOTHEISM  179

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which would soon become a classic.40 For Bousset, Judaism as a religion remained trapped between particularism (the Torah) and universalism (the prophets).41 Te book tackles the question of monotheism and the dualist trends sprouting up in the vicinity of Israel’s monotheism (in particular Gnosis, a movement to which Bousset had dedicated an entire monograph).42 Like other liberal Protestant theologians, Bousset did not have a high regard for most Jewish post-­biblical literature. Te exception was Greek sources stemming from Hellenistic Diaspora Judaism, which he opposed to Palestinian Hebrew and Aramaic sources, the latter coming, for the most part, from Pharisaic and Rabbinic Judaism. For Bousset and his colleagues, the religion of the Pharisees echoed the traditional Christian, theological construct, which placed Jesus in radical opposition to the Pharisees.43 In such a scheme, Jesus was set apart from his own cultural and religious milieu.44 Tis was an infnite source of perplexity for European Christians: Jesus’s Jewish identity and background. Renan’s Life of Jesus showed this tendency to dislodge Jesus from his surroundings. It was as a freethinker and not as a theologian, though, that Renan had written his Life of Jesus. While he did not make extensive use of rabbinic sources, he did not deny their value outright. Te approach of the Religionsgeschichtlische Schule was not to everyone’s taste. At the turn of the century, for instance, Adolf Harnack, the towering fgure of liberal theology and Kulturprotestantismus, insisted that Christianity ought to be understood in isolation and on its own terms; in

40 Wilhelm Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter (Berlin: Reuther and Reichard, 1903), on which see Lutz Doering, “Wilhelm Bousset’s Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter,” Early Christianity 6 (2015), 51–66. In 1892, Bousset had published Jesu Predigt in ihrem Gegensatz zum Judentum: Ein religionsgeschichtlicher Vergleich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht). 41  On Bousset’s views of Judaism and the polemics against them, see Roland Deines, Die Pharisäer: Ihr Verständnis im Spiegel der christlichen und jüdischen Forschung seit Wellhausen und Graetz (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1997), 96–135. 42 Bousset, Die Religion des Judentums, V Abschnitt, 302–357 in the 1926 edition; cf. Wilhelm Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1907). 43  For the enduring value of a classic study, see George Foot Moore, “Christian Writers of Judaism,” Harvard Teological Review 14 (1921), 197–254. On the long German tradition of dismissiveness towards Judaism, see, for instance, Amy Newman, “Te Death of Judaism in German Protestant Tought from Luther to Hegel,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 61 (1993), 455–484. 44  See, for instance, Franz Delitzsch, Jesus und Hillel: Mit Rücksicht auf Renan und Geiger verglichen (Erlangen: Deichert, 1866). For the author, Hillel’s teachings belong to a long-­dead system, while Jesus remains alive to this day in “the progress of culture” (ibid., 39). Te Hebraist Delitzsch (on him, see Chapter 3, note 54 as well as Chapter 9, note 24 in this volume) used to discuss Talmud and Jewish philosophy with Ignaz Goldziher during the latter’s stay in Leipzig.

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his view, there was little place for the study of other religions in theological faculties.45 Troughout his life, Harnack would be drawn to the ­second-­century heretic Marcion, on which he published a seminal monograph, the fnal fruit of a long gestation, towards the end of his life.46 According to Harnack’s Neo-­Marcionism, it was high time for the Church to divest itself of the Old Testament as a Scripture—something he claimed Luther had not dared to do at the time of the Reformation. Perhaps the clearest expression of Harnack’s thought is found in Das Wesen des Christentums, a compilation of his lectures at the University of Berlin in the fall term 1899–1900. Te core of Christianity, for him, had rather little to do with the Hebrew Bible, and the Jewish roots of Christianity were not ­particularly relevant to its essence.47 Te challenge of Harnack’s views for the Jews was not unnoticed by Jewish scholars. In 1902, Felix Perles, a scholar and rabbi from Königsberg, penned a systematic refutation of Harnack, showing his shaky knowledge of Judaism, modern as well as ancient.48 Tree years later, in 1905, Leo Baeck published Das Wesen des Judentums, the most enduring Jewish response to Harnack.49 Perles also 45  His general attitude towards the study of the history of religions within theological faculties notwithstanding, Harnack was able to appreciate the value of the distinguished Swedish theologian and scholar Nathan Söderblom (1866–1931) and sought to get him an academic position in Berlin. Söderblom, a specialist of Zoroastrism and the author of La vie future d’après le Mazdéisme (Paris: Leroux, 1901), would later become archbishop of Uppsala, and in 1930 became the recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. On Söderblom, see Eric J. Sharpe, “Nathan Söderblom and the Study of Religion,” Religious Studies 4 (1969), 259–274. 46  Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott: Eine Monographie zur Geschichte der Grundlegung der katholischen Kirche (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1921). 47  On the perception of Judaism and Islam by Protestant theologians, see Reinhard Schulze, “Islam und Judentum im Angesicht der Protestantisierung der Religionen im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Lothar Gall and Dietmar Willoweit, eds, Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the Course of History: Exchanges and Conficts (Schrifen des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquium 82; Munich: Oldenburg, 2011), 139–165. 48  Felix Perles, Was lehrt uns Harnack? (Frankfurt: Kaufmann, 1902). Tis work immediately appeared in English translation: “What Jews May Learn from Harnack,” Jewish Quarterly Review 14 (1902), 517–543. Perles is also the author of a rather rare approach of Talmudic literature from the perspective of the Religionsgeschichte: “Die religionsgeschichtliche Erforschung der talmudischen Literatur,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaf 16 (1913), 580–597, where he deals with scholars from Geiger to Louis Ginzberg (the frst volume of Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews was published in 1909). Te Jewish reaction to Harnack crossed the German borders; see, for instance, Maurice Liber, “L’esprit du christianisme et du judaïsme,” Revue des Études Juives 51 (1906), 192–205. 49  Leo Baeck, Das Wesen des Judentums (Berlin: Nathansen & Lamm, 1905 [English transl. Te Essence of Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1948)]. Until his late years in London, Baeck retained a strong interest in Christianity and in the comparative study of Judaism and Christianity. For a representative collection of his texts, see Leo Baeck, Judaism and Christianity, transl. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Atheneum, 1970 [1958]); see further Leo Baeck, Te Pharisees and Other Essays (New York: Schocken, 1947).

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FROM THE QUARREL OF MONOTHEISM  181 published, in 1903, a strong refutation of Bousset.50 Essentially, he claimed that Bousset’s ignorance of rabbinic Judaism, like that of Harnack, invalidated his views. Although Bousset’s reaction to Perles’s critique was less than ­gracious, he took it seriously enough to introduce signifcant changes in his third edition, published posthumously in 1926.51 While Bousset heralds the comparative, inclusive approach to the history of religions, Harnack insists on the irrelevance of such an approach in the study of Christianity, a ­religion sui generis. From their diverse, almost opposing viewpoints, ­however, they both seek to circumvent the idea of a Jewish matrix of Christianity. In doing so, they express a deep wish to negate Israel’s central locus in the Christian identity of Europe—the same wish which was ofen implicit in the idea of Semitic monotheism. Discussion on Renan’s thesis eventually died down, but debate on the nature and origins of monotheism went on, with a fresh emphasis on the possible contribution of the new discipline of Assyriology. In 1875, Eberhard Schrader, the father of German Assyriology, argued in print that the true origin of monotheism was Sumerian. According to him, it was only afer their contact with the Babylonians that the Hebrews could conceive of monotheism.52 From the days of Schrader on, this stark opposition between Hebrews and Babylonians would make a regular reappearance. In this context, it is worth recalling that there appears to have been a continuous growth in the use of “monotheism” in (at least English) books printed from the 1860s to a dramatic peak in the frst half of the 1890s. Tis brings us to the frst years of the twentieth century, when a notorious dispute, the impact of which reached far beyond scholarly circles, broke out in Germany. Referred to as the Babel-­und-­Bibel-­Streit, or the “Babylon and Bible controversy,” it inscribes itself in the direct line of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule. Since the decipherment of the cuneiform 50 Felix Perles, Bousset’s Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter kritisch untersucht (Berlin: Wolf Peiser, 1903). 51  Tis revised (“verbesserte”) edition, prepared by Hugo Gressmann, even appeared under a new title: Die Religion des Judentums im späthellenistischen Zeitalter (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1926). Bousset died in 1920. 52  Eberhard Schrader, “Semitismus und Babylonismus. Zur Frage nach dem Ursprung des Hebraismus,” Jahrbücher für protestantische Teologie 1 (1875), 117–133; cf. Jerrald S. Cooper, “Sumerian and Aryan: Racial Teory, Academic Politics and Parisian Assyriology,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 210 (1993), 169–205; in Cooper’s words, “the great paradox for Europeans was that the spiritual salvation of the Aryan race came not from religious intuitions of its own, but from those of the alien Semites” (178). On the beginnings of Assyriology in Germany, see Sabine Mangold, Eine “weltbürgerliche Wissenschaf”: Die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004), 164–167.

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182  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism script and the discoveries of Babylonian archaeology in the nineteenth cen­tury, the study of Mesopotamian civilizations had blossomed, and what had been traditionally perceived as a backdrop to the biblical world assumed an independent importance. Assyriologists tended to claim the pre-­eminence of their feld over biblical studies. For some of them, the so-­ called Panbabylonisten, Mesopotamia was the fount of all Near Eastern religious traditions, up to Egypt, and even the original source of monotheism, an idea stolen by the Hebrews.53 In Germany, in particular, such trends ofen went hand in hand with a growing tendency to devalue, and even to ­dismiss, Hebrew culture and the Old Testament. In 1902, Friedrich Delitzsch (1850–1922), a leading Assyriologist and the most vocal of the Panbabylonists (as well as the son of the renowned Hebraist Franz Delitzsch) gave a public lecture in Berlin, in which he developed these themes. It was this lecture—which was attended by Emperor Wilhelm II—that ignited the “Babel und Bibel” controversy. Te lecture was followed by two more, which received swif transcription, publication, and translation into English.54 For Delitzsch, it is in the Babylonian world, rather than in biblical Israel, that one should search for the roots of biblical religion, of monotheism in particular. Tis approach, which amounted to a “downgrading” of Hebrew culture and religion, went much further in its anti-­Jewish animus than the disparaging attitude of “liberal theologians” on the Jewish roots of Christianity. But so radical were Delitzsch’s ideas, and so raucous his voice, that he lost many of his supporters in the academic world. By the time he delivered the third and fnal lecture, 53  On the “Panbabylonisten,” see Alfred Jeremias, Die Panbabylonisten: Der Alte Orient und die ägyptische Religion (Leipzig: Hinrich, 1907). Cf. Michael Weichenhan, Der Panbabylonismus: Die Faszination des himmlischen Buches im Zeitalter der Zivilisation (Berlin: Frank & Timme, 2016). See further Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 236–238 and 244–251. Marchand speaks about panbabylonism as “a quintessential expression of the furor orientalis” (237). 54  Friedrich Delitzsch, Babel und Bibel, Erster Vortrag (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1902); Friedrich Delitzsch, Babel und Bibel, Ein Vortrag (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1903); Friedrich Delitzsch, Babel  und Bibel, Dritter Vortrag (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1905); Friedrich Delitzsch,  Babel and Bible: Signifcance of Assyriological Research for Religion (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1905); cf. Reinhard  G.  Lehmann, Friedrich Delitzsch und der Babel-­Bibel-­Streit (Fribourg: Universitätsverlag, 1994). On the “Babel und Bibel” controversy, see Klaus Johanning, Die Bibel-­Babel Streit: eine Forschungsgeschichtliche Studie (Frankfurt, New York, Paris: Peter Lang, 1988). For a broader perspective on the “Babel-­Bibel” controversy within the question of monotheism in the history of scholarship, see Fritz Stolz, Einführung in den biblischen Monotheismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschafliche Buchgesellschaf, 1996), 23–30. As noted by Suzanne Marchand, the “Babel und Bibel” controversy, far from remaining within scholarly circles, raised interest in the broader public sphere; see her “Popularizing the Orient in Fin de Siècle Germany,” Intellectual History Review 17 (2007), 175–202.

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FROM THE QUARREL OF MONOTHEISM  183

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well-­known fgures such as Adolf Harnack, Eduard Meyer, and Teodor Nöldeke had distanced themselves from him.55 Delitzsch later revealed the depth of his hatred of Jews in Die grosse Täuschung, a book published shortly before his death.56 In this book, Delitzsch proposed to replace the Old Testament in German churches with old German myths. One may add that his student, Paul Haupt, was one of the major advocates of the Aryan Jesus.57 Indeed, Delitzsch’s understanding of the origins of monotheism comes quite close to what Houston Stewart Chamberlain writes in his Foundations of the Nineteenth Century.58 Along with Perles and Baeck, a handful of Jewish intellectuals and scholars courageously polemicized against the new scholarly anti-­ Semitism.59 Because those individuals did not hold recognized academic positions, however, they do not seem to have been taken seriously by Christian theologians. Nonetheless, some among the latter expressed outrage at the anti-­Semitic undertones or implications of their colleagues’ writings. Jewish scholars were naturally appalled by such views, clad in scholarly language and bearing professorial authority, and which were now socially legitimate, salonfähig. Generally focusing on the study of Judaism, as well as of Oriental religions, they ofered apologetics of Judaism in an efort to counteract the insidious attacks of theologians and Orientalists alike. Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that only a very few among these fgures were able to ofer direct contributions to the phenomenon of religion itself. Te American Jewish historian of religions, Morris Jastrow, 55 See, for instance, Alfred Jeremias, Im Kampfe um Babel und Bibel: Ein Wort zur Verständigung und Abwehr (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1903), who objects to Delitzsch’s thesis, as well as his Monotheistische Strömungen innerhalb der babylonischen Religion (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1904); cf. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 246. Marchand adds (248) that by 1910, the Panbabylonist furor was fading. 56  Friedrich Delitzsch, Die grosse Tauschung (Deutsche Verlags-­Anstast, 1921). 57  See Heschel, Te Aryan Jesus. 58  In the Preface to his opus, Chamberlain proposes to distinguish between monotheism stemming from “richness of the soul” (aus Reichtum des Gemütes) and monotheism originating in “the poverty of the soul” (aus Armut des Gemütes), Grundlagen des 19 Jahrhunderts (Munich: Brückmann, 1899), Vorwort, LXXXVII. Naturally, Hebrew monotheism falls into the second category. 59 See Yaacov Shavit, “Babel und Bibel—Te Controversy as a Jewish Event,” Leipziger Beiträge zur jüdischen Geschichte und Kultur 1 (2003), 263–264. See further, Tomas L. Gertzen, “Die Vortrāge des Assyriologen Friedrich Delitzsch über Babel und Bibel und die Reaktionen der deutschen Juden,” Zeitschrif für Religions-­und Geistesgeschichte 71 (2019), 238–258. Te continuing interest in this movement in Jewish context is refected in a Conference on the Babel-­Bibel-­Streit and the Wissenschaf des Judentums organized by the Moses-­Mendelsshon-­ Zentrum (Potsdam, November 2019), on the occasion of an exhibition on the Babel-­Bibel-­ Streit at the Pergamon Museum, in which a number of anti-­Semitic items, such as caricatures, directly related to the Streit were displayed.

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184  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism who had been trained by Delitzsch (and whose own father was a respected rabbinic scholar), is one of these few exceptions.60 From quite a diferent perspective, Jastrow juxtaposed in his Haskell Lectures of 1913 the ethical monotheism of the prophets of Israel to Babylonian henotheism.61 Tere, Jastrow expressed his strong support of the comparative study of religion:

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Te comparative study of religions follows as a natural corollary from the historical treatment of particular religions . . . As such, the comparative study of religion forms the only secure basis for the philosophy of religion, but only secure as long as in the comparative study itself, the historical method is adhered to.62

Te insistence on the essentially ethical nature of Hebrew monotheism, in particular as refected by the prophets of Israel, became more or less the “party line” among Jewish scholars and thinkers. Te ethical nature of biblical monotheism represented for them the best defense against Christian accusations of Old Testament particularism versus New Testament universalism, and Kantian ethics ofered a perfect intellectual basis, an idea nowhere better expressed than in the Neo-­Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen’s Religion of Reason Out of the Sources of Judaism.63 Te most radical way for European Christians to rid themselves of Christianity’s disconcerting Jewish roots was to claim that Jesus had not been a Palestinian Jew, but, rather, a Galilean Aryan. In one of its most curious ofshoots, the idea of an Aryan family of languages gave birth to the myth of an Indian origin of Christianity. One version of the myth of the Aryan Jesus has him bringing back his teachings from India.64 Like the 60  See Morris Jastrow Jr, Te Study of Religion (London: Scott and Scribner, 1901). For the early story of Assyriology in the United States, see Bruce Kuklick, Puritans in Babylon: Te Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life 1880–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Kuklick highlights the extent to which the beginnings of American Assyriology were dominated by German scholars, such as Hermann Hilprecht, professor of Assyriology at the University of Pennsylvania, who had been trained by Friedrich Delitzsch in Leipizig, and Paul Haupt from Johns Hopkins University. 61  See Morris Jastrow, Jr, Hebrew and Babylonian Traditions (New York: Scribner’s, 1914), esp. 263–265. 62 Jastrow, Te Study of Religion, 21. 63  Hermann Cohen, Religion der Vernunf aus den Quellen des Judentums: Eine jüdische Religionsphilosophie (Leipzig: Fock, 1919). Te book was published posthumously, as Cohen had died the previous year. 64  Various related fantasies circulated in the late nineteenth century, for instance that of a Crimean Jewish adventurer masquerading as a Russian nobleman. As Nicolas Notovitch, he is the author of La vie inconnue de Jésus Christ en Inde et au Tibet (Paris: Paul Ollendorf, 1894). Max Müller polemicized powerfully against this claim. For a survey, cf. Norbert Klatt, Lebte Jesus in Indien? Eine religionsgeschichtliche Klärung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1988) [non vidi].

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FROM THE QUARREL OF MONOTHEISM  185

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solar myth during the Enlightenment, the myth of the Aryan Jesus endowed the person of Jesus with cosmic dimensions. Te savior of the West originally came from the East and was in fact another avatar of the Buddha. Schopenhauer, in particular, had pointed to a close similarity between Jesus and the Buddha, and his views had lef a deep impression on many in Germany.65 Te sources of the fad of an Indian nature of Christianity, however, are also to be found in France. Arthur, Count of Gobineau (1816–1882), is widely regarded as the father of modern racial theory.66 Gobineau was an eccentric diplomat, intellectually curious, in particular about the cultures and religions of Central Asia; he was also a writer in his own right and penned a number of essays and pieces of literary fction.67 His magnum opus, the Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, was published in 1855.68 For Gobineau, there had been ten great civilizations in world history. Some of them were creations of Semitic peoples, others of the Aryans. Te Aryan race was the most noble, intelligent, and vital branch of the white stock; thus, on all counts, superior to the Semites. Te Semitic god El was responsible for the corruption of the Aryan god.69 Gobineau, moreover, had a low opinion of Islam, maintaining that the peoples professing Islam were bound to disappear if unwilling to give up on their religion. In contrast, he had a rather high opinion of the Jews. He was impressed by their isolationism and by their achievements in ancient Palestine. Te original Hebrews, he believed, had more in common 65  On Schopenhauer, see Chapter 3 in this volume. 66  In occupied France, a supporter of Nazi racism could proudly point out that racist theory was a French rather than a German invention. See Louis Tomas, Les précurseurs: Arthur de Gobineau, Inventeur du racisme (1816–1882) (5th edn; Paris: Mercure de France, 1941). Te fact that the book appeared in at least fve editions shows that it had a signifcant readership: . . . la théorie raciste, n’est pas un phantasme strictement allemand et nazi, ainsi que le prétendaient les Juifs installés à Paris; c’est au contraire une idée française. Il n’y a donc aucun crime contre notre patrie à professer des théories racistes: ces idées sont, avant tout, françaises, ayant été émises par un Français de Coeur (sic) et d’esprit très nobles.   (Tomas, Les précurseurs, 7) 67  About his scholarly writings, see in particular Les religions et les philosophies de l’Asie centrale (two vols; 2nd edn; Paris: Crès, 1923). Gobineau was particularly interested by the contemporary phenomenon of Babism. For him, the original cradle of the Aryans was located in Eastern Pamir. Gobineau and Renan had a good relationship, as Gobineau was a frequent visitor of Ary Schefer, Renan’s father-­in-­law. Renan also met Gobineau in Greece, where the latter was for some years the French minister. See Roger Béziau, ed., Les lettres de Cornélie Renan à Gobineau: correspondance inédite (Paris: Archives des Lettres Modernes, 75, 1967). 68 I have used the second edition: Arthur de Gobineau, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (two vols; Paris: Firmin-­Didot, 1884). On Gobineau, see for instance Janine Buenzod, La formation de la pensée de Gobineau et l’ “Essai sur l’inégalité des races” (Paris: Nizet, 1967); see further Michael D. Biddis, Father of Racist Ideology: Te Social and Political Tought of Count Gobineau (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970). 69  Tis fact is noted by Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age, 45.

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186  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism with the Aryans than with other Semites. On the Jews, then, Gobineau diverges notably from Chamberlain, whose Foundations of the Nineteenth Century is otherwise closely akin to the Essay.70 Although Gobineau maintained that some races were stronger than others and superior to them, he difered deeply from later racists who claimed to have been inspired by him; he held ethnic mixing, not racial separation, to be the future of humanity. Te idea of ethnic mixture was one of the Essay’s central themes. Gobineau was far from the only nineteenth-­century Frenchman smitten by the idea of Aryan India. In 1864, the renowned historian Jules Michelet published a book entitled La Bible de l’humanité as a response to Renan’s Vie de Jésus, which had been published the preceding year. Essentially emblazoned with the anti-­Church Enlightenment motto, “Écrasez l’infâme!,” Michelet’s work claimed opposition to the biblical tradition.71 Inscribing himself directly into the comparative history of religions ushered in by the Renaissance orientale, Michelet referred to India and Iran, the countries of the Vedas and the Avesta, as “the dawn of the world.”72 Greeks, Romans, and Celts, like Indians and Iranians, are Aryans. Aryan light coming from India, he added, contrasts with the “dark genius of the South,” from Egypt, Carthage, Tyr, and Judea. Te alternative bibles from Asia are those of our own family, while the Jewish bible belongs to another race. Te latter may indeed be beautiful, but, like the night, it is dark and dangerous. Jerusalem cannot remain, like in medieval maps, at the center of the world, between Europe and Asia. Free humanity requires air, water, and sky. Its Jerusalem, its Promised Land, is the whole world itself.73 For Michelet, then, the Jewish world is directly opposed to the Aryan one, in particular to “Indo-­European Hellenism.” Michelet and Edgar Quinet maintained a forty-­year friendship, beginning in 1825, when they met at the home of the philosopher Victor Cousin, until their falling out in 1865, with the publication of Quinet’s book on the French Revolution. Colleagues at the Collège de France, they collaborated on various projects. La Bible de l’humanité was obviously prepared by Quinet’s Le génie des religions (1842), although one must stress that the latter had not put the Vedas and the Avesta in radical opposition to the Bible, as had Michelet.

70  See Biddis, Father of Racist Ideology, 124–125 and 254–257. 71  See Laudyce Réat’s introduction to her critical edition of Jules Michelet, La Bible de l’humanité (Paris: Champion, 2009) [1st edn; Paris: Chamerot, 1864], 13–17. 72  (“l’aurore du monde”), Jules Michelet, La Bible de l’humanité (Paris: Chamerot, 1864), III. 73  Ibid., VIII–IX: “. . . combien la Bible juive appartient à une autre race. Elle est grande à coup sûr, et sera toujours belle—mais ténébreuse et pleine de scabreuse équivoque,—belle et peu sûre, comme la nuit.”

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FROM THE QUARREL OF MONOTHEISM  187 Quinet considered all religious traditions to be so many refections of the same light. For Michelet, light could only come from the Aryan East. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the gap between Aryans and Semites had become a gulf, a situation refected by world history. Tis radical, far-­fetched approach was gaining traction among some scholars of religion, such as Émile-­Louis Burnouf (1821–1907), a classical scholar and historian of religions who authored a Sanskrit–French dic­tion­ary. Burnouf, a nephew of the great scholar of Buddhism, Eugène Burnouf, was from 1867 to 1875 director of the École Française d’Athènes. In 1872, he published a synthetic work of haute vulgarisation on the history of religions, now quite forgotten but in its time representative of a popular mishmash of diferent trends on Semitic and Aryan religions.74 Burnouf accepted the racist theory in its most radical form—lock, stock, and barrel. Semites and Aryans are not only diferent races, but the latter are superior to the former even in their physical anthropology; the brains of the Semites are smaller than those of the Aryans, and he can speak of a “Yellow threat” (le péril jaune)—a phrase which turned out to have a nasty, long future. Although Burnouf does not mention Renan in the book, the latter’s ­presence is palpable. Like Renan, Burnouf was convinced that a real science of religion would be established before the end of the century, and like him, he thought that this science should be comparative in nature. Practically, this would entail the preliminary study of a few groups, afer which the comparison would be broadened. At once historical, linguistic, and philosophical, this inquiry would have nothing in common with religious polemics. Science was for Burnouf “the great force ruling society,”75 and India the religious country par excellence. Like Renan, Burnouf maintained that the Semites had little mythology; instead of mythology, they developed the historical dimension of religion. Unlike Renan, however, he did not endorse an original monotheism. Te Semites, he held, were polytheists before they developed monotheism—or rather, before one Semitic people, the Hebrews, developed monotheism. Tings are more complex, however, as the Jews can be ­subdivided into two races. While the majority of them were Semites and worshipped Elohim, a minority among them, having come to Galilee from 74  Émile-­Louis Burnouf, La science des religions (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1872). I quote according to the fourth edition (Paris: Delagrave, 1885). For an English translation, see Émile-­Louis Burnouf, Te Science of Religion (London: Sonnenschein, 1888). Under the general title: “La science des religions: sa méthode et ses limites,” Burnouf had published in the 1860s a series of articles in the Revue des Deux Mondes. 75  See Burnouf, La science des religions, chapter one: “La méthode,” 1–10.

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188  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Asia, were originally Aryans, and worshippers of Jehovah. Physically, Burnouf added, they looked like Poles.76 Although Judaism from the ­post-­exilic period is partly of Aryan origin, this religion, which had no vestige of Aryan universalism and genius, was ft only for the people from mixed racial origins which had Jerusalem as its capital.77 For Burnouf, the intellectual narrowness of the Semitic religions (sic!) established on the Koran and their limited scientifc interest results from the Semitic mind, always inferior in science to the Aryan mind. While Yahve, the Jewish god, was rejected by all other peoples, Allah, the god of the modern Semites, succeeded in enslaving under the Muslim yoke people belonging to other races—albeit only inferior ones. Tis opinion, he says, long held by many scholars and scientists, is newly confrmed on a daily basis, and is now becoming incontestable.78 Today, Burnouf goes on, Allah:

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. . . is humiliated in India, in Algeria, in Egypt, and even in Constantinople. A day will come when he will be humiliated throughout the world, because no one, god or man, can become the god of humanity, who enslaves his worshippers in order to bring them more docilely to combat.79

In this jarring passage, under the cover of universalism and progress, “­scientifc” racism transparently reveals itself as the natural bedfellow of colonialism. For Burnouf, other Semitic peoples, like the Phoenicians, were never monotheists. Tis point refects the impact of the scholarly polemics against Renan’s theory.80 Burnouf believed that there must have been an Aryan foundation upon which the Semitic religions were established. More generally, the development of religion among the Aryans represents the other side of religious history among the Semites. Te Aryans from South East Asia transformed their original polytheism into pantheism. Tis transformation is refected, in particular, in Buddhism, a religion whose ethical teaching is as elevated as it is in Christianity.81 For the pantheistic Aryans, the unity of God does not exist less than for Jews and Muslims, but incarnation is a direct result of pantheism.82 As to Christianity, it is “all in all an Aryan doctrine, which as a religion has almost nothing to do with Judaism.”83 Sound scholarship, he stated, should be able to distinguish what in Christianity comes from the Semitic 76  Ibid., 234. 77  Ibid., 236. 80  On the Semites, see ibid., 54–67. 82  Ibid., 76. 83  Ibid., 99.

78  Ibid., 129. 81  Ibid., 75–76.

79  Ibid., 67.

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FROM THE QUARREL OF MONOTHEISM  189 trend, and what from the Aryan one. Te dogmas of Creation, Trinity, and Incarnation are those where the Semitic and the Aryan elements are closer to one another.84 Te Zend Avesta, by contrast, explicitly includes the whole Christian doctrine. Te true, Aryan doctrine of Christianity, however, is essentially esoteric, and has remained oral.85 Burnouf ’s jumble of notions circulating among scholars and other educated people in the mid-­century is not typically French. We have seen examples of similar ideas coming from Germany. Such a hodgepodge shows how old ideas about Judaism and Islam were transformed in the nineteenth century, under the cover of secular modernity, and how they were able to cross borders without losing any of their lethal power. Yet another way was open to radical anti-­Semites in their attempts to repudiate any signifcant debt of Christianity and Europe to Judaism. Denying the Jews, or more precisely their Hebrew ancestors, the paternity of monotheism was indeed an obvious temptation for anti-­ Semites. A  dramatic form of such denial was to argue that Moses had not been a Hebrew, a Semite. Te idea that Moses was born an Egyptian was argued at length by Stewart Houston Chamberlain, in his infamous Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a book frst published, in German, in 1899. In his professed wish to cleanse world history of pernicious Jewish infuence, Chamberlain, Richard Wagner’s son-­in-­law, would go even further, by de-­Judaizing Moses, as it were. Just as Jesus had been an Aryan, Moses had been an Egyptian.86 Wagner himself had been deeply impressed by Gobineau’s Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (although he failed to notice the author’s lack of anti-­Jewish animus) and Gobineau became a member of the Bayreuth circle.87 84  Ibid., 99–100. 85  Ibid., 93–97. Te idea of a secret wisdom of Christ, of a teaching diferent for the elect and for hoi polloi, is echoed by other contemporary authors, such as Ernst von Bunsen (1819–1903), a Prussian diplomat and son of Baron Christian von Bunsen, the patron of Max Müller and Paul de Lagarde. See Ernst von Bunsen, Te Hidden Wisdom of Christ (London: Longman Green, 1865). See further his Die Einheit der Religionen im Zusammenhange mit den Völkerwanderungen der Urzeit und der Geheimlehre (Berlin: Trubner, 1870), and Te Angel-­ Messiah of Buddhists, Essenes and Christians (London: Longman Green, 1880). Te long tradition of an esoteric Christian doctrine started, of course, with the Gnostics of the frst Christian centuries. 86  See Chamberlain, Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 495, where he establishes his presentation of Moses as Egyptian on Renan’s Histoire du peuple d’Israël. See Jacques Le Rider, Modernité viennoise et crise de l’identité (Paris: PUF, 1990), 282–284. See further, Sander  L.  Gilman, Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 184. 87  In 1894, the Wagnerian anti-­Semitic journalist Ludwig Schemann founded a Gobineau Vereinigung, and started referring to “Gobineauismus.”

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190  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism As this chapter draws to a close, it is worth mentioning that it was only shortly before his death, afer the publication of Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion, that Freud learned, with some embarrassment, about the congruence between his own argument regarding Moses and that of Chamberlain.88 Jan Assmann has followed the topos of an Egyptian Moses through the centuries, but his book ends with the eighteenth ­cen­tury.89 Clearly, then, Moses’s Egyptian identity is not always related to ­anti-­Semitism, as it was for Chamberlain. Notably, Assmann received the information about Chamberlain’s “Egyptian Moses” with stupefaction:90 there has been scholarly silence on this issue for the two decades since the publication of Moses the Egyptian. Chamberlain’s opus, it may be remarked, has not passed the test of time. Tis chapter drew attention to some surprising facets of the complex exchange of knowledge between Germany and France. Specifcally, it spotlighted the distinct role and status of Jewish scholars in each of the two countries and demonstrated the impact they had on the study of religions at its acme. Additionally, it recalled the social, religious, and intellectual context of a topical episode in the history of scholarship, the discussion on monotheism and its origins. Renan’s idea of Semitic monotheism had become the pivot of a major debate among European scholars of religion. Far from being constrained within scholarly boundaries, this debate was part and parcel of social and political attitudes towards the Jews. Indeed, the progressive integration of Jews into society at large in a number of Western European countries was accompanied by violent outbursts of anti-­Semitism. Tese outbursts refect the transformation of traditional, religious ­anti-­Judaism into racial hatred in the age of secularization.91

88  Freud expressed his surprise in a letter written in 1938 to Israël Doryon, the author of a book on Freud and Hebrew monotheism (frst published in Hebrew in 1946 and in French translation as Freud et le monothéisme hébreu: L’homme Moïse (Paris: Zikarone, 1972). See there, 56–58, with the translation of Freud’s letter to Doryon from October 7, 1938. See further the stimulating remarks of Edward Said in his Freud and the Non-­European (London, New York: Verso, 2003). 89 Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: Te Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 1998). 90  Te bearer of this message was the present author (personal communication, 2018). 91  See especially Poliakov, Le mythe aryen. As is well known, the Nazis remained of two minds on Christianity. Te idea of “Positives Christentum” sought a Christianity purifed of its Jewish elements. But for Himmler, among others, Christianity remained doomed, as a Semitic religion.

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9

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Semitic Religion and Sacrifcial Ritual Renan’s theory on the origins of monotheism among the Semites generated a massive wave of international polemics. Chapter  8 presented the main plot and players in this polemic. Tus far, we have mainly dealt with the discussion of theological conceptions. Students of religion, however, knew that ritual, as much as myths and beliefs, belonged to the core of religious phenomena. Chapters 9 and 10, then, will focus on ritual, in particular on sacrifce, which William Robertson Smith positioned at the very heart of ritual in Semitic religions, and hence of Israelite, and then Christian and Islamic monotheism. In the footsteps of Max Müller, Robertson Smith symbolizes the prominence of British scholarship in the fnal decades of the century. We now turn to the broader intellectual context during the fnal three decades of the century, when sociology and anthropology were moving to the fore of the scene, ofen pushing philology backstage, as the preferred approach to the study of religion. As we shall see, the stakes, which were high, showcase at once ambivalent attitudes towards Judaism and the precarious status of Jewish scholars. Te standing of Jewish scholars in the comparative and anthropological tradition refects the strategy chosen by some among them (not always in a refexive, conscious way) to overcome this precarious status. Both the comparative and the anthropological method permitted them to circumvent the traces of Christian theology which they correctly detected in more traditional, philological approaches to the study of the monotheist systems. Before we take that turn, however, an introduction to some of the leading actors in the comparative study of religion is in order.

Max Müller and the Birth of “World Religions” Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900), known as the father of the comparative study of religions, was born in the same year as Ernest Renan, and died The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press (2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0010

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192  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism eight years afer him.1 Renan and Müller met several times and maintained an amicable epistolary exchange. Te German-­born Müller studied Sanskrit with Franz Bopp in Berlin and with Eugène Burnouf in Paris.2 Te young Müller then came to Oxford and decided to stay. For years, he worked mainly as a Sanskrit philologist, before turning to the comparative study of mythologies and religions. In his classifcation of languages, there were three main linguistic families: the Aryan (or Indo-­European, or Indo-German), Semitic, and Turanian languages.3 Of those, the Aryan and the Semitic languages, set in contradistinction to one another, were the main two linguistic families. Tis linguistic classifcation had a deep impact on attempts to establish a taxonomy of religions, more “scientifc” than the old Christian taxonomy, which classifed Judaism and Islam next to Christianity, dumping all other religions into a fourth category, “paganism.”4 Linguistic families were assumed to be refected in ethnic and religious ones, hence the categories of Semitic peoples and of Semitic religions, and the postulated existence of a single original Semitic people, and of a single original Semitic religion. Similarly, just as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin (and other European languages) shared many traits, so the cultural and religious traditions of India were perceived as retaining some kind of family resemblance to those of Europe. Te fact that this was a major fallacy, which would have dramatic consequences in the twentieth century, cannot be overemphasized. To be sure, this fallacy was not the source of mounting racial anti-­Semitism and of a mindset of spite or strong distaste for Islam among many European in­tel­lec­ tuals. It is beyond doubt, however, that the fallacy would strengthen such attitudes and serve as scholarly support for them.

