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How materialism became an ethos of hope for Jewish reformers

#1
C C Offline
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-materialism-be...-reformers

EXCERPT: . . . In the 1870s European Judaism underwent an intellectual revolution. Around then, a group of young Russian Jewish radicals began to identify Judaism with materialism, and to theorise about what they called – whether in Russian, German, Yiddish or Hebrew – the ‘material’ (material’nii, materiell, gashmi, ḥomri) aspects of the Universe. For many Jews living in this period, ‘materialism’ was a worldview that brought into focus latent Jewish ideas and beliefs about the physical world. The materialists claimed that a theory of Judaism, defined by the way people related to land, labour and bodies, had been lying dormant within Jewish literature – in Hasidic texts, the Bible, Spinoza’s philosophy – and could now be clearly recognised and fully articulated. Jewish particularity was based on specific historical economic differences between Jews and others. What made Jews different was a certain socioeconomic dynamic that distinguished them from their neighbours.

The Jewish revolutionaries in 1870s Russia who embraced the idea of materialism shared a number of critical assumptions. They all rejected the notion that Judaism was based on abstract metaphysical theories (Scholasticism), rituals (Hasidism), study (Mitnagdim), and ethics and reason (Enlighteners). Judaism was not a religion, like Protestantism. Instead it was something attached to their bodies and expressed through one’s relationship to land, labour and resources. The materialists had also given up hope that the state could protect them and ensure their economic wellbeing. And finally, they no longer believed that history was headed in a positive direction. Over no amount of time would Jews living in Russia ever be granted greater rights and opportunities. Therefore, only a radical reclaiming of the physical world on the part of Jews could ensure that they would be protected and given a fair and equal share of resources.

Soon, the Jewish materialism of the Russians could be found among western European Jews residing in England and Germany. [...] Over the course of the 20th century, Jews would increasingly come to believe that ‘there is nothing purely spiritual that stands on its own … Everything spiritual requires a necessary material basis.’

Jewish materialists were despised not only by staunch liberals but also by ‘defenders of the faith’. [...] Jewish materialists were cast as upstarts, deviants, social provocateurs and, of course, with providing Jew-haters with excuses to promote anti-Semitism.

But the Jewish materialists’ deviancies reflected a radically new kind of Jewish identity, one focused on their bodies and the physical world. [...] Jews’ needs and desires would now be seen as the primary feature of Judaism. The material Jewish identity set the stage for Jews’ involvement in 20th-century politics: Zionism, Bundism (the Jewish labour movement), the Minority Rights movement, and Jewish forms of communism all assumed that the organising structure of Jewish identity was a Jewish body, and not a Judaism of the heavens or the heart. Jewish materialism made Jews political without them possessing their own state or even citizenship in a host country.

Though the idea of the Jewish body as the locus of collective identity would always be suspect in western Europe, it would, however, become the basis of a new kind of Jewish identity most commonly witnessed in Israel and the United States....

MORE: https://aeon.co/ideas/how-materialism-be...-reformers
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#2
Magical Realist Offline
I was astounded when I learned that the Jewish faith doesn't believe in an afterlife. That when one dies they just cease to exist forever. That is an admirable faith in a way, believing in spite of not getting any future reward out of it.
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#3
Secular Sanity Offline
(Nov 12, 2018 08:46 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: I was astounded when I learned that the Jewish faith doesn't believe in an afterlife. That when one dies they just cease to exist forever. That is an admirable faith in a way, believing in spite of not getting any future reward out of it.

I've always loved their "A Note in Each Pocket".


[Image: Dust-and-Ashes.jpg]
[Image: Dust-and-Ashes.jpg]

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