Judge Dennis Davis
The Non-Jewish Jew

Judge Dennis Davis | The Non-Jewish Jew | 04.28.22

- Good evening, good morning, afternoon, whatever it is to everybody who’s listening. Again, I’m giving you this lecture from literally no more than about 150 metres from the Victoria Falls, which is quite the most extraordinary sight, and I recommend to everybody. Tonight I’m going to be talking about Isaac Deutscher and emphasising to a considerable extent his work, “The Non-Jewish Jew.”

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

But let me try to back up and explain quite a few things before I start. It is interesting if you reflect upon many of you who’ve been attending these lectures of Lockdown University since its commencement, and those who’ve joined the journey as it has progressed, would’ve encountered all sorts of Jews. After all, really, the lecturers have emphasised aspects of Judaism one way or the other. And we’ve heard lecturers on Freud and Marx and Spinoza, just to mention Rosa Luxemburg has come into the picture. A whole range, Freud, have all appeared. And what is characteristic of all of them, is although they’re Jewish, and we talk about that, what kind of Jew were they?

Now, in particular, what I’m trying to talk about, what I’m trying to focus on, is something I raised with you yesterday when I grappled with the problem of the relationship between the universalism, which is inherent within Judaism, are cosmopolitanism if you wish, and on the other hand a particularism. I’m not going to traverse my last night’s lecture, but I do believe that this particular tension between the particular and the universal, lies at the heart of our tradition and lies at the heart of trying to unlock an understanding of not only the Jewish tradition, but how it was that all these extraordinary people, who’ve contributed so much to our knowledge, one way or the other, how it was that they were all Jewish, but they were not from Jews. They were not identifying Jews. They were certainly not Jews who would’ve rocked up a shul on Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur or paid money to any Jewish communal fund. And the reason therefore that Isaac Deutscher becomes so interesting is because he wrote a series of essays which were published posthumously in 1968 called, “The Non-Jewish Jew.”

They were a series of essays and which seemed to me to be perhaps one of the great guides to this particular issue that I’ve raised with you. And indeed I’ve been hacking on for quite some time that we needed to do a lecture about this, because I think it gives some insight into so much that we’ve traversed over this lengthy period. Before I start, let me tell you a little bit about Isaac Deutscher, who he was, what he did. He was born in 1907, near Cracow. Significantly, he was raised within a Hasidic context. He was regarded as a child prodigy in both Torah and Talmud, but at the age of 13, we are told, he tested God, they tell us, by eating treyf food at the grave of a holy person on Yom Kippur and became an atheist thereafter. He was a journalist, an essayist and a poet. He joined the Polish Communist Party in 1926, which would’ve been unsurprising given his rejection of the tradition of which he had been so immersed, but he was expelled six years later for criticising Stalin.

He wrote a book, which many of regarded as both flawed and confused, the biography of Stalin. But at a later point, his real fame came from a magisterial three volume study of Leon Trotsky. The three volumes are “The Prophet Armed,” “The Prophet Unarmed,” “Prophet Outcast.” They are regarded by most scholars as a central source for trying to understand Trotsky and those who were expelled from or fled Stalinism throughout Stalin’s evil reign. At the start of World War II, Deutscher moved to England where he wrote for The Observer and he became the chief European correspondent for The Economist. The first of the articles that he wrote for this book called “The Non-Jewish Jew,” was published in 1958, in fact, the essay was called “The Non-Jewish Jew.” And what is significant, and we are going to talk about this, he affirmed the abiding influence of Judaism on his intellectual life and politics and considered then, this is what I’m going to discuss, the creative role played in history by what he regarded as Jewish heretics from Elisha ben Abuyah, to Karl Marx to Leon Trotsky, all of whom in his view were shaped by the Jewish particularist universalistic tensions of which I spent most of last night talking. And so it’s interesting therefore to kind of just say a little bit more about Deutscher before we do something that I want to, which is to take you through text, to actually take three texts or three extracts from “The Non-Jewish Jew” and to discuss them with you.

It is particularly interesting that notwithstanding the fact that he rejected traditional Judaism and having emerged from Hasidism and then embracing Trotskyism, which he considered to be the inheritor of a messianic revolutionary tradition and what he said he sensed was a rational universal project of emancipation, Deutscher was shattered by the emergence of antisemitism within the Russian Revolution. He was particularly disturbed by the fact that the first state Hebrew theatre, the Habima Theatre, which of course was closed down after being, as it were, almost the emancipation of Jewish letters and cultural life, was closed down by the Stalist bureaucracy and therefore, in his view, destroyed an intimate link between Bolshevism and Eastern European Jewish communities. And essentially that broke his faith in this idea of a kind of European cosmopolitanism, which would’ve been sourced in some or other form of Marxism.