1  On Müller, see in particular Lourens P. van den Bosch, A Life Devoted to the Humanities: Friedrich Max Müller, Studies in the History of Religions 94 (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2002). See also Molendijk, Friedrich Max Müller and the Sacred Books of the East. Renan wrote a preface to the French translation of Max Müller’s Introduction to Mythology, a work translated by Renan’s wife (although the translator’s name is not mentioned) and published in 1859 as Essai de mythologie comparée. See Renan’s letter to Müller from 30 January 1858, in Ernest Renan, OC X (Paris: Calmann-­ Lévy, 1961), 224–225, mentioned by Pierre Brunel, ed., in his Introduction toMax Müller, Mythologie comparée (Paris: Robert Lafont, 2002, 5, note 1). 2  Müller’s father was the lyric poet Wilhelm Müller, whose verse Schubert had set in music (Die schöne Müllerin, Winterreise). 3  Tis last term, now obsolete, was proposed by Müller to refer to many of Asia’s languages that belong neither to the Semitic nor to the Indo-­European families of languages. Turan is an ancient Iranian name for Turkic lands of Central Asia. 4  See Chapter 1 in this volume.

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Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual  193

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Müller’s greatest claim to fame is the initiative he took in the publication of Te Sacred Books of the East, English translations from the sacred scriptures of Asian religions. As general editor of the whole series, which holds ffy volumes, he presents a particularly striking example of the double persona of the scholar-­entrepreneur.5 While the Koran was included among these sacred books, the Bible was not. It seems that Müller pondered at some point the possibility of including the Hebrew Bible, seeking to publish the new English translation, the so-­called Polychrome Bible, which was being prepared at the time by the Assyriologist Paul Haupt (1858–1926), who taught both in Göttingen and Johns Hopkins. Eventually, however, this did not happen, and Te Sacred Books of the East do not include the Hebrew Bible (nor does the series, of course, include the New Testament). Te editorial decision, then, discloses a perception of Islam as belonging to the Orient, hence as essentially foreign to the religious and cultural world of Christian Europe. It lef no question as to the demarcated distance between (European) Christianity and (Asiatic) Islam. Müller was convinced that Christianity, a superior religion, provided the best seedbed for the growing of comparative studies of religion. He could state, quite simply: In no religion was there a soil so well prepared for the cultivation of Comparative Teology as our own. Te position which Christianity from the very beginning took up with regard to Judaism, served as the frst lesson in comparative theology, and directed the attention even of the unlearned to a comparison of two religions . . .6

Of course, a parallel case could be made about other religions, such as Islam, although Müller appears quite oblivious to that fact. Medieval Islamicate civilizations indeed made impressive intellectual eforts to understand the history of religions from a comparative perspective.7 According to Müller’s 5  On this, see the analysis of Arie L. Molendijk, “Friedrich Max Müller and the Persona of the Oriental Scholar,” in Christian Engberts and Herman Paul, eds, Scholarly Personae in the History of Orientalism, 1870–1930 (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2019), 45–63. 6  Friedrich Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion: Four Lectures Delivered at the Royal Institution, with Two Essays on False Analogies, and the Philosophy of Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1873), 29. Te lectures were delivered in 1870 and frst printed in 1873; cf. Laurens  P.  van den Bosch, “Mythology in Comparative Perspective,” in his Friedrich Max Müller, 243–292. 7  A classic example is the polymath Iranian al-­Birūnī (973–afer 1050) and his account of the religions of India. It is also in this context that the twelfh-­century Jewish philosopher and theologian Maimonides should be understood. See, for instance, Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World, chapter IV; see also above, 39, on Ibn Kammuna.

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194  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism categories, Islam is a Semitic religion, while Christianity, identifed, essentially, as the religion of Europe, can be considered Indo-­European, or “Aryan,” a term coined by Müller himself (one should perhaps say “re-­coined,” as he was extending the meaning of a Sanskrit term).8 While Müller’s taxonomy squarely denied any afnity between Islam and Christianity, it showed a fundamental ambivalence about Judaism and the Jews. On the one hand, the Bible (including the Hebrew Old Testament) was not identifed as a “sacred book of the East,” a category established, precisely, to give the sacred books of Asian religions a quasi-­biblical status. Excluding the Hebrew Bible from this category, however, did not necessarily mean that Judaism and the Jews really belonged to Europe, a continent still considered as Christian and Aryan in nature. In short, the Jews were neither here nor there: neither fully European nor quite Asian. Later in life, Müller seemed disheartened to discover how the categories he had formulated were exploited for racist purposes. In the ambiguity of his racial terminology, Müller was typical of his times, and similar to his friend Renan. Renan made use of the same concepts as Müller, while usually (but not always) stipulating that they should be understood metaphorically. As we have seen, the ambiguity of Renan’s language as well as his thought has brought upon him accusations of racism, although these are not fully justifed.9 In his Introduction to the Science of Religion, Müller clarifed his ideas regarding the comparative study of religions. If one asks: “What is gained by comparison?” his answer is to look at the study of language. Müller applies to religion Goethe’s celebrated bon mot about languages: “He who knows [only] one, knows none.” For him, the fully fedged development of a science of religion was only a question of time. Te impact of the European discovery of Sanskrit and the scholarly construct of the family of Aryan languages would be dramatic. From comparative philology, the nineteenth century moved quickly to comparative mythology, and then to comparative politics.10 Upon the two main races, the Aryans and the Semites, so the argument went, are established the two major religious families in history, and a series of canonical texts belong to these families. In his “Semitic Monotheism?,” which was meant, as we have seen, as a response to Renan’s much-­ discussed mémoire on Semitic monotheism, 8  See Chapter 3 in this volume. 9  For a discussion of the vexed question of Renan’s racism, see Chapter 5 in this volume. 10  See Edward A. Freeman, Comparative Politics (London: Macmillan, 1873).

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Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual  195 Müller develops an idea that had been germinating in Renan’s publications about natural versus revealed religions. He follows Renan in distinguishing between the “transcendent monotheism” of the Semites and the “nature polytheism” of the Aryans. Müller, however, also refers to the henotheism of Vedic Brahmanism.11 For Müller, “Semitic monotheism” refects a revelation (or an “instinct”) that was handed down to “Jews, Christians and Mohammedans—to all who believe in the God of Abraham.” Te comparative study of religions (which Müller calls “comparative theology”) permits, he writes, the identifcation of the dialectic growth and decay of any religion, and the study of its life in evolution.12 Müller adds that for the comparative student, religions are all true, albeit in diferent ways, and at diferent times. In the appeal to historical evolution of religions, one can detect an echo of Darwin’s powerful impact on all felds of knowledge. One may also discern an attempt at “objectivity” that might be later identifed with the phenomenological approach. In the preceding chapters, we have seen how scholars of religious history have been drawn to the idea of comparison. Starting with Judaism and Islam, religions were naturally compared to Christianity. In this context, the comparative efort served to highlight the supremacy of Christianity. It was the quintessential religion of the spirit, displaying a perfect balance between the One God and the plural character of divinity, between justice and love, Israelite Heilsgeschichte and true universalism. Te principle of comparison was then diversifed: from their own perspective, contemporary Jewish scholars also started to compare Judaism and Christianity, Judaism and Islam. As the heirs of a long tradition of reciprocal, ofen vicious religious polemics, as well as an equally long tradition of Christian anti-­Semitism and persecution of Jewish communities, these Jewish scholars tended to be reserved, at the very least, when writing about Christianity. Instinctive suspicions were frequently presented as refecting the problematic monotheism of the Trinitarian dogma. As to Islam, things were simpler. Te lack of 11  See Friedrich Max Müller, “Semitic Monotheism?,” Journal Asiatique (1859) [Reprinted in Friedrich Max Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, Vol. I (New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co., 1874)], 368; cf. Chapter 8 in this volume. 12 Alongside “comparative theology,” which deals with the historical forms of religion, Müller refers to what he calls “theoretic theology,” which seeks to explain the conditions under which religion is at all possible. For him, “theoretic theology” (i.e. philosophy of religion) will be revolutionized by “comparative theology” just as comparative philology transformed the philosophy of language. See his Introduction to the Science of Religion, 21–22 and 219.

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196  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism

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collective memory about Jewish tribulations under the Islamic yoke made it easier to imagine an almost Edenic past of cultural cooperation and osmosis, for instance in medieval al-­Andalus, with the myth of peaceful and fruitful convivencia between Muslims, Christians, and Jews.13 Te Remonstrant liberal theologian Cornelis Petrus Tiele (1830–1902) was appointed in 1877 as the frst holder of a Chair in the history of religion newly created at the University of Leiden, following the 1876 Dutch Higher Education Act. Together with Abraham Kuenen and Jan Hendrik Scholten, Tiele founded the Leiden School of theology, while insisting that the study of religion should disentangle itself from its theological cradle.14 Tiele worked mainly on the major religions of the ancient Near East: the Zoroastrian, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian religions. He considered Max Müller the founder of the science of religion, although Tiele himself is a serious contender for the title, and is certainly the doyen of the Dutch school of comparative religion.15 For him, religions develop in phases, passing from natural religions to mythological, then doctrinal, and eventually “world religions.”16 Tiele referred to religions of the Aryans and of the Semites, and maintained that Greek and Roman religions are religions of Aryan peoples under Semitic and Chamitic infuence. He was the frst

13  See for instance Efron, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sephardic. Salomon Munk’s more balanced evaluation of the past is here an exception. 14  On Tiele as a historian of religion, see Jacques Waardenburg, Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion (Te Hague, Paris: Mouton, 1973–1974), Vol. I, 96–104 and Vol. II, 282–286. See further Arie  L.  Molendijk, Te Emergence of the Science of Religion in the Netherlands, Numen Book Series 105 (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2005), chapters 5 and 6, 123–178. Tiele’s student and successor, the Norwegian William Brede Christensen (1867–1953), established the Dutch school of phenomenology of religion, mainly known abroad through the works of Gerardus van der Leeuw (1890–1950). 15  Cornelis Petrus Tiele, On the Elements of the Science of Religion, Giford Lectures (two vols; Edinburgh, London: Blackwood, 1897–98), see esp. 4–5 and 16. Tis work is based on his Giford Lectures. See further Cornelius Petrus Tiele, Religious Systems of the World: A Contribution to the Study of Comparative Religion: A Collection of Addresses Delivered at South Place Institute (London, New York: Sonnenschein, 1892). On the Dutch tradition of religious studies, see Arie L. Molendijk, “Transforming Teology: Te Institutionalization of the Science of Religion in the Netherlands,” in Arie L. Molendijk and Peter Pels, eds, Religion in the Making: Te Emergence of the Sciences of Religion, Studies in the History of Religion, LXXX (Leiden, Boston, MA, Cologne: Brill, 1998), 67–97. 16  See, for instance, the list of chapters of his On the Elements of the Science of Religion. Tis last expression had already been used by Tiele in 1864; see Molendijk, Friedrich Max Müller and the Sacred Books of the East, 173f. Tiele also spoke of “universal religions,” a term already used by Renan in L’avenir de la science (a text written in 1848–1849) to refer to Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam. For Renan, a central criterion of these religions is their reference to a sacred book.

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Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual  197 scholar to speak about “world religions,”17 which, for him, were religions “looking up to God as the Most High,” such as Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism.18 Yet, the concept of “universal” or “world” religions, which would have a brilliant future, retained an indelible theological coloring. Indeed, universal religions were those which one liked to compare to Christianity: mainly Buddhism, but also Islam, or, as it was then ofen called, Mohammedanism. In 1882, another Dutch Semitist and biblical scholar, Tiele’s friend and colleague Abraham Kuenen (1828–1891), delivered the Hibbert Lectures at Oxford and London.19 Here too, we can follow the development of the concept of universal religions, which eventually became known as “world religions.”20 Kuenen proposed to classify all religions into national and universal ones.21 For Kuenen, who also did signifcant work on Arabic texts, Islam was “the kernel of Judaism, transplanted to Arabian soil.” Te Jewish roots of Islam, he argued, refected its artifcial nature and original poverty (a claim that it would surely not have occurred to him to make about Christianity). Although Islam’s geographical span gave it universal dimension, “the true character of universalism” was missing there.22 Such disparaging views of Islam were quite common among late nineteenth-­century scholars of religion. Buddhism, a religion considered until recently (at the time) as “nihilistic” or atheistic, was thought to be much more akin, at least in dignity, to Christianity. It certainly did not present an inherent and proximate threat similar to that of the prophet Muhammad, who had claimed to supersede Jesus Christ.

17  See Christoph Aufarth, “ ‘Weltreligion’ als ein Leitbegrif der Religionswissenschaf im Imperialismus,” in Ulrich van der Heyden and Holger Stoecker, eds, Mission und Macht im Wandel politischer Orientungen (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005), 17–36. 18 Cornelius  P.  Tiele, Outlines of the History of Religion to the Spread of the Universal Religions (London: Trübner, 1877). Maurice Vernes translated the original Dutch text into French: Cornelius P. Tiele, Manuel de l’histoire des religions jusqu’au triomphe des religions universalistes (Paris: Leroux, 1880). 19 Abraham Kuenen, National Religions and Universal Religions (London, Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1882). 20  On this, see especially Masuzawa, Te Invention of World Religions. In 1893, the frst Parliament of the World’s Religions, held in Chicago, represented a major event. 21  See Kuenen, National Religions and Universal Religion, esp. 6. Kuenen had done signifcant work on Arabic texts; cf. Jonathan Z. Smith, “A Matter of Class: Taxonomies of Religion,” Harvard Teological Review 89 (1996), 387–403, esp. 394–395. On the origins and early use of the concept, see Masuzawa, Te Invention of World Religions, chapter 3, 107–120. On the perceptions of biblical monotheism of Kuenen and Wellhausen, see Nathan MacDonald, Deuteronomy and the Meaning of “Monotheism” (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 22–29. 22 Kuenen, National Religions and Universal Religions, 37.

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198  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Kuenen’s taxonomy lef a strong mark upon Protestant theologians and scholars. Maurice Vernes, for instance, whom we encountered in Chapter 7, accepted this framework. Judaism, just like Israelite religion, was obviously conceived as a national rather than a universal religion, although with a twist: its universal leanings announced Christianity, and therefore, the Jews could be said to be the inventors of universalist religion—a perspective echoing that of Renan.23 In the case of Islam, on the other side, its universal character was only reluctantly recognized. In contrast to Christianity and Buddhism, Islam retained for leading Semitists such as Abraham Kuenen or Teodor Nöldeke what they considered to be its original identity as a Judaism of sorts for the Arabs—albeit lacking the main virtue of Judaism, its being a praeparatio evangelica. Both, indeed, had been convinced by Abraham Geiger’s arguments about Jewish infuence on Muhammad.24 Departing from such taxonomies, Jewish contemporary scholars liked to think in terms of monotheism, insisting that on this count, Judaism clearly belongs to the best, most distinguished religions. Several possible attitudes could lead to Christianity being perceived as a universal religion. Te legacy of the religious Enlightenment ofered a view of Christianity circumventing its exclusive character. Another option was to weaken Christianity’s links to Biblical Israel. For those who endorsed the latter approach, there had been, in the passage from Judaism to Christianity, a “quantum leap” of sorts in the nature of religion. As we have seen in previous chapters, the nineteenth century saw leading Protestant theologians in Germany expending endless eforts to free Christianity from its Jewish roots, to “de-­Judaize” it, as it were. In the view of these theologians, there was more discontinuity than continuity between the Old and the New Testaments. Te more Christianity was perceived to be an essentially European phenomenon (and possessed, as such, of an “Aryan” nature), the more its Jewish roots would fade. As a consequence, even the concrete, 23  Universalism remained a major point of contention between Jewish and Christian in­tel­ lec­tuals in Germany throughout the nineteenth century, and beyond. For the Hebraist Franz Delitzsch (1813–1890), for instance, the author of an excellent translation of the New Testament into Mishnaic Hebrew, Judaism represented a stage, now obsolete, in the history of revelation. Delitzsch established in Leipzig the Institutum Judaicum, for the training of Christian missionaries to the Jews; cf. Chapter 3 in this volume, note 54. 24 On Nöldeke as a Semitist, see Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 174–178. Kuenen “demoted” Islam from the status of a universalist religion, which Tiele had granted it, to that of a national religion, as Jonathan Z. Smith (note 22 above) points out. I have proposed to speak of a Christian praeparatio Coranica in Guy G. Stroumsa, “Athens, Jerusalem and Mecca: Te Patristic Crucible of the Abrahamic Religions,” in Markus Vinzent, ed., Studia Patristica 62, Vol. 10 (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 153–168.

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Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual  199 Jewish identity of Jesus sometimes came to be questioned by those, like Émile Burnouf, who imagined him as having been a Galilean Gentile.25 It was the birth of the concept of “world religions” launched by Tiele, which would gain traction towards the end of the century, however, that most hindered the development of the comparative study of the “Abrahamic religions” in the nineteenth century.26 While Judaism, a national rather than a universal religion, could not claim to belong to that exclusive club, Islam, as we have just seen, was not really welcomed as a fully fedged member, despite both the number of its practitioners and its worldwide geographical spread.27 Semitic in its origins, Islam did not have the appeal of originally “Aryan” Buddhism. Te great religious traditions of India attracted interest and sympathy more immediately. As is well known, “Hinduism,” a term with no Sanskrit equivalent, is a recent Western scholarly invention representing the “consolidation” of the many and varied religious traditions of India.28 Although Matteo Ricci and other Jesuit missionaries had mentioned Buddhism as early as the seventeenth century, as an object of scholarly research, it was only in the nineteenth century that it made its European appearance. At the time, Buddhism was perceived as a logical puzzle, a godless, atheistic religion. Unlike Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism were considered rich religions, exotic and fascinating. Buddhism was also seen as some kind of Indian parallel to “Aryan” Christianity, or even as a spiritual twin of Christianity, stemming from the archaic rituals and beliefs of India just as Christianity had emerged from those of ancient Israel.29 In the fnal decades of the century, side by side with the growing interest in “world religions,” noted above, the comparative approach to the study of religion picked up momentum. In Victorian Britain, the growth of the discipline owed a great deal to the commanding presence and indefatigable activity of Max Müller, who lef his clear imprint on the next generation of scholars not only in Indian studies and comparative philology, but also— perhaps especially—in the new emphasis on comparativism in the study of 25  See Chapter 8 in this volume. 26  On this concept, see in particular Masuzawa, Te Invention of World Religions. 27  Masuzawa highlights the ambivalence with which Islam was perceived and studied. See further Nongbri, Before Religion, 128. 28  See for instance Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Post-­colonial Teory, India and the “Mystic East” (London, New York: Routledge, 2002). 29  See, for instance, Émile Burnouf, discussed in Chapter 8 in this volume. On the philosophical fascination with Buddhism in the nineteenth century, see, for instance, Poger-­Pol Droit, Le culte du néant: les philosophes et le Bouddha (Paris: Le Seuil, 1997). See further Philip  C.  Almond, Te British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

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200  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism religions and mythologies. Müller insisted that any deep knowledge could only be comparative, for instance at the start of his lectures on the study of religion: “All higher knowledge is acquired by comparison, and rests on comparison.”30 Te discipline called in France Histoire des religions and in Germany Vergleichende Religionswissenschaf became more commonly known in Britain as “comparative religion.” Te expression itself points to the time of its conception: the British Empire, at its zenith, encouraged the comparison of cultures in all felds: linguistics, history, archaeology, law, political and economic systems, as well as religion.31 Te “great” religions, in terms of numbers of believers or practitioners, also called “world religions,” were also deemed comparable, mutatis mutandis, to Christianity in their theological riches, geographical spread, historical span, and civilizational impact. In his Comparative Religion, Its Genesis and Growth, published in 1905, Louis Henry Jordan (1855–1923) analyzed the genesis and growth of a then-­blooming approach—especially in England—to the study of religious phenomena, an approach of which he was the great herald.32 Tis book, which presents a systematic and sympathetic overview of the comparative study of religion in the second half of the nineteenth century, arguably sealed what we may call the foruit of the comparative approach. For Jordan, comparison entailed “respecting the claims and values” of the religions compared.33 In the next decades of the twentieth century, the comparative method would transform into the phenomenological study of religions. In 1917, Rudof Otto (1869–1937), a Lutheran theologian from Marburg, published a study of the numinous that would usher in the phenomenology of

30 Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 12. 31 See Marjorie Wheeler-­ Barclay, Te Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010). See further Guy G. Stroumsa, “History of Religions: Te Comparative Moment,” in Gagné, Goldhill, and Lloyd, eds, Regimes of Comparatism, 318–342. 32 Louis Henri Jordan, Comparative Religion: Its Genesis and Growth (Edinburgh: Clark, 1905). 33  Te Jordan Lectures in Comparative Religion, held every two years under the auspices of the Department of Religious Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, honor the memory of Reverend Jordan who published a number of other studies on the comparative study of religion. On the hermeneutics of comparative religion in its heyday, see Joachim Wach, “Development, Meaning and Method in the Comparative Study of Religions,” Te Comparative Study of Religions, ed. with an Introduction by Joseph Kitagawa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958, 3–26). On the contemporary challenges of comparative religion from a Durkheimian perspective, see William  E.  Paden, New Patterns for Comparative Religion: Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective (London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016).

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual  201 religion. It is a sign of the times that Otto’s Das Heilige: über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen would have an extraordinary career, while his comparative study of mysticism, based on the thought of Sankara and Meister Eckhardt, West-­östliche Mystik: Vergleich und Unterscheidung zur Wesensdeutung (1926), lef a much less evident mark.34

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Julius Wellhausen on Hebrews and Arabs Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), who gave the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch its classic formulation, can be considered the father of modern biblical high criticism. An accomplished Arabist, Wellhausen is also one of the central fgures in the critical study of Islamic origins and Islamic history. As a comprehensive Semitist, he was interested both in ancient Israel and in early Islam. In 1862, Wellhausen began his studies in Göttingen, where he started to move away from his father’s strict, orthodox piety. He was attracted by the philological study of the Old Testament, taught by the eminent Semitist Heinrich Ewald, whose Geschichte des Volkes Israel he read in 1863. Ewald, who also taught him Arabic, lef a powerful imprint upon him.35 Wellhausen counted among the very best of Ewald’s many brilliant students. In 1872, Wellhausen received his frst professorial appointment, in Old Testament, at the Greifswald faculty of evangelical theology. At Greifswald, he was a colleague of the renowned classicist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-­ Möllendorf (1848–1931). But the strictures of a theological faculty lef him deeply uncomfortable, and as early as 1879, he asked the Kultusminister (the minister in charge of education and culture), “for objective reasons” (“aus sachlichen Gründen”), to be transferred to the faculty of Oriental studies. In his 34  On the Nachleben of Otto’s concept of the sacred, see Hans Joas’s “Nachwort: ‘Säkulare Heiligkeit: Wie aktuell ist Rudolph Otto?,’ ” in Rudolph Otto, Das Heilige (Munich: Beck, 2014), 255–281. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, phenomenology of religion lost much of its epistemological power, a fact due at least in part to the unmasking of Mircea Eliade’s Fascist past. Te comparative study of religion, on its side, led too ofen, on a slippery slope, to “interfaith studies,” through giving up on the imperative demand of epochē (in the Husserlian sense) of one’s beliefs in the scholarly enterprize. 35 “Ewaldius me excitaret ex somno,” in Wellhausen’s own words. See Reinhard Kratz, “Julius Wellhausen,” Teologische RealEnzyklopädie 35, 527–536, here 527. Kratz notes that it is from Ewald that Wellhaussen acquired his love for the study of Arabic. Wellhausen would later think that students of Semitic languages should study Arabic before Hebrew, as the former has retained more archaic forms than the latter.

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202  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism request letter, he claimed that his unorthodox views on the formation of the Bible made him unft to prepare students for a pastoral career. As the minister did not fulfl his wish, Wellhausen eventually resigned from his Chair in 1882, and joined the Oriental faculty in Halle, moving then to Marburg, before being ofered the Chair of oriental languages in Göttingen, lef vacant afer the death of Paul de Lagarde, Ewald’s successor. While Wellhausen does not seem to have been a particularly pious man, he never rebelled publicly against the Evangelical Church. Some of his letters, as well as his eforts to leave the theological faculty, reveal that his interest in religion remained at the intellectual level, rather than being anchored in the core of his personality. Afer moving to an Oriental faculty, he switched his main feld of research from the Hebrew Bible to Arabic and started publishing on ancient Arab society and on early Islamic history— without, however, abandoning research on both ancient Judaism and the New Testament. Wellhausen’s strong dislike of theological strictures did not dissuade him from a lifelong commitment to scholarship on early Christianity. Between 1903 and 1905, he published no fewer than three commentaries on the Synoptic Gospels. Tese works would have a deep infuence on New Testament scholars from Albert Schweitzer to Rudolph Bultmann.36 In 1882, Wellhausen published his Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, a work which had come out four years earlier under the simpler title of Geschichte Israels 1. Te book originated in the long entry “Bible” that William Robertson Smith, as the editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica from 1881 to 1888, had commissioned for its ninth edition.37 Te Prolegomena had an immediate and remarkable efect, and an English translation rapidly appeared, with a preface by Wellhausen’s friend Smith. According to Wellhausen, the importance of the ancient religion of Israel for contemporary European culture lies in the fact that it represented the Vorstufe, or preliminaries, to the birth of Christianity. In the Mosaic theocracy, ritual became “a pedagogic instrument of discipline,” and the law 36  For an excellent presentation of Wellhausen’s career and oeuvre, see Rudolph Smend, Julius Wellhausen: Ein Bahnbrecher in drei Disziplinen (Munich: Siemens, 2006). 37 On the Prolegomena, see, for instance, Rudolf Smend, “Julius Wellhausen and His Prolegomena to the History of Israel,” in Douglas  A.  Knight, ed., Julius Wellausen and His Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), 1–20 (= Semeia 25). See Julius Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, with a Reprint of the Article “Israel” from the Encyclopedia Britannica; Preface by Prof. William Robertson Smith (New York: Meridian, 1957). See further Rudolf Smend, From Astruc to Zimmerli: Old Testament Scholarship in Tree Centuries (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 91–100.

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Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual  203 would now replace the Israelites’ paganism against which the prophets had argued so vehemently. As “nature had been killed” in ritual, so had ritual become “the shield of supernaturalistic monotheism.”38 For him, the Mosaic theocracy already represents “an immense retrogression,” as ritual, or worship (Cultus) had been “estranged from its own nature” and “worship no longer sprang from an inner impulse.”39 In Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte, a book published in 1894, Wellhausen claimed that the prophets represented the passage from Israelite to Jewish history.40 Te Israelites, so the argument went, were a Semitic people, and their religion was representative of “Semitic religion.”41 Te concept of Semitic religion, which, as we have seen, had been introduced by Renan, was quite current among Semitists in the fnal decades of the century. Its importance for both Wellhausen and Smith probably refects the deep imprint of Renan’s idea of Semitic religion on academic circles, even on those specialists who felt little sympathy for Renan’s scholarship and disagreed with many of his opinions.42 In sharp contrast to Renan, the focus of Wellhausen’s work was the history of the biblical text itself. Unlike Renan and unlike Smith, whose Religion of the Semites had a signifcant impact on him, Wellhausen was essentially a philologist; notably, he never felt the need, like Renan and Smith, to leave his study for a research tour of the Near East. Wellhausen’s attitude towards Judaism and to Jews was as ambivalent as that of Renan, and for the same reason: it is in Judaism that Christianity was born. On the one hand, Wellhausen supported the emancipation of the Jews in contemporary Germany and elsewhere. It was, however, his belief that their integration into European societies would inevitably lead to the extinction of Judaism “wherever the process is extended” that inclined him

38 Wellhausen, Prolegomena, Engl. transl., 425. 39  Ibid., 423–425 (last pages of the book). 40  Wellhausen objected to the ancient historian Eduard Meyer’s views on the Persian infuence on the origins of Judaism. On the polemics that ensued, see Reinhard Gregor Kratz, “Die Entstehung des Judentums: zur Kontroverse zwischen E. Meyer und J. Wellhausen,” Zeitschrif für Teologie und Kirche 95 (1998), 167–184. 41  “Religion und Volk von Israel gehören zusammen. Das Volk ist semitischen Ursprung, und auch die Religion trägt die Spuren davon.” Julius Wellhausen, “Die israelitisch-­jüdische Religion,” 1 (= Introduction to Adolf Jülicher, Adolf Harnack et al., Geschichte der christlichen Religion (Leipzig, Berlin: Teubner, 1906). 42  Wellhausen, who never met Renan, does not ofen refer to him. Among more than 1,000 published letters of Wellhausen, only 6 are addressed to Renan—while 93 are addressed to Smith, until 1893, shortly before the latter’s death. See Julius Wellhausen, Briefe, ed. Rudolf Smend with Peter Porzig and Reinhard Müller (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013).

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204  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism to support Jewish emancipation.43 On the other hand, Wellhausen shared some of the ingrained anti-­Semitic attitudes of most of his contemporaries, a fact exposed in his letters. Such attitudes, however, were a far cry from the virulent anti-­ Semitism of his Göttingen predecessor de Lagarde. De Lagarde, a brilliant philologist, had done important work on the Septuagint and had edited many Syriac and Coptic texts. But he also expressed time and again, in print as well as orally, rabid anti-­Semitic ideas—ideas that would eventually infuence Alfred Rosenberg’s racial anti-­Semitic ide­ol­ ogy.44 While Wellhausen respected de Lagarde’s scholarship, he loathed the man, whom he called “a bufoon and a liar” (“ein Hanswurst und ein Lügner”), on account of his ferocious anti-­Semitism, among other traits. Te deprecatory stance that Wellhausen took on Judaism refects his detestation of institutionalized religion tout court. He abhorred established Christianity (in particular, Roman Catholicism), preferring to it the ­religion of the free spirit. Tis attitude also stands at the root of his dislike of Pharisaism.45 Like most of his contemporaries, Wellhausen rejected ­post-­biblical Judaism as decadent. For him, the Law, which was the creation of Judaism, represented the greatest challenge to true, spiritual religion. One might describe his approach as “Pauline antinomism exacerbated by Luther.”46 Paul, for Wellhausen, had been “der grosse Patholog des Judentums.”47 Judaism was a set of practices and beliefs which lacked a systematic theology, remaining “a maze of antinomies” (“ein Gewirr von Antinomien”).48 As a living religion, Judaism ends where Christianity starts. Although Wellhausen readily afrmed Jesus’s essential Jewishness, this Jewishness in no way refected for him Jesus’s religiosity. In this regard, he famously wrote: “Jesus was not a Christian, but a Jew” (“Jesus war kein Christ, sondern Jude”). Beyond a frst reading of this line, one can hear an 43  Julius Wellhausen, “Israel,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 548 (last page of the entry). Te article had been commissioned by William Robertson Smith. See further below. 44  On de Lagarde, see Ulrich Sieg, Germany’s Prophet: Paul de Lagarde and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2013 [= Deutschlands Prophet: Paul de Lagarde und die Ursprunge des modernen Antisemitismus (Munich: Claus Hauser, 2007)]. See further Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 168–174, as well as Suzanne Marchand, “Paul de Lagarde and the Esoteric Tradition,” lecture delivered at the German Studies Association Conference in Pittsburg in 2006. I thank Professor Marchand for sharing her typescript with me. 45  On Wellhausen’s view of the Pharisees, see Deines, Die Pharisäer, 40–67. 46  Lou H. Silberman, “Wellhausen and Judaism,” in Knight, ed., Julius Wellhausen and His Prolegomena to the History of Israel, 75–82, here 75. 47  Smend, “Wellhausen und das Judentum,” Zeitschrif für Teologie und Kirche 79 (1982), 249–82, here 263. 48  Ibid., 260.

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Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual  205 echo of Renan’s view of Jesus’s identity. Renan’s well-­known statement: “Au fond, Jésus n’avait rien de juif,”49 also entails implicit recognition of the fact that Jesus was a Jew. Hence, these two scholars display a distinct overlap regarding Jesus’s Jewish identity: while more or less afrming his Jewish origins, they nonetheless maintained that his personality owed little to the Judaism of his times. In Die Pharisäer und die Sadduzäer (1874),50 Wellhausen set out to respond to Urschrif und Übersetzungen der Bibel, a book published in 1857 by the Jewish scholar and theologian Abraham Geiger (1810–1874).51 In this book, Geiger wrote that Jesus’s teachings were not at all remote from those of the Pharisees. Geiger’s claim shocked German theologians,52 the very same scholars who had welcomed Geiger’s frst book, on the Jewish roots of Muhammad’s religion. Wellhausen argued at length against Geiger’s view of the likeness between Jesus and the Pharisees. Like most Christian scholars, Wellhausen saw little similarity between the world of the Pharisees and that of Jesus. Although he expressed gratitude to Geiger for having introduced into the discussion rabbinic texts hitherto ignored by Christian scholars, he rejected the relevance of both the Mishna and the Talmud, on the grounds of their belatedness, for the study of Christian origins. Today, the scholarly consensus on Jesus tends to support Geiger’s claims. At the time, however, Wellhausen was thought to have refuted Geiger’s views, which had been met with vehement opposition from New Testament scholars. For Wellhausen, the Pharisees “are, in fact, nothing more than the quintessential Jews, the true Israel.” Te only mission the Pharisees recognize as their own is to fulfl the Law. According to him, the Zealots originated from the Pharisees. He concluded that the Pharisees had given Judaism its defnitive expression: “Ihr Ein und Alles war das Gesetz.”53 Tis centrality of the Law accentuated ritual practice and involved some degree of hostility towards outsiders.54 Te priests had fnally triumphed over the prophets, and the true spirit of Israelite religion would now move to Christianity.

49  See Chapter 6 in this volume, note 3. 50 Julius Wellhausen, Die Pharisäer und die Sadducäer: eine Untersuchung zur inneren jüdische Geschichte (Greifswald: Bamberg, 1874). 51  On Geiger, see Chapter 3 in this volume. 52  See Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus. 53 Wellhausen, Die Pharisäer und die Sadducäer, 13–16. 54 Wellhausen, Die Israelitisch-­jüdische Religion, 38.

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206  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Wellhausen showed no serious interest in rabbinic Judaism or any sympathy for Judaism afer the birth of Christianity. Te fnal passages in the Prolegomena concern contemporary Judaism. Tere, Wellhausen recalled Spinoza’s claim, at the end of Chapter 3 of the Tractatus Teologico-­Politicus, that it is mainly thanks to circumcision that the Jewish people was sustained through the centuries. He then argued for the social and political emancipation of the Jews, expressing the wish that this emancipation should in due course bring the extinction of Judaism—although, he added, centuries might be needed to achieve this goal. Moving from the study of ancient Israel to that of ancient Arabia, Wellhausen stated that he hoped to fnd in Arabia “religiosity without priests and prophets, that is, without the Law and without institutions.” In a letter to Robertson Smith, he exhibited little interest in religion itself, adding that he approached early Islamic history mainly from the perspective of political phenomena. He further wrote that while his interest in ancient Arab paganism brought him to Muhammad, his interest lay in the religio-­political aspects of the establishment of the Islamic state in Medina, rather than in the theological aspects of early Islam. He added that he did not really care about monotheism, as he lacked any “philosophical streak.”55 Wellhausen’s main works in the study of Islam and its roots are his Reste arabischen Heidentums (1887) and his Das arabische Reich und sein Sturz (1902).56 In the frst of these books, he established his argument mainly on Ibn al-­Kalbī’s Kitāb al-­Aṣnām (Book of Idols). Noting that in the southwest of the Arabian peninsula Judaism and Christianity had been long vying for supremacy, he argued that it is mainly from Jews that Muhammad learned various biblical legends during his Meccan period, legends that appear in the Koran and show close similarities to Midrashei Aggada of late antiquity. Wellhausen, who was aware that similar material was circulating among Christians, seemed to follow here Geiger’s basic approach. In the last chapter, Wellhausen conveyed his partiality for the pre-­Islamic Arab tribes and their male virtues. Each had its own deity, he wrote, while trade, pilgrimage, and tribal movements gradually undermined the close relationship of the 55 Wellhausen, Briefe, 76 (letter 92, sent from London on August 18, 1880): “Das Interessante ist für mich natürlich nicht das Teologische, sonder das Religiös-­Politische, die Stifung des Staates durch den Islam in Medina. Monotheismus und dergleichen ist mir ganz wurscht; für dergleichen fehlt mir das Verständnis; vom Philosophen habe ich keine Ader” (italics added). On the question of monotheism in the fnal third of the nineteenth century, see Chapter  8 in this volume. 56 See Kurt Rudolph, “Wellhausen as an Arabist,” in Douglas  A.  Knight, ed., Julius Wellhausen and His Prolegomena to the History of Israel, 111–155.

