Science and Judaism: Where has the dialogue got to?
Daniel Langton
One’s imagination goes off in all sorts of directions when one thinks of Science and Judaism. There is the phenomenon of the contribution of Jewish scientists to modern science and its understanding, such as those of Freud, Franklin, Einstein, Bohr, Feynman, Sagan, and Gould. There is the fascinating question of how an ancient religio-legal system, the halakhah, has been applied to science, from medical ethics to technological solutions for work prohibitions on Shabbat. There is the spooky realm of kabbalah and quantum mysticism, and the spookier story still of the precursor of the morality tale of Frankenstein, the monstrous golem. There is the tragic history of the murderous application of race science during the Nazi genocide. And, if you’re up to speed with current conspiracy theories, you’ll know that things have moved on since the Protocols of the Elders of Zion so that the Jews are now understood to control space lasers as well as the Press.
Broadly speaking, however, one can map out three periods of the study of Jewish religion and science. Early Jewish scholarship on science focused on harmonizing scientific knowledge with Jewish theology, particularly in the medieval period, when figures like Maimonides and Gersonides attempted to integrate Aristotelian science, often through an Arabic medium, into Jewish thought; the focus tended to be in areas such as astronomy, physics and mathematics (see Freudenthal, Rudavsky). Over time, from the early modern period onwards, Jewish engagement adapted to new scientific developments, shifting from metaphysical reconciliation to practical concerns, such as medicine, chemistry and optics (see Ruderman, Brown). The classic example is the relatively recent involvement with biological evolutionary theory, with long-running debates as to whether Jewish belief could accommodate the challenges regarding human origins and ethics, and the implications of natural science for biblical authority (see Cantor, Swetlitz, Langton). By the late twentieth century, scholarship increasingly focused on applied issues, such as bioethics (Jonas) and environmental ethics (Tirosh-Samuelson), reflecting concerns about technological advancements and global challenges (see Carmell, Hollinger, Efron). At the same time, one can observe that Jewish science-religion engagement has become increasingly interdisciplinary, incorporating philosophy, history, and ethics, rather than remaining primarily theological.
Models of Dialogue
Norbert Samuelson, a leading scholar in Judaism and science studies, has focused on the philosophical and theological aspects of Jewish dialogue with science. He points out that the familiar models of complementarity and confrontation are not mutually exclusive. On the one hand, post-Newtonian physics and Rabbinic creation doctrine are deeply complementary, at least as far as the dominant interactions of traditional rabbinic sources and contemporary Jewish philosophical theology with academic studies of elementary and cosmological physics are concerned. On the other hand, the interaction between post-Darwinian biology and rabbinic understandings of revelation is in his view an example of where the dominant interaction is pervasively confrontational. Samuelson accepts the argument that there is a basic ontological tension between modern scientific theory and Judaism insofar as modern science presupposes methodologically that everything that is can be reduced to what is physical, and the dynamics of the physical can be understood in solely mathematical and mechanical terms. For traditional Judaism, the material world is only one small part of all of reality. But interestingly, as he sees it, the real problem actually lies in the abandonment of philosophy by Judaism and the Jewish people. He writes,
[I]n many respects ours is the most ignorant Jewish community in history… I do not mean to say that Jews are ignorant. Quite the opposite is the case, for Jews have been at the forefront of all modern scientific advances in the past 200 years. However they have pursued science not as Jews; in fact, they have pursued science in conscious opposition to their Jewish inheritance… The source of the problem is a traditional European rabbinate that in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, in marked opposition to the tradition of Jewish rationalism that culminated in the writings of Maimonides, separated what we recognize to be the study of science from the standard curriculum of the learned Jew. (‘Judaism and Science’, 55-56)
Here Samuelson refers to two groups, namely the religious traditionalists and those whom Isaac Deutscher called the ‘non-Jewish Jews’ (such as Spinoza, Freud, Einstein). For Samuelson, the ideal solution is a return of Orthodox Jews to the philosophical orientation of medieval Jewish thought, so that Judaism can once again work out its relation to science in a well informed and authentic manner. Perhaps this is not so very far from the position of the former Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, also a trained philosopher, whose ‘partnership model’ is set out in The Great Partnership: Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning (2011), the best known Jewish contribution to the modern dialogue. Sacks frames science and religion as mutually enriching, expressing an Orthodox theological openness toward science, which in turn reflects a shifting Orthodox Jewish attitude towards modernity, although not one with which all his co-religionists would agree.