Now significantly, and it’s important to emphasise, Deutscher, then writing against the backdrop of the Holocaust and the emergence of the state of Israel, had a lot to say about this. He started off, unsurprisingly, you would consider, to be an anti-Zionist, but in the 1950s he spoke about his guilt in encouraging Jews to stay in Europe and fight for socialism. This is what he said. “I have, of course, long since abandoned my anti-Zionism, "which was based on a confidence in the European labour movement, or, more broadly, in European society and civilization, which that society and civilization have not justified. If, instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers. For the remnants of European Jewry, is it only for them? The Jewish State has become an historic necessity. It is also a living reality. "Whatever their cleavages, grievances, and frustrations, the Jews of Israel are animated by a fresh and strong sense of nationhood and by a dogged determination to consolidate and strengthen their State by every means at their disposal. They also have the feeling, how well justified, that the civilised world, which in one way or another has the fate of European Jewry on its conscience, has no moral ground to stand on when it tries to sermonise or threaten Israel for any real or imaginary breaches of international commitments. Even now,” writes Deutscher, “however, I am not a Zionist, and I have repeatedly said so in public and in private. The Israelis accept this with unexpected tolerance,” huh, he was writing in a different time, was he not? “But seem bewildered, ‘How is it possible not to embrace Zionism?’ they ask, ‘if one recognises the State of Israel 'as an historic necessity?’ What a difficult and painful question to answer!” he said.

Now what makes Deutscher so unique is that he was probably one of the very few peoples on the left, certainly if you look at left wing publications, which were around in his time, including the New Left Review, who was, “Writing that the flight from Europe and the formation of the state of Israel was,” as he wrote, “akin to a man jumping out of a burning house and landing on top of another man, neither of them being at fault.” In fact, Amos Oz who seemed to borrow that but actually Deutscher had written about it earlier. “But he could never celebrate this necessity, as a universalist. For him, it always remained for him a defeat.” But at the end of the day, Deutscher actually understood the idea of the Jewish state, and he actually was totally impressed by Kibbutzim, “seeing them, unsurprisingly, not as comparable to the backward Kolkhoz of the steppes but as laboratories of the future which were tracing, perhaps in a utopian manner, intimations of what a new collective, universal social formation might look like.”

So here was a man who, to a large extent, saw the new Jewish identity forged in Israel as product of crisis and catastrophe, didn’t celebrate it, but understood it. And that in a sense is the tension which comes out of someone like Deutscher, writing as he did about the fact that he never, ever escaped his identity as a Jew, but could not share, to a large extent, the kind of tradition of which I was trying to develop in the lecture last night. Now, as for a background, and I hope that therefore just by giving you these elementary details of his life, that you’ll realise that we are dealing here with somebody who goes to the heart of something which is really interesting, which is what was it about these Jews who were non-Jewish Jews, which essentially shaped them and which to some extent, such as in his case, meant that they never escaped in some very profound way, their embracing of one or other form of Jewish identity?

Now with that in mind, I want, if I may, to turn to some of the writings of “The Non-Jewish Jew,” before I get to the tips that I’m going to show you, or let me say the text, let me start off with the introduction to “The Non-Jewish Jew,” it is absolutely fascinating. Deutscher writes as follows. “I remember that when as a child I read the Midrash "I came across a story and a description of a scene which gripped my imagination. It was the story of Rabbi Meir, the great saint, sage, and the pillar of Mosaic orthodoxy and co-author of the Mishna, who took lessons in theology from a heretic Elisha ben Abuyah.”

Now, let me pause there. Elisha ben Abuyah, known in the Talmud as Akher, The Stranger, was one of the great rabbis of his time round about 100 AD, somewhere around there, certainly after 70 AD. And there are many reasons for the explanation as to why Elisha ben Abuyah, who was this great rabbinical scholar, became a heretic. Perhaps the most interesting for me was the story that he saw a person go up a tree and basically take the baby bird from the mother’s nest without shooing away the mother and landing quite happier on the ground from the ladder. The next day he saw a similar scenario where somebody went up and sought to take the bird, but shooed the mother away before taking the little bird. And we know that the shooing away of the mother, in order to take a bird, the baby bird, that is regarded as one of the basis by which you ought to have a long life. And yet the second person who did this, according to Elisha ben Abuyah, fell from the ladder and was killed. And therefore at that point where he saw somebody violating the law, nothing happening, somebody complying with the law and should have had longer years, dying, it shattered his faith in the tradition and he left it. So much for Elisha ben Abuyah, who’s then referred to because he’s heretic throughout the relevant portions of the Talmud, as Akher, The Stranger, never as Elisha ben Abuyah.