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Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual  207 people and their cult, eventually leading to religious syncretism and a fusion of the diferent tribal religions. Te name “Allah” would eventually come to be reserved for the eponymous deity, the new God above all gods. Like most Semitists, Wellhausen was unconvinced by Renan’s argument about the essentially monotheistic instincts of the Semites and insisted on the centrality of gender duality (“der sexuelle Dualismus”) in Semitic conceptions of the divinity.57 Renan had argued that Muhammad was above all a political leader, adding that Islam, which enjoyed little originality as a religion, could arouse but minimal intellectual interest. Here, Wellhausen’s perspective echoes that of Renan: only the political aspects of Islamic history capture his fancy. For neither scholar did Islam as a religion or post-­biblical Judaism have much to ofer. Such an approach towards these two religions resonates an old tradition among Christian scholars—a fact worth highlighting here, as it is ofen overlooked by students of Orientalism.

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William Robertson Smith: Te Sacrifcial Turn William Robertson Smith (1846–1894), the son of a minister in the Free Church of Scotland, grew up in Aberdeenshire. He attended Aberdeen University from 1861 to 1866, transferring to New College Edinburgh in order to prepare for the ministry in the Free Church. In 1870, at the remarkably young age of twenty-­four, he was appointed professor of Hebrew at the Aberdeen Free Church College.58 From 1867 to 1876, four extended visits to German universities (frst to Bonn and Heidelberg, then to Göttingen) acquainted Smith with Old Testament scholars, including Wellhausen. In Göttingen, where Wellhausen had studied with the Semitist Heinrich Ewald (“our father,” as Wellhausen referred to him in a letter to Smith), Smith studied with his successor, Paul de Lagarde.59 Te two young scholars, whose biographies reveal striking similarities, established a strong friendship, which would last until Smith’s

57  On Wellhausen and Renan, note 43 above. See, in Julius Wellhausen, “Nachträge,” in his Reste arabischen Heidentums gesammelt und erläutert (2nd edn; Berlin: Reimer, 1897), 208. Te book is dedicated to Teodor Nöldeke. 58  For an excellent biography of Smith, see Bernhard Maier, William Robertson Smith: His Life, His Work and His Times (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). 59  On de Lagarde, see Ulrich Sieg, Germany’s Prophet.

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208  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism untimely death.60 In Germany, Smith was also highly impressed by the Göttingen theologian Albrecht Ritschl (1822–1889). Wellhausen’s infuence on Smith can be felt in the latter’s approach to the Old Testament and conception of ancient Semitic religion. Indeed, Smith and Wellhausen overlap in their approach to ancient Semitic religion. Both may well have been following here, perhaps unconsciously, in Renan’s footsteps, although Smith, whose respect for Renan’s scholarship was limited, claimed that the diferences between Semites and Aryans, or at least between their religions, are less fundamental than ofen thought.61 Signifcantly, this remark announced the full intellectual collapse of the opposition between Semites and Aryans, a collapse to which we will return in Chapter 10. In 1875, Smith published the entry “Bible” in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in which he argued that not all biblical statements could be taken at face value. Two years later, in 1877, the Free Church tried him for heresy and forbade him to teach.62 Smith put this imposed sabbatical to good use: like Renan afer his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, he journeyed to the Levant, visting Egypt and Arabia, and thus developing his interest in Arabic folklore and linguistics. Afer Smith fnally lost his position in 1881, he was appointed Reader in Arabic at the University of Cambridge. Tere, he would eventually become University Librarian, Almoner Professor of Arabic (in 1882), and a Fellow of Christ’s College. From 1881 to 1889, Smith also served as editor of the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Kuenen, Wellhausen, and Smith formed a trio of friends. In diferent ways, each of these scholars engaged with the idea of what we call today the Abrahamic religions, but fell short of formulating clearly the relationship between the three religious systems.63 Upon receiving Abraham Kuenen’s important and infuential National Religions and Universal Religions, Smith thanked the author, adding that what he had “found most instructive and what is certainly most necessary at present is your vindication of Judaism.”64 60  Rudolf Smend, the great connoisseur of Wellhausen, suggests that their lives might be read as vitae parallelae of sorts. See Rudolf Smend, “William Robertson Smith and Julius Wellhausen,” in William Johnstone, ed., William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment, JSOT, Suppl. 189 (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic Press, 1995), 226–242. 61  William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, First Series (London: Black, 1889), third lecture. 62  For the detailed description of Smith’s heresy trial, see Maier, William Robertson Smith, chapter  6, 150–186. Maier notes (184–185) that at the time of his process, an article in the Aberdeen Journal had described Smith as having “unmistakably Jewish features.” 63  On the idea of the Abrahamic religions, see the Conclusion in this volume. 64  See Maier, William Robertson Smith, 116–117.

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Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual  209 Although Smith stayed in contact with his former Göttingen teacher de Lagarde, the latter’s anti-­Semitism did not contaminate him.65 As a Fellow of Christ’s College, Smith was personally responsible for getting the Jewish scholar Solomon Schechter elected a Fellow, and specially instructed the college cook to provide kosher meals for him (Schechter was to achieve fame in his groundbreaking work on the Cairo Genizah documents, many of which he brought to Cambridge).66 Tanks to Schechter, Smith would also develop an interest in rabbinic Judaism.67 Smith’s frst book, Te Old Testament in the Jewish Church, was published afer his dismissal from his Aberdeen Chair.68 Te book, which shows a salient theological approach, refects Smith’s twofold scholarly concern, namely, the history of ancient Israelite religion and the text of the Hebrew Bible.69 For him, as for Wellhausen, Hebrew is a Semitic language and the ancient Hebrews were a Semitic people.70 Smith’s lack of sympathy for post-­biblical Judaism is evident throughout the work. It is worth mentioning that in the Presbyterian Scotland of his youth, he probably had had few encounters with Jews. While Renan appears by name only a handful of times in Smith’s work, the former’s distinction between Semitic and Aryan religions seems to have informed Smith’s conception of the idea of Semitic religion.71 Te great divide between Semites and Aryans had become widely accepted by the 1870s, when Max Müller published his Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873), a book shaped by this divide. Just like Goldziher, however, Smith objected to the French scholar’s idea that there would have been little room for myths in Semitic religions: “But all this is mere unfounded assumption,” he writes on this topic.72 As his 65  See ibid., 115. 66  On Schechter and the Geniza, see Adina Hofman and Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: Te Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (New York: Schocken, 2011). 67  See Janet Soskice, Te Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels (New York: Knopf, 2009). 68  William Robertson Smith, Te Old Testament in the Jewish Church: Twelve Lectures on Biblical Criticism (Edinburgh: Adam and Black, 1881). 69  For Maier, (William Robertson Smith, 187), the basis of the book’s theological approach is Calvin’s Testimonium Spiritus Sancti internum. 70  On the concept of Semitic languages, as formulated by August Ludwig von Schlözer a century earlier, see Chapter 3 in this volume. 71 See Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 9. I found only two mentions of Renan in the Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (see 155 on Renan’s mission in Phoenicia), and there is no reference to Renan in the Index of Maier’s biography. Renan, moreover, does not seem to be mentioned in Smith’s letters either; see Bernhard Maier, ed., Selected Letters of William Robertson Smith (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019). 72  William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, Second and Tird Series, ed. John Day, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Suppl. Series 183 (Shefeld: Shefeld

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210  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism notes for the planned Tird Series of Lectures on the Religion of the Semites show, he also objected to Renan’s famed but ultimately bizarre claim that Semitic religion was essentially monotheistic.73 Living on the threshold of a new era in which archaeology would bring to light a plethora of texts from the West Semitic world, Smith wrote his works before this watershed unearthing of scholarly riches. For him, the paucity of surviving texts from ancient Near Eastern literature made it impossible to draw defnitive conclusions about the existence of an ancient Semitic mythology. In his biblical work, Smith drew on contemporary German scholarship, in particular on Wellhausen’s Geschichte Israels 1, a book frst published in 1878: Judaism, Christianity and Islam are positive religions, that is, they did not grow up like the systems of ancient heathenism . . . but trace their origin to the teaching of great religious innovators . . . and deliberately departed from the traditions of the past. Behind these positive religions lies the old unconscious religious tradition.74

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Dealing with piacular (i.e. expiatory) rituals, Smith wrote: . . . the various aspects in which atoning rites presented themselves to ancient worshippers have supplied a variety of religious images which passed into Christianity, and still have currency. Redemption, substitution, purifcation, atoning blood, the garment of righteousness, are all terms that in some sense go back to antique ritual. But in ancient religion all these terms are very vaguely defned . . .75

Academic Press, 1995), 49. In 1887, Smith wrote a scathing review of Renan’s Histoire du peuple d’Israël, which was reprinted in John Sutherland Black and George Chrystal, eds, Lectures and Essays of William Robertson Smith (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1912), 608–622. In his biography of J. G. Frazer, Robert Ackerman suggested that Frazer admired Renan but failed to acknowledge his indebtedness to him in Te Golden Bough because he wished to dedicate the book to Smith and knew that the latter thoroughly disliked Renan; see Robert Ackerman, J.  G.  Frazer: His Life and Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 93–94. On Goldziher’s refutation of Renan’s idea of the Semites’ ignorance of mythology, see Chapter 8 in this volume. 73  See Chapters 5 and 7 in this volume. 74 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 1. Smith notes that it is imperative to study what preceded a religious system in order to understand it. 75  Ibid., 439.

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Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual  211 Smith’s loss of the Aberdeen Chair and his move to Cambridge prompted him to shif the focus of his scholarly life from Hebrew to Arabic texts. At the same time, it spurred a journey to the Near East, where he spent time in both Egypt and Arabia, stimulating an interest in Arabic texts, as well as in Arabic folklore, ethnography, and linguistics. In 1882, he published Te Prophets of Israel and their Place in History, and in 1885, he published Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, a topic on which he had lectured in 1882. For the latter book, Smith mined Arabic sources for information about what he believed to be the earliest totemist matriarchal society in Arabia, which practiced exogamy. Goldziher wrote in a review of the book that it was a work “of far-­reaching importance,” a view he confrmed by writing additional notes to the second edition, published afer Smith’s death, in 1903.76 As noted by Rudolf Smend, Smith’s trajectory from a theological to an Orientalist institutional framework paralleled that of his mentor and friend, Julius Wellhausen.77 It is thanks to their move from Teology to Oriental studies that both dared to identify as fully fedged Semitists. In his Burnett lectures, delivered in Aberdeen from autumn 1888 until summer 1889, Smith developed most keenly the idea of an original Semitic religion, which would have been that of a hypothetical initial Semitic people. Te lectures were published that same year as Te Religion of the Semites: First Series: Te Fundamental Institutions. In this book, his fnal and most famous one, Smith applied fndings from Kinship and Marriage—as well as from Wellhausen’s Reste arabischen Heidentums—in his characterization of ­pre-­Islamic Arab society. A second and a third series of lectures were also in preparation. Te second dealt with Semitic mythology—hence undermining, like Goldziher’s early book on the mythology of the Hebrews, Renan’s obiter dictum and methodological principle on the absence of mythology among the Semites. Smith pursued this direction further in the third series, where two chapters are devoted to Semitic polytheism. Tere, he compared Semitic and Greek polytheism, again ignoring the traditional clef between Semitic and Aryan 76  In the Literaturblatt für orientalische Philologie: see Maier, William Robertson Smith, 238; Cf. the second edition of the work, with Goldziher’s contributions: William Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, new edn, with additional notes by the author and Prof. Ignaz Goldziher (London: Black, 1907). On his part, Smith quotes Goldziher’s Le culte des ancêtres et le culte des morts chez les Arabes (Paris: Leroux, 1885) and his Muhammedanische Studien in his own Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 156, note 2 and 277, note 1. Smith and Goldziher had a friendly personal relationship. 77  See note 61 above.

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212  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism religions. Te planned fourth series was to focus on a comparison between the three “positive” religions that emerged from the “Ur-­Semitic” times: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.78 It is a matter of deep regret that Smith died before publishing these lectures, which would no doubt have proven enlightening. In 1995, the Oxford Old Testament scholar John Day published Smith’s notes for the second and third series, which he had found in the Cambridge University Library.79 Tis interesting publication includes chapters on Feasts, Priests, Prophets, Polytheism, and Cosmology. Hence, it deals with ancient Semitic religion rather than with the later evolution of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. We are lef to speculate on how Robertson Smith would have approached the topic. Like his friend Wellhausen, and also like Renan, Robertson Smith’s critical views on the Bible brought him early into confict with his native church. He considered his groundbreaking Lectures on the Religion of the Semites a study in Comparative Religion, a discipline he saw as “indispensable to the future progress of Biblical research,” adding: “In modern times Comparative Religion has become in some degree a popular subject . . .” Smith approached Judaism, Christianity, and Islam with the same method—but of course the core of his work was elsewhere, as he sought to reconstruct the earliest stages of Semitic religion.80 As already mentioned, there is no reason to believe that Smith harbored anti-­Semitic sentiments. Just as he did not write much about post-­biblical Judaism, he wrote little about Islam. Nonetheless, the few views he did express, on Jewish ritual and ethics, are not particularly fattering—a fact underlined by his biographer, Bernhard Maier. He seems to have kept up good relations with the handful of Jews in Cambridge.81 His attitude towards Muhammad, however, was quite disparaging, and he reverted more than once to the traditional Christian slur, calling him a charlatan and an 78 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 1; Maier, William Robertson Smith, 258–263. 79  Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, Second and Tird Series. 80  Ibid., V–VI. For his friend James Frazer, Smith was one of the founders of the comparative method in the study of religion. On the signifcance of comparatism in Smith’s work, see T. O. Beidelman, W. Robertson Smith and the Sociological Study of Religion, with a Foreword by E. E. Evans-­Pritchard (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 1974), 49–52. 81  See Stefan C. Reif, “William Robertson Smith in Relation to Hebraists and Jews at Christ College Cambridge,” Johnstone, ed., William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment, 210–223. Reif mentions a letter of Schechter’s wife, Mathilde Schechter, in which she calls Smith “a great anti-­Semite,” but he rejects such a characterization in his assessment. Schechter himself was sensitive to anti-­Semitic prejudice among scholars. In this regard, he mentioned Wellhausen and Harnack, but not Smith.

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Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual  213 impostor. For Smith, the Wahhabis and the Puritans belonged in the same comparative class.82 Unlike Wellhausen, but similarly to Renan, Smith regarded himself as a comparative historian of religion. In the preface to his Lectures, he refers to John Spencer (1630–1693), the erstwhile Master of Cambridge’s Corpus Christi College, whose De legibus ritualibus Hebraeorum earumque rationibus was frst published in 1685. Spencer had focused his inquiry on the ancient Hebrew rituals (and in particular the Temple sacrifces), seeking their origins in Egyptian religion.83 Tis monograph, according to Robertson Smith, had opened the way, “so much before his time,” to the modern scholarly study of religion. Teodor Nöldeke, a true homo philologicus, was not overly impressed by Smith’s Lectures, which were too speculative for his taste. It may be worth mentioning, however, in this context, that Nöldeke detested religion, for which he retained, like Wellhausen, only a limited scholarly interest. It was in Te Religion of the Semites that Smith ofered the frst reasoned explanation of sacrifce.84 Te importance of this discussion for the history of the discipline cannot be overstated. In this book, Smith was developing ideas he had already presented in the entry on “Sacrifce” in the Encyclopedia Britannica.85 In his preface to the frst edition of Te Religion of the Semites, Smith recalls Wellhausen’s recent Reste arabischen Heidentums.86 In this work, Wellhausen mined later Arabic texts in order to retrieve the religion of the pre-­Islamic Arabs, which he identifed as practitioners of the original Semitic religion. Despite numerous additions to our documentation made over the course of the twentieth century, it has been impossible to reconstruct the history of this putative Semitic religion before the appearance of what Smith called the “positive religions,” such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.87 And yet, Smith believed, we can identify some of its central rituals, in particular sacrifce, mainly thanks to Leviticus, the single, surviving full description of sacrifce among a Semitic people. 82 Maier, William Robertson Smith, 172. 83  Spencer’s book had frst been published in Cambridge in 1685. See Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, V. It is through Maimonides that Spencer had learned to read the biblical text as refecting ancient paganism. On Maimonides, see Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World, 84–124. On Spencer, see Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science, 95–100 and notes. 84  See for, instance, Hans Georg Kippenberg, “On the Origin of All Social Obligations: Te Ritual of Sacrifce,” in his Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age, 65–80. 85  Tis was published in 1886 in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, of which Smith had been appointed joint editor in 1881. 86  Published in Berlin in 1887. See Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, IX. 87 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 15.

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214  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Although Smith’s theory of the totem and of the original sacrifce, as developed in his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites,88 is now universally rejected, he was the frst leading scholar to mark the primacy of practice (or ritual) over belief (or myth) in primitive religion. In Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, Smith disclosed a deep interest in ethnology, an interest that must have been furthered by his Cambridge friendship with James George Frazer (1854–1941).89 Te frst edition of Frazer’s magnum opus, Te Golden Bough dates from 1890, and the two authors clearly infuenced one another. Sacrifce (including sacrifce of the god) plays a major role in Te Golden Bough. Smith mentions Frazer’s work on primitive nations in the preface to his Lectures, while it is from Smith that Frazer took both the association of myth with ritual and the ritual killing of the god.90 As noted by Robert Ackerman, however, Frazer’s theory of the slain god and Smith’s derivation of animal sacrifce from totemism are independent of one another.91 In the preface to Te Golden Bough, Frazer notes that his work is “an inquiry into the primitive religion of the Aryans,” and also speaks of an “Aryan race.” Mutatis mutandis, it seems, then, that Smith was trying to do for the Semites what Frazer was attempting to do for the Aryans. Smith also considered his own task the easier of the two, as the geographical dispersion of the Semites had been immeasurably more minimal than that of the Aryans.92 While Smith was directly following the Scottish ethnologist John Ferguson McLennan, who had coined the word “totemism,” Frazer considered himself to be a disciple of Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), the herald of cultural evolution whose deeply infuential Primitive Culture had been published in 1871. Tylor’s new approach to sacrifce was based on ethnological analysis rather than theological refection.93 He identifed the root 88  Smith did not hide his aversion to the barbaric and primitive aspects of sacrifce; see Gillian M. Bediako, Primal Religion and the Bible: William Robertson Smith and his Heritage, JSOT, Suppl. 246 (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic Press, 1997), 358. 89 Smith was a pioneer in applying an anthropological approach to ancient Israel. See Howard Eilberg-­Schwartz, Te Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 8–12. Smith had read John Ferguson McLennan’s Worship of Animals and Plants as soon as it was published, in 1869–70. On Frazer’s infuence in Cambridge, see Robert Ackermann, Te Myth and Ritual School: J. G. Frazer and the Cambridge Ritualists (New York, London: Routledge, 1991). 90  See Ackerman, Te Myth and Ritual School, VIII.    91  Ibid., 53. 92 Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, 9. 93  See Edward Burnett Tylor, “Rites and Ceremonies,” in his Religion in Primitive Culture, Part II, with an Introduction by Paul Radin (New York: Harper, 1958), 461–496. James George Frazer dealt at length with sacrifce in the frst edition of his Golden Bough, subtitled a Study in Comparative Religion (London: Macmillan, 1890). On Tylor, see for instance Ivan Strenski, “Te Shock of the ‘Savage:’ Edward Burnett Tylor, Evolution, and Spirits,” in his Understanding

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Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual  215

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of religion not in an abstract monotheism, but rather in polytheism, and more specifcally in “animism,” ascribing souls to inanimate objects. It is only subsequently that higher beliefs appeared, replacing animism. Moreover, like Renan and so many other nineteenth-­century thinkers, Tylor maintained that in the future, all religious thought would be replaced by science.94 During those same years, Jane Ellen Harrison (1850–1928) was transforming the study of Greek religion by making use of ethnological material, although her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion would be published only in 1903. Tere is, however, no trace of a reciprocal infuence between Smith and Harrison, although their use of contemporary ethnology (on the totem, in particular) is strikingly parallel. Smith and Harrison, in fact, moved in diferent circles. Furthermore, Harrison was away from Cambridge much of the time in the later 1870s and in the 1880s.95 Smith’s approach impacted such diverse fgures as Frazer, Durkheim, and Freud. Both Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912) and Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913) develop ideas frst introduced by Smith.96 James Frazer owed much of his own comparative boldness to Smith.97 One may mention that not all scholars of religion were so daring. Sheldon Pollock, noting that Max Weber, the pre-­eminent sociologist of religion across civilizations, did not seek to refect upon “the comparative method itself, its historical ontology, its logic, even its purposes,” fnds this inexplicable.98 A discussion of Weber lies beyond the scope of this book. Sufce to Teories of Religion: An Introduction (2nd edn; Madden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 45–54. 94 I am following here Jonathan Decter, “Survivals, Debris and Relics: E.  B.  Tylor, the Orientalist Inheritance, and Medieval Polemics,” Journal of the History of the Humanities 5 (2020), 251–271. I am grateful to Jonathan Decter for having shared with me his manuscript. Tylor also had a deep impact on the Scottish poet and anthropologist Andrew Lang (1844–1912), author of Te Making of Religion (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898). 95  See Annabel Robinson, Te Life and Work of Jane Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 96  On the importance of the comparative method in the Durkheimians’ sociological and ethnological studies, see for instance, E. E. Evans-­Pritchard’s “Introduction” in Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, transl. R.  and C.  Needham (Aberdeen: Cohen and West, 1960), 9–24, esp. 14–15. On Durkheim and his school, see further Chapter 10 in this volume. On the relationship between the Durkheimians and the British social anthropologists, see further Philippe Borgeaud, “Mythe et émotion. Quelques idées anciennes,” in Üli Dill and Christine Walde, eds, Antike Medien, Transformationen und Konstruktionen (Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 2009), 426 and note 30. 97  On Frazer and his context, see Ackerman, Te Myth and Ritual School, esp. 44–65. 98  See Sheldon Pollock, “Comparison without Hegemony,” in Hans Joas and Barbro Klein, eds, Te Beneft of Broad Horizons: Festschrif for Björn Wittrock on his Sixty-­Fifh Birthday (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2010), 185–204, esp. 185–186.

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216  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism say, as a short answer to Pollock’s puzzlement, that one should remember that the scholarly tradition in which Weber inscribed himself did not overly rely on comparativism. Smith’s book would eventually become a foundational text for the modern study of religion. His premature death, at the age of forty-­seven, while he was planning a work on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three “positive” religions issuing out of the Ur-­Semitic religion, makes it impossible to know what his full contribution to the question at hand would have been. It is entirely possible that he would have been able to launch the kind of comparative study of the Abrahamic religions that eventually started only a century afer his death.99 A real web of relations exists between our protagonists, in particular, between Renan and Smith, on the one hand, and Smith and Wellhausen, on the other. Teir work shows signifcant mutual contacts, as well as mighty reciprocal infuences. Both Smith and Wellhausen labored over various aspects of ancient Hebrew and Arabic literatures, and of Judaism and Islam.100 While they came from diferent religious traditions, intellectual leanings, and national backgrounds, and although their scholarship shows substantially diferent approaches, they did not develop their views in isolation from one another. Indeed, they were part of a European scholarly network. In his youth, Renan had learned German in order to immerse himself into the most recent biblical scholarship, and his was a lifelong commitment to German theological scholarship. In particular, he was profoundly infuenced by Ewald, the great Semitist who had taught Wellhausen in Göttingen. On their side, Wellhausen and Smith, who were both born more than twenty years afer Renan, and whose scholarly praxis difered strongly from his, ofen followed in his footsteps, incorporating, probably not always consciously, some of his major conceptions. In particular, their preoccupation with “the religion of the Semites” reveals Renan’s footprints, despite the fact that they rarely referred in print to his work. Renan and Smith were both profoundly, even primarily, interested in religion. Wellhausen, on his side, maintained a certain religious skepticism,

99 See Peter Rivière, “William Robertson Smith and John Ferguson McLennan: the Aberdeen Roots of British Social Anthropology,” in Johnstone, ed., William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment, 293–302. 100  It may be noted here that the study of Arabic (and Islamic) literature for itself was relatively new: until the late eighteenth century, Arabic ofen remained a Hilfswissenschaf for biblical studies and the study of Eastern Christianity. See Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire, 26.

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Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual  217 and insisted that it was in the political context and implications of religion that his main focus lay. Tis focus is especially evident in Wellhausen’s studies on Islamic history. It is mainly the languages and literatures of the Near East that fascinated Wellhausen, rather than its religions. Moreover, it is from Renan that Smith got the idea of the original religion of the early Semites, to which he devoted his last (and lasting) work. For our three scholars, fnally, the birth of Christianity entailed the extinction of Judaism, or at least its disappearance as a thriving religious tradition. Judaism would survive, in Renan’s terms, only as a sect. Wellhausen and Smith both insisted on a philological precision that was foreign to Renan. While all three were totally devoted to their scholarship, Renan was the only one among them who was at once a scholar, in an originally rather esoteric discipline, and what we call today a public in­tel­lec­ tual—a double mission he executed with great panache. Te intellectual rigor and honesty of these three scholars, as well as their fercely independent minds, brought them into serious confict with the churches of their youth. Tey all paid a heavy price for their intellectual integrity, confronted with traditionalist theologians (Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists alike) who would not tolerate open, free research in matters of religion. Renan, who had once trained for the priesthood, decided early in life to break with the Catholic Church. Smith lost his Chair in Old Testament afer being tried for heresy. Even before the verdict in Smith’s heresy trial, Wellhausen requested his own transfer from a theological faculty to one of Oriental studies. As a result, both Smith and Wellhausen refocused their teaching (and to some extent their research) from Hebrew to Arabic (and from Biblical to Islamic) studies. Te ambivalent attitudes of Renan, Wellhausen, and Smith towards Islam stemmed in each case from their assessment of Islam as an essentially political religion. Tey had little respect for contemporary Islamic societies (and primarily the Ottoman Empire, then “the sick man of Europe”), which could not impress them as open societies. Teir perception of Islam as largely political underlined what it was not: a spiritual religion, one of salvation. Hence, their denigration of Islam was essentially cultural and political, rather than religious. In a sense, their understanding of Islam met here their attitude towards Judaism: both were inadequate, incomplete religions, which ignored the core of true religion (mainly for Protestants): interiority (versus the state) and spiritualism (versus the letter). Te birth and growth of the idea of universal or world religions, as well as that of social anthropology, prominent in Victorian Britain more than

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218  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism

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elsewhere, fostered a momentous change of emphasis and of methods in the study of religious phenomena. Te frst entailed a more positive posture towards universal religions, while the other replaced the supremacy of theology by the core of praxis in the understanding of religious systems. In its turn, the new emphasis on world religions, together with the dethronement of philology by anthropology as the primary method for studying religions, brought about some radical changes in the perception of Judaism and Islam. On the one hand, the concept of world religions dealt yet another blow to the idea of an Abrahamic family of religions. On the other hand, thanks to the sacrifcial turn efected with such brio by Smith, the anthropological approach to the religion and the replacement of theology with ritual as the core of a religious system, severely undermined the counter-­positioning of Semitic and Aryan religions, thus further eroding the sway of Renan’s idea of Semitic monotheism. Chapter  10 will discuss this new emphasis on sacrifce.

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10

Sacrifce Compared

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Israel and India

Together with the new prominence of social anthropology, the close of the nineteenth century, as we saw in Chapter 9, witnessed a rise in the perception of ritual in general and sacrifce in particular as representing the crux of religion. In the same period, the previous prominence of belief in religious systems (a prominence essentially stemming from Protestant theology in the Romantic age) was starting to lose its grip on scholarship, as more Catholics and Jews were entering the feld, stressing religious praxis, which for them was, intuitively, more central to the defnition of religion. At the time of imperialism, the new scholarly fashion of world religions accentuated the cultural and linguistic embedding of global religious traditions, rather than “faith.” Te work of William Robertson Smith on Semitic sacrifce, discussed in Chapter 9, heralded a forceful turn to social anthropology at the forefront of religious scholarship. In turn, the perception of monotheism as a key element in the taxonomy of religions was losing its long-­held primacy. Alongside social anthropology, sociology opened up new approaches to religious systems. Without a doubt, the immense body of work produced by Max Weber (1864–1920) on Protestantism, ancient Israel, and Indian and Chinese religions would remain throughout the twentieth century, by far the most compelling legacy of sociology for the study of religions in diferent historical and cultural contexts.1 Although most major social anthropologists came from Britain, the new sensitivity to ritual among students of religion, it appears, was felt more powerfully in France than elsewhere. Paris, we recall, hosted institutional structures that permitted scholars from diferent backgrounds to work together in a cultural atmosphere which minimized the importance of their theological beliefs, or lack thereof, at times rendering such beliefs marginal, 1  Te bibliography on Weber is, of course, immense. For a recent collection of studies, see Tomas  C.  Ertman, ed., Max Weber’s Economic Ethic of the World Religions: An Analysis (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press (2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0011

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220  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism almost irrelevant. By bringing together scholars stemming from diferent religious and cultural backgrounds, moreover, these structures fostered a comparative approach to religious phenomena. Catholics were the heirs to the long tradition of comparativist ethnology and studies of rituals developed since early modern times by missionaries, such as the Jesuits, across the continents. French Protestant scholars, who closely monitored foreign research, in particular that coming from Germany, were implicitly thinking in comparative terms. As for Jewish scholars, their own religious identity inclined them towards a focus on rituals rather than on theological tenets. For a number of reasons, then, many historians of religion in France endowed rituals with a more central status than elsewhere. In the present chapter, I consider the conditions in which a new intellectual sensitivity to sacrifce appeared towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the immense implications of this sensitivity on new approaches to religion. Although intellectual refection on sacrifce dates back to antiquity, it is only with the emergence of the science of religion as an academic discipline afer the mid-­nineteenth century that it became grounded in theoretical approaches to religion.2 We will see how Durkheim’s most gifed students dealt with sacrifce, and call attention to the broader political context, from the Dreyfus Afair to the First World War. Alongside the German Weber, the French Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), a rabbi’s son from Alsace, was then establishing the foundations of modern sociology. Like Weber, Durkheim was drawn to questions of religion.3 Sacrifce, he was convinced, was “a fundamental notion playing a capital role in the evolution of morals and ideals.”4 His team, or équipe, included brilliant young scholars who wished to study religious world views and social coherence in a comparative fashion. As we have seen, what I propose to call “the comparative moment” reached its zenith around the turn of the 2 See, for instance, Marcel Detienne, “. . . c’est l’avènement d’une Science des religions au milieu du dix-­neuvième siècle qui apporte au sacrifce son statut théorique,” in Marcel Detienne and Jean-­Pierre Vernant, La cuisine du sacrifce en pays grec (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), 26. 3  More broadly, religion retained a central role in the thought of the frst social scientists, roughly between 1880 and 1920. See Hans Joas, “Die Soziologie und das Heilige,” in his Braucht der Mensch Religion? Über Erfahrungen der Selbsttranszendenz (Freiburg, Basel, Vienna: Herder, 2014), 64–77. In this essay, Joas deals with Durkheim, Weber, William James (Te Varieties of Religious Experience was published in 1902), Ernst Troeltsch (Die Soziallehren der christlichen Kirchen und Gruppen dates from 1912, like Durkheim’s Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse), and Rudolf Otto, whose Das Heilige appeared in 1917. 4  Tis is what he wrote in a letter to Hubert in June 1898, shortly afer the publication of Hubert and Mauss’s Essai. See Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifce, presentation by Natacha Gagné (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016 [1898]), 217, note 26.

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SACRIFICE COMPARED: ISRAEL AND INDIA  221 twentieth century.5 Te growth of modern anthropology and sociology bears directly on comparative approaches to the study of religion.

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Hubert and Mauss: Sacrifce in Context In 1898, two of Durkheim’s most distinguished disciples, Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss (who was also Durkheim’s nephew), published their Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifce. To this day, the Essai, which frst appeared as an article in the Annales de sociologie, remains perhaps the most infuential work on sacrifce in the comparative study of religion.6 What may have been less clearly articulated is that this book, in ofering an imposing comparative study of Semitic and Aryan sacrifcial rituals, represents in efect a powerful refutation of the long-­accepted distinction between Semite and Aryan forms of religion, upon which the idea of Semitic monotheism had been established. While the term “sacrifce” is commonly associated with temple oferings, it has in fact much broader currency. One might think, for example, of making a difcult fnancial efort, or, going much further, of giving one’s life for one’s country. Te latter can likely be traced to various forms of martyrdom in ancient Christianity. Today, at least in Western societies, such fg­ur­a­tive senses of the term are the rule. Yet any attempt to deal with the word “sacrifce” on a metaphorical level is bound to be unsatisfactory if one simply sets aside the original meaning of the term. In its primary, traditional sense, the term denotes a core religious act. Christianity, of course, radically reinterpreted sacrifce.7 Instead of humans bringing oferings to the divinity (ofen conceived as a bargain: do ut des), God sacrifced His own Son in order to 5  See Stroumsa, “History of Religions: Te Comparative Moment.” 6 Te Annales de Sociologie was the journal of the Durkheimians. Te Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifce was also published as a monograph that same year and has been reprinted many times. I quote according to the reprint edition published by the publisher Mimésis in 2015. See also the republication of the work with a presentation by Natacha Gagné (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2016). All translations from this work are mine. A full English translation of the Essai, published only in 1964, is graced with a Foreword by E. E. Evans-­Pritchard, who highlights the seminal importance of this text for comparative religion and social anthropology alike. See Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifce: Its Nature and Function, transl. W. D. Halls (London: Cohen and West, 1964). 7  See, in particular, Robert J. Daly, Te Origins of the Christian Doctrine of Sacrifce (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1978), as well as Hildegard Cancik-­Lindemaier, “Eucharistie,” Handbuch der religionsgeschichtliche Grundbegrife, Vol. II (Stuttgart, Berlin, Cologne: Kohlhammer, 1990), 347–356. See further Guy G. Stroumsa, “Sacrifce and Martyrdom in the Roman Empire,” Archivio di Filosofa 76 (2008) [Il Sacrifcio], 145–154, reprinted as chapter 7

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222  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism save humans from sin and death. For the modern study of religion, which grew out of (and against) Christian theology, sacrifce has constituted a central topic of inquiry, its presence recognized in most cultures and religious systems. Te Essai, which is widely considered the foundational text of the French sociological school, was published in the fnal decade of the nineteenth century, at a time when the new comparative science of religion stood at the vanguard of the human sciences.8 For the authors, “theories of sacrifce are as old as religion” and sacrifce is a religious act which can be efected only in a religious milieu.9 Tis study revolutionized the parameters of research on sacrifce, and has had an impressive Nachleben.10 In 1898, Hubert wrote to Mauss:

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We shouldn’t miss a chance to make trouble for these good, but badly informed, souls. Let’s stress the direction of our work. Let’s be clear about our aims so that they are pointed, sharp like razors, and so that they are treacherous. Let’s go! I love a fght! Tat’s what excites us!11

Hubert and Mauss, who clearly indicated the intellectual tradition in which their work was inscribed, were conscious of breaking new ground with their theory of sacrifce. Ivan Strenski, who has exhaustively investigated the intellectual background and social context of Durkheim and his closest collaborators, called Hubert and Mauss’s work “the frst theory of sacrifce,” arguing that the Essai “has almost singlehandedly shaped an entire feld of discourse concerning one of the most perennial subjects in the study of religion . . .” For him, this book “ofers us a remarkable opportunity to look inside the conception and genesis of our own thought about sacrifce.”12 On in G. G. Stroumsa, Te Crucible of Religion in Late Antiquity: Selected Essays (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021). 8 For a good example of the impact of Hubert and Mauss’s Essai, see René Dussaud, Introduction à l’histoire des religions (Paris: Leroux, 1914). Tis book was the frst in a new series edited by Dussaud and Paul Alphandéry, the co-­editors of the Revue de l’Histoire des Religions. Dussaud’s views on sacrifce refect William Robertson Smith’s theory and Hubert and Mauss’s Essai. On Smith, see Chapter 9 in this volume. 9  Hubert and Maus, Essai, 5 and 21. 10 On the Nachleben of the Essai, see, for instance, Louis Dupré, “Te Structure and Meaning of Sacrifce: From Marcel Mauss to René Girard,” Archivio di Filosofa 76 (2008), 253–259. 11  I quote the translation of Ivan Strenski, Contesting Sacrifce: Religion, Nationalism, and Social Tought (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2002), 164–165 and note 29 there. 12 Ivan Strenski, Teology and the First Teory of Sacrifce (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2003), 26–27.

