The Sacred Chain

Judaism, Summer, 1995 by William Nicholls

How do we write religious history? are we caught without recourse between the alternatives of fundamentalism and complete disbelief in the historical foundations of our religions? These questions are raised by Norman Cantor's The Sacred Chain, a book claiming to be an up-to-date account of the whole of Jewish history.(1)

The innocent reader will learn a number of remarkable things from this book, should he or she take it at its own valuation. Among them are the following: All biblical history before the time of the monarchy is romantic fiction, without "a shred" of empirical basis. Although anti-Semitism is a reality, and one that the author does not minimize, nevertheless,Jews have always been in large measure responsible for their own misfortunes. Only about forty thousand Jews left Spain at the Expansion in 1492 while the majority of the conversions were sincere in embracing Christianity. Many classical Jewish texts, such as the Kuzari of Yehuda ha-Levi, are boring and nearly unreadable. The Kuzari is racist, but then so is the Bible, some of its most characteristic ideas being "blatantly racist"; but Cantor also believes.that Jews have inherently superior genes. The traditional liturgy is jejune, as well as at least three times too long. judaism has yet to come to terms with modernity, let alone post-modernity: however, there is no hope whatsoever of the rabbis (of any movement) accomplishing this feat, which would need at least ten thinkers of the caliber of Maimonides. The odds are that the Jewish people will lose their distinctive identity in the course of the next century, whether in America or in Israel. However, though a cause for sadness, this does not ultimately matter because the jewish people have already fulfilled their historical destiny by spawning two world religions, Christianity and Islam, and doing most of the creative work of bringing about modernity and post-modernity.

One of Cantor's often repeated claims is that these contentions rest upon a superior historical method@ however, it is not entirely clear from his book what that method is. He likes to use the word empirical, yet flirts with deconstructionism, which is grounded in a very different philosophical outlook. Perhaps most consistently, he deploys a sociological approach to historical data in which the form and historical development of Jewish society is regarded as mainly determined by its supposed power relationships. While such a method will incontestably lead to historical insights unattainable without it, the sociology he practices in this book is clearly inadequate for a full account of religious history. In fact, much of the difficulty of writing religious history arises from the fact that only an interdisciplinary approach can hope to do justice to its complexity.

Cantor is clearly much more at home in the world of modern ideas and scholarship than he is with traditional judaism. For him, newer seems to be unconditionally better. The Jewish past whether historical or literary, halakhic or mystical, is all discredited by modernity. Indeed, if there is a common theme running through the book, it seems to be that everything more traditional Jews revere or respect is a myth to be exploded. Cantor's immense self-confidence seems to include contempt for all who disagree with him or who embrace a more traditional approach.

His judgments rest on insufficient knowledge. His acquaintance with philosophy, for example, or spirituality and Kabbalah for which he prefers the Christian spelling Cabala, for some reason) is not on the evidence of this book, above the undergraduate level. The post-Hegelian Franz Rosenzweig, for example, is characterized as a neo-Kantian along with Hermann Cohen. The account of Kabbalah shows little evidence of Cantor's claimed debt to Gershom Scholem; it might easily have been written by a disciple of Graetz, for whom not surprisingly Cantor has the greatest admiration. Otherwise, he appears to read Scholem through Harold Bloom, who, incidentally, is treated as a major biblical scholar, along with another amateur in that particular field, Robin Lane Fox. Cantor similarly displays his up-to-dateness by dispensing entirely with footnotes and references for his few quotations. His practice has little to do with empirical or historical scholarship, which is concerned with evidence and what may legitimately be concluded from it@ his practice amounts to an intellectual confidence trick.

When it comes to biblical scholarship, Cantor goes right out on a limb. His dogmatic statement that there is not a shred of empirical evidence to support the biblical account of Israel's origins appears to be based on the total exclusion of literary evidence; he relies upon archaeology alone. Whether or not it is correct to call this procedure empirical, all such sweeping statements are vulnerable to new discoveries. Even if the statement had been true -- within its limitations -- at the time it was made, it seems not to be true now.