Back to Deutscher, “Once on a Sabbath, Rabbi Meir went out on a trip with his teacher, and as usual they became engaged in deep argument. The heretic was riding a donkey, and Rabbi Meir, as he could not ride on a Sabbath, walked by his side and listened so intently to the words of wisdom falling from heretical lips of Elisha ben Abuyah, that he failed to notice that he and his teacher had reached the ritual boundary which Jews were not allowed to cross on a Sabbath. At that moment, Elisha ben Abuyah turned to his pupil and said, ‘Look, we have reached the boundary, 'we must part now, 'you must not accompany me any further, go back!’ Rabbi Meir went back to the Jewish community whilst Elisha ben Abuyah rode on, beyond the boundaries of Judaism and of Jewry.”

Continues Deutscher, “There was enough in this scene to puzzle an orthodox Jewish child, such as myself. Why, I wondered, did Rabbi Meir take his lessons from the heretic? Why did he show him so much affection? Why did he defend him against other rabbis? My heart, it seems, was with the heretic. Who was he? I asked, he appeared to be in Jewry and yet out of it. He showed a curious respect for his pupil’s orthodoxy when he sent him back to the Jews on the holy Sabbath, but he himself, disregarding canon and ritual, rode beyond the boundaries. When I was 13 or perhaps 14, I began to write a drama on Akher and Rabbi Meir and tried to find out more about Akher’s character. What made him transcend Judaism?” And then he says the following, “The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition. You may, if you like, view Akher as a prototype for those great revolutionaries of modern thought, about whom he then continues to speak.”

Now, before I show you the first clip, what is particularly important here, please observe, is we are reading about somebody who’s grappling with why a whole bunch of revolutionaries who were Jewish, what was their relationship to Judaism? What was his? We’re reading about somebody who actually knows his Talmud, with great respect to people who would criticise him, many of them know Talmud, he was steeped in the tradition and that’s why he begins, which is so astounding, with a whole series of references, of which this is one, to Talmudic literature. And he then poses his question, was Akher, Elisha ben Abuyah, the prototype heretic, which is basically which tradition has continued? So that we’ve got also the parallel tradition. Those of us who tried to follow the tradition one way or the other, and those who reject it but are essentially still within that tradition, one way or the other, the paradox is interesting. Let us have a look then at clip one if I can, Lauren, the first text. All right, let me just move this so I can read it properly.

There we go, “The Jewish heretic,” writes Deutscher, “who transcends Jewry belongs to a Jewish tradition. You may, if you like, view Akher as a prototype of those great revolutionaries of modern thought about whom I am going to speak this evening, you may do so, if you necessarily wish to place them within any Jewish tradition. They all went beyond the boundaries of Jewry. They all, Spinoza, Heine, Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Freud, found Jewry too narrow, too archaic, and too constricting. They all looked for ideals and fulfilment beyond it, and they represent the sum and substance of much that is greatest in modern thought, the sum and substance of the most profound upheavals that have taken place in philosophy, sociology, economics, and politics in the last three centuries.”

Let me just leave that up. “Have they anything in common with one another? Have they perhaps impressed mankind’s thought so greatly because of their special Jewish genius? I do not believe in the exclusive genius of any race. Yet I think that in some ways they were very Jewish indeed. They had in themselves something of the quintessence of Jewish life and of the Jewish intellect. They were a priori exceptional in that as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures. They were born and brought up on the borderlines of various epochs. Their minds matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilised each other. They lived on the margins or in the nooks and crannies of their respective nations. They were each in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.”

Let me consider this, let’s do this, you know, in the great Jewish tradition of actually lecturing through a text, what he’s saying is like Akher, who admittedly was a, as they say , he was a great rabbi, but he was also of the outside, outside because he had been this great rabbi who had rejected the Jewish tradition and become a heretic. And yet he never was actually totally outside for reasons I’ve advanced. And what in fact Deutscher is saying is they were non-Jewish Jews in the sense that each of them felt that the constraints of Judaism were, as it were, too narrow, too archaic, too constricting upon them. But although it would be wrong, says Deutscher, to believe in some exclusive genius of any race, what is particularly interesting for him is that these were people who were insider outsiders.

In many ways they were identified as Jews. We all know that because we’ve actually examined them throughout Lockdown one way or the other. And even Marx, who in some lectures has been suggested, you know, profoundly rejected everything, I would recommend, as I indicated to you and I debated with Jeremy Rosen, I would recommend to all of you that you read Shlomo Avineri’s recent book on Marx, which shows an entirely different picture. So all of these people, all of them were very Jewish in some ways because they were on the borderline between the secular, as it were, world, and in a sense still to some extent constructs of the Jewish identity. They dwelt, as it were, between the insider outsider. They lived on the margins, meaning they weren’t totally in the one nor in the other, just like Elisha ben Abuyah. That’s what he’s saying.