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SACRIFICE COMPARED: ISRAEL AND INDIA  223 the idea of sacrifce, Durkheim would be indebted to the work of his disciples, as well as to that of Smith. Strenski rightly considers the Essai to have been a “camoufaged subversive piece” in the cultural war then raging in France between Catholic and Protestant intellectuals. I submit, however, that Hubert and Mauss’s subvertion went beyond what Strenski has suggested. Indeed, it is the very foundations on which the history of religions had been established for decades that our twin authors (Mauss referred to Hubert as “my work twin” [“mon jumeau de travail”]) sought to sap. In his essay on “Te Signifcance of Teory,” the literary theorist Terry Eagleton argues that the birth of a new theory points to something having been previously “amiss.” Tus, we ought to ask what was “amiss” that spurred Hubert and Mauss to formulate their revolutionary theory of sacrifce.13 In their avowed anthropological interest and search for “le fait social total,” Mauss and Hubert, together with their collaborators at the Année Sociologique (founded by Durkheim in 1896), were largely responsible for broadening the study of religion.14 And Mauss was more than a theoreticiananthropologist. He was intensely concerned with written sources; the ­ Hebrew and Sanskrit texts that he studied with Sylvain Lévi and Israël Lévi at the École Pratique des Hautes Études formed the conceptual fulcrum for the Essai. Furthermore, Mauss, like his uncle Durkheim, had received an excellent Jewish education; unlike him, however, he held a lifelong connection to various aspects of Judaism. Mauss’s study of religious phenomena seems to have been more Jewish in character than that of Durkheim; he was also more keen than his uncle to make references to Jewish texts. One can draw a direct line from the former’s comparative interests and the signifcance that Jewish identity and culture retained for him.15 13  Terry Eagleton, “Te Signifcance of Teory,” in his Te Signifcance of Teory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 26. See also Terry Eagleton, Radical Sacrifce (New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press, 2018), where the Marxist author, who grew up as a Roman Catholic, seems to rediscover, rather naively, the power of Christian sacrifce. 14  See Bruno Karsenti, Marcel Mauss: Le fait social total (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994). For Karsenti, the Essai sur le don remains Mauss’s major work, and sacrifce, as much else, must be understood in its light. Tis last work, however, was written afer the First World War, more than twenty years afer the Essai sur la nature et fonction du sacrifce. On the remarkable spectrum of the history of religions in early twentieth-­century France, see François Laplanche, “L’histoire des religions en France au début du XXe siècle,” Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome, Italie et Méditerranée 11 (1999), 623–634. 15  See W.  S.  F.  Pickering, “Mauss’s Jewish Background: A Biographical Essay,” in Wendy James and N. J. Allen, eds, Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), 43–60, esp. 57. On Mauss’s “openness toward his roots” and his “Jewish approach” to religion, see Marcel Fournier, “Une éducation juive,” in his Marcel Mauss (Paris:

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224  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Mauss was a consummate comparatist. In 1909, Sylvain Lévi attempted unsuccessfully to promote Mauss’s candidacy for the Chair of History of Religions at the Collège de France, to replace Jean Réville, Albert’s son and successor, who had died early, only two years afer his election (Alfred Loisy was chosen to replace him). Lévi argued, in favor of Mauss, that the Collège needed a comparatist, using a more novel method than traditional historical investigation. In a text which Mauss probably submitted in 1930 as part of his application to the Chair of Sociology at the Collège (to which he was then elected), he wrote: “I wish to teach exactly what I have always worked on: the comparative history of societies and especially of religions.”16 Durkheim and his équipe closely followed foreign publications in ethnology and the history of religions.17 Regarding the origins of religion, William Robertson Smith’s conception of the totem, in particular, impressed Durkheim, and Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (frst published in 1889) stimulated refection on sacrifce among them. Te book lef a clear imprint on Durkheim’s Te Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912)—just as it did on Freud’s Totem and Taboo, a book published the following year.18 Durkheim encouraged his nephew Mauss to spend a year abroad, in Leiden and Oxford, in order to broaden his intellectual horizons. In the Netherlands, Mauss met the historian of religion Cornelius Petrus Tiele, and in England the anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor and the classicist and folklorist James George Frazer. At the start of the Essai, the authors recall their direct predecessors in the study of sacrifce, beginning with Tylor’s Religion in Primitive Culture. As Hubert and Mauss note, Tylor maintained that a gif originally made to spiritual beings was later transformed, in more

Fayard, 1994), 32–40. Mauss agreed to be involved in the Alliance Israélite Universelle, an institution of which Sylvain Lévi was then President. Other Jewish scholars, from Salomon Munk and Joseph Derenbourg to Israël Lévi and Salomon Reinach, had accepted important roles in that institution. On Durkheim and Judaism, see Ivan Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 1997), as well as Bruno Karsenti, La question juive des modernes: philosophie de l’émancipation (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2017), 189–239. 16  Text published in the Revue Française de Sociologie 20 (1979), 209–220. I quote the translation in Wendy James and N. J. Allen, eds, Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute, 32. 17  Durkheim returned in 1887 from Germany, where he had started his career; he was keen to follow scholarly publications also in Britain and elsewhere. 18  On Durkheim’s theory of sacrifce, seen in a very broad perspective, see, for instance, David I. Weddle, Sacrifce in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (New York: New York University Press, 2018), 27–34. On the transmission of ideas from Durkheim to his students, see Camille Tarot, De Durkheim à Mauss: l’invention du symbolique; sociologie et science des religions (Paris: La Découverte, 1999). On Durkheim and Freud, see Stroumsa, “Myth into Novel: Te Late Freud on Early Religion.”

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SACRIFICE COMPARED: ISRAEL AND INDIA  225 complex societies, into sacrifcial rituals to the gods. However, they add, Tylor’s theory did not explain the mechanism of sacrifce. Like Hubert and Mauss, Robertson Smith rejected Tylor’s conceptions, proposing a striking new theory of sacrifce and its origins. As we have seen, this theory was based on the new “discovery” of totemism by the ethnologist John Ferguson McLennan. For Smith, as for McLennan, sacrifce had originally been a meal in which the tribe’s members, identifying with the totem, ate its fesh. Smith relies here on a single source, a Greek text describing the slaughter of a camel by Sinai Arabs that dates to approximately the late fourth century.19 Te Essai analyzes Smith’s theory at length, concluding that “the great fault of this system” consists in deriving all the various forms of sacrifce from a single, arbitrarily chosen principle. For the authors, Smith’s main error had been one of method. Rather than analyzing the complex system of sacrifce among the earliest Semites, he sought to assemble facts according to perceived analogies between them. Unlike some English anthropologists, Hubert and Mauss did not wish to compile an encyclopedia of sacrifce. Tey were afer something else, something they called “the scheme” of sacrifce. In this work, they focused on a number of specifc facts, gleaned from two doctrinal corpora dealing with sacrifces in two religious traditions: the Hebrew Bible and Sanskrit texts. For them, the corresponding religions diverged vitally—the frst led to monotheism, the second to pantheism. It was this diference, they wrote, that enabled one to reach “sufciently general conclusions” through comparison. Oddly enough, the strikingly comparative nature of the Essai and its centrality in the book’s core argument is not always acknowledged. A recent study, for instance, discusses the text as if it dealt only with Indian sacrifce, totally ignoring its treatment of Israelite sacrifce.20 Mauss was able to read both the Hebrew and the Sanskrit sources in the original.21 Coming to Paris from Bordeaux in 1896, he had attended, at the 19  See William Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, First Series: Te Fundamental Institutions (London: Black, 1889), Lecture VI, on sacrifces. cf. Joseph Henninger, “Ist der sogenannte Nilus-­Bericht eine brauchtbare religionsgeschichtliche Quelle?” Anthropos 50 (1955), 81–148. 20  See Nick Allen, “Using Hubert and Mauss to think about Sacrifce,” in Julia Meszaros and Johannes Zachhubber, eds, Sacrifce and Modern Tought (Oxford: Oxford Unviersity Press, 2013), 147–162. 21  Tanks to his mother, a rabbi’s daughter, Mauss had received early on a good Jewish education, and knew Hebrew. For Mauss’s biography, see Fournier, Marcel Mauss. On Mauss’s Jewish identity, see Pickering, “Mauss’s Jewish Background: A Biographical Essay.” Mauss retained a real interest in Judaism throughout his life and taught for a while at the Séminaire rabbinique. It may be worth noting that, according to Georges Dumézil’s oral testimony, Mauss

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226  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism École Pratique des Hautes Études (ÉPHÉ), the seminar of Israël Lévi, reading rabbinic literature with him. He also learned Sanskrit, in order to read Indian texts with Sylvain Lévi, also at the ÉPHÉ.22 Mauss soon became close to the latter, referring to him as his “second uncle.” Te notion that biblical religion “leads to monotheism” is not, in and of itself, particularly provocative. Te claim that Vedic religion “leads to pantheism,” however, prompts further thought. Te Vedic hymns to the gods refect a polytheism akin to that of ancient Iran and Greece, which in no way led to a pantheistic world view. Yet, this claim was quite common in the second half of the nineteenth century. Among historians of religion, Max Müller, who had called attention to some striking similarities between Vedanta and pantheism, might have spearheaded the trend, but similar attitudes could also be found among philosophers. In 1889, the philosopher Adolphe Franck gave a lecture at the Société des Études Juives entitled “Le panthéisme oriental et le monothéisme hébreu.” Franck, who had been elected president of the Société in the previous year, argued that unbridled polytheism leads to the confusion of God with nature, that is, to pantheism. In history, he added, it is Buddhism that refects “Oriental pantheism” at its peak.23 Here, it is the striking “atheism” of Buddhism that could easily be deciphered as a pantheism of sorts.

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Jewish Scholars and the Dreyfus Afair Te year 1898 saw, in addition to the Essai sur le sacrifce, Sylvain Lévi’s monograph on the doctrine of sacrifce in the Brahmanas.24 Te work is discretely returned to some religious practice during the Second World War; on this, see Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France, 124, n. 30. 22  On Mauss and Sylvain Lévi, see Ivan Strenski, “Sylvain Lévi: Mauss’s ‘Second Uncle,’ ” in his Durkheim and the Jews of France, 116–148 and notes 192–201. On Mauss, see futher John Scheid, “L’étude des religions au Collège de France et à la Ve section de l’École pratique des hautes études,” in Jean-­Luc Fournet, ed., Ma grande église et ma petite chapelle: cent cinquante ans d’afnités électives entre le Collège de France et l’École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris: Collège de France, 2020), 263–273. In the Archives of the Collège de France, I was able to consult the “Notes prises par Marcel Mauss au cours de Sylvain Lévi, 1896–1897” (56 pages). 23  Adolphe Franck, “Le panthéisme oriental et le monothéisme hébreu,” in his Nouvelles Études orientales, 367–387. Franck, whose La Kabbale, hailed by Michelet, had earned the young author his election to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, was ofered a Chair of Law at the Collège de France, where he taught from 1854 to 1881. 24 Sylvain Lévi, La doctrine du sacrifce dans les Brâhmanas, Bibliothèque de l’ÉPHÉ, Sciences Religieuses, XI (Paris: Leroux, 1898) [Reprint of the second edition (1966), with a Preface by Louis Renou and a new Postface by Charles Malamoud, Bibliothèque de l’École

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SACRIFICE COMPARED: ISRAEL AND INDIA  227 based on Lévi’s seminars during the academic year 1896–1897, which Mauss had followed.25 Te Essai sur le sacrifce and La doctrine du sacrifce are obviously connected. Lévi’s research topic, it seems, brought Mauss and Hubert to work on sacrifce.26 Sylvain Lévi (1863–1935) was born in Paris, into a traditional Jewish family originating in Alsace. Like Mauss, he had received a robust Jewish education. During his student years, Chief Rabbi Zadoc Kahn requested that he tutor his children. Although Lévi wrote few articles dealing with Jewish topics, he kept up friendly relations with the scholar of Judaism Israël Lévi, his colleague at the ÉPHÉ, and, like many others, he seems to have been marked by the example of Salomon Munk.27 Unlike most scholars of the Wissenschaf des Judentums in Germany, Munk refused to dissociate the study of the Jewish sources from their broader historical and cultural context. Te comparative ethos so characteristic of Munk is also striking in the scholarship of Mauss and of his teachers, Israël Lévi and Sylvain Lévi.28 Following in the footsteps of the two Lévis, Mauss, too, chose to remain active in the Jewish community, for instance, through his involvement in the Alliance Israélite Universelle. Te Alliance’s main mission was the establishment of what would become an impressive network of schools (teaching in French) in the Jewish communities across the Mediterranean and the Near East, from Morocco to Iran. Sylvain Lévi eventually became president of the Alliance, and, in his last years, he would be actively involved in fghting the persecution of the Jews by Nazi Germany. In his willingness to keep a high profle as a Jew, Lévi was not alone among French intellectuals. Salomon Reinach, for instance, who came from the very diferent cultural Pratique des Hautes Études, 118 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003)]. In the Année sociologique for 1900, Mauss published a laudatory review of Lévi’s book, reprinted in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres (Paris: Minuit, 1968), I, 352. 25  In 1894 (at the age of thirty-­one!), Lévi had been elected to the Collège de France, and was teaching in both institutions. Cf. Roland Lardinois, Sylvain Lévi et l’entrée du Sanskrit au Collège de France (Paris: École Française d’Extre �me Orient, 2018) (non vidi). 26  See Fournier, Marcel Mauss, 150. Fournier discusses the Essai on pages 150–165. It is less plausible that it is Mauss who had asked Lévi to read in his seminar texts relating to sacrifce. 27  See Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France, 121–125. On the relationship between Lévi’s orientalist scholarship and his Jewish interests, see Catherine Fhima and Roland Lardinois, “Sylvain Lévi passeur d’Orients: autorité savant et conscience morale,” in Espagne and Simon-­Nahum, eds, Passeurs d’Orient, 163–184; they note (170–171) that Sylvain Lévi penned an article on “Problèmes indo-­hébraïques” for Israël Lévi’s Festschrif. 28  See Mauss’s intellectual autobiographical sketch, written in 1930, towards his election at the Collège de France. Tis text appears in English translation as “An Intellectual Self-­Portrait,” in Wendy James and N. J. Allen, eds, Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), 29–42. On Durkheim’s and Mauss’s Jewish identity, see also Karsenti, La question juive des modernes.

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228  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism and economic background of the “haute bourgeoisie assimilée,” also expressed his Jewish identity by joining the Alliance. From 1898 to 1911, he served as the vice-­president of its committee.29 Reinach, whose scope of interest was particularly broad, established himself rapidly as the main propagator in France of the works of British anthropologists, and in particular of William Robertson Smith’s ideas on sacrifce. According to Reinach, Robertson Smith’s great discovery was the idea that sacrifce as communion is more primitive than sacrifce as gif. Additionally, for Reinach, this discovery sparked a true revolution in the study of religion.30 Te old scourge of anti-­Semitism was then in the midst of a mutation, fast taking new forms: the traditional religious prejudices against the Jews were now being transformed into racial hatred, through pseudo-­scientifc conceptions. Since the days of Müller and Renan (both born in 1823), as we have seen, the radical distinction between “Aryans” (or “Indo-­Europeans” or “Indo-­Germans”) and “Semites” had become almost universally accepted. As we have seen, the clef between Aryan and Semite had been heralded by Max Müller in the linguistic realm and broadened to religion by Ernest Renan around the mid-­nineteenth century.31 Both Müller and Renan realized that a literal understanding of their categories could have frightening consequences, and argued, a bit late, that their notion of “race” to buttress these categories was meant only metaphorically—as for instance, Renan said, when he called the Muslim Turks “Semites.” In 1883, in an important lecture he delivered at the Société des Études Juives, “Le judaïsme comme race et religion,” Renan explicitly denied race a major role in the modern period. Tat same year, his Jewish former student and protégé, the Iranist James Darmesteter, echoed Renan’s recently articulated views on race in “Race et tradition.” As a Jew, deeply conscious of the brutal and frightening character of the new racial anti-­Semitism, at the time (a decade before the Dreyfus Afair) most virulent across the Rhine, Darmesteter claimed that Jewish identity was established on tradition rather than race—a claim reverberating Renan’s well-­known view on what constituted a nation. He also noted, rather prophetically, that the German

29  In 1911, a furious campaign was launched against him among German Jews, accusing him of treason to the spirit of Judaism in his scholarly publications. 30  See Salomon Reinach, “La théorie du sacrifce,” in his Cultes, Mythes et Religions, Vol. 1 (3rd edn; Paris: Leroux, 1922), 97–104 (text of a lecture read in 1902), in particular 103–104. Reinach argues that sacrifce lies at the core of all cults, as it represents the essential link between man and the divine. 31  See Demoule, Mais où sont passés les Indo-­européens?

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SACRIFICE COMPARED: ISRAEL AND INDIA  229

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obsession with race did not bode well for the future of that nation.32 In his eulogy of the Sanskritist Abel Bergaigne (1838–1888) at a meeting of the Société Asiatique, Darmesteter argued forcefully against the “mythological illusion of India” among European scholars who, by predating the Vedas, presented them as an “Aryan Bible,” as “the sacred book of the religious origins of the race.”33 A decade later, Salomon Reinach would, in his turn, echo Darmesteter’s views, strongly objecting to the broadly accepted racial dichotomy between Aryans and Semites. In 1892, he published a polemical essay on the Aryan controversy.34 In little more than 120 pages, Reinach reviewed the history of the notion of Aryan (i.e. Irano-­Indian) origin of European languages and religions, indeed, of European civilizations, from the days of Leibniz and Bopp. In conclusion, he remarked, many results of the linguist Adolphe Pictet, which had been accepted mainly by German scholars, were of doubtful value.35 Reinach, who rejected the idea of an Asian origin of European civilizations, dealt in particular with the views of those pre-­historians for whom anything of value in Europe fnds its origin in India, calling such a view of things a fction, “un roman.” Reinach’s critique concluded negatively that the pan-­Aryan idea does not really hold water and should be discarded.36 Te following year, Reinach further developed his polemics against pan-­Aryanism in a ferce attack he launched on racial theories, which were 32  See James Darmesteter, “L’histoire d’Israël et M. Renan,” and “Race et tradition,” in his Les prophètes d’Israël (Paris: Rieder, 1931), respectively 199–220 and 239–264; cf. Salomon Reinach’s Preface to Darmesteter’s Les prophètes d’Israël, 14: “Comme son maître et ami Renan, Darmesteter ne voulait pas qu’on fît état d’une race juive.” Darmesteter’s “Race et tradition” maintains that the so-­called eternal clash between the Aryan and the Semitic races is in radical opposition to Renan’s idea of what constitutes a nation. Darmesteter points out that the idea of race thrives in Germany, creating a serious threat to the future of that nation. He has a prophetic sentence: “Le malheur de l’Allemagne—ce qui fait sa force apparente pour un instant et fera sa faiblesse durable dans l’avenir—c’est que l’élément de race y est mieux conservé que partout ailleurs” (262). In a lecture on Darmesteter, published in Les Cahiers d’Études Juives II (Paris, 1932), Reinach notes that Renan was the frst to speak about Darmesteter’s “genius.” Te kind of dark prophecy refected in Darmesteter’s words brings to mind the last pages of Heine’s History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany (a text written in Paris in 1834), announcing the terrifying thunder of the awaking Germanic gods, compared to which the French Revolution will look like “an innocent idyll.” 33  James Darmesteter, “Rapport sur les travaux du conseil de la Société Asiatique pendant les années 1888–1889–1890,” Journal Asiatique 16 (1890), 19–180, esp. 23–27. 34  Salomon Reinach, L’origine des aryens: histoire d’une controverse, Bibliothèque orientale elzévirienne LXVII (Paris: Ledoux, 1892). Oddly enough, Reinach’s name does not appear in the index to Demoule’s otherwise thorough book (cited note 31 above). On Reinach as a historian of religions, see also Chapter 7 in this volume. 35 Reinach, L’origine des aryens, 19. On Pictet, see Maurice Olender, Les langues du paradis, 127–141. 36 Reinach, L’origine des aryens, 84.

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230  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism largely dependent on the pan-­Aryan idea. In a long article focusing on new discoveries in European archaeology, titled “Le mirage oriental,” also published as a separate pamphlet, he argued that “it is a futile hypothesis to speak of an Aryan race of three thousand years ago; to speak of it as if it still exists is simply an absurdity.”37 In this text, Reinach also rejected the view that Semitic infuences were perceptible in archaic Europe, although this point is much less salient than his objection to pan-­Aryanism.38 Te idea, widely shared by Indologists and archaeologists, that India was the true cradle of Europe, he wrote, was nothing but a fata morgana, a mirage with which too many scholars were infatuated until it was disproved by the modern research of the 1880s. From the days of Mycenaean civilization on, there were no discernible contributions to Europe coming from India. At most, it was from Assyria and Egypt that one could discern a real import. Altogether, he asserted, the common civilization of Europe grew independently from external infuences. It was high time, then, for research, he added, to break with “the Oriental fata morgana.” Some of the scholars identifed by Reinach as arguing most powerfully against pan-­Aryanism, such as Michel Bréal and James Darmesteter, were Jews: more than anyone else, they had reasons to fear the dread implications of the reigning theory, which excluded “Semites” from the core of European identity.39 All this, let us note, was happening before the Dreyfus Afair, which would radicalize attitudes in the second half of the 1890s. Reinach’s essay shows that the scholarly Aryans/Semites dichotomy was clearly perceived as the pseudo-­scientifc foundation of the growing threat of racial and violent anti-­Semitism. In a lecture delivered at the Société des Études Juives in 1903, Reinach contended, following in Renan’s footsteps, that there was no such thing as a Jewish race, or as a single “Jewish type.”40 37 Published in L’anthropologie 5–6 (1893), and also as a separate publication: Salomon Reinach, Le mirage oriental (Paris: Masson, 1893). See Aron Rodrigue, “Totems, Taboos, and Jews: Salomon Reinach and the Politics of Scholarship in Fin-­de-­Siècle France,” Jewish Social Studies 10 (2004), 1–19, here 10. 38  See Bernal, Black Athena, 370–373. 39 Reinach, Le mirage oriental, 7–8. Te linguist Michel Bréal (1832–1915), who is widely considered as the inventor of semantics, was born in Landau, in the Palatinate. He studied in Paris, and Sanskrit with Bopp in Berlin, whose comparative grammar of the Indo-­European languages he translated into French. He was elected in 1864 to the Chair of grammar at the Collège de France. 40 Salomon Reinach, “La prétendue race juive,” in his Cultes, Mythes, Religions, Vol. III (Paris: Leroux, 1908), 457–471, a reprint of a text originally published in the Revue des Études Juives in 1903. Under the pseudonym “L’archiviste,” Reinach also published a pamphlet against the Anti-­Semitism of the Anti-­Dreyfus movement, Drumont et Dreyfus: Études sur la “libre parole” de 1894 à 1895 (Paris: Stock, 1898). Despite the pseudonym, Reinach was, of course,

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SACRIFICE COMPARED: ISRAEL AND INDIA  231 We have encountered Strenski’s claim that Hubert and Mauss’s Essai was a camoufaged text and suggested that this was also the case in a deeper sense.41 Once again, we can ask: What sort of camoufage were the authors aiming for? As students of Durkheim, who insisted on the objective character of the social science he was establishing, both Hubert and Mauss took precautions to maintain an epistemological distance in their various writings. In other words, they treated the problems they were discussing as objectively as possible, avoiding any reference to a possible “relevance” to contemporary issues. Te authors strove to reach universally valid conclusions about the “nature and function” of sacrifce in human societies. Yet, when choosing to compare Hebrew and Sanskrit texts on sacrifce, they were obviously aware of the scholarly consensus on the constitutive contrast between “Semitic” and “Aryan” languages, societies, and religions. Tis awareness may well have informed their research and even, to some extent, motivated it. Afer all, their teacher Sylvain Lévi, following in Michelet’s tracks, referred to the Vedas as “the Aryan Bible” (la Bible aryenne)—thus implying the “Semitic” character of the Hebrew Bible.42 Teir efort to compare forms of sacrifce within the earliest fully documented strata of Semitic and Aryan religious traditions, seeking their common ground, was also, I suggest, an attempt to debunk the universal signifcance of the dichotomy between those two linguistic and (putative) ethnic families. In the fnal decades of the century, this dichotomy, by then an almost universally accepted postulate, exerted a powerful efect on the new racial anti-­Semitism. Tis anti-­Semitism had become loud in France during the years of the Dreyfus Afair, at a time when French society was brutally split (sometimes even within families) between Dreyfusards and anti-­Dreyfusards. Te ubiquitous distinction between Semitic and Aryan was well known to our two authors, and its intellectual fallacy as well as the social threat it harbored must have seemed quite clear to them. Showing the existence of one single “grammar” of sacrifce (a word frst used in this context, it seems, by Evans-­Pritchard in his foreword to the English translation of the Essai) openly identifed as a Dreyfusard (see Marcel Proust, Le temps retrouvé [277–278 in the “Livre de poche” edition]). On the broader context of Reinach’s denial of the existence of a Jewish race, see Michael  R.  Marrus, Te Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Afair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), esp. 271. 41  See p. 223 above. 42  In his Avant-­Propos to La doctrine du sacrifce, 9 (a text composed in Saigon). He also denounces there the “regrettable heredity” leading to a return to Rudra Shiva, the mechanical recitation of mantras, the absurd and revolting formalism of tantras (12).

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232  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism across the artifcial boundaries between Semites and Aryans was for them a way to reject the racial patterns of thought.43 We are lef with a fnal question: Why choose sacrifce? Many other forms of ritual are integral to religion in both traditions, starting with prayer, the topic of Mauss’s unfnished doctoral thesis. Myth, central to Müller’s thought, was another obvious option. Te concept of myth had a long history, especially in Germany. As Renan had famously argued, myth was unknown to the intellectually uninventive Semites—a theory laid to frm scholarly rest.44 But Hubert and Mauss distrusted concepts that could not be anchored in social praxis. For Durkheim and his students, such concepts as “myth” or “faith,” cherished by Protestant theologians, were of dubious analytic value.45 In the Essai, Hubert and Mauss call attention to the reinterpretation, or “sublimation,” of sacrifce in Christian theology, adding:

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From this point of view, Christian sacrifce is one of the most enlightening one may fnd . . . In its general lines, the mechanism of consecration in the Catholic mass is the same one fnds in Hindu sacrifces . . . Christian imagination has built on ancient models.46

Although theological refection on sacrifce is as old as Christianity itself, since the Reformation, it had played a prominent role in the polemics between Catholics and Protestants: Should it be understood literally or metaphorically? In his systematic study of the evolution of “sacrifce” in French thought from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century,47 Michel Despland shows how discourse on sacrifce intensifed in France during the fnal two decades of the latter.48 Tis discourse, once essentially scholarly 43  Cf. Naphtali S. Meshel, Te “Grammar” of Sacrifce: A Generativist Study of the Israelite Sacrifcial System in the Priestly Writings with a “Grammar” of Σ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Meshel, a Jerusalem biblical scholar and historian of religions, has also studied Sanskrit and invested serious eforts in studying Indian sacrifce. 44 See in particular the cases of Hermann Steinthal and Ignaz Goldziher discussed in Chapter 8 in this volume. 45 Teir approach of “the sacred” was also deeply diferent from that of contemporary Protestant theologians and scholars of religion, a fact emphasized by Hans Joas, “Nachwort: ‘Säkulare Heiligkeit: Wie aktuell ist Rudolph Otto?,’ ” in Rudolph Otto, ed., Das Heilige (Munich: Beck, 2014), 255–281. 46  Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifce, 107. Durkheim and his followers were strongly marked by Christian ideas of sacrifce, as shown by Detienne, La cuisine du sacrifce en pays grec, 24–35. 47  Michel Despland, Le recul du sacrifce: quatre siècles de polémiques françaises (Montréal: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2009). 48  Ibid., 193f.

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SACRIFICE COMPARED: ISRAEL AND INDIA  233 and theological, now became multifaceted. On the one hand, it was nourished by a long tradition of Catholic thought, a tradition reinterpreted by Joseph de Maistre. On the other hand, the new scholarly study of religion was to some extent in the hands of Protestant scholars.49 Tis was true, frst of all, at the Collège de France, where Albert Réville had been ofered in 1870 the frst Chair for the History of Religions. As mentioned in Chapter  7, Réville and his colleague Maurice Vernes (1845–1923) had also established the Revue de l’Histoire des Religions, a journal ofen considered at the time by Catholics as primarily a venue of Protestant scholarship. Te Section des Sciences Religieuses of the ÉPHÉ, where Vernes was active, was also largely perceived by the clerical party as a Protestant enterprise. All in all, one gets the impression that in France, the academic discourse on the nature of religion in general, and of sacrifce in particular, was perceived as largely controlled by Protestants.50 Sacrifce was a suspect topic for Protestant scholars, who associated it with Catholic doctrine. Réville, for instance, who, Strenski writes, “dominated the study of religion in France in the last two decades of the nineteenth century,” launched a passionate attack on sacrifce, which he deemed a perversion of religion.51 Discussing sacrifce in his Prolegomena to the history of religions, Réville recognized that all religions consider sacrifce, more or less transformed, as the main means of realizing union between man and the divine. He notes further that it is to the Jews that we owe the invention of a cult without sacrifce, adding that this innovation is both one of the most remarkable and the least noticed in history.52 As to Christian sacrifce, for Catholics and Protestants alike, it has for him nothing in common with sacrifces as known in Antiquity, excepting the historical afliation.53 Protestant scholars, in France as elsewhere, were altogether interested in questions of individual rather than collective religion.54

49  See Chapter 4 in this volume. 50  See Strenski, Teology and the First Teory of Sacrifce, 86f. 51  See Strenski, Contesting Sacrifce, 125. 52  Cf. Guy G. Stroumsa, Te End of Sacrifce: Religious Mutations in Late Antiquity (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 2009) [= La fn du sacrifce: les mutations religieuses de l’antiquité tardive (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005)]. 53 Albert Réville, “Le Sacrifce,” Prolégomènes de l’Histoire des religions (4th edn; Paris: Fishbacher, 1886., 179–194; see esp. 179, 193–194; cf. Strenski, Teology and the First Teory of Sacrifce, 86f. 54  See, for instance, Tiele’s view of sacrifce, in Cornelius Petrus Tiele, Outlines of the History of Religion to the Spread of the Universal Religions (London: Trübner, 1877). On Tiele, see further Chapter 9 in this volume.

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234  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Let us recall that while Protestant scholars were launching the non-­partisan study of religion in France, they were working side by side with their Catholic and Jewish colleagues. To be sure, as also mentioned earlier, this collaboration was not a perfectly harmonious one. Tensions, indeed, appeared at the Section des Sciences Religieuses of the ÉPHÉ in the frst decade or so of its existence, when communitarian identities were still clearly marked. Jewish scholars felt an afnity with their Protestant colleagues, who, like them, belonged to a small minority in French society. On the question of rituals (and hence of sacrifce), however, Catholics and Jews, who both insisted on the communitarian nature of religion, were on the same side of the divide. Towards the end of the century, Durkheim’s approach to the social sciences may be seen as bridging Rome and Reform, a middle way between Catholic objectivism and Protestant subjectivism.55 Te Sanskrit scholar Abel Bergaigne, to whom Renan had sent the young Sylvain Lévi, studied Vedic rituals. Bergaigne likely inspired in Lévi an interest in Indian rituals in general, and sacrifce in particular—an interest revealed in his seminal monograph. For Jewish scholars, rituals formed the core of religion. Such scholars seem, moreover, to have been attracted by comparative approaches, which permitted them to tackle both Jewish themes and other, related ones. Tis being said, Strenski went too far in claiming that Sylvain Lévi led the way to the comparison of Israel and India. Without rejecting the comparative approach, Lévi remained quite reserved on this account.56 Two leading scholars whom we have already encountered published synthetic studies on sacrifce that merit mention. Te frst, Marie-­Joseph Lagrange, was a Dominican friar whose vision and eforts, as we saw in Chapter  7, were vital to the establishment of the École Biblique in Jerusalem—an institution meant to demonstrate that Catholics could become, just like Protestants, critical biblical scholars. Lagrange was among the frst Catholic scholars to discuss sacrifce seriously, from a comparative viewpoint. He considered sacrifce the quintessential religious act. While Lagrange appreciated the quality of Robertson Smith’s monograph on Semitic religion, he argued that Smith’s views of sacrifce were based on the

55  On Durkheimians and Catholics, see Strenski, Teology and the First Teory of Sacrifce, 49–53. On Protestants, ibid., 69–75. 56  See Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France, 121.

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SACRIFICE COMPARED: ISRAEL AND INDIA  235 false idea of totemism. Lagrange also noted there the importance of Smith’s debt to British anthropology.57 Te second scholar, Alfred Loisy (1857–1940), was a former priest who had been excommunicated in 1908 for his modernist views. Although Loisy’s opus on sacrifce was published only in 1920, it represents the gist of his work on sacrifce as one of the constitutive elements of religion, a topic on which he had been working since his election to the Collège de France in 1909.58 Loisy, who denied the possibility of starting the history of sacrifce from a single ritual, found Smith’s argument less than compelling, and does not explicitly discuss Hubert and Mauss’s Essay.59 Despland notes that at the time of the Dreyfus Afair, two main versions of sacrifce were being counterposed in French society.60 He also mentions that the leading Dreyfusard journalist, anarchist, and polemicist Bernard Lazare (1865–1903), then a student at the ÉPHÉ, chose ritual murder as the topic of his thesis. Accusing the Jews of ritual murder, that is, of killing a Christian child in order to use his blood in the Passover ritual, was actually a specifc accusation of human sacrifce—one which periodically triggered pogroms against Jewish communities.61 Let us return, for a moment, to the fnal years of the nineteenth century. French Jewish scholars and intellectuals fought for Jewish rights and culture, not only in France, but also elsewhere, such as in Czarist Russia and in the Ottoman Empire, where Jews were persecuted or living in distress. Tey were also involved in the educational project of the Alliance. Te immediate context of their determination was obviously the Dreyfus Afair. But the conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for treason, in December 1894, did not immediately shock the nation; the tsunami came three years later, in January 1898, in the wake of the acquittal of Major Ferdinand Esterhazy. A violent wave of anti-­Semitism then engulfed French society, savagely sundering it into two enemy camps.62 Georges Vacher de Lapouge (1854–1936) represents a striking example of this new racial anti-­Semitism

57  Marie-­Joseph Lagrange, Études sur les religions sémitiques (Paris: Lecofre, 1903). See esp. Avant-­Propos and Chapter VII, “Le sacrifce,” 247–274, esp. 267. On Lagrange and the École Biblique, see Chapter 7 in this volume. 58  Alfred Loisy, Essai historique sur le sacrifce (Paris: Nourry, 1920). On Loisy, see Chapter 7 in this volume. 59  I found in Loisy’s Essai historique a single reference to Hubert and Mauss’s Essai, on p. 18. 60 Despland, Le recul du sacrifce, 205. 61  See Strenski, Durkheim and the Jews of France, 102. 62  On this wave of anti-­Semitism, see in particular Pierre Birnbaum, Le moment antisémite: un tour de la France en 1898 (Paris: Fayard, 1998).

