Rowan Williams on Jewish identity and religious freedom in liberal modernity
"The [French] revolution wanted to save Jews from Judaism, turning them into
rational citizens untroubled by strange ancestral superstitions. It
ended up taking just as persecutory an approach as the Church and the
Christian monarchy. The legacies of Christian bigotry and enlightened
contempt are tightly woven together in the European psyche, it seems,
and the nightmares of the 20th century are indebted to both strands.
"In some ways, this prompts the most significant question to emerge from
the [history of Jews in modern Europe]. Judaism
becomes a stark test case for what we mean by pluralism and religious
liberty: if the condition for granting religious liberty is, in effect,
conformity to secular public norms, what kind of liberty is this? More
than even other mainstream religious communities, Jews take their stand
on the fact that their identity is not an optional leisure activity or
lifestyle choice. Their belief is that they are who they are for reasons
inaccessible to the secular state, and they ask that this particularity
be respected—granted that it will not interfere with their compliance
with the law of the state.
"This question is currently a pressing one. Does liberal modernity mean
the eradication of organic traditions and identities, communal belief
and ritual, in the name of absolute public uniformity? Or does it
involve the harder work of managing the reality that people have diverse
religious and cultural identities as well as their papers of
citizenship, and accepting that these identities will shape the way they
interact?
"Yet again, we see how Jews can be caught in a mesh of skewed
perception. The argumentative dice are loaded against them. As a
distinctive cluster of communities held together by language, history
and law—with the assumption for the orthodox believer that all of this
is the gift of God—they pose a threat to triumphalist religious
systems that look to universal hegemony and conversion.
"The Christian or Muslim zealot cannot readily accept the claim of an
identity that is simply given and not to be argued away by the doctrines
of newer faiths. But the dogmatic secularist finds this no easier.
Liberation from confessional and religiously exclusive societies ought,
they think, to mean the embrace of a uniform enlightened world-view—but the Jew continues to insist that particularity is not negotiable. So
we see the grimly familiar picture emerging of Judaism as the target of
both left and right.
"The importance of [this history] is that it forces the reader to think
about how the long and shameful legacy of Christian hatred for Jews is
reworked in 'enlightened' society. Jews are just as 'other' for a
certain sort of progressive politics and ethics as they were for early
and medieval Christianity. The offence is the sheer persistence of an
identity that refuses to understand itself as just a minor variant of
the universal human culture towards which history is meant to be
working. And to understand how this impasse operated is to understand
something of why Zionism gains traction long before the Holocaust."