And it’s that basis, that sense of being the insider outsider, which provides, as it were, the energy for the creativity, which fueled all of them in their own way and which essentially sought in each case for the development of some cosmopolitan vision, if you wish, not in a religious sense when we say in the Shabach prayer, that the whole world will recognise God. It wasn’t about recognition of God, but the idea that humanity would come together, that was what they were on about. And in a way it was precisely because they had lived in the margins, it’s precisely because they knew what it was to be an outsider, where they could be subjected to diverse cultural influences that we see the reasons for the product of their work. And so what Deutscher is saying is don’t come here and tell me about exclusive genius of Jews per se, but do listen to the fact that given these conditions of these people and given the fact that they therefore represent a long condition, going right back to Elisha ben Abuyah, these are revolutionaries of thought precisely for the reasons that he’s articulated here.

Now again, you may not necessarily agree with this, but you have to accept that this, I would hope you would accept, that this is a particularly interesting phenomenon of trying to understand, to a large extent, what Deutscher was on about when he spoke about trying to engage with all of these people and asking the question, they were all Jewish, is there anything within their Judaism that actually helps us understand what they were on about in terms of the various theories that they developed, whether it be politics, psychology, sociology, literature, et cetera, or theology as the case may be? Now let me, as it were, turn to clip two just to reinforce the point that he then makes, which I think makes, this first clip makes the understanding what he about to say about Israel a little bit more apparent. He says here, right, all this, in fact what he’s saying is, all this meaning the entire basis of the total failure of the cosmopolitan dream prior to the Second World War, the total destruction by way of the genocidal activities of the Nazis drove the Jews to see their own state as the way out.

Most, oh I dunno what’s happened to my, oh, “Most of the great revolutionaries, whose heritage I am discussing, have seen the ultimate solution to the problems of their and our times, not in nation-states but in international society.” That is true, all of the people that I’ve been speaking about now did not see their problems in nation-states. “As Jews they were the natural pioneers of this idea, for who was as well qualified to preach the international society of equals as were Jews free from all Jewish and non-Jewish orthodoxy and nationalism?” That flows, it seems to me, from this insider outsider framework that he’s trying to develop. Now, I appreciate that it’s a possible, I mean, what I would’ve loved was to dished out the whole book to everybody and we could have had three or four sessions on him. So please accept my apology for only taking extracts, but I hope this will stimulate you to read the entire text.

But then he goes on to say, “The decay of bourgeois Europe has compelled the Jews to embrace the nation-state.” In other words, whilst he, Deutscher, regards himself in the same way as Akher, he’s also realistic to know that the decay of bourgeois Europe had compelled Jews to embrace the nation-state. And this is the paradoxical consummation of the Jewish tragedy. “It is paradoxical, we live in an age when the nation-state is fast becoming an archaism, not only the nation-state of Israel but the nation-states of Russia, the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and others. They are all anachronisms. Do you not see it yet? Do you not see that when atomic energy daily reduces the globe in size, when man starts out on his own interplanetary journey, when a sputnik flies over the territory of a great nation-state in a minute or in seconds, that at such a time technology renders the nation-state as ridiculous and out-lived as mediaeval little princedoms were in the age of the steam engine?”

Well, that was written in the 1960s. And you can see that what Deutscher was saying was this, that there was within Judaism a cosmopolitan tradition, a tradition which believed that the nation-state wasn’t basically central to our continued existence, despite the fact that for 2,000 years it wasn’t. But the fact was that for people like him, quote, “The decay of bourgeois Europe,” essentially regarded there as being a reason, and many people have suggested certainly in the debate about Zionism and Israel, that in some ways the nation-state of Israel formed in 1948 almost meant that the Jews were caught off sides because by then there was this criticism of nationalism as such. Of course we now know particularly as that of what is going on in Ukraine and Russia, that is not entirely so. And the real issue, I suppose, as we reflect upon what he’s writing, is whether it is true to say that the nation-state is an anachronism.

What I think we can say is that all of the revolutionaries who saw the solution, not in the nation-state, but in a broader cosmopolitan view of humanity, that certainly was the ideal, which should prevail, but tragically hasn’t. And when you read Deutscher now in the cold light of 2022, it does seem somewhat problematic, does it not? Nonetheless, what I’m trying to illustrate for you is what do we mean when we talk about the non-Jewish Jews? We mean people who essentially were trying to transcend the restrictions of identity by trying to embrace the insider outsider paradigm and to look therefore in a more universalistic perspective. And as I indicated last night, that is seriously problematic for all the reasons that I’m not going to advance here yet again. But what again I’m emphasising is why I don’t think you can understand all these people that we’re talking about without at least engaging with this concept of the non-Jewish Jew.