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236  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism

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among scholars and intellectuals. An anthropologist with deep sympathies for Marxism, he published in 1899 a book identifying the Europeans as Aryans and which saw the Semitic Jews as the most dangerous enemy of the Homo Europaeus, poised to conquer France and Western Europe through their economic domination.63 In their great majority, the anti-­Dreyfusards were closely related to the clerical milieus, while Jewish intellectuals and philo-­Semites squarely stood on the side of Dreyfus. It is against this background that Henri Hubert’s decision to choose the Celts as the core of his scholarship should be seen. To my mind, this choice may refect his wish to contest the idea that all European peoples belonged to the Aryan race.64 In the fnal decade of the nineteenth century and the frst decade of the twentieth, the Dreyfus Afair tore apart French society. To the Dreyfusard camp, by and large, belonged those groping for a scholarly world free of religious prejudices, while the opposite party rejected anything having to do with Jews or Jewish ideas. Jewish historians of religions, like Darmesteter, did not hesitate to express their views against the racist and anti-­Semitic implications of the Aryanism theory.65 For Darmesteter, as for the philosopher and historian of Kabbalah Adolphe Franck a generation before him, there was no such thing as a Jewish race. Te Protestant liberal Albert 63  Georges Vacher de Lapouge, L’Aryen, son rôle social (Paris: Fontemoing, 1899). Te book represents the content of a course taught at the University of Montpellier in 1889–1890. Here are some striking sentences: “Le seul concurrent dangereux de l’Aryen, c’est le Juif ” (464). For the author, the Jews represented an “ethnological” race rather than a biological one: . . . les Juifs sont blonds, les Juifs sont bruns, mas partout ils sont les mêmes, arrogants dans le succès, serviles dans le revers, cauteleux, flous au possible, grands amasseurs d’argent, d’une intelligence remarquable, et cependant impuissants à créer. Aussi dans tous les temps ont-­ils été odieux, et accablés de persécutions qu’ils ont toujours mises sur le compte de leur religion, mais qu’ils semblent avoir méritées par leur mauvaise foi, leur cupidité et leur esprit de domination.  (466) Te book appeared in German translation in Frankfurt in 1939. On the author’s direct infuence on Nazi thought, see Jennifer Michael-­Hecht, “Vacher de Lapouge and the Rise of Nazi Science,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000), 285–303. 64  Unsurprisingly, Hubert had been a supporter of Dreyfus during the Afair. It may not be irrelevant to mention here that Mauss would in the 1930s choose the ancient Germans as the topic of his lectures at the Collège de France. Georges Dumézil was then following Mauss’s lectures. He would himself publish, in 1939, La religion des anciens Germains, a book that became the core of a polemic launched by Arnaldo Momigliano in the 1980s. See Guy G. Stroumsa, “Georges Dumézil, Ancient German Myths, and Modern Demons,” Zeitschrif für Religionswissenschaf 6 (1998), 125–136, reprinted as chapter  8 in Stroumsa, Religion as Intellectual Challenge in the Long Twentieth Century. 65  On this, see especially Demoule, Mais où sont passés les Indo-­Européens? Demoule shows how the invention of this myth was meant to reject the Jewish roots of Christianity, and hence of European identity.

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SACRIFICE COMPARED: ISRAEL AND INDIA  237 Réville put his considerable clout in support of Captain Dreyfus.66 One may conclude that Jewish scholars played a signifcant role in the demise of the modern myth of Semites and Aryans in scholarship. It remains a painful fact that the demise of scholarly myths is not enough to change the tragic course of history. A contemporary literary source refects an attitude that was rather common at the time. In his great saga, In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust places in the mouth of the Duke of Guermantes the following remark: “It is infuriating, the rage of people belonging to one religion to study that of others.”67 In this oblique reference to Swann, a Jew who was researching the Templars’ history, the Duke expresses his own hostility to Jews daring to study Christianity, a religion that should remain the cultural property of its believers, hedged about by “No Trespassing!” signs. Proust’s Duke is articulating the traditional Catholic attitude (which was also that of Renan, as we saw) towards the new voices, and their objection to the visible Jewish presence in religious scholarship.

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Robert Hertz: Becoming the Expiatory Sacrifce Hubert and Mauss had argued that every sacrifce leads to the sacralization of the victim. Durkheim and Mauss, like all French Jews in the era of the Dreyfus Afair, discovered to their shock and distress that they had become the object of many of their compatriots’ hatred. Tese two scholars succeeded in retaining their scholarly detachment. But, as the bafing and tragic case of Robert Hertz (1881–1915) shows, not everyone managed to do so. A scholar of sacrifce, he would go so far as to identify himself as the sacrifcial victim, and ofer the voluntary gif of his own life, to expiate a crime, even a crime committed not by him or by members of his community, but rather against them. Hertz’s case, in which a scholar of religion transforms into the very object of his research, highlights, as it were, the permanence of deep irrationalism in the study of religion itself, at the dawn of the twentieth century.68 66  See Strenski, Contesting Sacrifce, 125–131. 67  “Car c’est inouï la rage des gens d’une religion à étudier celle des autres.” Marcel Proust, Du côté de Guermantes (À la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. VIII) (Paris: NRF, 1919), 233. 68 On the important role of irrationalism in the making of the social sciences, see Jason A. Josephson-­Storm, Te Myth of Disenchantment: Magic Modernity and the Birth of the Social Sciences (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 2017).

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238  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Together with Mauss and Hubert, Hertz was a prominent member of Émile Durkheim’s team around the Année sociologique, which sought to establish the social sciences on solid methodological ground.69 Hertz, who came in frst at the agrégation national contest in philosophy, chose to work as an ethnologist. Among the brilliant minds in Durkheim’s group, he stood out as perhaps the most promising. Like Durkheim and Mauss, Hertz was a Jew who self-­identifed as a socialist and a rationalist.70 Unlike them, Hertz had been raised in a home of “assimilated” bourgeoisie, where no real place was made for knowledge of the Hebrew tradition or of Jewish rituals. His socialism, ultimately rooted, like that of other French intellectuals, in the utopian socialism of Saint Simon and the social doctrine of Auguste Comte, had also been strongly infuenced by the ideals of the Fabian Society. He had discovered these ideas through Frederick Lawson Dodd, a friend he had in common with Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the founders of the Fabian Society. At Durkheim’s suggestion, he stayed in London from 1904 to 1906, working at the British Museum on his doctoral thesis, prepared under Durkheim’s supervision. Tis thesis, on sin and expiation in primitive societies, would remain unfnished. In 1922, Mauss published its long introduction, together with notes on what should have become chapters of the fnished thesis.71 Te third and fnal part of the planned thesis would have been entitled “La souffrance rédemptive.” Te conclusion of this fnal part of the book was to deal with the theory of the sacrifce of the man-­God and with “the future of the notions of sin and expiation in our societies.” As this outline indicates, for Hertz, ethnology was never detached from behavioral norms, and the objective study of distant societies was also his way to express a yearning to fully belong to his own society. Mauss concluded his introduction to the publication of Hertz’s unfnished thesis with the remark that “Hertz himself signed his ethics (sa morale) with his own blood.”72

69  On Hertz and his work, see in particular Robert Parkin, Te Dark Side of Humanity: Te Work of Robert Hertz and its Legacy (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996). Afer a biographical chapter and one on Hertz as a political pamphleteer, Parkin devotes four chapters to his major works. 70  See Alexander Tristan Riley, Godless Intellectuals: Te Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred Reinvented (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), 125–134. 71  Robert Hertz, Le péché et l’expiation dans les sociétés primitives (Paris: J.-M. Place, 1988) [re-­ edition of Marcel Mauss in Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 1922 (Paris: Leroux, 1922), 1–­60]. 72  Ibid., 53.

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SACRIFICE COMPARED: ISRAEL AND INDIA  239 Like the unfnished thesis, most of Hertz’s articles demonstrate his deep interest in problems of religion.73 His focal point was the interface between religious beliefs and practices, the fate of the individual and his dealing with death, and the well-­being of society. In his important “Collective representation of death,” frst published in the Année sociologique in 1907, he insisted that it is only at the end of a long and complex process of ritualized mourning that “society, having returned to peace, may overcome death.”74 Half a century afer their initial publication, in 1960, some of Hertz’s seminal articles were published in English translation. In his introduction, E. E. Evans-­Pritchard notes that the centrality of religion for Hertz, as well as for Durkheim and Mauss, also refected a fascination with aspects of Christianity: the idea of Ecclesia for Durkheim, the sacrifce of mass for Mauss, and the sacrament of auricular confession for Hertz. Evans-­Pritchard calls for a study of these intellectuals (as well as many others, such as Bergson and Proust) regarding what he refers to as “their dual Jewish and rationalist upbringing and Catholic background.”75 Hertz’s interest in and respect for religious rituals also seems to have included the Jewish tradition, with which he was not familiar. His sister’s religious wedding ceremony stirred him to express how he had been moved by those old traditions. He never sought to deny his Jewish identity. In January 1898, when Zola published his celebrated open letter, “J’accuse,” in the daily newspaper L’aurore, Hertz was barely seventeen years old. He thus belonged to a generation of French Jews that were deeply marked by the Afaire, shocked to discover the virulence of anti-­Semitic sentiments, and the violence of their expression, throughout large segments of the French population (in particular among the supporters of the Church). And yet,

73  Robert Hertz, Mélanges de sociologie religieuse et folklore, with preface by Alice Robert Hertz (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1928). Five texts are reproduced in this volume. Te frst two also appeared in English translation (by Rodney and Claudia Needham), with an introduction by E. E. Evans-­Pritchard, as Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand (Aberdeen: Cohen and West, 1960). Tese two seminal studies of Hertz were republished, together with a third one, “Saint Besse: Study of an Alpine Cult,” in Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, and Robert Hertz, Saints, Heroes, Myths, and Rites: Classical Durkheimian Studies of Religion and Society, ed. and transl. Alexander Riley, Sarah Daynes, and Cyril Isnard (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2009). As we saw (n. 6 above) Evans-­Prichard also wrote the introduction to the English translation of Hubert and Mauss’s Essai sur la nature et function du sacrifce. 74  Mélanges de sociologie religieuse et folklore, 121; cf. Carlo Ginzburg, “Representation—the Word, the Idea, the Ting,” in Carlo Ginzburg, Wooden Eyes: Nine Refections on Distance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001 [Italian original 1998]), 63–78, here 66, where Hertz’s essay is described as “splendid.” “Representation” originally appeared in Annales (1991). 75  E. E. Evans-­Pritchard, “Introduction,” in Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, 9–24.

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240  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism Hertz makes a point of rejecting Zola’s “J’accuse,” which, he says, attacked directly what were for him symbols of France itself.

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Although I am a Jew, or, rather, because I am a Jew, and because I stick furiously to the fatherland that chance gave me, I have been revolted, like all true and impartial Frenchmen, by the too-­famous letter.76

Years later, in the trenches, Hertz’s tone is diferent: it is as a man revolted by injustice, rather than as a Jew, that he sympathizes with Dreyfus, or with other sufering Jews.77 Hertz thus reveals himself to have been profoundly ambivalent about his Jewish identity. At once unable and unwilling to deny this identity, he felt that his Jewishness set him apart from his Gentile countrymen, with whom he desperately wished to identify. Tis intense and brilliant scholar was indeed a personality set in tensions, even contradictions. At the outbreak of the First World War, Hertz joined a fghting unit, in full knowledge that this would put him on the front lines. In April 1915, he was indeed killed in action on the Meuse. Hertz, as we learn from his correspondence, ofered his life to his country expressly and willingly, even happily. In the words of his widow, he aspired “to the ardent region where full sacrifce (le plein sacrifce) is being burned, and where the individual disappears, absorbed by the social forces to which he consciously wanted, with all his soul, to submit.”78 From August 1914 to April 1915, on the eve of his death, Hertz wrote to his wife, Alice, on an almost daily basis. Tese missives, published in 2002, are both profoundly touching and deeply disturbing: they show how Hertz turned himself into a sacrifcial lamb for the real or imagined sins of Israel, and for the welfare and salvation of society. He became the sufering servant of the Lord on the model of Isaiah 53, taking upon himself the divine punishment for all of his 76  He expresses these ideas in a letter to his friend Lawson Dodd from April 1898: “. . . bien que juif, ou plutôt parce que je suis juif et que je m’attache avec frénésie à la patrie que le hasard m’a donnée, j’ais été indigné comme tous les vrais français impartiaux de la letttre trop fameuse.” Alexandre Riley and Philippe Besnard, eds, Un ethnologue dans les tranchées: aoȗt 1914- avril 1915: lettres de Robert Hertz a sa femme Alice (Paris: CNRS, 2002), 12. 77  “Non je ne sympathise pas pour Dreyfus ni pour les juifs de Roumanie parce que juifs mais parce que victimes de l’injustice . . .” Letter to his sister Fanny, from 1902; see Nicolas Mariot, Histoire d’un sacrifce: Robert, Alice et la guerre (Paris: Seuil, 2017), 149. Te underlining is Hertz’s. 78 Alice Hertz, “Preface,” in Robert Hertz, Mélanges de sociologie religieuse et folklore, XIV. For a further discussion of these letters, see “Sacrifce Accomplished: Robert Hertz,” chapter 3 in Stroumsa, Religion as Intellectual Challenge in the Long Twentieth Century.

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SACRIFICE COMPARED: ISRAEL AND INDIA  241 people’s sins. Tis brilliant, conficted scholar transformed himself into nothing short of a Christ fgure.

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Oriental Religions In 1906, the Belgian classicist Franz Cumont (1868–1947) published Les Religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, thus embarking upon a journey to uncharted lands. Te book, based on lectures he had delivered at the Collège de France the preceding year, proposed a new understanding of late antique religious history. Cumont’s main claim was that only the development of the “Oriental religions” in the Roman Empire could explain the eventual end of ancient polytheism and the success of Christianity. By referring to “Oriental religions,” Cumont was seeking to bring the Near East back into the purview of historians of Roman religions and Christian origins, as well as to move the scholarly investigation beyond the traditional formulation about the Jewish, monotheistic roots of Christianity. At the same time, he aimed to usher classicists and Orientalists into a renewed conversation.79 Since Greek antiquity, the Orient has been perceived as a potent seductress. At the turn of the twentieth century, in the world of German scholarship, the case of Richard Reitzenstein ofers a clear analogue to that of Cumont. At the time, the parallel between Reinach’s “mirage oriental” and Renan’s “miracle grec” was indeed powerful. But it was to a diferent kind of East that Cumont was referring. Te First World Congress of Orientalists had taken place in Paris in 1873. In his address to the Second Congress which took place in London in 1874, Max Müller contrasted the military conquest of Eastern nations to the true “conquest,” that of Orientalist scholarship. Müller, however, was mainly interested in the religious literatures of India and further East. To take one example among many: a book published in 1891, under the title Oriental Religions and Christianity, which stemmed from a series of lectures at the Union Teological Seminary in New York, deals with Hinduism, Buddhism, and what was then called Mohammedanism. It compares the New Testament to the Bhagavad-­Gita, but does not refer, even in cursory fashion, to the “Oriental religions” of the early Christian centuries studied by 79  For the best edition, see the frst volume of the Bibliotheca Cumontiana, Scripta Maiora, I: Franz Cumont, Les religions orientales dans le paganisme romain, Corinne Bonnet and Françoise Van Haeperen, eds, with Bastien Toune (Turin: Nino Aragno, 2006).

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Cumont.80 Te latter’s decision to refer to the “Oriental religions” of the Near East, then, refects a real shif in scholarship. Cumont’s perspective on the Orient was the obverse of Renan’s.81 What Cumont admired and respected, Renan despised and rejected.82 Isis, Sarapis, Mithra: the heroes of Cumont’s book, under their “exotic dress,” represented for Renan the superstitions of the Orient, conquering the very heart of Europe, “shaking hands” with the worst in Western religiosity, while for Cumont the time was not yet ripe for a scholarly handshake across the same landscapes. From Renan to Cumont, we can follow the transformation of a negative, rather simplistic perception of the Orient and of Oriental religions to a more complex one, endowed with more positive features. Like Müller, Renan classifed races and religions along a neat taxonomy, Indo-­European versus Semitic. Tis dual taxonomy had been spread among French historians, in particular, by Fustel de Coulanges’ La cité antique, which sought to go back to the earliest, Indo-­European roots of the religions of Greece and Rome.83 While Cumont basically accepted the dichotomy between Aryans and Semites, he did not share in the instinctive dismissal of the Semitic world. He considered Judaism as the highest expression of Semitic religiosity—and religion was the only feld of culture in which the Semites were able to express real creativity, namely, their invention of monotheism. For Renan, however—and this is quite typical of traditional scholarly 80 F. F. Ellinwood, Oriental Religions and Christianity (New York: Scribners, 1892). 81 On Cumont’s view of Renan, see Corinne Bonnet, “Les ‘Religions Orientales’ au Laboratoire de l’Hellénisme,” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 8 (2006), 181–205, esp. 192–193. Bonnet refects in this article upon Cumont’s positive attitude towards the concept of the Orient, arguing convincingly that the idea of Oriental religions is today a relatively useless category, and should be abandoned. See further Danny Praet, “Oriental Religions and the Conversion of the Roman Empire: Te Views of Ernest Renan and of Franz Cumont in the Transition from Traditional Paganism to Christianity,” in David Engels and Peter van Nufelen, eds, Religion and Competition in Antiquity (Brussels: Latomus, 2014), 285f. 82  L’élément barbare ne se glisse qu’en prenant l’apparence et la couleur du mythe grec. Plus tard, les cultes étrangers ne se donneront plus la peine de changer de vêtement. Isis, Serapis, Mithra viendront trôner en pleine Grèce, sous leur accoutrement exotique, comme pour préluder a ces monstrueux amalgames où les superstitions de l’Orient et celles de l’Occident, les excès du sentiment religieux et ceux de la pensée philosophique, l’astrologie et la magie, la théurgie et l’extase néo-­platonicienne semblent se donner la main. Ernest Renan, Etudes d’histoire religieuse (3rd edn; Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1858), 48. 83  Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (1830–1889) published his seminal La cité antique: Étude sur le culte, de droit, les institutions de la Grèce et de Rome (Paris: Durand, 1864) while he was a professor at the University of Strasbourg. Te Aryan origin and nature of both Greeks and Romans (“. . . ces deux peuples, qui étaient deux branches d’une même race . . .”) is mentioned in the very frst paragraph of the book’s introduction.

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SACRIFICE COMPARED: ISRAEL AND INDIA  243 perceptions—Judaism was too similar, in the public formality of its ritualism, to Roman religion, to have ofered any signifcant spiritual challenge to ­religious men and women in the Empire. For Cumont, on the other side, “Oriental religions,” which “dealt with man as a whole” were another story altogether.84 Cumont, however, also inherited Renan’s perception of Judaism, difering here from his contemporary Alfred Loisy.85 While the latter had allotted to the Semites, in the feld of religion—and only in this feld—cultural superiority, Cumont evinced no interest in that ominous slip from linguistic categories to racial taxonomy so common in the late nineteenth century, and so clearly refected in Müller and Renan. While, in all likelihood, Cumont was indebted to Renan’s intellectual heritage, the major transformation of the discourse that occurred from Renan to Cumont demands due note. Te latter, indeed, avoided being ensnared by Renan’s identifcation of the Orient with a hypostasized Semitic world—a false concept, born from the amalgam of a category mistake and the modern avatar of old religious prejudices. Cumont broadened Renan’s concept of Semitic creativity in matters of religion (and only in those matters) to “the Orient.” For him, indeed, the East is superior to the West, in particular in matters of religion. What for Gibbon had represented the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” for Cumont refected growth. In the religious sphere, late antiquity showed progress, not decadence. Tis progress, of course, found its ultimate expression in the victory of Christianity. In a sense, this scheme represents a return to the categories of traditional Christian historiography, but with a crucial twist: this victory was prepared not so much by Judaism as by the “Oriental religions.” Cumont’s notion of the spiritual superiority of “Oriental religions” fnds its roots in the modern European tradition of Orientalism, from the 84  “Elles prenaient l’homme tout entier,” Cumont, Les religions orientales, 40. 85  See Corinne Bonnet and Annelies Lannoy, “Penser les religions anciennes et la ‘religion de l’humanité’ au début du vingtième siècle: Le dialogue Loisy-­Cumont,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 234 (2017), 797–822; cf. Annelies Lannoy, “Le Jubilé Loisy de 1927: Entre histoire des religions et histoire du christianisme,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 229 (2012), 503–526. Lannoy refers there to the tense religious atmosphere in France during the institutionalization phase of the history of religions, which explains why Cumont resigned from the honorary committee established to celebrate Loisy’s achievements. See further Annelies Lannoy, “Saint Paul in Early Twentieth-­Century History of Religions. Te ‘Mystic of Jesus’ and the Pagan Mystery Cults afer the Correspondence of Franz Cumont and Alfred Loisy,” Zeitschrif für Religion- und Geistesgeschichte 64 (2012), 222–239; cf. the epistolary exchange between Cumont and Loisy: “Mon cher Mithra” Correspondance entre Franz Cumont et Alfred Loisy, eds Annelies Lannoy, Corinne Bonnet, and Danny Praet, Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Letttres, 55 (Paris: AIBL, 2019) [non vidi].

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seventeenth century on.86 Moreover, it refects the transformations of the religious Orient we have traced in the course of this book. It was only following the paradigm shif that occurred with the institutionalization of Orientalism that the idea of “Oriental religions” could materialize in scholarly discourse. In this fnal chapter, which brought us back to Francophone scholarship at the turn of the twentieth century and in its frst two decades, we were able to follow some deep transformations in the study of religion in general, and monotheism in particular. We saw the role played by Jewish scholars in the fnal debunking of the Aryans versus Semites myth, at a time of heightened anti-­Semitism, and also, with the odd case of Hertz, the price some of these Jewish scholars eventually paid. Finally, Cumont’s focus on the Oriental religions in the Roman world represent, in a sense, the fnal demise of what Reinach could call the “oriental mirage.”

86  See Stroumsa, A New Science, as well as Guy  G.  Stroumsa, “Ex Oriente Numen: From Orientalism to Oriental Religions,” in Corinne Bonnet, Vinciane Pirenne-­Delforge, and Danny Praet, eds, Franz Cumont et les religions orientales (Brussels, Rome: Istituto storico belga di Roma, 2009), 89–101.

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Conclusion

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Comparing Monotheisms

Guided by the leading thread of the idea of Semitic monotheism, we have charted many storylines in the chapters of this book. In order to follow the trajectory of this scholarly idea, it was imperative to consider the historical, cultural, and religious contexts in which it was born, grew, and eventually waned. Rather than seeking to study a whole feld, I have focused here on one major theme. No systematic survey of other problems encountered was attempted, nor any review of the methods developed by the modern history of religion in its most dynamic period. My aim was rather more modest: to shed light, from diferent angles, on the study of the monotheistic religions, in a century which saw the collapse of the old paradigm emphasizing the “family resemblance” ([Familienähnlichkeit], to use Wittgenstein’s metaphor) between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and its replacement by a dual taxonomy opposing Semites to Aryans. Troughout the chapters of this book, the presence of Judaism has been more prominent than that of Islam. Tis imbalance refects the fact that the idea launched by Renan was directly related to the perception of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. Te Jewish presence in countries of Western Europe, moreover, compounded by the high percentage of Jewish scholars of religion, also meant that Jews would be more visible than Muslims in this book. Additionally, I hope to have shown that the study of Judaism and Islam in the long nineteenth century was fraught with problems and paradoxes stemming from broader cultural shifs in European societies in the age of secularization. Our period, moreover, saw the growth of modern racism, which took the form of anti-­Semitism against the Jews of Europe, as well as that of imperialism and colonialism, which fostered Islamophobic sentiment against Muslims, mainly outside Europe. It is in this multifaceted context, I argue, that one should understand the rise and fall of the myth of Semitic monotheism forged by Renan. Indeed, as the eminent Sanskritist Charles Malamoud writes, in a remark that serves as a The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth. Guy G. Stroumsa, Oxford University Press (2021). © Guy G. Stroumsa. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192898685.003.0012

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246  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism motto of this book, in their quest for new insights on human cultures, scholars themselves occasionally concoct myths.1 Te tasks undertaken by the scholars of religion we met in these pages ofen brought them into confict with their own religious upbringing and communities: witness, for example, Ernest Renan, William Robertson Smith, and Julius Wellhausen. While each of these fgures approached the study of Judaism and Islam in his own particular way, as a group they remained faithful to their scholarly Beruf, never relinquishing their search for truth. For this scholarly integrity, which required intellectual courage, each of them ultimately payed a personal, sometimes heavy, price. Te idea of Semitic monotheism, from its birth and growth to its eventual demise, was devised in a context of cultural comparatism, one imbued with a value system which clearly sought to arrange races, cultures, and religions in an ascending scale, with white, Christian European peoples on top.2 Te invention of the “world religions,” which grew in the fnal decades of the century, did much to disrupt the idea of a family relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the three religious traditions that are now ofen called the Abrahamic religions.3 Long before the end of the nineteenth century, the three rings had disappeared, together with the three impostors. For most European scholars, in the period that concerned us in this book, Christianity had so little in common with Judaism and Islam that their comparative study was not considered worthwhile. As an epistemological paradigm, comparing is of course as old as thought itself. It is in the nineteenth century, however, that comparatism. became a common method of scholarly and scientifc investigation in a broad spectrum of academic disciplines. Te age of imperialism and colonialism, in particular, promoted the comparative study of vastly diferent societies in the felds of languages, literatures, legal and economic systems, social or­gan­ i­za­tion, history, and the arts. Moreover, the use made of the comparative method in the natural sciences, which had proved highly successful from a 1 Charles Malamoud, “Histoire des religions et comparatisme: la question indo-­ européenne,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 208 (1991), 115–121. 2  For a typical instance of the total demise of the idea of Semitic monotheism in contemporary scholarship, see Aziz Al-­Azmeh, Te Emergence of Islam in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambidge University Press, 2014). Renan is mentioned only once in this hefy book, and there is no entry on Semitic monotheism in the index. See in particular Chapter fve, “Allāh” (379–357), where the author makes no appeal to a pre-­Islamic Arab monotheism. 3  See Masuzawa, Te Invention of World Religions. See also, for their historical contextualization within religious transformations in the second half of the nineteenth century J.  Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: Eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Beck, 2009), Chapter XVIII, 1239–11,278, esp. 1243–1244.

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Conclusion  247 heuristic viewpoint since the days of Cuvier’s comparative anatomy, had a profound bearing on the Humanities. Rather late in the game, but before the curtain came down on the nineteenth century, the comparative approach, which had blossomed since the Enlightenment, had penetrated academia. In some cases, it succeeded in gaining ofcial status. Comparative religion, as well as, for instance, comparative literature, would become recognized as a legitimate and fruitful scholarly enterprise. Universities adopted the separation of faculties and the diferentiation of disciplines conceived by Wilhelm von Humboldt, and, according to the Humboldtian model, the study of religious phenomena was ofen split between a number of faculties, such as theology, philosophy, and Oriental studies. Nonetheless, serious attempts to bridge the emerging felds have been made at least since the second half of the nineteenth century. Distinct university departments were established where diferent religions or literatures were studied together, with the goal of identifying patterns of similarity and diference. In felds such as law, politics, and history, the comparative method never quite attained the same recognition. Yet throughout the twentieth century this method was possessed of a certain stature, while remaining an exotic appendix of sorts to the core of scholarly activity. Alongside the explicit objectives of the comparative method, namely, comparing phenomena in order to understand their essence and analyze their manifestations, it has other aims—more implicit but no less im­por­ tant. In assessing comparative eforts, several questions ought to be posed: Who compares what? Which tools are to be selected for the comparison? And, more fundamentally, why compare at all? Two opposing approaches vie for primacy here: One is the search for similarities between the comparanda; the other is the search for meaningful diferences. Taking a cue from John Stuart Mill, who discussed two distinct methods of comparison, one can juxtapose the “method of agreement” to the “method of diference.”4 Te choice of method tends to refect unspoken assumptions. For instance, civilizations, or elements thereof, have long been compared in an efort to establish a hierarchy of cultural value; this was a favored tactic of European imperialists, who used comparison as a tool of colonial domination. In other contexts, such as interfaith practice, similarities are sought between religions while deep diferences are ofen ignored or muted. Such practices refect a conception of comparatism as an ideology (seeking either 4  See the discussion of this point in Jürgen Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond.” History and Teory 42 (2003), 39–44.

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248  The Idea of Semitic Monotheism to rank cultures or to erase diferences between them) rather than as an investigative approach. Tey cast a long shadow on the comparative method, now deemed of dubious scholarly merit. To these blemishes of the comparative approach other problems were added, which contributed to a loss of its prestige and a deprecation of its use. Foremost among these are the depth and breadth of knowledge required in order to properly compare cultures. Mastery of multiple languages demands a huge investment of time and efort, hardly encouraged under the current conditions of academia. Te dramatic accumulation of knowledge and the sheer number of scholars has meant a radical demand for early specialization. “Knowing more and more about less and less,” as the stinging adage goes, has also meant, inter alia, the demise of “romantic” attempts at broad comparisons between cultures. Herein lies a paradox: the more focused (read: limited) one’s own feld of expertise becomes, the greater the need to relate one’s work to what is being done in other felds and compare. And the more taking this path becomes imperative, the less it seems to be trodden. Tere are diferent kinds of comparative cultures, just as there are moments in which certain types of comparison are more natural or more convincing than others. One can also speak of synchronic, as well as diachronic, comparison. One may even entertain the idea of drawing a genealogy of regimes of comparison. Since Herodotus, historiography has been a comparative activity. For the comparative study of religion, the fnal decades of the nineteenth century and the frst ones of the twentieth were, as we have seen above, a “magical moment.”5 Later on, the comparative ethos, without disappearing, seems to weaken considerably. From time to time, we hear a call to pay due respect to the comparative task. One may refer here to Marc Bloch’s work on the cusp of the Second World War, or to the recent, powerful demonstration of the value of comparative history made by Sir John Elliott.6 Yet the default option always involves studying the past of a single society (ofen one’s own). Today, it would seem that Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s concept of “connected history” succeeds in afrming the dynamic and integrative character of comparing 5  See Stroumsa, “History of Religions: Te Comparative Moment.” 6  See Marc Bloch, “Pour une histoire comparée des sociétés européennes,” in M. Bloch (ed.), L’Histoire, la Guerre, la Résistance (Paris: Gallimard, 2006 [1938]), 349–380. See further John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press, 2006); John H. Elliott, History in the Making (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2012), esp. Chapter 5.

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Conclusion  249

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societies in their historical, contextual interface.7 One wonders whether broadening such a concept to ft disciplines other than history may not put us on the right track in our search for a new paradigm of comparison between societies and cultures. Nowadays, it has become customary to speak of the Abrahamic religions, an inclusive term referring to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. From a heuristic perspective, at least, the idea of the Abrahamic religions appears to function more or less as “Semitic monotheism” did more than a century ago. While the common use of the expression “Abrahamic religions” is quite recent, its gestation has been a long one. As demonstrated by Mark Silk, the adjective “Abrahamic” itself is more than two centuries old. And yet, the prevailing use of “Abrahamic religions” to refer to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, is a much newer phenomenon. Silk notes that, in English at least, its usage doubled between 1980 and 1995, only to double again by 2005.8 Te soil in which the locution frst grew, however, is most likely to have been continental Europe. As I have argued elsewhere, it seems that the new, common use of the notion originates in the writings of the French Arabist Louis Massignon (1883–1962) and was developed by some of his Maronite students at the Collège de France.9 Scholars have identifed several difculties raised by the concept of Abrahamic religions, to which a number of monographs have been de­voted.10 I shall mention in this regard two works by American scholars. In 2012, Jon Levenson published a book on the fgure of Abraham in Judaism, 7  See, e.g., Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); cf. the French concept of histoires croisées, which covers much of the same semantic feld. 8  See Mark Silk, “Te Abrahamic Religions as a Modern Concept,” in Adam J. Silverstein and Guy  G.  Stroumsa, eds, and Moshe Blidstein, ass. ed., Te Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions, 71–87. 9  Te French Arabist Massignon seems to have been at the root of the modern use of the Abrahamic religions. See in particular his Les trois prières d’Abraham (Paris: Cerf, 1997). On the origins of the concept of the Abrahamic religions, see for instance Guy G. Stroumsa, “From Abraham’s Religion to the Abrahamic Religions,” Historia Religionum 3 (2011), 11–22, which represents the text of my inaugural lecture as the frst Professor of the Study of the Abrahamic Religions at the University of Oxford, in May 2010. 10  For some salient examples see, for instance, Karl-­Josef Kuschel, Abraham: A Symbol of Hope fore Jews, Christians and Muslims (London, SCM Press, 1995 [original German version 1994]); Carol Delaney, Abraham on Trial: Te Social Legacy of Biblical Myth (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1998); Kelly James Clark, ed., Abraham’s Children: Liberty and Tolerance in an Age of Religious Confict (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); Henry Hanoch Abramovitch, Te First Father, Abraham: Te Psychology and Culture of a Spiritual Revolutionary (Seattle, WA: Libertary Editions, 2010); Carol Bakhos, Te Family of Abraham: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Interpretations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).

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Christianity, and Islam.11 Te same year saw the publication of Aaron Hughes’s investigation on the heuristic value of the concept of Abrahamic religions.12 Both authors react to what they rightly perceive as a new scholarly trend to use, in rather uncritical fashion, an expression originally coined by theologians for interfaith dialogue. And both authors suggest that such use of the term “Abrahamic religions” might put historical research on the wrong track. Intellectual accuracy, for them, demands rigorous tools, crafed especially for the task at hand, rather than tools adapted from a purpose wholly diferent than that for which they had been designed.13 Concepts dealing with religion tend to be laden with theological overtones. Te attempt to avoid religiously tainted vocabulary at all costs may thus be fancifully misguided. Yet, care must be taken. Carlo Ginzburg has likened the historian to a surgeon, who is responsible for sterilizing their instruments before proceeding to an operation.14 Te need for sterilizing our concepts and categories is nowhere as imperative as in the history of religion. Although historians of religions are not in the business of ofering normative statements, they cannot ignore the fact that the comparative study of religions has direct implications for our present societies. Too ofen, the comparative study of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam appears as a search for the “spiritual roots of Europe,” a belated corrective, as it were, to the rejection of Judaism and Islam as religions essentially and irremediably 11 Jon D. Levenson, Inheriting Abraham: Te Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Princeton, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012). See already Jon D. Levenson, Abraham between Torah and Gospel, Te Père Marquette Lecture in Teology 2011 (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2011). Note that the Festschif for Levenson, edited by Gary Anderson and Joel S. Kaminsky, is entitled Te Call of Abraham: Essays on the Election of Israel (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2013). 12  Aaron Hughes, Abrahamic Religions: On the Uses and Abuses of History (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 13  Levenson emphasizes the diferent emblematic fgures of Abraham as they are presented and developed in the various Abrahamic religions. He emphasizes the fact that the Patriarch’s legacy is a diferent one in each case. In a sense, Levenson returns here, with a greater scholarly accuracy, to the elevated level of Massignon’s Tree Prayers of Abraham: the diferences in the personality of Abraham as forged by the three traditions refect their own inclinations, their own perception of the essence of Abrahamic monotheism. Unlike Massignon, however, Levenson argues that speaking of three equally “Abrahamic” religions, just as hypostatizing an imaginary Abrahamic “meta-­religion” of which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would be historical variants, refects, to put it mildly, both wishful thinking and historical dramatic inaccuracies. He echoes here the Catholic philosopher Rémi Brague, who has argued forcefully against the idea of the Abrahamic religions. For Brague, the status of Islam, which does not accept the Bible (any version of it) as revealed literature, is here strikingly diferent from that of both Judaism and Christianity. See Rémi Brague, Du Dieu des chrétiens et d’un ou deux autres (Paris: Flammarion, 2008), esp. 26–33. 14  See Carlo Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (London, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 97–119, esp. 107–108.

