The Dual Revolutions and the Fundamentalist Backlash - 2nd of 3 essays re: Israel
2. THE DUAL REVOLUTIONS AND THE FUNDAMENTALIST BACKLASH
In the West, the Industrial and (French) democratic revolution finally destroyed the political power of the Catholic Church to dictate to governments and to defend its religious obscurantism against scientific investigation. For a hundred years (roughly 1870 to 1970), theocracy was dethroned. Because of the new logic of the nation-state and of democracy, consistency demanded that the Jewish people be allowed to exit the ghetto.
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Emancipation of the Jews, therefore, as granted by the national state system in Europe during the nineteenth century, had a double origin and an ever-present equivocal meaning. On the one hand, it was due to the political and legal structure of a new body politic which could only function under the conditions of political and legal equality. Governments, for their own sake, had to iron out the inequalities of the old order as completely and quickly as possible. On the other hand, it was the clear result of a gradual extension of specific Jewish privileges, granted originally only to individuals (My note: i.e., "court Jews", who were financiers), then through them to a small group of well-to-do Jews; only when this limited group could no longer handle by themselves the ever-growing demands of state business, were these privileges extended to the whole of Western and Central European Jewry...
although their status was defined through their being Jews, it was not defined through their relationship to another class. Their special protection from the state and their special services to the governments prevented their submersion in the class system as well as their own establishment as a class. Whenever they were admitted to and entered society, they became a well-defined, self-preserving group within one of the classes, the aristocracy or the bourgeoisie.
There is no doubt that the nation-state's interest in preserving the Jews as a special group and preventing their assimilation into class society coincided with the Jewish interest in self-preservation and group survival
- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Nation-State; the Birth of Antisemitism
This flaw, this special status of Judaism, occurring at the very beginning of the modern era was the inevitable result of a millennium of Christian practices towards Jewry. Disastrously, the way the change in the status of Judaic monotheism was made set off a chain reaction of fundamentalisms in all three monotheisms, and has largely defined the murderous zealotry that began in 20th century Europe and has spread to the greater Middle East in the 21st century.
2.1 Religious fundamentalism, the reaction to modernity
The religious counter-attack to the Dual Revolutions emerged almost immediately in all monotheisms: fundamentalism. All fundamentalisms originate in the 19th century, and all are reactionary. They seek to drag society back before the Dual Revolutions. To deny science, to return women to the status of chattel, to end the freedom to think and criticize. They all demand literal interpretation of an inerrant holy book.
The fundamentalists have been greatly aided in their cause by the secular theocracies that arose in the wake of the meltdown of the West during the thirty year European Civil War (1914-45) - Fascism and, especially, the atheistic Communism. The Catholic Church rehabilitated itself from its blatant collaboration with the fascists during WW2 by being more anti-Communist than anyone in the postwar era. In general, the capitalist hysteria about Communist economic practices was easily manipulated to empower the hysterical reaction of religious fundamentalists to the self-destructive Communist practice of state atheism.
2.1.1 Christian Fundamentalism
Christian fundamentalism arose in the late 19th century in response to Darwin's theory and the scientific Biblical criticism that was undermining Biblical teachings. Founding institutions in the US included the Moody Bible Institute; and founding documents included the Scofield Reference Bible. The cornerstone of this movement was scriptural literalism - that the earth was created in 4000 BC and so on.
2.1.2 Islamic Fundmentalism
The Wahhabi strain of Islamic fundamentalism is recent, largely the result of the symbiosis of the Wahhabi sect and the Kings of Saudi Arabia, occurring in the late 18th/early 19th century. The kings protected the Wahhabis, and the Wahhabis gave theological legitimacy to the kings. Relevantly for this essay, Wahhabism emphasized stamping out the slightest tincture of polytheism from islamic practice. That is, it started an Islamic counter-reformation against Shia (sort of Islamic Protestants) and localist practices that it considered polytheistic.
To understand the significance of Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab's ideas, they must be considered in the context of Islamic practice. There was a difference between the established rituals clearly defined in religious texts that all Muslims perform and popular Islam. The latter refers to local practice that is not universal.
The Shia practice of visiting shrines is an example of a popular practice. The Shia continued to revere the Imams even after their death and so visited their graves to ask favors of the Imams buried there. Over time, Shia scholars rationalized the practice and it became established.
Some of the Arabian tribes came to attribute the same sort of power that the Shia recognized in the tomb of an Imam to natural objects such as trees and rocks. Such beliefs were particularly disturbing to Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab. In the late 1730s he returned to the Najdi town of Huraymila and began to write and preach against both Shia and local popular practices. He focused on the Muslim principle that there is only one God, and that God does not share his power with anyone--not Imams, and certainly not trees or rocks. From this unitarian principle, his students began to refer to themselves as muwahhidun (unitarians). Their detractors referred to them as "Wahhabis"--or "followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab," which had a pejorative connotation.
Helen Chapin Metz, ed. Saudi Arabia: A Country Study - The Saud Family and Wahhabi Islam
(Wahhab) started a reform movement in the remote, sparsely populated region of Najd, advocating a purging of such widespread Sunni practices as the veneration of saints and the visiting of their tombs and shrines, all of which were practiced all over the Islamic world, but which he considered idolatrous impurities and innovations in Islam (Bid'ah). Eventually he formed a pact with a local leader, Muhammad bin Saud, offering political obedience and promising that protection and propagation of the Wahhabi movement meant "power and glory" and rule of "lands and men".