Let me then go to the third clip, if I can, Lauren. Ah, now again, I need to just juggle my thing. Sorry, I’m so useless with this. “‘The Jewish heretic who transcends Jewry belongs 'to a Jewish tradition.’ And he sees this great Jewish heretic as a prototype of some great revolutionaries of modern thought, all of whom were Jewish by birth, but all of whom transcended Jewry.” Spoken about that, that all of them were beyond the bounds of Jewry. They all found it too narrow and constricted. So let’s go to the next paragraph. “They had in themselves something of the quintessence of Jewish life and of the Jewish intellect. They were a priori exceptional in that as Jews they dwelt on the borderlines of various civilizations, Their minds matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilised each other. Each one was in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it.” How can one not agree with that? That has been the dilemma of Jewish life forever.

Now you can say the solution to that is the state of Israel, and that of course is where debate should take place. And certainly you’ve heard Deutscher’s view, but what I think is less contestable is the fact that if we try to explain this group, astonishing group of Jews, what he’s saying about them makes a very plausible explanation as to what they were trying to do. “Each of them was in society and yet not in it, of it and yet not of it. It was this that enabled them to rise in thought above their societies, above their nations, above their times and generations, and to strike out mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future.” Let me just stop there for a moment. It does seem to me that at least this, that when you consider, for example, the enterprise of modern Jewish orthodoxy, and I spoke last night about David Hartman and I also referred to Jonathan Sacks, although I think David Hartman is a more aggressive proponent of this than Jonathan Sacks, but we can have different views and it doesn’t really matter ‘cause they’re both within the same paradigm. They were seeking to reach a reconciliation. And certainly I’m not going to be able to succeed in that if Hartman and Sacks, two of the greatest Jewish thinkers of that part of 20th century failed.

But what I am saying is that that dilemma, that tension they sought, that is Spinoza, and Luxembourg, Heine, et cetera, they sought to resolve that differently. They struck out, they could not be an insider. The fact that they were outsiders to a large degree did not mean that they did not carry with them something of the insider. But they saw it important to strike out mentally into new, wider rises, to think beyond the confines of a nation-state, to think beyond the confines of particularistic identities. “They were essentially optimists, and their optimism reached heights which it is not easy to ascend to in our times. And here’s the thing, They did not imagine that it would be possible for civilised Europe in the 20th century to sink into a depth of barbarity at which the mere words solidarity of man would sound as a perverse a mockery to Jewish ears.” And there’s the tragedy. The tragedy is that these non-Jewish Jews wrote at a time, yes, it’s true, all of them would have experienced various forms of vicious antisemitism, hatred, et cetera, pogroms, and you name it. But the notion that civilised Europe, the Europe which was supposed to embrace their cosmopolitan views, at least to some extent, would sink to a depth of barbarity, that there’d be no solidarity of the human beings.

That was something way beyond their contemplation. And to Deutscher, therefore, even writing in 1967, shows a remarkable reflection of the fact that this is not an easy solution. And this is why when he’s asked the question early on, remember in the first clip that I gave you or when I actually read to you, and let me read it again in the light of what we’ve just said, “Even now, however, I am not a Zionist, and I have repeatedly said so in public and in private. The Israelis accept this with unexpected tolerance but seem bewildered, 'How is it possible not 'to embrace Zionism?’ they ask, ‘if one recognises the State of Israel 'as an historic necessity?’ What a difficult and painful question to answer!” he says. And yet it seems to me, of one thing I’m reasonably sure is that whilst Deutscher is utterly correct when he says this, “He worried that Hebrew anti-universalism and the construction of a narrow sense of national consciousness would put at risk, when combined with geographical separation, much of huge value in Jewish culture and, to boot, implies getting rid of the diaspora, the memories, the habits, the tastes, and the smells of exile, millennia of exile. That Jewish exile experience had profoundly enriched European humanity. But when Europe discarded it in the Holocaust, the creation of a new home, a Jewish home, became an historic necessity.”

It was a vital, it was that tragic destruction of a particular dream. But I think what he’s trying to say, this great biographer of Trotsky, was that if you want to understand this whole country of people that we’ve been studying for the last two and a half years in regard to why they were as they were, then you need to understand precisely what he’s talking about, that they had not foreseen that possibility and that they saw some form of broader emancipation, some form of embracing the outsider, which they too were, in order to have a society which emphasised the kind of humanity of humankind rather than the ethnic and religious and other forms of identity which divide us. And so in summary, what I suppose I’m saying, ‘cause I see there are quite a lot of questions and I’d like to leave time for them, what our summary, as I’m saying is I think that this collection of essays, which I’ve tried at least to give you a little bit of an indication, if I could concretize it, perhaps, all of these people, whether it be Spinoza, Freud, Marx, et cetera, all of them could never totally transcend the identity as Jews.