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Conclusion  251 foreign to Christian Europe.15 As we have seen in this book, what Salomon Reinach dubbed “the Oriental mirage” was responsible for ominous intellectual misperceptions. Tese, in their turn, begot abominable attitudes, which ended in the Nazi genocide of the Jews.16 Te contemporary lively public discussion in Europe regarding the waves of immigration coming from Muslim countries is also sometimes marred by strident and raucous overtones, which echo anti-­Semitic discourse from the previous century. Although there are signifcant diferences between European attitudes towards Jews on the one hand, and towards Muslims on the other, as well as between European perceptions of Judaism and Islam, one can hope that refecting on the roots of these perceptions may shed new light on current debates. Te radical opposition between Athens and Jerusalem, standard from Tertullian to Lev Chestov, might therefore advantageously be replaced by a long arc, stretching from Baghdad to Toledo, through Mecca, Jerusalem, Alexandria, Athens, and Rome. It is along this arc that the complex interface between languages, religions, and cultures eventually forged what we call the European cultural identity. Europe has lost most of its former Jewish communities. At the same time, the combined efects of decolonization and globalization have led to a massive surge of Muslim populations in Western European societies. It appears that, for the European mind, the status of the stranger within, coming from the East, once exemplifed by that of the Jew, has now become that of the Muslim. Today, more than ever, a potent Islamophobia is thriving in European societies. It has not, however, replaced Judeophobia; rather, the two diseases have found ample room to cohabit. In fact, they even seem to be mutually reinforcing.17 Hatred of Jews fuels hatred of Muslims, and vice versa. Judaism and Islam in the mind of Europe: this is the unfnished—and perhaps interminable—story of our time.

15 See, for instance, the demonstration of Dietmar Müller about two case studies, Staatsbürger auf Widerruf: Juden und Muslime als Alteritätspartner in rumänischen und serbischen Nationscode: Ethnonationale Staatsbürgerschafskonzepte 1878–1941 (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2005). 16  Te Nazis, who were not overly concerned with the logical cogency of their ideology and behavior, also sought to annihilate the Sinti and Roma, Indo-­European peoples par excellence. 17  See, for instance, Matti Bunzl, Anti-­Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe (Chicago, IL: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2007), as well as Hillel Schenker and Ziad Abu-­ Zayyad, eds, Islamophobia and Anti-­Semitism (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2006). Sadly, one must point out that the contemporary rebirth of anti-­Semitism (which, one had naively hoped would have disappeared with the defeat of Nazism) also seems to be sometimes fueled among the new European Muslim populations. For the refections of a contemporary philosopher on religious tensions between the three monotheisms, see Peter Sloterdijk, Gottes Eifer: Vom Kampf der drei Monotheismen (Frankfurt, Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 2007).

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260 Bibliography Delaney, Carol, Abraham on Trial: Te Social Legacy of Biblical Myth (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1998). Delitzsch, Franz, Jesus und Hillel: Mit Rücksicht auf Renan und Geiger verglichen (Erlangen: Deichert, 1866). Delitzsch, Friedrich, Babel und Bibel, Erster Vortrag (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1902). Delitzsch, Friedrich, Babel und Bibel, Ein Vortrag (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1903). Delitzsch, Friedrich, Babel und Bibel, Dritter Vortrag (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1905). Delitzsch, Friedrich, Babel and Bible: Signifcance of Assyriological Research for Religion (Chicago, IL: Open Court, 1905). Delitzsch, Friedrich, Die grosse Täuschung (Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1921). Demoule, Jean-Paul, Mais où sont passés les Indo-européens? Le mythe d’origine de l’Occident (Paris: Seuil, 2014). Derenbourg, Hartwig, La science des religions et l’islamisme: deux conférences (Paris: Leroux, 1886). Descola, Philippe, “Anthropological Comparatisms: Generalisation, Symmetrisation, Bifurcation,” in Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geofrey  E.  R.  Lloyd, eds, Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology, Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 24 (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2018), 402–417. Despland, Michel, La religion en occident: évolution des idées et du vécu (Montréal: Fides, 1979). Despland, Michel, L’émergence des sciences de la religion: La Monarchie de juillet: Un moment fondateur (Paris, Montreal: L’Harmattan, 1999). Despland, Michel, “Les sciences religieuses en France 1880–1886: des sciences que l’on pratique mais que l’on n’enseigne pas,” in his Comparatisme et christianisme: Questions d’histoire et de méthode (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002). Despland, Michel, Le recul du sacrifce: quatre siècles de polémiques françaises (Montréal: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2009). Detienne, Marcel and Jean-Pierre Vernant, La cuisine du sacrifce en pays grec (Paris: Gallimard, 1979). Doering, Lutz, “Wilhelm Bousset’s Die Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter,” Early Christianity 6 (2015), 51–66. Doniger, Wendy, “Te Postcolonial and Postmodern Critique of Comparison,” in her Te Implied Spider: Politics and Teology in Myth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 64–71. Doryon, Israël, Freud et le monothéisme hébreu: L’homme Moïse (Paris: Zikarone, 1972 [Hebrew edn; 1946]). Droit, Poger-Pol, Le culte du néant: les philosophes et le Bouddha (Paris: Seuil, 1997). Dubois, Jean-Daniel, “Mani, le prophète de l’humanité entière”, in Jean-Christophe Attias, Pierre Gisel, and Lucie Kaennel, eds, Messianismes, Variations sur une ­fgure juive (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 2000), 195–212. Dubuisson, Daniel, Te Western Construction of Religion: Myths, Knowledge, and  Ideology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003 [French original: L’Occident et la religion: mythes, science et idéologie (Paris: Complexe, 1998)]).

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Bibliography  261 Duchêne, Hervé, “Introduction,” in Salomon Reinach, Cultes, Mythes et Religions (Paris: Robert Lafont, 1999), LXII. von Düfel, Peter, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Nathan der Weise: Erläuterungen und Dokumente (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006). Dunkelgrün, Teodor, “Dating the Even Bohan of Qalonymos ben Qalonymos of Arles. A Microhistory of Scholarship,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 7:1 (2013), 39–72. Dupré, Louis, “Te Structure and Meaning of Sacrifce: From Marcel Mauss to René Girard,” Archivio di Filosofa 76 (2008), 253–259. Dupuis, Charles F., Origine de tous les cultes, ou Religion universelle (four vols; Paris: an III [1794]). Dussaud, René, Introduction à l’histoire des religions (Paris: Leroux, 1914). Dussieux, Louis, Essai sur l’histoire de l’érudition orientale (Paris: Imprimerie de Bourgogne et Martinet, 1842). Dye, Guillaume, “Les Grecs, les Arabes et les ‘racines’ de l’Europe: réfexions sur ‘l’afaire Gougenheim,’ ” Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire 87 (2009), 811–835. Eagleton, Terry, “Te Signifcance of Teory,” in his Te Signifcance of Teory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). Eagleton, Terry, Radical Sacrifce (New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press, 2018). Edwards, Mark, “Pagan and Christian Monotheism in the Age of Constantine,” in  Mark Edwards and Simon Swaine, eds, Approaching Late Antiquity: Te Transformation from Early to Late Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 211–234. Efron, John, German Jewry and the Allure of the Sefardic (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016). Eichhorn, J. G., ed., Repertorium für biblische und morgenländische Literatur, Vol. VIII (Leipzig: Weidmanns, 1781). Eilberg-Schwartz, Howard, Te Savage in Judaism: An Anthropology of Israelite Religion and Ancient Judaism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990). Eliade, Mircea, Journal II, 1957–1969 (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 1977). Ellinwood, F. F., Oriental Religions and Christianity (New York: Scribners, 1892). Elliott, John  H., Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492–1830. (New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press, 2006). Elliott, John H., History in the Making (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2012). Ertman, Tomas  C., ed., Max Weber’s Economic Ethic of the World Religions: An Analysis (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). Espagne, Michel and Perrine Simon-Nahum, eds, Passeurs d’Orient: les Juifs dans l’orientalisme (Paris: L’Éclat, 2013). Espagne, Michel and Michael Werner, “La construction d’une référence culturelle allemande en France: genèse et histoire (1750–1914),” Annales ESS 42 (1987), 969–992. Espagne, Michel and Michael Werner, Les juifs allemands de Paris à l’époque de Heine: la translation ashkenaze (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1996).

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262 Bibliography Espagne, Michel and Michael Werner, Les transferts culturels franco-allmands (Paris: Pressees Universitaires de France, 1999). Espagne, Michel, Nora Laf, and Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn, eds, Silvestre de Sacy: le projet européen d’une science orientaliste (Paris: Cerf, 2014). Espagne, Michel, Svetlana Gorshenina, Frantz Grenet, Shahin Mustafayev, and Claude Rapin, eds, Asie centrale: Transferts culturels le long de la route de la soie (Paris: Vendémiaire, 2016). Evans-Pritchard, E. E., “Introduction,” in Robert Hertz, Death and the Right Hand, transl. Rodney and Claudia Needham (Aberdeen: Cohen and West, 1960), 9–24. van Ess, Josef, “Goldziher as a Contemporary of Islamic Reform,” in his Kleine Schrifen, Hinrich Biesterfeldt, ed., (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 497–511. Evans-Pritchard, E.  E., “Social Anthropology: Past and Present,” in his Social Anthropology and Other Essays (New York: Te Free Press, 1962), 139–154. Ewald, Heinrich, Die Geschichte des Volkes Israel (eight vols; Göttingen: Dieterich, 1843–1859) [3rd edn; Göttingen: Dieteriche Buchhandlung, 1863–1865]. Faust, Ulrich, Mythologien und Religionen des Ostens bei Johann Gottfried Herder (Münster: Aschendorf, 1977). Feil, Ernst, Religio (four vols; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986–2012. Fenet, Annick, “Silvestre de Sacy, premier président de la Société Asiatique (1822–1829 et 1832–1834),” in Michel Espagne, Nora Laf, and Pascale RabaultFeuerhahn, eds, Silvestre de Sacy: le projet européen d’une science orientaliste (Paris: Cerf, 2014), 155–189. Fenton, Paul B., “Moritz Steinschneider’s Contribution to Judaeo-Arabic Studies,” in Reimund Leicht and Gad Freudenthal, eds, Studies on Steinschneider: Moritz Steinschneider and the Emergence of the Science of Judaism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2012), 363–382. Fenton, Paul B., “Salomon Munk and the Franco-Jewish Discovery of Orientalism,” in Ottfried Fraisse, ed., Modern Jewish Scholarship on Islam in Context: Rationality, European Crisis, and the Search for Belonging (Berlin, Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2018), 267–290. Fernandez-Morera, Dario, Te Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain (Wilmington, DE: Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2016). Feuerhahn, Wolf, ed., La politique des chaires au Collège de France (Paris: Collège de France, Belles Lettres, 2017). Fhima, Catherine and Roland Lardinois, “Sylvain Lévi passeur d’Orients: autorité savante et conscience morale,” in Michel Espagne and Perrine Simon-Nahum, eds, Passeurs d’Orient: les Juifs dans l’orientalisme (Paris: L’Éclat, 2013), 163–184. Filliozat, Pierre-Sylvain, “Anquetil Duperron, un pionnier du voyage scientifque en Inde,” Comptes Rendus de l’Académie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres 149 (2005), 1261–1280. Fitzgerald, Timothy, Te Ideology of Religious Studies (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Fleischmann, Eugène, Le christianisme “mis à nu”: la critique juive du christianisme (Paris: Plon, 1970). Fournier, Marcel, Marcel Mauss (Paris: Fayard, 1994).

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Bibliography  263 Fraisse, Ottfried, Ignać Goldzihers monotheistische Wissenschaf: Zur Historisierung des Islam (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014). Fraisse, Ottfried, ed., Modern Jewish Scholarship on Islam in Context: Rationality, European Crisis, and the Search for Belonging (Berlin, Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2018). Franck, Adolphe, La Kabbale, ou la philosophie religieuse des Hébreux (Paris: Hachette, 1843). Franck, Adolphe, Études orientales (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1861). Franck, Adolphe, Nouvelles Études orientales (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1896). Frazer, James George, Te Golden Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (1st ed.; London: Macmillan, 1890). Freeman, Edward A., Comparative Politics (London: Macmillan, 1873). Frei, Hans W., “Herder on the Bible: the Realist Spirit in History,’ in his Te Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press, 1974). Freiberger, Oliver, Considering Comparison: A Method for Religious Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Fürst, Alfons, “Monotheism between Cult and Politics: Te Temes of the Ancient Debate between Pagan and Christian Monotheism,” in Stephen Mitchell and Peter van Nufelen, eds, One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 82–99. Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis, La cité antique: Étude sur le culte, le droit, les institutions de la Grèce et de Rome (Paris: Durand, 1864). Gagné, Renaud, Simon Goldhill, and Geofrey  E.  R.  Lloyd, eds, Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology, Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 24 (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2018). Gallien, Claire, “Une querelle orientaliste: la réception controversée du Zend Avesta d’Anquetil-Duperron en France et en Angleterre,” Littératures classiques 81 (2013), 257–268). Gaskin, C.  A., “Hume on Religion,” in David Fater Norton, ed., Te Cambridge Companion to Hume (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 313–344. Gauthier, Léon, Introduction à l’étude de la philosophie musulmane. L’esprit sémitique et l’esprit aryen: la philosophie grecque et la religion de l’Islam (Paris: Leroux, 1923). Gerdmar, Anders, Roots of Teological Anti-Semitism: German Biblical Interpretation and the Jews, from Herder and Semler to Kittel and Bultmann (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2009). Gertzen, Tomas L., “Die Vorträge des Assyriologen Friedrich Delitzsch über Babel und Bibel und die Reaktionen der deutschen Juden,” Zeitschrif für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 71 (2019), 238–258. Gilman, Sander  L., Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Ginzburg, Carlo, Te Cheese and the Worms: Te Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980) [originally published as Il formaggio e i vermi: il cosmo di un mugnaio d’el 500 (Turin: Einaudi, 1976)]. Ginzburg, Carlo, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (London, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

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264 Bibliography Ginzburg, Carlo, “Representation—the Word, the Idea, the Ting,” in his Wooden Eyes: Nine Refections on Distance (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001 [Italian original 1998]), 63–78 [“Representation” originally appeared in Annales (1991)]. Gnuse, Robert Karl, No Other Gods: Emergent Monotheism in Israel, JSOT, Suppl. Series 241 (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic Press, 1997). Gobineau, Arthur de, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (two vols; Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1884). Gobineau, Arthur de, Les religions et les philosophies de l’Asie centrale (two vols; 2nd edn; Paris: Crès, 1923). Goblet d’Alviella, Eugène, Count, “Maurice Vernes et la méthode comparative,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 12 (1850), 170–178. Goitein, Shlomo Dov, “Te Humanistic Aspects of Oriental Studies,” Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 9 (1987), 1–13. Goldenberg, David  M., Te Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003). Goldstein, Jane E., “Toward an Empirical History of Moral Tinking: Te Case of Racial Teory in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France,” American Historical Review 120 (2015), 1–27. Goldziher, Ignaz, Der Mythos bei den Hebräern und seine geschichtliche Entwickelung (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1876). Goldziher, Ignaz, Le culte des ancêtres et le culte des morts chez les Arabes (Paris: Leroux, 1876). Goldziher, Ignaz, Renan als Orientalist: Gedenkrede am 27. November 1893, ed. Friedrich Niewöhner, transl. Peter Zalán (Zurich, 2000), 37–40 [originally, Renan mint orientalista: emlékbeszéd (Budapest, 1894)]. Goodman, Martin, George H. van Kooten, and Jacques T. A. G. M. van Ruiten, eds, Abraham, the Nations, and the Hagarites: Jewish, Christian and Islamic Perspectives on Kinship with Abraham (Leiden: Brill, 2010). Graetz, Michael, Les Juifs en France au XIXe siècle: de la révolution française à ­l’Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paris: Seuil, 1989 [Hebrew edition 1982]). Graf, Fritz, Griechische Mythologie: eine Einführung (Zurich: Artemis: 1985 [English translation: Greek Mythology: an Introduction (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993)]). Grafon, Anthony, “Protestant versus Prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus,” in his Defenders of the Text: Te Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–1800 (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 259–270. Grafon, Anthony and Joanna Weinberg (with Alastair Hamilton), “I Have Always Loved the Holy Tongue”: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2011). Grau, Rudolf Friedrich, Semiten und Indogermanen in ihrer Beziehung zu Religion und Wissenschaf. Eine Apologie des Christentums vom Standpunkte der Völkerpsychologie (Stuttgart: Liesching, 1864). Guéné, Antoine, Lettres de quelques juifs portugais, allemands et polonais à M.  de Voltaire (8th edn; Versailles: Lebel, 1817).

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Bibliography  265 Gunkel, Hermann, Zum religionsgeschichtlichen Verständnis des Neuen Testaments (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1903). Gunkel, Hermann, Die Religionsgeschichte und die alttestamentliche Wissenschaf (Vortrag; Berlin: Protestantischer Schrifenvertrieb, 1910). Haber, Peter, Zwischen jüdischer Tradition und Wissenschaf: Der ungarische Orientalist Ignác Goldziher (1850–1921) (Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, 2006). Habib, M. A. R., “Hegel and Islam,” Philosophy East and West 68 (2018), 59–77. Hadas-Lebel, Mireille, “Renan et le judaïsme,” Commentaire 62 (1993), 369–379. Hadidi, Djavad, Voltaire et l’Islam (Paris: Publications orientalistes de France, 1974). Harnack, Adolf von, Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1924 [1920]). Harris, Horton, Te Tübingen School (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). Hartog, François, La nation, la religion, l’avenir: Sur les traces d’Ernest Renan (Paris: Gallimard, 2017). Hartwig, Dirk, Walter Homolka, Michael J. Marx, and Angelika Neuwirth, eds, “Im vollen Licht der Geschichte:” Die Wissenschaf des Judentums und die Anfänge der kritischen Koranforschung, Ex Oriente Lux, 8 (Würzburg: Egon Verlag, 2008). Havet, Ernest, Jésus dans l’histoire: Examen de la Vie de Jésus par M. Renan (2nd edn; Paris: Ferdinand Sartorius, 1863). Hayoun, Maurice-Ruben, Renan, la Bible et les Juifs (Paris: Arléa, 2008). Hazard, Paul, Te Crisis of the European Mind 1680–1715 (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013) [French original: La crise de la conscience européenne, 1689–1715 (Paris: Fayard, 1961 [1935])]. Henninger, Joseph, “Ist der sogenannte Nilus-Bericht eine brauchtbare religionsgeschichtliche Quelle?,” Anthropos 50 (1955), 81–148. Henrich, Dieter, with David S. Paccini, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2003). Henriet, Patrick, ed., L’École Pratique des Hautes Études: Invention, érudition, ­innovation de 1868 à nos jours (Paris: Somogy, 2018). Henriet, Patrick, “Les premières générations de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études: à l’ombre de Renan? Avec une lettre inédite d’Albert Réville à Renan sur la composition de la cinquième section,” in Jean-Luc Fournet, ed., Ma grande église et ma petite chapelle: cent cinquante ans d’afnités électives entre le Collège de France et l’École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris: Collège de France, 2020), 5–38. Henriet, Patrick, “La création de la chaire d’histoire des religions au Collège de France (1880). Rapports de Jules Soury et d’un savant anonyme identifé comme Ernest Renan,” Revue de Synthèse (forthcoming). Herder, Johann Gottfried, Another Philosophy of History for the Education of Mankind, transl. Ioannis  D.  Evrigenis and Daniel Pellerin (Indianapolis, IN, Cambridge: Hackett, 2004). Hertz, Robert, Le péché et l’expiation dans les sociétés primitives; (Paris: J.-M. Place, 1988) [re-edition of the text established by Marcel Mauss in Revue de l’Histoire des Religions in 1922 (Paris: Leroux, 1922)]. Hertz, Robert, Mélanges de sociologie religieuse et folklore, preface Alice Robert Hertz (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1928).

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268 Bibliography King, Richard, Orientalism and Religion: Post-Colonial Teory, India and the ‘Mystic East’ (London, New York: Routledge, 2002). Kippenberg, Hans Georg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002) [transl. from Die Entdeckung der Religionsgeschichte: Religionswissenschaf und Moderne (Munich: Beck, 1997)]. Kister, Menahem, “Some Early Jewish and Christian Exegetical Problems and the Dynamics of Monotheism,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 37 (2006), 548–593. Klatt, Norbert, Lebte Jesus in Indien? Eine religionsgeschichtliche Klärung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1988) [non vidi]. Klauser, Teodor, Franz Joseph Dölger 1879–1940: sein Leben und sein Forschungsprogramm “Antike und Christentum, Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum, Ergänzungsband 7 (Münster: Aschendorf, 1980). Kleuker, Johann Friederich, ed., Zend Avesta. Zoroasters lebendiges wort . . . nach dem französischen des herrn Anquetil du Perron (Riga: Hartnock, 1777–1786). Kocka, Jürgen, “Comparison and Beyond,” History and Teory 42 (2003), 39–44. Kramer, Martin, ed., Te Jewish Discovery of Islam: Studies in Honor of Bernard Lewis (Tel Aviv: Moshe Dayan Centre, 1999). Kratz, Reinhard Gregor, “Die Entstehung des Judentums: zur Kontroverse zwischen E.  Meyer and J.  Wellhausen,” Zeitschrif für Teologie und Kirche 95 (1998), 167–184. Kratz, Reinhard Gregor, “Julius Wellhausen,” Teologische RealEnzyklopädie 35 (2003), 527–536. Kriegel, Maurice, “Not Scepticism, but Certainty: A Diferent Plea for Toleration in Late Medieval Spain,” in Mercedes García-Arenal and Stefania Pastore, eds, From Doubt to Unbelief: Forms of Scepticism in the Iberian World (Oxford: Legenda, 2019), 19–33. Kriegel, Maurice, “Words and Tings: On the Rise of the Antisemitic Movements and the History of the Term ‘Antisemitism’, 1879–1894,” Zion 85 (2020), 375–390 [in Hebrew]. Kuenen, Abraham, National Religions and Universal Religions, Hibbert Lectures (London and Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1882). Kuklick, Bruce, Puritans in Babylon: Te Ancient Near East and American Intellectual Life 1880–1930 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). Kuschel, Karl-Josef, Abraham: A Symbol of Hope for Jews, Christians and Muslims (London, SCM Press, 1995 [German 1994]). Labrousse, Pierre, ed., Langues O’, 1795–1995: Deux siècles d’histoire de l’École des Langues Orientales (Paris: Hervas, 1995). Laftau, François, Customs of the American Indians Compared with the Customs of Primitive Times, transl. W. N. Fenton and E. L. Moore (two vols; Toronto: Champlain Society, 1974–1977). Lagrange, Marie-Joseph, Études sur les religions sémitiques (Paris: Lecofre, 1903). Lagrange, Marie-Joseph, La méthode historique. La critique biblique et l’Église (Paris: Legofre, 1903). Lagrange, Marie-Joseph, Quelques remarques sur l’Orpheus de M. Salomon Reinach (Paris: Gabalda, 1910).

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Bibliography  269 Lang, Andrew, Te Making of Religion (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1898). Lang, Bernhard, Monotheism and the Prophetic Minority (Shefeld: Almond Press, 1983). Lang, Bernhard, “Monotheismus,” Hubert Cancik, Burkhard Gladigow, and Matthias Laubscher, eds, Handbuch der religionsgeschichtlicher Grundbegrife, Vol. IV (1998), 148–165. Lannoy, Annelies, “Le Jubilé Loisy de 1927: Entre histoire des religions et histoire du christianisme,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 229 (2012), 503–526. Lannoy, Annelies, “Saint Paul in Early Twentieth-Century History of Religions. Te ‘Mystic of Jesus’ and the Pagan Mystery Cults afer the Correspondence of Franz Cumont and Alfred Loisy,” Zeitschrif für Religion- und Geistesgeschichte 64 (2012), 222–239. Lannoy, Annelies, Alfred Loisy and the Making of History of Religions: A Study on the Development of Comparative Religion in the Early Twentieth Century (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2020). Lannoy, Annelies, Corinne Bonnet, Danny Praet, eds. “Mon cher Mithra” Correspondance entre Franz Cumont et Alfred Loisy, (Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Letttres, 55; Paris: De Boccard, 2019). Laplanche, François, La Bible en France entre mythe et critique (XVIe–XIXe siècle) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994). Laplanche, François, ed., Les sciences religieuses: Le XIXe siècle, 1800–1914 (Dictionnaire du monde religieux dans la France contemporaine) (Paris: Beauchesne, 1996). Laplanche, François, “L’histoire des religions en France au début du XXe siècle,” Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome, Italie et Méditerranée 11 (1999), 623–634. Laplanche, François, La crise de l’origine, la science catholique et l’histoire au XXe ­siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2006). Lardinois, Roland, Sylvain Lévi et l’entrée du Sanskrit au Collège de France (Paris: École Française d’Extrȇme Orient, 2018). Lassen, Christian, Indische Althertumskunde (fve vols; Bonn: Koenig, 1847–1862). Laurens, Henry, Les origines intellectuelles de l’expédition d’Egypte: l’orientalisme ­islamisant en France, 1698–1798, (Istanbul: Isis, 1987). Laurens, Henry, ed., Ernest Renan: La science, la religion, la République (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2013). Lazarus, Moritz, Was heisst national? (Berlin: Dümmler, 1879). Le Brun, Jacques, “De l’Histoire critique du Vieux Testament à Totem et tabou: ­l’invention de l’origine (XVIIe–XXe siècles,” in his La jouissance et le trouble: Recherches sur la littérature chrétienne de l’âge classique (Geneva: Droz, 2004), 561–611. Le Brun, Jacques and Guy  G.  Stroumsa, Les juifs présentés aux chrétiens: textes de Léon de Modène et de Richard Simon, introduits et commentés (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1998). Le Rider, Jacques, Modernité viennoise et crise de l’identité (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990). Le Rider, Jacques, “Freud, lecteur de Salomon Reinach,” in Sophie Basch, Michel Espagne, and Jean Leclant, eds, Les frères Reinach: Colloque réuni les 22 et 23 juin 2007 à l’AIBL (Paris: AIBL—Difusion de Boccard, 2000), 339–346.

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270 Bibliography Lehmann, Reinhard  G., Friedrich Delitzsch und der Babel-Bibel-Streit (Freibourg: Universitätsverlag, 1994). Leonard, Miriam, Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism from Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 2012). Levenson, Jon D., Abraham between Torah and Gospel, Te Père Marquette Lecture in Teology 2011 (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2011). Levenson, Jon  D., Inheriting Abraham: Te Legacy of the Patriarch in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2012). Lévi, Sylvain, La doctrine du sacrifce dans les Brâhmanas, Bibliothèque de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, Sciences Religieuses, Vol. XI (Paris: Leroux, 1898) [Reprint of the 2nd edn (1966), with a Preface by Louis Renou and a new Postface by Charles Malamoud, Bibliothèque de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, 118 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003)]. Lévi, Sylvain, “Religions universelles et religions particulières,” in his Shūkyogaku (Tokyo, 1928) [Reprinted in Mémorial Sylvain Lévi (Paris: Paul Harmann, 1937), 126–132]. Levitin, Dmitri, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of a New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c. 1640–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). Lewis, Bernard, Semites and Antisemites (New York, London: Norton, 1986). Liber, Maurice, “L’esprit du christianisme et du judaïsme,” Revue des Études Juives 51 (1906), 192–205. Lichtenberger, Frédéric, ed., Encyclopédie des Sciences Religieuses, Vol. I (Paris: Sanchez and Fischbacher, 1877). Lifschitz, Avi, Language and Enlightenment: Te Berlin Debates of the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Lincoln, Bruce, “Isaac Newton and Oriental Jones on Myth, Ancient History, and the Relative Prestige of Peoples,” History of Religions 42 (2002), 1–18. Lincoln, Bruce and Cristiano Grottanelli, “Te Future of History of Religions,” in Bruce Lincoln, ed., Apples and Oranges: Explorations In, On, and With Comparison (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 2018), 14–24. Lincoln, Bruce and Cristiano Grottanelli, “Teses on Comparison,” in Bruce Lincoln, ed., Apples and Oranges: Explorations In, On, and With Comparison (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 2018), 25–33, esp. 25. Löwenbrück, Anna-Ruth, Judenfeindschaf im Zeitalter der Auflärung: eine Studie zur Vorgeschichte des modernen Antisemitismus am Beispiel des Göttinger Teologen und Orientalisten Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791) (Frankfurt-amMain: Lang, 1995). Loisy, Alfred, Leçon d’ouverture du cours d’histoire des religions au Collège de France, 24 avril 1909 (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1909). Loisy, Alfred, Essai historique sur le sacrifce (Paris: Nourry, 1920). Löwith, Karl, Meaning in History: On the Teological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1949). Lozat, Mélanie and Sara Petrella, eds, La Plume et le Calumet (Paris: Garnier, 2019). Lüdemann, Gerd, ed., Die ‘Religionsgeschichtliche Schule’: Facetten eines theologischen Umbruchs (Frankfurt, New York: Peter Lang, 1996).

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Bibliography  271 Lüdemann, Gerd and Alf Özen, “Religionsgeschichtliche Schule,” Teologische Realenzyklopädie 28 (1997), 618–624. MacDonald, Nathan, Deuteronomy and the Meaning of “Monotheism” (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). Mackintosch, Robert, “Monolatry and Henotheism,” in Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, Vol. VIII (Edinburgh: Clark 1915), 810b–811b. Maier, Bernhard, William Robertson Smith: His Life, His Work and His Times (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). Malamoud, Charles, “Histoire des religions et comparatisme: la question indoeuropéenne,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 208 (1991), 115–121. Mali, Joseph, Te Rehabilitation of Myth: Vico’s “New Science” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Mangold, Sabine, Eine “weltbürgerliche Wissenschaf”: Die deutsche Orientalistik im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2004). Mangold, Sabine, “Ignác Goldziher et Ernest Renan—Vision du monde et innovation scientifque,” in Céline Trautmann-Waller et al., Ignác Goldziher: un autre orientalisme? (Paris: Geuthner, 2011), 73–88. Manuel, Frank  E., Te Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959). Manuel, Frank  E., Te Broken Staf: Judaism through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 1992). Marchand, Suzanne L., “Paul de Lagarde and the Esoteric Tradition,” unpublished text of a lecture delivered at the German Studies Association Conference in Pittsburg (2006). Marchand, Suzanne  L., “Popularizing the Orient in Fin de Siècle Germany,” Intellectual History Review 17 (2007), 175–202. Marchand, Suzanne L., German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Washington, Cambridge: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 2009). Marchand, Suzanne  L., “Dating Zarathustra: Oriental Texts and the Problem of Persian Prehistory, 1700–1900,” Erudition and the Republic of Letters 1 (2016), 203–245. Marenbon, John, Pagans and Philosophers: Te Problem of Paganism from Augustine to Leibniz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015). Mariot, Nicolas, Histoire d’un sacrifce: Robert, Alice et la guerre (Paris: Seuil, 2017). Marrus, Michael  R., Te Politics of Assimilation: A Study of the French Jewish Community at the Time of the Dreyfus Afair (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971). Marty, Jacques, Albert Réville, sa vie, son oeuvre (Cahors et Alençon: Coueslant, 1912). Massa, Francesco, “Nommer et classer les religions aux IIe-IVe siècles: la taxonomie ‘paganisme, judaïsme, christianisme,’ ” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 234 (2017), 689–715. Massignon, Louis, Les trois prières d’Abraham (Paris: Cerf, 1997). Massignon, Louis, “La légende ‘de tribus impostoribus’ et ses origines islamiques,” in Louis Massignon, ed., Écrits mémorables II (Paris: Lafont, 2009), 142–145 [= Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 82 (1920)].

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272 Bibliography Masuzawa, Tomoko, Te Invention of World Religions, Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago, IL, London: University of Chicago Press, 2005). Maunier, René, “Benjamin Constant, historien des sociétés et des religions,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 102 (1931), 93–113. Mauss, Marcel, Oeuvres (Paris: Minuit, 1968), 3 vols. Mauss, Marcel, “An Intellectual Self-Portrait,” in Wendy James and N. J. Allen, eds, Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), 29–42. Mauss, Marcel, Henri Hubert, and Robert Hertz, Saints, Heroes, Myths, and Rites: Classical Durkheimian Studies of Religion and Society, ed. and transl. Alexander Riley, Sarah Daynes, and Cyril Isnard (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2009). Meshel, Naphtali S., Te ‘Grammar’ of Sacrifce: A Generativist Study of the Israelite Sacrifcial System in the Priestly Writings with a ‘Grammar’ of Σ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). Messling, Markus, Champollions Hieroglyphen: Philologie und Weltaneignung (Berlin: Kadmos, 2012). Messling, Markus, Gebeugter Geist: Rassismus und Erkenntnis in der modernen europäischen Philologie (Göttingen: Wallerstein, 2016). Metzler, Dieter, “A.  H.  Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805) und das Konzept der Achsenzeit,” in his Achaemenid History VIII, Trough Travellers’ Eyes (Leiden, Brill, 1991), 123–133. Michael-Hecht, Jennifer, “Vacher de Lapouge and the rise of Nazi Science,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000), 285–303. Michelet, Jules, La Bible de l’humanité, ed. Laudyce Réat (Paris: Champion, 2009) [1st edn; Paris: Chamerot, 1864]. Minois, Georges, Te Atheist’s Bible: Te Most Dangerous Book that Never Existed (Chicago, IL, London: University of Chicago Press, 2012) [French original: Le traité des trois imposteurs: histoire d’un livre blasphématoire qui n’existait pas (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009)]. Mitchell, Stephen, “Further Toughts on the Cult of Teos Hypsistos,” in Stephen Mitchell and Peter van Nufelen, eds, One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 167–208. Mitchell, Stephen, and Peter van Nufelen, eds, Monotheism between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity (Leuven, Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2010). Mitchell, Stephen, and Peter van Nufelen, eds, One God: Pagan Monotheism in the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Molendijk, Arie L., “Transforming Teology: Te Institutionalization of the Science of Religion in the Netherlands,” in Arie L. Molendijk and Peter Pels, eds, Religion in the Making: Te Emergence of the Sciences of Religion, Studies in the History of Religion, Vol. LXXX (Leiden, Boston, MA, Cologne: Brill, 1998), 67–97. Molendijk, Arie  L., Te Emergence of the Science of Religion in the Netherlands, Numen Book Series 105 (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2005). Molendijk, Arie  L., “Les premiers congrès d’histoire des religions, ou comment faire  de la religion un objet de science?,” Revue germanique internationale 12 (2010), 91–103.

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Bibliography  275 Otto, Eckhart, “Jenseit der Achsenzeit: Das Achsenzeit-Teorem im Ausgang und mit Blick auf Max Webers Wirtschafsethik der Weltreligionen,” Zeitschrif für Altorientalische und Biblische Rechtsgeschichte 25 (2019), 55–92. Paden, William  E., New Patterns for Comparative Religion: Passages to an Evolutionary Perspective (London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). Pagden, Anthony, Te Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Parkin, Robert, The Dark Side of Humanity: Te Work of Robert Hertz and Its Legacy (Reading: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1996). Patai, Raphael, Ignaz Goldziher and his Oriental Diary (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1987). Patlagean, Évelyne, “Introduction,” in Évelyne Patlagean, ed., Israël Lévi, Le ravissement du Messie à sa naissance et autres essais (Paris, Louvain: Peeters, 1994), 7–29. Perles, Felix, Was lehrt uns Harnack? (Frankfurt: Kaufmann, 1902) [transl. “What Jews May Learn from Harnack,” Jewish Quarterly Review 14 (1902), 517–543)]. Perles, Felix, Bousset’s Religion des Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter kritisch untersucht (Berlin: Wolf Peiser, 1903). Perles, Felix, “Die religionsgeschichtliche Erforschung der talmudischen Literatur,” Archiv für Religionswissenschaf 16 (1913), 580–597. Petit, Jérôme, Le sanctuaire dévoilé: Antoine-Léonard Chézy et les études sanskrites en France, 1800–1850 (Paris: Geuthner, 2019). Pettazzoni, Rafaele, Dio: Formazione e sviluppo del monoteismo nella storia delle religioni Vol. I: L’essere celeste nelle credenze dei popoli primitive (Rome: Athenaeum, 1922) [Vol. II: Il Dio supreme nelle religioni politeistiche; Vol. III: Il Dio unico nelle religioni monoteistische]. Pettazzoni, Rafaele, “La formation du monothéisme,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 88 (1923), 193–199. Pholien, Georges, Les deux Vie de Jésus de Renan (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1983). Pickering, W.  S.  F., “Mauss’s Jewish Background: A Biographical Essay,” in Wendy James and N. J. Allen, eds, Marcel Mauss: A Centenary Tribute (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), 43–60. Pinard de la Boullaye, Henri, S.  J., L’Étude comparée des religions, Vol. I (Paris: Beauchesne, 1929). Poliakov, Léon, Histoire de l’antisémitisme, II: De Voltaire à Wagner (Paris: CalmannLvy, 1968). Poliakov, Léon, Le mythe aryen: Essai sur les sources du racisme et des nationalismes (Paris: Calmann Levy, 1971). Pollock, Sheldon, “Comparison without Hegemony,” in Hans Joas and Barbro Klein, eds, Te Beneft of Broad Horizons: Festschrif for Björn Wittrock on His Sixty-Fifh Birthday (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2010), 185–204. Pongratz-Leisten, Beate, ed., Reconsidering the Concept of Revolutionary Monotheism (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2011). Popper, Julius, Der Ursprung des Monotheismus: Eine historische Kritik des hebräischen Altertums, insbesondere Ofenbarungsgeschichte, Kritik der Patriarchengeschichte (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1879).