- Wikipedia, Muhammad al Wahhab
2.1.3 Jewish Fundamentalism
Hannah Arendt discussed the course of those Jewish people who took the path of assimilation and who adopted Enlightenment philosophy. But there was another part of Judaism that rejected and recoiled from the new status on offer from the modern nation-state. The classic reactionary scheme in monotheisms, as Sam Harris recounted, is to take an extreme rigorist position and to brand oneself as the one true religion, declaring everyone else to be heretics. The Haredi and Hasidic Jews took exactly this course, with a brief detour being imposed by the genocide of the Nazi secular monotheism.
The scriptural interpretations of Judaism makes medieval Scholasticism look like kindergarten. I am no scholar of Judaism. Therefore, in the interest of not making any theological errors, I am simply going to quote Wikipedia.
Haredi Judaism is a reaction to societal changes, including emancipation, enlightenment, the Haskalah movement derived from enlightenment, acculturation, secularization, religious reform in all its forms from mild to extreme, the rise of the Jewish national movements, etc. In contrast to Modern Orthodox Judaism, which hastened to embrace modernity, the approach of the Haredim was to maintain a steadfast adherence both to Jewish Law and custom by segregating themselves from modern society. However, there are many Haredi communities in which getting a professional degree or establishing a business is encouraged, and contact exists between Haredi and non-Haredi Jews, as well as between Haredim and non-Jews.
For centuries, before Jewish emancipation, European Jews were forced to live in ghettos where Jewish culture and religious observance were preserved. Change began in the wake of the Age of Enlightenment when some European liberals sought to include the Jewish population in the emerging empires and nation states. The influence of the Haskalah movement (Jewish Enlightenment) was also evidence. Supporters of the Haskalah held that Judaism must change in keeping with the social changes around them. Other Jews insisted on strict adherence to halakha (Jewish law and custom).
According to its adherents, the forebears of the contemporary Haredim were the traditionalists of Eastern Europe who fought against modernization. Indeed, adherents see their beliefs as part of an unbroken tradition dating from the revelation at Sinai. However, most historians of Orthodoxy consider Haredi Judaism, in its modern incarnation, to date back no earlier than the start of the 20th century.
Hasidic Judaism is a Jewish religious group. It arose as a spiritual revival movement in contemporary Western Ukraine during the 18th century, and spread rapidly throughout Eastern Europe...Present-day Hasidism is a sub-group within Ultra-Orthodox ("Haredi") Judaism, and is noted for its religious conservatism and social seclusion. Its members adhere closely both to Orthodox Jewish practice – with the movement's own unique emphases – and the traditions of Eastern European Jews, so much so that many of the latter, including various special styles of dress and the use of the Yiddish language, are nowadays associated almost exclusively with Hasidism.
The bottom line here is that Jewish fundamentalism definitely has a 19th century origin.
2.2 The state of play as of 1900
Even though Christianity, in response to the Thirty Years War and the Enlightenment, had been evolving towards religious moderation for over a century, the ever-increasing impact of science (Darwinism) and rational thinking (historical literary criticism of Bible texts) on religious life provoked a return to uncompromising reaction in the late 19th century. This reaction, known as fundamentalism and based largely on Biblical literalism, gained traction from its opposition to the disgusting, pseudoscientific Social Darwinism, promoted by Herbert Spencer to the joy of brutal capitalists everywhere. The Catholic Church argued to throw out the baby of Darwin's theory and the whole Dual Revolution along with the bathwater of Social Darwinism. Outside of Catholicism, new fundamentalist Protestant sects multiplied like mushrooms after a rainstorm.
The Islamic world, less penetrated by science, had nevertheless seen a recrudescence of the war on moderate religious rituals that were newly construed to be un-Koranic polytheism. This war was instigated by the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam, and re-energized the long-simmering Sunni antagonism towards Shias. Wahhabism became a political weapon in the hands of the medieval kingdom of Saudi Arabia as early as 1800. Thus, the classic pattern of zealous monotheism being forced on people by a dominant state repeated itself. Wahhabism was not a direct reaction to the developments in European civilization; but it nevertheless used the penetration of European armies, money, and companies into the Moslem World to circle the wagons in favor of an intolerant rigorism with deeply tribal overtones.
The Jewish world underwent a complete revolution in the 19th century. The Dual Revolution released them from the ghetto and exposed the Jewish community to the classic dilemma of assimilation versus withdrawal. These were the only viable options on offer to the tiny Jewish community that resided in a huge and largely anti-Semitic Christian Europe.
Assimilated Jews in Western Europe adopted a moderate, less zealous religious dogma, Haskalah or Reform Judaism. They sought to become an integral and equal part of the newly created democratic nation states. At the same time, fundamentalist Haredi/Hasidic movements arose in Central and Eastern Europe. These movements rejected the wave of new ideas that was crashing over Europe. Instead of involving themselves in the nation state, they practiced self-segregation, withdrawing into their own ghettos. Both responses generated problems for the future. Assimilated Jews were resented for their success. Haredic Jews were despised for their alien dress and behavior and for their poverty. The costume worn today by Hassidic Jews originated in 19th century Poland. The mistreatment of women in that group continued as from Biblical times.