But each of them sought, as it were, to harmonise conflicting influences and to create an outlook which transcended for them the dichotomy of the insider outsider. Each of them was a unique blend of a whole range of different influences. But each of them carried, I think, which is what Deutscher is trying to say, some form of both either Jewish temperament, Jewish experience, or in fact, Jewish , Jewish views. All of them in a sense might not have regarded, Spinoza’s case, God as a Jewish God. But at the end of the day, the fact that he did see some form of universal process was very similar to that which he had born into, saved that he realised that unless you could reconcile the insider outsider conundrum, in fact society would land up in the way it was, all of them were ruthless, all of them were ruthless in the way that Jews were ruthless throughout the Jews of Jewish history, all of them essentially grappled with these dilemmas. And it seems to me therefore that all of them, as Deutscher has correctly identified, have to be seen in a strange way in that paradox of non-Jewish Jews, those who issued the tradition, but remain Jewish for all the reasons I’ve advanced.

So let me now turn to questions.

Q&A and Comments

Romaine says, “Great talk by creativity of the outsider.” Thank you,

Q: “Is the defining difference between the insider outsider the relationship with Torah?” A: Well, I think not necessarily Torah. I think it’s how you identify. Do you identify by emphasising the particularism or do you not? I would want to suggest that if you, depending, you could have a very much more universalistic definition of Torah. I don’t think that’s the case. I think what he starts off when he talks about Elisha ben Abuyah, what he’s talking about is somebody who rejects the fundamental tenants of the tradition as it then was, the kind of the cement that held the whole of Jewish structure together at the time that Elisha ben Abuyah was living, but on the other hand understood it and could never totally escape it. And that he says is the prototypical revolutionary of all of these particular kinds.

Q: Marilyn, “Is this not the problem, Judaism has a difficulty to accept people who live on the margins and accept Jews who can enjoy cross-cultural influences, but still have Jewish values?” A: Yes, I do think that’s right, Marilyn. That’s what I feel. I feel that, you know, I’m influenced by Jewish values absolutely. But as for many, they’re also secular values. What I’m trying to suggest is that it’s trying to reconcile these two. And so I agree with you entirely that if you just sort of prefer the idea that you can’t accept the cross-cultural influences, really that to me is tragic. And I think that’s the tragic problem about certain aspects of the Jewish world today.

Ron says, “This is what I think about Jews in a more general sense, not just that we’re recognise as people of genius. Jews recognise that they’re outsiders, wherever they live outside Israel, perhaps even there. This, to some extent, frees Jews from the constraints of conforming norms society that does not fully accept them, allowing them to try new things, propose new ideas, be iconic, classic”, yes, in some ways that’s true. But what Deutscher was saying, it’s precisely because you were an outside, but you also were not entirely an outsider, that there were parts of you that were an insider. I mean, I just know for myself that whilst I am critical of Israeli government policy, I really profoundly believe in the centrality of Israel to Jewish life. And yet because some people think that’s not good enough, you know, in a way you’re therefore regarded as a complete outsider. I don’t regard myself as an outsider. I regard myself as an insider, but also certainly railing against certain kinds of influences from the outside. Now I’m just a small example of that. I’m sure all of you feel one way or another in this particular way, whatever your politics are. So I think you’re right, that the fact that you actually are in that position and they all felt in that position, that’s all the ones I’ve been mentioning, that gave them a sort of energy of creativity as they tried to puzzle out the way in which life could be better for them. So I mean, Trudy’s spoken very often about the fact that Rosa Luxembourg said, you know, I’ve got bigger problems than to worry about the Jews. But the fact is that if you rarely read her life, you realise that to some extent she’s influenced by that particular conundrum and that influences the way she thinks. And all I’m therefore saying is, whether she’s right or wrong, is this is a very profound group of people, the non-Jewish Jew, and frankly many of us saw those, many of us fit that bill one way or another.

Q: “What is your view about the Bund? Secular, but fighting for political rights and Yiddish culture in Eastern Europe?” A: Well, of course we know, and I think Deutscher would say, that failed, that failed and the Holocaust basically put an end to that, and that was a great tragedy. So he’s not saying that in a way that’s the way back. What he’s saying is the great loss that occurred because of the Second World War, because of the genocide, because of the holocaust, what the great loss was any possibility of trying to bring about some form of reconciliation, of for example, such as the Bunt or such as some of those who would be regarded as non-Jewish Jews.