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276 Bibliography Pourjavady, Reza and Sabine Schmidtke, A Jewish Philosopher of Baghdad: ‘Izz al-Dawla Ibn Kammūna (d. 683/1284) and His Writings, Islamic Philosophy, Teology and Science 65 (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2006). Pozzi, Regina, “Alle origini del razzismo contemporaneo: Il caso di Ernest Renan,” Rivista di Storia Contemporanea 14 (1985), 497–520. Praet, Danny, “Oriental Religions and the Conversion of the Roman Empire: Te Views of Ernest Renan and of Franz Cumont in the Transition from Traditional Paganism to Christianity,” in David Engels and Peter van Nuefelen, eds, Religion and Competition in Antiquity (Brussels: Latomus, 2014), 285f. Preus, James S., Explaining Religion: Criticism and Teory from Bodin to Freud (New Haven, CT, London: Yale University Press, 1987). Priest, Robert D., “Ernest Renan’s Race Problem,” Te Historical Journal 58 (2015), 309–330. Priest, Robert D., Te Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). Problèmes et méthodes d’histoire des religions (Paris: ÉPHÉ, Presses Universitaires de France, 1968). Proust, Marcel, Du côté de Guermantes (À la recherche du temps perdu, Vol. VIII) (Paris: NRF, 1919). Psichari, Henriette, La prière sur l’Acropole et ses mystères (Paris: CNRS, 1956). Quinet, Edgar, Du génie des religions (Paris: Charpentier, 1842) [= Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984)]. Quinet, Edgar, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Pagnerre, 1857 [reprinted London: Forgotten Books, 2018]). Rabbinowicz, Israel-Michel, La religion nationale des anciens Hébreux (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1873). Raphson, Joseph, De spatio reali seu ente infnito (London: Chruchill, 1697). Rauwel, Alain, “Un sanctuaire laïc pour les sciences religieuses,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 237 (2020), 11–123. Reif, Stefan  C., “William Robertson Smith in Relation to Hebraists and Jews at Christ College Cambridge,” in William Johnstone, ed., William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic Press, 1995), 210–223. Reinach, Salomon, L’origine des aryens: histoire d’une controverse, Bibliothèque orientale elzévirienne, Vol. LXVII (Paris: Ledoux, 1892). Reinach, Salomon, “Le mirage oriental,” L’anthropologie 4 (1893), 539–579, 699 [= Le mirage oriental (Paris: Masson, 1893)]. Reinach, Salomon, Drumont et Dreyfus: Études sur la “libre parole” de 1894 à 1895 (Paris: Stock, 1898) [under author’s pseudonym: L’archiviste]. Reinach, Salomon, “La prétendue race juive,” in his Cultes, Mythes, et Religions, Vol. III (Paris: Leroux, 1908), 457–471 [Reprint of a text originally published in the Revue des Études Juives in 1903]. Reinach, Salomon, Orpheus: histoire générale des religions (Paris: Picart, 1909). Reinach, Salomon, Cultes, Mythes et Religions, Vol. IV (Paris: Leroux, 1912). Reinach, Salomon, “De bello orphico,” in his Cultes, Mythes et Religions, Vol. IV (Paris: Leroux, 1912), 438–483.

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Bibliography  277 Reinach, Salomon, “La théorie du sacrifce,” in his Cultes, Mythes et Religions, Vol. I (3rd edn; Paris: Leroux, 1922). Reinach, Salomon, Cultes, Mythes et Religions, ed. Hervé Duchêne (Paris: Robert Lafont, 2000). Renan, Ernest, Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1855) [8th edn; Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1928]. Renan, Ernest, Averroès et l’averroïsme in Henriette Psichari, ed., Oeuvres complètes, Vol. III (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1949), 8–365 [Original published Paris: Durand, 1852]. Renan, Ernest, “Du peuple d’Israel et de son histoire,” Revue des deux mondes (1855), 10–12. Renan, Ernest, Études d’histoire religieuse (3rd edn; Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1858). Renan, Ernest, Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère général des peuples sémitiques et en particulier sur leur tendance au monothéisme (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1859) [Reprint from Journal asiatique 13 (1859), 214–282 and 417–450, as well as from Comptes Rendus des Sessions de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres (1859), 67–100]. Renan, Ernest, L’avenir religieux des sociétés modernes, in Oeuvres Complètes,Vol. I (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1947, 233–281 [originally published in the Revue des deux mondes (October 15, 1860)]. Renan, Ernest, De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’histoire de la civilisation, (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1862). Renan, Ernest, Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? (Paris: Association scientifque de France, 1882). Renan, Ernest, Le judaïsme comme race et comme religion, lecture read at the Cercle Saint-Simon on January 27, 1883 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1883). Renan, Ernest, Le judaïsme et le christianisme: identité originelle et séparation graduelle, conference, Société des Études Juives, May 26, 1883 (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1883). Renan, Ernest, L’islamisme et la science, lecture read at the Sorbonne on March 29, 1883 (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1883). Renan, Ernest, Life of Jesus, transl. with an Introduction by William G. Hutchinson (London, 1897 [=New York: Burt, 1863]). Renan, Ernest, “Te Share of the Semitic Peoples in the History of Civilization,” in C.  D.  Warner, ed., Library of the World’s Best Literature (1917) [for a digitized ­version of the actual publication see https://archive.org/stream/libraryofworldsbv21warn#page/12180/mode/2up]. Renan, Ernest, De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l’ histoire de la civilisation. Discours d’ouverture du cours de langues hébraïque, chaldaïque et syriaque au Collège de France, in Oeuvres complètes, Henriette Psichari, ed., Vol. II (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1948), 317–335. Renan, Ernest, L’avenir de la science, in Oeuvres complètes, Henriette Psichari, ed., Vol. III (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1949), 712–1121. Renan, Ernest, “Les juifs sous la domination grecque,” Revue des Deux Mondes 116 (1893), 241–256. Renan, Ernest, Oeuvres complètes, Henriette Psichari, ed., Vol. X (Paris: CalmannLévy, 1961).

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278 Bibliography Renan, Ernest, Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, ed. Jean Pommier (Paris: Gallimard, 1983 [1883]). Renan, Ernest, Légendes patriarchales des Juifs et des Arabes, cours professé au Collège de France, 1888–1889, transl., introduction, and notes by Laudyce Rétat (Paris: Hermann, 1989). Renan, Ernest, Études d’histoire religieuse, suivies de Nouvelles études d’histoire religieuse (Paris: Gallimard, 1992). Renan, Ernest, “Les historiens critiques de Jésus,” in his Études d’histoire religieuse, suivies de Nouvelles études d’histoire religieuse (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 116–167 [Tis text had originally appeared, signed only E.  R., in La liberté de penser, March 15 and April 15, 1849. It is reprinted in Ernest Renan, Oeuvres Complètes, VII, ed. Henriette Psichari (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1958). Renan, Ernest, “Mahomet et les origines de l’islamisme,” Revue des Deux Mondes, nouvelle période, 12 (1851) [Reprinted in Ernest Renan, Études d’histoire religieuse (Paris: Gallimard, 1992), 168–220]. Renan, Ernest, La réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1871) [new edn; Paris: Perrin, 2012]. Rétat, Laudyce, Religion et imagination religieuse: leurs formes et leurs rapports dans l’oeuvre d’Ernest Renan (Lille: Université de Lille III, 1979). Rétat, Laudyce, L’Israël de Renan (Berne: Peter Lang, 2005). Réville, Albert, La Vie de Jésus de M. Renan devant les orthodoxies et devant la critique (2nd edn; Paris: Cherbuliez, 1864). Réville, Albert, “De la renaissance des études religieuses en France,” in his Essais de critique religieuse (Paris-Geneva: Cherbuliez, 1869), 361–421. Réville, Albert, Leçon d’ouverture du cours d’Histoire des religions au Collège de France (Paris: Fischbacher, 1880). Réville, Albert, Prolégomènes de l’Histoire des religions (4th edn; Paris: Fishbacher, 1886). Réville, Albert, Études de critique et d’histoire, 2e Série (Bibliothèque de l’ÉPHÉ; Paris: Leroux, 1896). de Ricci, Seymour, “La méthode comparative dans l’histoire des religions et l’oeuvre de Salomon Reinach,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 55 (1934), 5–28. Richard, Nathalie, La Vie de Jésus de Renan: La fabrique d’un best-seller (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2015). Richardz, Monika, Der Eintritt der Juden in die akademischen Berufe: Jüdische Studenten und Akademiker in Deutschland 1678–1848 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1974). Riley, Alexander and Philippe Besmard, eds., Un ethnologue dans les tranchées, août  1914-avril 1915: lettres de Robert Hertz à sa femme Alice (Paris: CNRS, 2002). Riley, Alexander Tristan, Godless Intellectuals: Te Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred Reinvented (New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010). Ringer, Monica M., Islamic Modernism and the Re-Enchantement of the Sacred in the Age of History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020). Rivière, Peter, “William Robertson Smith and John Ferguson McLennan: the Aberdeen Roots of British Social Anthropology,” in William Johnstone, ed.,

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Bibliography  279 William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment, JSOT, Suppl. 189 (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic Press, 1995), 293–302. Robin, Christian Julien, “La mission d’Ernest Renan en Phénicie,” in Henry Laurens, ed., Ernest Renan: La science, la religion, la République (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2013), 125–154. Robinson, Annabel, Te Life and Work of Jane Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). Rodrigue, Aron, “Totems, Taboos, and Jews: Salomon Reinach and the Politics of Scholarship in Fin-de-Siècle France,” Jewish Social Studies 10 (2004), 1–19. Römer, Tomas, “Renan et l’exégèse historico-critique,” in H.  Laurens, ed, Ernest Renan, 145–162. Römer, Tomas, L’invention de Dieu (Paris: Seuil, 2014). Rogerson, John, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (London: SPKP, 1984). Rossi, Paolo, Te Dark Abyss of Time: Te History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 1984). Rothschild, Jean-Pierre and Jérome Grondeux, eds, Adolphe Franck: philosophe juif, spiritualiste et libéral dans la France du XIXe siècle (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012). Rubies, Joan-Pau, “From Antiquarianism to Philosophical History: India, China, and the World History of Religion in European Tought (1600–1770),” in Peter Miller and François Louis, eds, Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–1800 (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2012), 313–367. Rubini, Rocco, “Te Vichian ‘Renaissance’ between Giuseppe Ferrari and Jules Michelet,” Intellectual History Review 26 (2016), 9–15. Rudolph, Kurt, “Wellhausen as an Arabist,” in Douglas  A.  Knight, ed., Julius Wellhausen and His Prolegomena to the History of Israel (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), 111–155. Rudolph, Kurt, Geschichte und Probleme der Religionswissenschaf, Studies in the History of Religions, Vol. LIII (Leiden, New York, Cologne: Brill, 1992). Rüpke, Jörg, “Comparative Religion—Past and Present,” in Guy  G.  Stroumsa, ed., Comparative Studies in the Humanities (Jerusalem: Te Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 2018), 153–172. Ruthven, Malise, “Introduction,” in Voltaire, Voltaire’s Fanaticism, or Mahomet the Prophet: A New Translation (Sacramento: Litwin Press, 2013), 1–12. Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978). Said, Edward W., Freud and the Non-European (London, New York: Verso, 2003). Salvador, Gabriel, Joseph Salvador, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1881). Salvador, Joseph, Loi de Moïse, ou système religieux et politique des Hébreux (Paris: Guyot, 1822). Salvador, Joseph, Histoire des institutions de Moïse et du peuple hébreu (Paris: Ponthieu, 1828). Salvador, Joseph, Jésus-Christ et sa doctrine: Histoire de la naissance de l’Église, de son organisation et de ses progrès pendant le premier siècle (Bruxelles: Société Belge de  Librairie, Hauman and Co., 1838) [new edn; Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1864–1865].

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280 Bibliography Schadler, Peter, John of Damascus and Islam: Christian Heresiology and the Intellectual Background to Earliest Christian-Muslim Relations, History of Christian-Muslim Relations, 34 (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2011). Schäfer, Peter, Zwei Götter im Himmel: Gottesvorstellungen in der jüdischen Antike (Munich: Beck, 2017). Scheid, John, “L’ étude des religions au Collège de France et à la Ve section de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études,” in Jean-Luc Fournet, ed., Ma grande église et ma petite chapelle: cent cinquante ans d’afnités électives entre le Collège de France et l’École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris: Collège de France, 2020), 263–273. Schenker, Hillel and Ziad Abu-Zayyad, eds, Islamophobia and Anti-Semitism (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2006). Schmidt, Francis, L’ impensable polythéisme: Etudes d’historiographie religieuse (Paris: Editions des archives contemporaines, 1988). Schmidt, Wilhelm, Der Ursprung der Gottesidee: eine historisch-kritische und positive Studie (12 vols; Münster: Aschendorf, 1912–1955). Schopenhauer, Arthur, Sur la religion (Paris: Flammarion, 1996). Schopenhauer, Arthur, Essays from the Parerga and Paralipomena, transl. Tomas Bailey Saunders (London: George Allen, 1951). Schorsch, Ismar, “Breaking into the Past: Te Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaf der Juden,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 33 (1988), 3–28 [Reprinted in Ismar Schorsch, From Text to Context: Te Turn to History in Modern Judaism (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press, 1994), 205–232]. Schorsch, Ismar, “Converging Cognates: Te Intersection of Jewish and Islamic Studies in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Leo Baeck Yearbook 55 (2010), 3–36. Schorsch, Ismar, “Beyond the Classroom: Te Enduring Relationship between Heinrich  L.  Fleischer and Ignaz Goldziher,” in Hans-Georg Ebert and Toralf Hanstein, eds, Heinrich Leberecht Fleischer: Leben und Wirkung (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2013), 75–114. Schorsch, Ismar, Leopold Zunz: Creativity in Adversity (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Schorsch, Ismar, “Drei Vorträge zur Wissenschaf des Judentums (Leopold Zunz – Abraham Geiger – Moritz Steinschneider),” in Cord-Friedrich Berghahn, ed., Wolfenbütteler Vortragsmanuskripte, Vol. 24 (Wolfenbüttel: Lessings-Akademie, 2018), 11–45. Schrader, Eberhard, “Semitismus und Babylonismus. Zur Frage nach dem Ursprung des Hebraismus,” Jahrbücher für protestantische Teologie 1 (1875), 117–133. Schulze, Reinhard, “Islam und Judentum im Angesicht der Protestantisierung der Religionen im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Lothar Gall and Dietmar Willoweit, eds, Judaism, Christianity and Islam in the Course of History: Exchanges and Conficts, Schrifen des Historischen Kollegs, Kolloquium 82 (Munich: Oldenburg, 2011), 139–165. Schwab, Moïse, Salomon Munk, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris: Leroux, 1900). Schwab, Raymond, Vie d’Anquetil-Duperron, suivie des usages civils et religieux des parses, preface by Sylvain Lévi and two essays by Dr Sir Jivanji Jamshedji Modi (Paris: Leroux, 1934). Schwab, Raymond, La Renaissance orientale (Paris: Payot, 1950).

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282 Bibliography Simon-Nahum, Perrine, “L’histoire des religions en France autour de 1880,” Revue germanique internationale 17 (2002), 177–192; special issue on: Références juives et identités scientifques en Allemagne. Simon-Nahum, Perrine, “Le scandale de la Vie de Jésus de Renan: du succès littéraire comme mode d’échec de la science,” Mil Neuf Cent: Revue d’Histoire Intellectuelle 25 (2007), 61–74. Simon-Nahum, Perrine, “L’Orient d’Ernest Renan: de l’étude des langues à l’histoire des religions,” Revue germanique internationale 7 (2008), 157–168 [= Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn and Céline Trautmann-Waller, eds, Itinéraires orientalistes]. Simon-Nahum, Perrine, “Philosophie et science du judaïsme: la place d’Adolphe Franck dans le paysage intellectuel français du XIXe siècle,” in Jean-Pierre Rothschild and Jérôme Grondeux, eds, Adolphe Franck, philosophe juif, spiritualiste et libéral dans la France du XIXe siècle; Actes du Colloque tenu à l’Institut de France le 31 mai 2010 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012), 185–193. Simon-Nahum, Perrine, “Renan passeur: De la science des religions à l’histoire des religions,” in Henry Laurens, ed., Ernest Renan: la science, la religion, la république, Travaux du Collège de France (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2012), 265–279. Simon-Nahum, Perrine, “Le mort saisit le vif. La place des Juifs dans les études orientales aux XIXe et XXe siècles,” in Michel Espagne and Perrine Simon-Nahum, eds, Passeurs d’Orient: les Juifs dans l’orientalisme (Paris: Éditions de l’éclat, 2013), 49–65. Simon-Nahum, Perrine, Les juifs et la modernité: L’héritage du judaïsme et les Sciences de l’homme en France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Albin Michel, 2018). Sloterdijk, Peter, Gottes Eifer: Vom Kampf der drei Monotheismen (Frankfurt, Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 2007). Smend, Rudolf, “Wellhausen und das Judentum,” Zeitschrif für Teologie und Kirche 79 (1982), 249–282. Smend, Rudolf, “Julius Wellhausen and His Prolegomena to the History of Israel,” in Douglas  A.  Knight, ed., Julius Wellausen and His Prolegomena to the History of Israel, (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983), 1–20 [= Semeia 25]. Smend, Rudolf, “William Robertson Smith and Julius Wellhausen,” in William Johnstone, ed., William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment, JSOT, Suppl. 189 (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic Press, 1995), 226–242. Smend, Rudolf, Julius Wellhausen: Ein Bahnbrecher in drei Disziplinen (Munich: Siemens, 2006). Smend, Rudolf, From Astruc to Zimmerli: Old Testament Scholarship in Tree Centuries (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007). Smith, Jonathan Z., Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990). Smith, Jonathan Z., “A Matter of Class: Taxonomies of Religion,” Harvard Teological Review 89 (1996), 387–403. Smith, Jonathan  Z., “A Twice-Told Tale: Te History of the History of Religions’ History,” in his Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004), chapter 16, 362–374. Smith, Mark S., Te Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel’s Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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Bibliography  283 Smith, William Robertson, Te Old Testament in the Jewish Church: Twelve Lectures on Biblical Criticism (Edinburgh: Adam and Black, 1881). Smith, William Robertson, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, First Series: Te Fundamental Institutions (London: Black, 1889). Smith, William Robertson, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, with additional notes by the author and Prof. Ignaz Goldziher (new edn; London: Black, 1907). Smith, William Robertson, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites, Second and Tird Series, ed. John Day, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament, Suppl. Series 183 (Shefeld: Shefeld Academic Press, 1995). Söderblom, Nathan, La vie future d’après de Mazdéisme (Paris: Leroux, 1901). Sofa, Francesca, “Gerusalemme tra Roma e Parigi: Joseph Salvador e le origini del cristianesimo,” Annali di Storia dell’Esegesi 21 (2004), 645–662. Sommer, Andreas Urs, Der Geist der Historie und das Ende des Christentums: Zur “Wafengenossenschaf” von Friedrich Nietzsche und Franz Overbeck. Mit einem Anhang unpublizierte Texte aus Overbecks “Kirchenlexicon” (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997). Sorkin, David, Te Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Soskice, Janet, Te Sisters of Sinai: How two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels (New York: Knopf, 2009). Sperber, Dan, “Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations,” Man 20 (1985), 73–89. Stausberg, Michael, Faszination Zarathustra: Zoroaster und die europäische Religionsgeschichte der frühen Neuzeit (two vols; Berlin, New York: de Gruyter, 1998). Steinthal, Hermann, “Zur Charakteristik der semitischen Völker. Auf Anlass von E.  Renan, ‘Nouvelles considérations sur le caractère des peuples sémitiques,’ ” Zeitschrif für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaf 1(1860), 328–345. Steinthal, Hermann, Mythos und Religion (Berlin: Lüderich, 1870). Steinthal, Hermann, “Die Frage vom Ursprung des Monotheismus,” in his Zu Bibel und Religionsphilosophie (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1895 [1891]). Steinthal, Hermann, “Die Sage von Simson: Heidnische Reste im monotheistischen Bewusstsein,” in his Zu Bibel und Religionsphilosophie (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1895), 35–77. Steinthal, Hermann, “Die Stellung der Semiten in der Weltgeschichte,” Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur, 4 (1901), 64f. [Reprinted in Hermann Steinthal, Über Juden und Judentum (Berlin: Boppelhauer, 1906), 105–125]. Sternhell, Zeev, Les anti-lumières: du XVIIIe siècle à la guerre froide (Paris: Fayard, 2006). Stolz, Fritz, Einführung in den biblischen Monotheismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschafliche Buchgesellschaf, 1996). Strauss, David Friedrich, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, I, II (Tübingen: Osiander, 1835–1836). Strenski, Ivan, Durkheim and the Jews of France (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 1997). Strenski, Ivan, Contesting Sacrifce: Religion, Nationalism, and Social Tought (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2002).

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284 Bibliography Strenski, Ivan, Teology and the First Teory of Sacrifce (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2003). Strenski, Ivan, “Te Shock of the ‘Savage:’ Edward Burnett Tylor, Evolution, and Spirits,” in his Understanding Teories of Religion: An Introduction (2nd edn; Madden, MA, and Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 45–54. Ström, Åke V., “Monotheismus I (religionsgechichtlich),” Teologische Realenzyklopädie 23 (1994), 233–237. Stroumsa, Guy  G., “Review of Kurt Rudolph, Geschichte und Probleme der Religionswissenschaf,” Jewish Quarterly Review 81 (1996), 508–509. Stroumsa, Guy  G., “Georges Dumézil, Ancient German Myths, and Modern Demons,” Zeitschrif für Religionswissenschaf 6 (1998), 125–136. Stroumsa, Guy G., “Homeros Hebraios: Homère et la Bible aux origines de la culture européenne (17e–18e. siècles),” in M. A. Amir-Moezzi and J. Scheid, eds., L’Orient dans l’histoire religieuse de l’Europe (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000), 87–100. Stroumsa, Guy  G., “Myth into Novel: Te Late Freud on Early Religion,” in Ruth Ginzburg and Ilana Pardes, eds, New Perspectives on Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism” (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2006), 203–216. Republished in Guy. G. Stroumsa, Religion as Intellectual Challenge: Selected Essays (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), chapter 3. Stroumsa, Guy G., “Review of Philippe Borgeaud’s Aux origines de l’histoire du religions,” History of Religions 45 (2006), 257–259. Stroumsa, Guy  G., “Sacrifce and Martyrdom in the Roman Empire,” Archivio di Filosofa 76 (2008), 145–154 [Il Sacrifcio], reprinted in Guy  G.  Stroumsa, Te Crucible of Late Antique Religion: Selected Essays (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021), chapter 9. Stroumsa, Guy G., “Ex Oriente Numen: From Orientalism to Oriental Religions,” in Corinne Bonnet, Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge, and Danny Praet, eds, Les religions orientales dans le monde grec et romain: cent ans après Cumont (1906–2006) (Brussels, Rome: Istituto storico belga di Roma, 2009), 89–101. Stroumsa, Guy  G., Te End of Sacrifce: Religious Mutations in Late Antiquity (Chicago, IL, London: Chicago University Press, 2009) [= La fn du sacrifce: les mutations religieuses de l’antiquité tardive (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005)]. Stroumsa, Guy  G., A New Science: Te Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). Stroumsa, Guy G., “From Abraham’s Religion to the Abrahamic Religions,” Historia Religionum 3 (2011), 11–22. Stroumsa, Guy  G., “John Selden et les origines de l’orientalisme,” in Quentin Epron, ed., John Selden: juriste européen, Annuaire de l’Institut Michel Villey 3 (2012), 1–11. Stroumsa, Guy  G., “Robert Bellah on the Origins of Religion: A Critical Review,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 229 (2012), 467–477. Stroumsa, Guy  G., “Athens, Jerusalem and Mecca: Te Patristic Crucible of the Abrahamic Religions,” in Markus Vinzent, ed., Studia Patristica 62, Vol. 10 (Leuven: Peeters, 2013), 153–168. Stroumsa, Guy G., Te Making of the Abrahamic Religions in Late Antiquity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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Bibliography  285 Stroumsa, Guy  G., “Tree Rings or Tree Impostors? Te Comparative Approach to  the Abrahamic Religions and Its Origins,” in Adam  J.  Silverstein and Guy G. Stroumsa, eds, Moshe Blidstein, assoc. ed., Te Oxford Handbook of the Abrahamic Religions (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 56–70. Stroumsa, Guy G., Te Scriptural Universe of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016). Stroumsa, Guy  G., “Renan on Jesus: Salvator nuper salvandus?” Storia del cristianesimo e storia delle religioni: Omaggio a Giovanni Filoramo, Humanitas 72:5–6 (2017), 716–732. Stroumsa, Guy G., “Anquetil Duperron et les origines de la philologie orientale: l’orientalisme est un humanisme,” Asdiwal 13 (2018), 128–140. Stroumsa, Guy  G., “Review of Markus Mesling, Gebeugter Geist,” in Romanische Forschungen 13 (2018), 122–125. Stroumsa, Guy  G., “Comparer à travers champs? Polythéismes et monothéismes,” Asdiwal 14 (2019), 65–71. Stroumsa, Guy  G., “History of Religions: Te Comparative Moment,” in Renaud Gagné, Simon Goldhill, and Geofrey E. R. Lloyd, eds, Regimes of Comparatism: Frameworks of Comparison in History, Religion and Anthropology, Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 24 (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2019), 318–342. Stroumsa, Guy  G., Te Crucible of Religion in Late Antiquity: Selected Essays (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021). Stroumsa, Guy G., Religion as Intellectual Challenge in the Long Twentieth Century: Selected Essays (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021). Stroumsa, Guy  G. and Sarah Stroumsa, Eine dreifältige Schnur: über Judentum, Christentum und Islam in Geschichte und Wissenschaf (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2020). Stroumsa, Sarah, Maimonides in His World (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009). Stroumsa, Sarah, Freethinkers of Medieval Islam: Ibn al-Rawandī, Abū Bakr al-Rāzī, and Teir Impact on Islamic Tought, Islamic Philosophy, Teology and Science, Vol. XXXV (Leiden, Boston, MA, Cologne: Brill, 2015 [1999]). Stroumsa, Sarah, Andalus and Sefarad: On Philosophy and Its History in Islamic Spain (Princeton, NJ, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2019). von Stuckrad, Kocku, Te Scientifcation of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800–2000 (Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2014). Stuurman, Siep, “Cosmopolitan Egalitarianism in the Enlightenment: AnquetilDuperron on India and America,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (2007), 255–278. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Suire, Éric, Les vies de Jésus avant Renan: Editions, réécritures, circulations entre la France et l’Europe (fn XVe–début XIXe siècle) (Paris: Droz, 2017). Tarot, Camille, De Durkheim à Mauss: l’invention du symbolique; sociologie et science des religions (Paris: La Découverte, 1999). Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography (London: Palgrave, 2001).

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286 Bibliography Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA, London: Harvard University Press, 2007). Teisohn, Philip and Georg Braungart, eds, Philosemitismus: Rhetorik, Poetik, Diskursgeschichte (Paderborn: Fink, 2017). Tomas, Louis, Les précurseurs: Arthur de Gobineau, Inventeur du racisme (1816–1882) (5th edn; Paris: Mercure de France, 1941). Tomson, Anne, Bodies of Tought: Science, Religion, and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Tiele, Cornelis Petrus, Outlines of the History of Religion to the Spread of the Universal Religions (London: Trübner, 1877) [= Manuel de l’histoire des religions jusqu’au triomphe des religions universalistes, transl. Maurice Vernes (Paris: Leroux, 1880)]. Tiele, Cornelis Petrus, Religious Systems of the World: A Contribution to the Study of Comparative Religion: A Collection of Addresses Delivered at South Place Institute (London, New York: Sonnenschein, 1892). Tiele, Cornelis Petrus, On the Elements of the Science of Religion Giford Lectures (two vols; Edinburgh, London: Blackwood, 1897–98). Tuilier, André, ed., Histoire du Collège de France, Vol. I (Paris: Fayard, 2006). Toland, John, Nazarenus: or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity, ed. Justin Champion (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999) [Original publication: London: Brown, 1718]. Trautmann, Tomas  R., Aryans and British India (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA, London: University of California Press, 1997). Trautmann-Waller, Céline, Philologie allemande et tradition juive: le parcours intellectuel de Léopold Zunz (Paris: Cerf, 1998). Trautmann-Waller, Céline, Aux origines d’une science allemande de la culture: Linguistique et psychologie des peuples chez Heydmann Steinthal (Paris: CNRS, 2006). Trautmann-Waller, Céline, “Du ‘caractère des peuples sémitiques’ à une ‘science de la mythologie hébraïque’ (Ernest Renan, Heymann Steinthal, Ignác Glodziher),” Revue germanique internationale 7 (2008), 169–184. Trautmann-Waller, Céline et al., Ignác Goldziher: un autre orientalisme? (Paris: Geuthner, 2011). Trautmann-Waller, Céline, ed., De la philologie allemande à l’anthropologie française: les sciences humaines à l’É.P.H.É., 1868–1945 (Paris: Champion, 2017). Trautmann-Waller, Céline, “Semites and Semitism: From Philology to the Language of Myth,” Philological Encounters 2 (2017), 346–367. Trüper, Henning, “Dispersed Personae: Subject-Matter of Scholarly Biography in Nineteenth-Century Oriental Philology,” Asiatische Studien 67 (2013), 1325–1360. Tylor, Edward Burnett, “Rites and Ceremonies,” in his Religion in Primitive Culture, Part II, with an Introduction by Paul Radin (New York: Harper, 1958), 461–496. Ulrich, Jörg, Euseb von Caesarea und die Juden: Studien zur Rolle der Juden in der Teologie des Eusebios von Caesarea, Patristische Texte und Studien, 49 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1999). Vacher de Lapouge, Georges, L’Aryen, son rôle social (Paris: Fontemoing, 1899). Valensi, Lucette, “Éloge de l’Orient, Éloge de l’Orientalisme: le jeu d’échecs d’Anquetil,” Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 212 (1995), 419–452.

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288 Bibliography Wellhausen, Julius, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel, with a Reprint of the Article “Israel” from the Encyclopedia Britannica, Preface by Prof. William Robertson Smith (New York: Meridian, 1957). Wellhausen, Julius, Briefe, ed. Rudolf Smend, with Peter Porzig and Reinhard Müller (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013). Whealey, Alice, Josephus on Jesus: Te Testimonium Flavianum Controversy from Late Antiquity to Modern Times (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). Wheeler-Barclay, Marjorie, Te Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010). Wiese, Christian, Challenging Colonial Discourse: Jewish Studies and Protestant Teology in Wilhelmine Germany (Leiden, Boston, MA: Brill, 2005) [= Wissenschaf des Judentums und protestantische Teologie in wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999)]. Wilhelm, Kurt, “Zur Einführung in die Wissenschaf des Judentums,” in Kurt Wilhelm, ed., Wissenschaf des Judentums im deutschen Sprachbereich: ein Querschnitt (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1967), 1–58. Wilke, Carsten, “From Talmud Torah to Oriental Studies: Itineraries of Rabbinical Students in Hungary,” in Tamás Turán and Carsten Wilke, eds, Modern Jewish Scholarship in Hungary: Te “Science of Judaism” between East and West (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2016), 75–98. Williamson, George S., Te Longing for Myth in Germany: Religion and Culture from Romanticism to Nietzsche (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2004). Winter, Michael, “A Polemical Treatise by ‘Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi against a Turkish Scholar on the Religious Status of the Dimmis,” Arabica 35 (1988), 92–103. Witte, Bernd, Moses und Homer: Griechen, Juden, Deutsche: Eine andere Geschichte der deutschen Kultur (Berlin, Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2018). Wittrock, Björn, “A Contemporary Classic: Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt’s Research Program in Its Context”, in Benjamin Z. Kedar, Ilana Friedrich Silver, and Adam Klin-Oron, éds, Dynamics of Continuity, Patterns of Change: Between World History and Comparative Historical Sociology (Jerusalem: Te Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Te Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, 2017), 11–45. Wolf, Friedrich August, Prolegomena to Homer, transl. Anthony Grafon, Glenn  W.  Most and James  E.  G.  Zetzel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). von Wyss-Giacosa, Paola, Religionsbilder der frühen Auflärung: Bernard Picarts Tafeln für die Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Wabern, Bern: Benteli Verlag, 2006). Yates, Frances, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1964). Zachhuber, Johannes, Teology as Science in Nineteenth-Century Germany: From F. C. Baur to Ernst Troeltsch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Zeller, Eduard, “Die Entwicklung des Monotheismus bei den Griechen,” in his Vorträge und Abhandlungen geschichtlichen Inhalts (Leipzig: Fues, 1865 [1862]), 1–29.

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Selected Name Index For the beneft of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.