Ron, “I don’t think the nation-state is anachronistic. I think it’s central due to the tribalism, which seems fundamental in human nature.” I think you’ve got a good point there, Ron. I’m not sure that it’s because of tribalism. I think nation-states are constructs, which then do, as it were, start having an autonomy of their own. But I have to say, and it’s hard to think now of a global form of governance, it’s clearly failed. But I’m not sure that local forms of governance, in a sense, people taking greater control of their locality is not perhaps the way which we are going to have to look at in the 21st century. For one thing is clear is that the great experiment after the Second World War in which we had the social welfare democratic state and in which that was supposed to take care of war, that ultimately imploded, certainly by the time of the Washington consensus, in fact earlier with Thatcher and Reagan. And it imploded because the nation-state could not fund it sufficiently for all sorts of reasons, which would require an entirely separate lecture. But what I’m trying to say is I don’t think we’ve got a case of , let’s return to the old days of the 1950s welfare state. We have to think through some other forms of governance, which are going to actually be far more successful than we are present, for one thing is for sure, whereas an inflexion point, the nation-states to a large degree have failed so much of their own population, as has globalists. And so in a way which doesn’t simply retreat to that which was the chivalry of the past and which manifests the cannot succeed in the 21st century. But I suspect that’s another lecture which one would have to give.

Alfred and your honour, “Otherness, it’s essential to understand that the Jewish electoral tradition as represented by the Talmud includes Akher, with respect, and even the degree of admiration rather than cancelling as a heretic. This opens as a foundational thread of Judaism, one that sadly is under attack from what has become the Orthodox mainstream, not only the ultra Orthodox.” All I can say to you is , I agree entirely. That’s what I’ve been hacking about for two lectures was that yes, Akher is part of the position and that’s why we should look at people like Spinoza, et cetera, in broad terms also as part of the position. And that’s what Deutscher is saying, yes.

Q: “Did Deutscher ever have the ability to consider the possibility that he might be wrong?” A: Yes, in a lot of his works, he certainly had doubt. And the fact that he actually talks about this is too painful a question to answer is itself a reflection of a kind of humility, which let me say is sorely lacking in so much public discourse at the moment.

Sheri says, “I would love to hear what Freud would say about his four sisters that died in the concentration camps. What would Trotsky have thought of his great grandson, David Axelrod, a settlers advocate in Israel who named his Baruch Meir for Baruch Goldstein and Meir Kahane?” I haven’t the slight idea what Trotsky would have thought about that other than to have, you know, basically been utterly bereft. And what Freud would’ve thought about his four sisters died in the concentration gap would’ve been, I would’ve thought precisely the point which I think Deutscher is making, which was that to a large extent, that great dream failed, Hitler destroyed it. And we’ve never really, I think, rethought those issues. But that does not in any way detract from the analysis of the non-Jewish Jew because many of us still holds to the view that although we think the tradition is too constricting, it has something there. And we then build from that in various other theoretical constructs. Many, many intellectual Jews at the moment in that particular regard, some most creative writing and political thought comes from Jews who essentially represent non-Jewish Jews in that way. I could have given a lecture talking about 10 or 15 professors of great distinction in today, but of course they were not being addressed by Deutscher. But the analysis for me holds, oh dear, I think I slipped one there, I do apologise. There’s one saying,

Q: “So are you proposing that we should continue to be strong diaspora where these outsiders can flourish?” A: No, I’m not suggesting that, but there will be a diaspora one way or another, although it is true now that, you know, there’s a very significant percentage of our population in Israel, and that’s terrific. But the fact of the matter is we do have a diaspora and one would hope that outsiders would flourish. And in fact, at the end of the day, as I’ve tried to indicate by quoting Hartman yesterday, by virtue of the fact that we have a state of Israel, that places obligations on us to essentially develop ethical conceptions which transcend the restrictions of nation-state. Not our one, but all nation-states. That’s what Hartman was talking about. And I invite you to go and have a look at the quote that I read to you yesterday.

Q: Susan, “Were all the non-Jewish Jews you’re speaking of brought up within a strong?” A: No, they weren’t brought up within a strong orthodox tradition, not at all. Deutscher was unusual for that factor. That’s what I found so interesting was that he starts by understanding the Jewish tradition and understanding, I think what a previous question put, which is understanding the way in which Judaism actually encapsulates insider outsider, it’s true, the Talmud has all range of minority opinions. Akher, Elisha ben Abuyah, appears often in the Talmud, wasn’t rejected, wasn’t cancelled. And so all I’m trying to say is that no, they weren’t all brought up in a strong Orthodox tradition. But the fact is that that’s not the point he’s making. The point he’s making is that they were outsiders precisely because they were Jews, and that in a fact had a bearing on the manner in which to a larger degree, they developed their cosmopolitan thought.