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Abel-Rémusat, Jean-Pierre  91–2, 102–3, 105–6 Al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din  129–30, 172–3, 175 Anquetil Duperron, Abraham Hyacinthe  86–103, 106–10; philologia orientalis and  62, 64–5, 86–7; translator of the Avesta and Upanishads  62, 85–7 Baeck, Leo  179–81, 180n.49, 183 Baur, Ferdinand Christian  68–9, 177–8 Bekker, Balthasar  31–2 Bergaigne, Abel  228–9, 234 Bernard, Jean-Frédéric  47–8 Boccaccio, Giovanni  39–40 Bopp, Franz  18, 74–5, 112–13, 157–8, 191–2, 229, 230n.39 Boulainvilliers, Henri, Comte de  48–50, 49n.22, 50nn.26,27, 56, 60–1 Bousset, Wilhelm  178–81, 178n.38, 179n.41, 180n.48, 181n.51 Bréal, Michel  156, 230, 230n.39 Burnouf, Émile-Louis  141, 141n.40, 186n.73, 187–9, 198–9 Burnouf, Eugène  89, 97–8, 102–3, 103n.65, 105–6, 112–13, 141n.40, 159–60, 191–2, 199n.30 Buxtorf, Johannes  51 Christensen, William Brede  196n.15 Chwolson, Daniel  173–4, 173n.24 Cohen, Hermann  81–2, 184, 184n.62 Comte, Auguste  7–8, 165–6, 169–70, 238 Constant, Benjamin  104–5, 141–2 Cousin, Victor  104–5, 158–9, 186–7 Creuzer, George Friedrich  34, 104–7, 105n.70 Cumont, Franz  241–3, 243n.85 Darmesteter, James  89–90, 89n.14, 103–4, 104n.67, 146, 156, 163–4, 230, 236–7; book on prophets of Israel  169, 171n.14;

Jewish identity  228–9, 229n.32; view of broad comparatism  163 views on race  228–9, 229n.32, 236–7 De Brosses, Charles  46–7, 104–5 Delitzsch, Franz  80–1, 81n.54, 179n.44, 182–3, 198n.24 Delitzsch, Friedrich  182–4, 183n.59 Derenbourg, Hartwig  156, 156n.33 Derenbourg, Joseph  121–2, 122n.46, 156, 223n.15 Dupuis, Charles-François  60n.60, 61–2, 102–3, 105 Durkheim, Émile  165–6, 215–16, 215n.97, 220–1, 220n.3, 223, 224n.17, 227n.28, 232n.46, 237–9; Annales de Sociologie and  163, 223, 238; conception of the totem and  163, 165–6, 215–16, 215n.97, 220–5, 220n.3; équipe of  163, 220–1, 224–5; idea of sacrifce and  224n.18, 227–8, 232n.46; modern sociological approaches of  105–6, 220–1, 231; views on myths  232 Eichhorn, Johann Gottfried  66–8, 73 Ewald, Heinrich  114, 169, 169n.5, 201–2, 201n.36, 207–8, 216 Fleischer, Heinrich Leberecht  75n.38, 82–3, 174–7, 175n.29, 176n.34 Franck, Adolphe  158–9, 169, 226, 226n.23, 236–7 Frankel, Zecharias  82 Frazer, James George  163–4, 164n.49, 209n.73, 212n.81, 214–16, 214nn.90,94, 215n.98, 224–5 Fustel de Coulanges, Numa Denis  242–3, 242n.83 Geiger, Abraham  16, 80n.53, 81–4, 123, 174–5, 180n.48, 207; attempt to

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290  Selected Name Index

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Geiger, Abraham (cont.) understand Jesus in his Jewish milieu  80–1, 165n.57; Jesus’s connection to the Pharisees  205; Jewish infuence on Christianity  121; Jewish infuence on Muhammad  198, 205; leader of the Jewish Reform Movement  80–1, 156–7; thesis on Jewish origins of Islam  121 Gobineau, Arthur de  48n.21; founder of modern racist theory  114–15, 185–6; interest in contemporary phenomenon of Babism  185n.66; member of the Bayreuth circle  189; racist theory  138n.28, 167; views on Jews and race  115n.16, 121n.45, 185–6 Goldziher, Ignaz (Ignać)  16, 83–4, 157n.35, 209n.73; on Jewish and Islamic monotheism  175nn.30,32, review of Smith’s book on totemist matriarchal society  211; study of Islam  174–7, 176n.34; views on ethical level of contemporary Judaism and Islam  174n.28 Graetz, Heinrich  80–2, 123 Harnack, Adolf von  162–3, 179–83, 180nn.45,48, 212n.82 Harrison, Jane Ellen  164–5, 215 Herder, Johann Gottfried  30, 64–6, 68–9, 73, 76, 76n.41, 89, 99–100, 104–9 Hertz, Robert  237–41; becoming the expiatory sacrifce  244 Holbac, Baron d’  60 Hubert, Henri: choice of Celts as core of scholarship  236; impact on the anthropology of religion  163; member of the team around Année sociologique 238; supporter of Alfred Dreyfus  236n.64; theory of sacrifce  221–7, 231–2, 235. See also Mauss, Marcel Hume, David  46–7, 52, 171n.15 Hurgronje, Christian Snouk  174–5 Hyde, Tomas  87–8, 99–100 Ibn Isma’il al-Nabulsi, ‘Abd al-Ghani  41 Jaspers, Karl  91–2, 101 Jesus: as a religious impostor  40–2, 50–1, 56–8; as the last prophet  129; Bousset’s view of  178–9; compared to holy men of his time  68–9; comparison with Moses and Muhammad  50; denial of divine

nature of  112–13; Geiger and  205; infuence of Jewish teachings on  80–1, 121; Jewish identity of  71, 198–9, 204–5; Jewish perception of  57–8; Judaism afer the coming of  70, 79, 120n.37; Loisy on  162–3; mythological connections to  61–2, 68–70, 105; no intention to abolish laws of Moses  45; Renan’s perception of  69–70, 113, 120–3, 120n.37, 129–30, 162–3, 178–9, 131–46; search for the historical  69–70; seen as an Aryan  183–5, 189; sympathetic stance toward  39; Voltaire’s view of  52–3 Jones, William  5–6, 5n.9, 74–5, 74n.32, 86n.3, 87–90, 88n.11, 96n.40, 102–3 Jordan, Louis Henry  200–1, 200n.34 Kleuker, Friedrich  89 Kuenen, Abraham  82n.56, 114n.15, 196–8, 197n.22, 198n.25, 208–9 Lagrange, Marie-Joseph  20, 34–5, 154, 164–5, 165n.57, 234–5, 235n.57 Lassen, Christian  75, 113n.8, 157–8, 170 Lazare, Bernard  235 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm  72–3, 229 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim  33, 39–43, 60 Lévi, Israël  156, 223, 223n.15, 225–7 Lévi, Sylvain  87, 146, 169n.7, 223–8, 223n.15, 226n.22, 227nn.25,27, 231, 234 Loisy, Alfred  162–5, 163n.47, 224, 235, 243 Maimonides  46–7, 60, 99–100, 141–2, 157–8, 175n.30, 193n.7, 213n.84 Marr, Wilhelm  23, 116, 122–3 Massignon, Louis  249, 249n.8, 250n.12 Mauss, Marcel  226n.24, 227nn.26,28, 236n.64; fascination with aspects of Christianity  239; impact on the anthropology of religion  163; member of the team around Année sociologique 238; theory of sacrifce  221–7, 231–2, 235. See also Hubert, Henri Michaelis, Johann David  67–8 Michelet, Jules  76, 97–8, 105, 118–19, 119n.31, 186–7, 226n.23 Moses  27, 36–7, 67, 95, 141–2; as an Egyptian  167, 189–90; as an impostor  42, 56–7, 60; comparison between Jesus, Mohammad and  50–1; de-Judaizing

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

Selected Name Index  291 of  189, 189n.85; Jesus and the laws of  45, 56–7, 60; monotheism and  143–4; presence in anti-religious tracts  58; Voltaire’s writings on  52–3 Muhammad (Mahomed, Mahomet)  19, 56, 121, 129, 132–3, 141–2, 197; as an impostor  42, 56–60; banalization of  50; disparaging attitude toward  7, 212–13; divine spirit and  21; Geiger’s understanding of Jewish infuence on  80–1, 165n.57, 198, 205; new perception of  48–9, 51; presence in anti-religious tracts  58; Renan on the origins of Islam and  124–7, 207; seen as a false prophet  57–8; Voltaire’s view of  52–6; Wellhausen on  206–7 Müller, Friedrich Max  6n.11, 33–4, 65–6, 72, 75, 96n.40, 112n.5, 115–16, 128n.76, 133, 170–1, 170n.9, 171n.15, 173–4, 176n.34, 184n.63, 189n.84, 191, 209, 226, 228, 241–3; and the birth of “world religions,”  191–201 Munk, Salomon  121–4, 130, 134, 156–9, 157n.35, 158n.36, 223n.15, 227 Nöldeke, Teodor  174–5, 182–3, 198, 207n.58, 213

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Otto, Rudolf  200–1, 220n.3 Pettazzoni, Rafaele  34, 177, 177n.36 Postel, Guillaume  40–1, 72–3 Quinet, Edgar  7–8, 11–12, 76, 86–7, 106–10, 130, 186–7 Rask, Rasmus  73, 89 Reinach, Salomon, introduced works of British anthropologists in France  163–4, 228; Jewish identity of  227–8; objection to his defnition of religion and comparative approach  164–5; on Christianity studies in the universal history of religion  164–5; on racial dichotomy between Aryans and Semites  229–30; Oriental mirage  6, 241–2, 244, 250–1; preoccupation with comparative study of religion  163–4; studying Jewish topics within framework of history of religion  156; totemism  163–4, 164n.49; view of sacrifce  227–8, 228n.30; view on Jews as a race  230

Renan, Ernest  246; accusations of anti-Semitism  120–2, 120n.38, 124–5; and William Robertson Smith  203, 209–10, 216–17; as a “public intellectual,”  111–12; as Administrateur of the Collège de France  150–1, 161; coined the term, “Semitic monotheism,”  1–2, 21–2; comparative study of Abrahamic religions  119, 119n.32; conception of the status and role of the history of religions  109–10; confict between Islam and science  127; disparaging view of Islam  124–8, 127n.71; Eugène Burnouf and  103–4, 187–8; Geiger and  121, 123; Goldziher’s response to denunciation of the Semitic peoples  174–7; Greek and Jewish miracles  122, 241–2; idea of God’s unity as the foundation for humankind’s future  117–18; infuence on future generations of scholars  166; intellectual background of “Oriental Renaissance,”  62; on Aryans and Semites  23, 115–19, 128–30, 128n.77, 170–4; on Judaism and Islam  111; on race  116–18; on the origins of Islam and Muhammad  124–7, 207; on the three impostors  58–9; perception of Jesus  69–70, 113, 113n.7, 120–3, 129–46, 162–3, 178–9; relationship between philology and race  114–15, 115 n.17; responsible for perception of chasm between Christianity and Judaism and Islam  113; self-perception as an historian of religion  113; supporter of German biblical scholarship  113–14; ties with Jewish scholars  111–24; view of Muhammad 125–6 Réville, Albert  139n.34, 150–3, 150nn.7,9, 159–60, 162–3, 224, 232–3, 236–7 Ritschl, Albrecht  207–8 Sacy, Isaac Silvestre de  63–4, 74–5, 82–3, 83n.58, 90–1, 91n.19, 102–3, 103n.62, 105–6, 106n.74, 175n.29 Saint Simon  143–4, 165–6, 238 Salvador, Joseph  21–2, 79–80, 141–4, 143nn.51–54, 144–5, 145n.62, 162–3 Schelling, Friedrich  12–13, 44, 71, 79–80, 103–4 Schlegel, Friedrich  30, 74–6 Schlözer, August Ludwig  73, 209n.71 Schmidt, Wilhelm  34–5, 177, 177n.36

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292  Selected Name Index Schleiermacher, Friedrich  32, 64–5, 65n.4, 104–5 Smith, William Robertson  246; ambivalent attitude towards Islam  217; and comparative religion  212–13, 212n.81; anthropological approach to ancient Israel  214n.90; as editor of the Encyclopedia Britanica  202–3, 213n.86; disparaging view of Muhammad  212–13; early academic life  207; lack of sympathy for post-biblical Judaism  209; modern study of religion and  217; on rituals  210; on Semitic mythology  209–12; preference of the term “monolatry” to henotheism  33–4; relationship to Solomon Schechter  208–9; Renan and  203, 209–10, 216–17; ritual in Semitic religions  191, 210; scholarship on Oriental studies  211; scholarship on the history of ancient Israelite religion and text of the Hebrew Bible  209–10; theory of sacrifce  166n.59, 213–15, 218–19, 222–3, 225, 227–8, 234–5; totemism and  163–4, 214–15, 224–5; tried for heresy  208, 208n.64, 217; Wellhausen’s infuence on  207, 216–17 Söderblom, Nathan  180n.45 Spencer, John  99–100, 213, 213n.84 Steinthal, Hermann  171–2, 171n.18 Strauss, David Friedrich  7–8, 68–70, 107, 113–14, 114n.12, 136–7, 142 Strauss, Victor von  91–2

Tiele, Cornelis Petrus  196–7, 196nn.15–17, 198n.25, 224–5, 229n.34; and the birth of “world religions,”  199 Toland, John  41–2, 45 Tylor, Edward Burnert  214–15, 215n.95, 224–5 Vernes, Maurice  151–3, 152n.15, 163, 164n.48, 197n.19, 198, 232–3 Vico, Giambattista  45–6, 118–19, 118n.28, 119n.29. Volney, Constantin-Francis de Chasseboeuf, Comte de  12–13, 60n.61, 61–2, 102–3, 105 Voltaire  12–13, 43–4, 46–7, 50n.27, 55n.45, 67, 74n.32, 147; attitude toward Arabs, Muhammad, and Islam  55–6; disdain for the Jews  54–5, 55n.44; views of China and India  53–4; vision of religion  52–3, 58, 76, 88–9 Weber, Max  215–16, 219–21, 220n.3 Wellhausen, Julius  246; as a philologist  203; deprecatory stance on Judaism  204–5; disagreement over Jesus’s connection to Pharisees  205; infuence on Willian Robertson Smith  207, 216–17; on Hebrew and Arabs  201–7; study of early Islam  206–7; support for Jewish emancipation as a precursor to extinction of Judaism  203–4, 206; use of the term “henotheism,” 33–4 Zunz, Leopold  79–81, 79nn.49,51, 157–8

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General Index Note: Notes are indicated by “n” following the page numbers.

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For the beneft of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abrahamic religions  22, 37–8, 40, 87, 119, 199, 208–9, 216, 246, 249–50, 249n.8, 250n.12. See also Christianity, Judaism, and Islam Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres  46–7, 87–8, 123–4, 130, 133n.9, 156, 167–8, 226n.23 agnosticism 51 Alliance Israélite Universelle 223n.15, 224–5, 227–8 ancient Near East  10, 20, 24–5, 24n.1, 54n.38, 63–4, 67, 151–2, 178–9, 196–7, 209–10 Andalus  16–17, 78, 124, 124n.56, 195–6 angelology 29 animism  31–2, 164–5, 214–15 Annales de Sociologie  163, 221, 221n.6 Année sociologique  223, 226n.24, 238–9 anti-Jewish (anti-Judaic, anti-Judaism)  23, 67, 71, 79n.49, 120–1. See also anti-Semitism antiquity  14–15, 46, 58–60, 99–100, 117, 170–3, 233; Greek  10, 241–2; Judaism during  70; late  1, 13, 25–6, 29, 56n.50, 57, 76, 129, 206–7, 220, 243; Near Eastern  4; Western 107–8 anti-Semitism  5–6, 10–11, 23, 115–16, 228, 244; Christian  11, 55, 67, 195–6; de Lagarde and  208–9; Lutheran  68–9; Marr and  116, 122–3; origins of the term  5–6, 22–3, 116n.22; racial  16–17, 192, 228–32, 235–6, 245–6, 251n.16; religious  10–11, 79; Renan and  112–13, 115n.17, 117n.24, 120–1, 120n.38, 124–5; Vacher de Lapouge and  235–6; Welhausen and  203–4. See also antiJewish, Islamophobia, Judeophobia Antisemitismus. See anti-Semitism Archiv fur Religionswissenschaf 153

Aryans  75, 172–4, 185–8, 185n.66, 214; origin of the term  72; Renan’s use of the term  116, 118–19, 138, 170; Semites and  5–6, 72–6, 84–6, 109–10, 116, 166, 185–8, 194–7, 208–9, 228–9, 231–2, 235–7, 242–5; Steinthal’s use of the term 172–3 Aryan-Semite taxonomy  6 Assyriology  156n.32, 68, 156, 193; American  183n.59; German  181n.52, 181–3 atheism  31–2, 40–1, 60–1, 106–7, 226 Aufebung  8, 70 Avesta  62, 87–90, 92, 95–9, 102–3, 105–6, 186–7. See also Quarrel of the Avesta Axial Age (Achsenzeit)  91–2, 101 Babel-und-Bibel-Streit (Babylon and Bible controversy)  181–2 biblical criticism: Calvinist Geneva and  148–9; Catholic hierarchy and  102n.59; Catholics and  7; German tradition of  68; Protestants and  160 biblical scholarship  68, 136–7; Catholic  34–5, 154; clef between Protestant and Catholic 20–1; European 168n.2; German  113–14, 216 Brahmanism 86n.3; Vedic 194–5 Buddhism  4, 10–11, 14, 21, 71, 92–3, 188, 198, 199n.30, 226, 241–2; “Aryan,”  245; as a refection of “Oriental pantheism,”  226; as a universal religion  113, 119, 196–7, 196n.17; as compared to Christianity  197; modern study of  112–13 Calcutta Asiatic Society  5–6, 74–5, 88n.11 China  10, 16–17, 30, 43–4, 53–4, 59–60, 62, 92–3

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Christianity and Islam: afnity between  193–4; as two branches of Judaism  71–2; as universalist religions  31, 113, 119, 196n.17; comparison between  51; Geiger’s approach to  65n.3. See also Judaism, Christianity, and Islam Collège de France  19n.45, 40, 75, 89, 103n.62, 121–2, 138–9, 156–9, 186–7, 227nn.25,28, 230n.39, 236n.64, 241, 249; Chair of Grammar  235; Chair of Hebrew  111–12; Chair of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac  134; Chair of Law  226n.23; Chair of Persian  105–6; Chair of Sanskrit Language and Literature  103n.65; Chair of Southern European Languages and Literatures  106–7; Chair of the History of Religion  139n.34, 150–1, 162–3, 224, 232–3; inaugural lectures  124–5, 159–61, 163, 208 Compagnie des Indes 89–90 comparativism  215–16; in the study of religions and mythologies  199–200 Consistoire Central des Israélites de France 156–7 cultural memory  77n.42; European  8, 77 Damascus Afair  157–8 Declaration of Human Rights (Déclaration des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen) 90–1 deism  32, 52–3 Deutsche Morgenl ändische Gesellschaf 82–3 dhimmis  41, 52–3 École Biblique et Archéologique Française. See École Pratique d’Études Bibliques École Française d’Athènes  154, 187 École Normale Supérieure 120–1 École Pratique d’Études Bibliques  223, 225–6 École Pratique des Hautes Études (ÉPHÉ)  156, 223, 225–6, 235; Section of Religious Sciences  152–4, 153n.22, 232–4 emancipation, Jewish  11, 65n.4, 67, 69–70, 79, 79n.49, 83–4, 203–4, 206 Enlightenment  1–3, 10–11, 13–14, 30–1, 35–6, 41–2, 63, 65–7, 72–3, 76, 85–9, 91n.21, 97–101, 107–8, 125–6, 177–8, 184–6, 246–7; birth of modern idea of race during the  63–4; French  104–5; idea of revolution 94; Islamic 165n.57; Orientalism and the  101–3; paradigm

shif of  21–2, 35, 43–62; perceptions of Islam during the  7n.14; radical  5–8, 16–17, 66n.8; religious  198–9; views of religious imposture during the  105, 124 ÉPHÉ. See École Pratique des Hautes Études ethnology  3, 7, 69–70, 219–20, 224–5; as an interest of William Robertson Smith  214–15; Robert Hertz’s relation to  238 Ezourvedam (Ezour Veidam)  53–4, 98–9 First International Congress for the History of Religions (1900)  153–4 First World Congress of Orientalists (1873) 241–2 France: academic study of religion  85–91; cultural war between Catholic and Protestant intellectuals in  223; development of a new epistemology in  101–10; discourse on sacrifce in  232–3; exchange of knowledge between Germany and  190; historical transformation in  43; role in the modern history of the study of religion  43–56; secular scholarship in  147–66, 219–20; theory of cultural transfers in  12–13, 13n.30; transformation of knowledge between Germany and  21–2 Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1871  114, 116–17 French Revolution (1789–1799)  11, 60–1, 65–6, 66n.8, 104–5, 147–8, 186–7, 229n.32 Galilee  132–3, 138, 187–8 Gnosticism  28, 32 Göttingen school  20, 66–9, 73, 114, 169, 177–8, 193, 201–4, 207–9, 216 grammar, comparative  18, 74–5, 156, 159–60, 230n.39; of the Indo-European languages Greek miracle (Le miracle grec)  122–3, 122n48, 140, 241–2. See also Jewish miracle Haskala. See Enlightenment heathenism  4–6, 59–60; ancient  210 Hebraism 141–4 Hebrew Bible  16, 57–8, 64–5, 67, 89–90, 100, 151–2, 178–81, 193–4, 202, 209, 225, 231; critical study of  63–4; relationship of Christian theology to  16 Heis Teos! (One God!)  25–6

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henotheism  25–6, 33–4, 170–1, 171n.15, 183–4, 194–5 hermeneutics, biblical  20; biblical historical  149; of comparative religion  200n.34; traditional, of rabbinic education 79–80 Hibbert Lectures  197, 197n.22 Hinduism  14, 21, 196–7, 199, 241–2 Histoire des religions  19, 199–200 Huguenots  101–2, 151–2 humanism  129; global  98; Marcilio Ficino’s 86–7; orientalist 100–1; traditional 98 Hypsistos Teos (Te Highest God)  25–6 idolatry  94, 97n.43, 109, 123. imperialism  9, 169–70, 219, 245–7; British 18n.44; German 11; Orientalism and  68 imposture, religious  37–8, 45, 57–9, 104–5, 135 India: antiquity and cultural primacy  59–60; Aryan  186; as the Eastern tradition of wisdom  30, 88–9; commercial and political importance of  90; cultural and religious traditions of  192, 199; impact on nineteenth century Europe  86–7; interest in great civilizations of  62; monotheism and  27; origins of religion  34, 53–4, 61–2, 71; pantheism in  34; sacrifce compared between Israel and  219 Indogermanen. See Aryans Islam. See Christianity and Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, science Islamophobia  22–3, 112–13, 245–6, 251. See also anti-Semitism, Judeophobia Jansenism 86n.3 Japhetic theory  73 Jewish identity: and academic appointments  171–2; Darmesteter’s view of  228–9; during Emancipation  83–4; in France  156–7; Jesus’s  141, 145, 178–9, 198–9, 229; non-religious  81; of Hertz  236, 239–40; of Mauss  221–6, 225n.21; of Reinach  227–8 Jewish miracle, anti-Islam and  120–30. See also Greek miracle Jewish Orientalism (orientalists), Wissenschaf des Judentums and  76–84

Judaism and Christianity  125–6, 206–7; close bond between  37; comparative study of  180n.49, 195–6; compared to Islam  48, 250n.12; relationship between  72; similarities between  47–8 Judaism and Islam  1, 5–6, 10–11, 16–17, 60–1, 77, 159, 189, 192, 216, 245–6; Christian afnities with  63; Christian views of  14–16; comparison to Christianity  195–6; considered false religions  4, 36; European perceptions of  250–1; evolution of monotheism in  175n.30; foreign to the spirit of Christianity  10; Goldziher’s views on ethical level of  174n.28, 175n.32; identifed as Semitic religions  1–2; perception of by Protestant theologians  180n.47; radical changes in the perception of  210; Renan on  111–31, 145; scholarly approaches to  7, 251; study of  13–14; Voltaire’s vision of  52–3 Judaism, Christianity and Islam  7, 173, 212, 249, 250n.12; as cognate religions  1, 60–1; comparative study of  15, 39, 119, 124–5, 211–12, 250–1; ethical dimension component of  28–9; new taxonomy of religions  60; relationship between  17, 24, 35–7, 43, 62, 245–6; Smith and the three “positive religions,”  216; theme of the three rings  42; three main stages of religious evolution expressed in  32. See also Abrahamic religions Judeophobia  23, 55, 251; Voltaire and  55. See also anti-Jewish, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia Kulturprotestantismus  179–81 languages  18, 31, 69–72, 94–7, 101–3, 117, 194, 246–8, 250–1; Aryan  6, 115–16, 184–5, 194, 231; Asian  15–16, 63–4, 68, 86–7, 108, 152, 192n.1, 192n.3; classifcation of  5–6, 191–2; Ethiopian  72–3; European  3, 6, 15–16, 74–5, 96n.40, 192, 229; IndoEuropean  18, 74–5, 89–90, 115–16, 191–2, 192n.3, 230n.39; Japhetic  73; Jewish  16; Near Eastern  216–17; Oriental  30–1, 95, 105–6, 150; Semitic  68, 72–5, 105–6, 112–13, 113n.8,

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languages (cont.) 115, 117–18, 128–9, 168n.1, 170, 191–2, 201n.36, 209n.71; Turanian  191–2. See also Sanskrit Manichaeism  32, 68–9 medieval legacy  35–42 Middle Ages  24, 31, 35, 37–9, 43, 58–9, 97–8, 129–30, 158–9, 165n.57 monolatry 33–4 monotheism, Abrahamic  30–1, 250n.12; biblical  81–2, 182–4, 197n.22; binarian  28; Christian  25–7; Christian Trinitarian  31, 195–6; comparing  245; critical view of  16–17; ethical  81–2, 82n.56, 183–4; Hebrew  177n.37, 184; Indian  34, 177n.36; interface between polytheism and  27, 33–4; Islamic  191; Israelite  63, 153, 163–4; Jewish  81–2, 132; late antique  25, 28–9; Middle Ages and  35–42; origin of the concept  3, 24–35, 168n.2, 177, 181–3, 191; pagan  25–6, 29, 31–2, 178n.39; paradox of  6; paternity of  189; patristic theory of a pristine  97n.43, 177; primordial  176–7; prophecy and  63, 128–9; quarrel of  167–77; race and  112–20; religious tensions between the three  251n.16; Renan’s perception of  128–9; Romantic preoccupation with  34; spread of  143–4; study of  7, 177; traits of  30–1; transcendent 194–5; universal 169–70; varieties of  24. See also Ur-monotheism mutatis mutandis  19, 20n.48, 87, 178–9, 199–200, 214 mythology  44–7, 124–5; Aryan  75; comparative  163, 194; Hebrew  211–12; Indian  96–7; Semitic  118, 128–9, 176–7, 209–12 nationalism  7–9, 77 New Testament  20, 68–9, 71, 80–1, 81n.54, 177–9, 193, 198–9, 198n.24, 202, 205, 241–2; critical scholarship of the  70–1; universalism of  184 Old Testament  43–4, 48–9, 179–84, 194, 201–2, 207–8; Christian theological approach to  79 Oriental despotism  90–1

Oriental mirage  244, 250–1 Oriental Renaissance (la Renaissance orientale)  11–12, 62, 86–7, 106–8, 186 Orientalism  207; concept of  63–4, 68; Enlightenment and  101–2; European  103–4, 243–4; French  156; Göttingen tradition of  67; humanism and  100–1; modern  51, 68, 97–8, 108–9; post-Enlightenment and  64–5; spirit of and the study of religion  1–23, 102–3, 152; Wissenschaf des Judentums and Jewish 76–84 Ottoman Empire  10–11, 22, 157–8, 217, 235–6 paganism  14–15, 17n.40, 36–7, 43–4, 192; ancient 213n.84; Arab 206; Israelites’ 202–3 pagans  4–5, 26, 29 pan-Aryanism  6, 229–30 Panbabylonisten  181–2, 182–3, 182n.53, 183n.55 pantheism  31–4, 33n.27, 106–7, 125–6, 128–9, 173–4, 177n.36, 188, 225; Oriental  226 Parable of the Tree Rings  39–42, 58–60, 63. See also Tree rings Pharisees  80–1, 132, 137, 178–9, 204n.46, 205 Philologia orientalis  62–7; cultural transfers and  85 philology  2n.4, 3, 7, 13n.30, 15, 20, 81, 191, 217–18; classical  70–1; comparative  96n.40, 194, 195n.13, 199–200; École Pratique des Hautes Études (ÉPHÉ) and  154; in German universities  66–7; New Testament and  68–9; Oriental  69–70, 89–90, 97–8; Renan’s  114–15, 132–3; Semitic  111–12 polytheism  5–6, 27, 32, 34–5, 46–7, 63, 104–5, 107, 170–1, 176–7, 212, 214–15; among the Hebrews  172n.19; ancient  241; decline of  105; interface between Monotheism and  27, 33–4; nature  194–5; Near Eastern forms of  153; origins of the term  31–2; Semitic  172n.19; Vedic hymns and  226; within Aryan religions  173–4, 188 prophecy  52–3, 92–3, 128–9; biblical  129; dark  229n.32; false  57–8, 64–5; general study of  39; of Zarathustra  24–5 Protestantism  105, 142, 219

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

general index  297

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Quarrel of the Avesta  86–8. See also Avesta Querelle du monothéisme (Monotheismusstreit) 167–77 race: anti-Semitic attitudes and  67; Aryan  6, 170–1, 181n.52, 185–6, 214, 229–30, 236; Darmester and  228–9, 229n.32; modern idea of  63–4; monotheism and  112–20; racial theory  167–8, 185–6; Reinach and  230; Renan’s concept of  138, 236; Semitic  115, 117–18, 128–9; taxonomies of  68, 243 racialism  6, 115n.17; as distinguished from racism 115 racism  9–10, 117; Herder and  68; modern  245–6; Nazi  48n.21, 185n.65; Orientalists and  68; relationship between secularization and  115n.16; Renan accused of  119, 120n.39, 194; scientifc  9, 188 Reformation  44n.4, 179–81, 232–3 religion: anthropology of  163; civil  59–61, 59n.56; comparative  2, 7–8, 19, 35–6, 45–8, 51, 111, 113, 125, 152n.15, 153, 183–4, 191–2, 194–7, 199–201, 200n.34, 201n.35, 212, 221, 221n.6, 246–8, 250–1; French study of  85–6, 162–3; modern study of  1–4, 7, 13, 20–1, 21n.51, 46n.11, 84, 216, 222; phenomenology of  196n.15, 201, 201n.35; science of  20–1, 45–6; transformations of  8–9, 9n.19, 15, 243–4; universal  95, 99–101, 113, 119, 168–9, 196–9, 196n.17, 217–18 religions: false  4, 56–7; history of  2, 2n.4, 21–2, 25–6, 53, 61–3, 69–71, 77–8, 85, 93, 102–3, 105, 107–10, 116–17, 130–1, 133n.6, 140, 148–52, 154–5, 155n.29, 161–5, 162n.45, 176n.34, 180n.45, 181, 186–7, 193–4, 223–5, 223n.14, 243n.84; Oriental  98–9, 183, 241–4; taxonomy of  1, 10, 16, 51, 63–4, 113, 192, 219 Religionsgeschichtliche Schule  20, 68–9, 177–82, 178n.38 religious identity  8–9, 26, 76, European; French  43–4; of French Jews  16n.38; of Jewish scholars  219–20 religious studies (Religionswissenschaf)  13–14, 19, 102–3, 105–6, 159, 196–7, 200–1; university chairs  4, 13–15, 44, 81n.55, 150–1, 153–4 revelation  27, 33, 52–3, 56–7, 97n.43, 194–5, 198n.24; Christian  30; divine  2, 35, 37,

42, 51, 54, 83–4, 150; rejection of  51; religious 108 Revue de l’Histoire des Religions 151–2, 166n.59, 222n.8, 232–3 ritual  44, 105; accusation against Jews of murder on Passover  235; as an integral part of religion  219–20, 232; centrality of in Catholicism  160–2; comparative study of  14n.35; fre as a  96–7; Jewish  51; reforming  81; replacement of theology with  218; sacrifce as a  21–2, 191–218, 235 Romantic Era  64–7, 69–70, 84 Sabeans 99–100 sacrifce  169; as a contrast between man and divinity  105; Christian  232–5, 232n.46; comparative study of  22; comparative study between Israel and India  219–44; grammar of  231–2; Hertz and  237–41; Hubert and Mauss on  221–6; Lagrange on  234–5; Lévi (Sylvain) on  226–7; Loisy on  235; reasons for  232; Reinach on  231–2; Réville’s attack on  233; Semitic religion and  191; Smith’s view of  2, 166n.59, 207–18, 225, 227–8, 234–5; Tylor’s approach to  214–15 salvation (Heilsgeschichte)  8n.18, 55, 79, 181n.52, 217, 240–1 Sanskrit  53–4, 72, 89–90, 98–9, 187, 194, 199, 225–6; academic studies of  103n.65, 157–8, 191–2, 223, 230n.39; as compared to Hebrew texts on sacrifce  231; comparative grammar and  159–60, 223; ‘discovery’ by William Jones  102–3; isomorphisms between European languages and  6; similarities between Greek, Latin, and  5–6, 74–5, 192; translations of sacred texts in  99–100, 99n.50. See also languages scholars  103–4, 127–8, 166, 168–9, 169n.7, 171–4, 188–9, 197, 199–200, 205, 212–13, 215–16, 219–21, 229–30; American  249–50; Arabic  7, 12n.26; biblical  34, 112, 114, 168–9, 234–5; Calvinist  148–9; Catholic  20, 20n.49, 154, 159–62, 159n.38, 161n.42, 234–5; Christian  15–16, 145, 204–5, 207, 216–17; Classicist  66–7, 187; European  1–2, 14–16, 30, 74–5, 88–9, 108–9, 174–5, 190, 246; French  21, 103–4, 150, 153–4, 157–8, 160–3, 237;

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

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298  general index scholars (cont.) German  63–4, 66–9, 74–5, 112, 114, 116–17, 137n.22, 177–8, 183n.59, 229; Islamic  12n.26; Jewish  4–5, 15–16, 21–2, 63–84, 121–3, 130, 146–50, 154–61, 156n.30, 157n.35, 161n.42, 167, 169–70, 169n.6, 170n.8, 174–7, 179–81, 180n.48, 183–4, 190–1, 195–6, 198, 219–20, 223n.15, 226–37, 244–6; Modern  45–6; Muslim  129–30; New Testament  202, 205; Old Testament  207–9; Orientalist  47–8, 66–7; Protestant  3, 10–13, 15, 17–18, 26, 30, 35–6, 59–60, 66, 70, 79–80, 82, 91–2, 147, 149–52, 151n.10, 154–5, 159, 161, 161n.42, 198, 219–20, 232–3, 232n.45, 235–6, 246, 248–50; traveling 95–6 science  112–13; confict between Islam and  127–8, 130; contemporary  114–15, 117–18; history of  2; human  109–10; natural  2, 18; of religion  20–1, 45–6; Renan’s view of  129; secular age  1, 8–9; social 18 secularization  1–2, 7–9, 14–15, 190, 245–6; as a process  8–9, 63, 77; in France during the second half of the nineteenth century  161; in Protestant countries  20; intellectual  101; joint efect of with nationalism  77; of Christian ideas about salvation  8n.18; of institutions of higher learning  147–8; of religious studies in the Tird Republic  159; philosophical and theological perceptions of  8; Reinach’s approach to  164–5 Séminaire Israélite de France 156–7 Semites (Semiten)  73, 75, 173–4, 221, 230; Arabs as Semites?  23, 23n.55; Aryans and  5–6, 72–6, 84–6, 109–10, 116, 166, 185–8, 194–7, 208–9, 228–9, 231–2, 235–7, 242–5; Burnouf ’s view of  184–8; European perception of  23n.55; Gobineau and  185–6; Renan’s views of  117–19, 127–30, 128n.77, 134, 167–8, 173–4, 191, 209n.73, 216, 232, 243; Smith and  214; Steinthal’s view of  172–3; transcendent monotheism of  194–5; Wellhausen view of  206–7 Société Asiatique  102–3, 105–6, 228–9 Societé des Études Juives  123, 226, 228–30 sociology  191; concerning new approaches to religious systems  219; historical  46–7; modern  220–1; of knowledge  166

Supreme Being (l’Être Suprême)  60–1, 90–1, 100–1 synchronicity 91–3 Testimonium Flavianum  135–6, 135n.16, 138–9 theism  170–1; origin of the term  32. See also henotheism theology  66, 70–1, 85, 102–3, 128–9, 150, 162–3, 217–18; ancient  34; Christian  7, 16–17, 27–8, 32, 55, 191, 222, 232; comparative  193–5, 195n.13; Evangelical  201–2; German Evangelical  148–9; Judaism and  204–5; liberal  85, 179–81; philosophy and  68–9, 85, 219; Protestant  68–9, 85, 219; theoretic  195–6 Tird Republic  111–12, 147–8, 150–2, 155, 159, 163, 169–70 Tree rings  21–2, 60, 246; legend of  43; varieties of monotheism and the  24. See also Parable of the Tree Rings toleration and intolerance  66n.8, 71–2, 217; Islam and  127–8; monotheism and  139n.33; Orientalists and  101; Protestantism and  105; religious  51, 173; Renan’s claim about the Jews and  138–9; toward religious minorities  41, 51 totemism  214–15; McLennan’s “discovery” of  225; Reinach as an expert on  163–4, 164n.49; Smith’s view of  163–4, 214, 235 Tübinger Stif  68–9, 71 ultra-Montanism 107 universal Jesus  140–1 universalism  98, 169, 188, 195–7; Aryan  187–8; as a point of contention between Jewish and Christian intellectuals in Germany  198n.24; as the true nature of Israel’s true monotheism  163–4; comparatism as an obverse of  163–4; of the Hebrew prophets  169–70, 178–9; tension between particularism and  169n.7, 184 Upanishads  87–90, 89n.15, 98–9, 99n.50, 102–3, 173–4, 62 Ur-monotheism  85–6, 99–100 Vedas, Vedic religion  33–4, 72, 95–100, 107–8, 186–7, 194–5, 226, 229, 231, 234

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University

general index  299 Vergleichende Religionswissenschaf 199–200. See also comparativism Volk 65–6 Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaf der Juden 79–80 Völkerpsychologie  171–2 Volney Prize  112–13

Zarathustra  24–5, 91–3, 132–3 Zoroastrianism  21, 32, 87–8; relationship between Judaism and  71, 71n.24; Tomas Hyde and  99–100

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Wissenschaf des Judentums  16, 63–6, 123, 155–7, 183n.58, 227; and the tension

between universalism and particularism  169n.7; Jewish Orientalism and  76–84 world religions  14, 17, 19, 22, 168–70, 217–19, 246; Müller and the birth of  191–201; Tiele and  199

Stroumsa, Guy G.. The Idea of Semitic Monotheism : The Rise and Fall of a Scholarly Myth, Oxford University