Peter, “We should expect people to change when they identify with if they,” sorry, I’ll read it again. “We should expect people to change what they identify with if they change how they think. As people evolve from using idealism as their main form of reasoning to empiricism, they can no longer base their social relationships and identity on a shared ideology. They’ll consider idealism a flawed form of reasoning. They’ll resent being required to identify an ideology. The greater epistemological change of civilization was the development of empiricism, the direction of human understanding reversed. Instead of projecting onto reality how we thought it should be, we formed our beliefs on what we observed, being the relationship material world.” That is a seriously controversial proposition. I’m not suggesting for one moment that empiricism isn’t an important epistemological framework, but the fact is, we all are products of one or other ideology, all of us. And the fact that you’re punting empiricism is itself an ideological construct. So the question which we have to ask ourselves is how do we transcend our own particularistic ideologies to talk to each other? And that’s a debate that we can have and should have because you raised a profoundly important point. I really can’t take it much further, but I want to contest, I am going to be giving lecture at some point on the Vienna Circle in which the particular points that you raise about empiricism and logical positivism and its failure essentially address some of the questions, Peter, that you’ve raise. So you’ll forgive me, I’m just giving you a broad outline of where I think the learning from the Vienna Circle goes.

Q: Bernard, “Were they trying to transfer Jewish social justice values into non-denominational, non-religious world?” A: To some extent, yes. To what extent they were influenced all of them by the actual writings within Jewish tradition, I don’t know. But the fact is that they were Jewish and the fact that essentially they felt outside of the broad community and that that Judaism matter to some extent is what Deutscher is talking about. And that was what fueled the energy towards the broad theories that we’ve examined.

“Well, it’s optimistic and progressive, but our future lies in our own culture.” I’m not quite sure what that means. I certainly think one’s entitled, our own culture, the culture of everybody’s entitled to be respected and given a great deal of dignity. But somewhere along the line, we’ve also got to understand that humanity as a whole does count, which is why these people were so important.

Yes, I have, yes. “As a Driven Leaf” by Milton Steinberg. Yes, it does, it does because he’s addressed, Steinberg, Milton Steinberg’s “As a Driven Leaf” does to some considerable extent, address many of these questions. And perhaps that’s a book that one should actually give a whole lecture on, I agree with you.

Q: Stephen, “But did these heretics not express their genius through the Jewish textual tradition, maybe not Marx, as their essential inner Jewishness, which is where it is to be found as prepared by secular Amos Oz and his daughter, Professor Fania Oz-Salzberger in their little book, Jews and Words”? A: Well, I’m not sure, yes, to some extent that Jewish textual tradition and the notion of text was particularly vital to many of them, certainly like Spinoza in fact and Marx too. So yes, there is something, and it’s also true that with many of them, when you read them, it’s almost a kind of Talmudic methodology to the way they write, which is particularly intriguing, you did right.

Q: Carol, “I consider myself a non-Jew Jew and I don’t practise any rituals, but join with family occasions. As a child, I was steeped in Judaism, went shul regularly, but now ancient to knowing so much about the world, the wars and human behaviour, I’ve lost all belief in any religion. And I know so many friends "and so many people who have these feelings. I feel all this is Jewish. What do you know about this type of thinking?” A: That’s precisely the type of thinking which I think you’re right, Carol. It is the non-Jewish Jew. It is somebody, if you’re going to define the Jew as somebody who really kind of holds on to rituals or the tradition as a whole or to a particular dominant form of Jewish ideology, if you’re outside of that, but still it becomes important to you, that’s what Deutscher, I think was many ways grappling with, which is why his work is so intriguing.

Q: “How do you view non-Jewish Jews?” asked Elena, “discussed today with the unJew, described by Sharansky.” A: Well, just precisely because I would not agree at all with Sharansky. So I think that’s why for me, Deutscher provides a methodology which is much more worthwhile of development. Thank you very much, Susan, and thank you very much, Aubrey.

Jules, “Deutscher writes in the book that after the Holocaust, no intelligent Jew can be anti-Zionist. Many of today’s non-Jewish Jews don’t have his perspective.” Yes, well, he wasn’t ever a Zionist for the reasons I’ve mentioned, but you did right. The difference between him and many other on the left, people who wrote for left wing magazines was that he understood the implications of Holocaust for all of the reasons that I’ve advanced.

And Miriam, yes, “In Israel, the trend is away from universalism into particularism, leading to much deserved criticism from abroad unless we’ve got the balance terribly wrong”. And I agree with that entirely, and that’s why I spent so much time devoted to Anton Hartman, sorry, Anton Hartman, David Hartman yesterday. Riva, “'Beatles’ song ‘Imagine,’ the same longing for universal peace by laying the fault at the door of diversity. It’s only in the very diversity that we can learn tolerance is indeed the world is in time, era exposed by a pandemic, the Russian Ukraine invasion, an era that extends both intra and inter religion already happens to no-Jewish streams also seen in Abraham Accords.” Well, I’m not sure about the Abraham Accords, but I will say this, that unless we actually, I think Jonathan Sacks wrote a book called “The Dignity of Difference,” it captures quite a lot of what I’m trying to talk about, I suppose. “Do you think this group of intellectuals who read Akher and he thought,” I would doubt it, but I can’t say it differently, thank you very much, Linette.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is all that I have. So goodnight to all of you and thank you very much for listening.