Others such as the eminent historian Geoffrey Cantor have like Samuelson rejected static conflict/harmony narratives, but rather emphasize the complexity of the changing historical contexts in which Jewish thinkers engaged with science and with other religious groups. Cantor’s work is an excellent example of contextual approaches that draw out Jewish-specific factors. Thus he discusses how in an Anglo-Jewish context science offered educational and career opportunities and how these served to facilitate this minority group’s integration in wider British society. And he highlights intercommunal dynamics in accounting for the generally pro-evolution stance of the Anglo-Jewish community, who deliberately contrasted their views with those of allegedly anti-scientific dogmatic Christianity. Furthermore, Cantor has explicitly criticised Barbour’s four-fold model for, among other things, focusing on the cognitive context of religions at the expense of other aspects, and for privileging an abstract set of indefinable concepts (i.e. religion and science) above the complexities of intellectual historical biography. These observations are true generally, but they are especially important for religion and science studies vis-à-vis Judaism and Jews.
Two Lessons
If there are only two lessons to be drawn from recent Jewish dialogue, it’s that one cannot assume a homogenised Jewish or Judaic entity, nor a shared Judeo-Christian experience. Jewish civilisation from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries has been characterised by seismic changes, including the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), political emancipation across Europe and the rise of Wissenschaft des Judentums (Jewish historical science and historicity), the widespread growth of modern Hassidic and mystical thought, the emergence of a science-hungry Zionist nationalist movement, and the Holocaust as the logical culmination of race science and eugenics. To highlight just three additional classes of Jews important to religion and science studies beyond Samuelson’s Orthodox Jews and non-religious Jews: 1. Jewish mystics who sought to reconcile or integrate secular scientific developments with kabbalistic concepts. Figures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries frequently translated the mystical language of the Sefirot (divine emanations) or Tzimzum (divine contraction) or Adam Kadmon (primordial man) into contemporary scientific paradigms, including cosmology, evolution, and even psychology. 2. Reform or Liberal Jews, that is, Jewish religious progressives, who since the early nineteenth-century have sought programmatically to reconcile the best of philosophic scientific thought with their theology; their engagement with Darwinism was not only sustained but profound in the sense of shaping their ideological development, especially in the US. 3. Haredi or so-called ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have historically approached science with a mixture of rejection, selective integration, and alternative epistemologies. While some Haredi communities have resisted secular scientific thought, particularly when it challenges traditional readings of Jewish texts (for example, biblical chronology), others have developed so-called Torah-based sciences, or selectively adopted technological advancements while maintaining their theological boundaries. All this reminds us that Jewish engagement with science is a complicated thing, the result of a complicated people whose religious and cultural identities are diverse and even fragmented.
Again, while engagement between Judaism and science has been framed by scholars in terms of the contested categories of conflict, independence, dialogue and integration, just as for Christianity, there are some differences with the normative Christian encounter. One of the most significant but underappreciated themes in Jewish engagement with science is panentheism, the belief that God is both immanent within and transcendent beyond the natural world. It’s there in the Christianity and science story, of course, but to a Jewish observer it appears that most commentators on Christianity have historically emphasised dualistic approaches (where God is external to nature) and/or theistic approaches (where divine intervention is required for natural processes), at least until the panentheistic turn attributed to Whitehead’s process philosophy in the post-War context. (Interestingly, Whitehead himself acknowledges the influence of two non-Jewish Jews, Henri Bergson and Samuel Alexander.) In contrast, an argument can be made that panentheism has always been the dominant position in Jewish thought about science, where scientific discoveries are seen not as challenges to divine action but as manifestations of it. This panentheistic character undermines the familiar religion and science relationship framework and bestows a distinct character to Jewish science-religion engagement, challenging any assumptions concerning a shared Judeo-Christian experience.
Judaism, unlike Christianity, is not a creedal religion that has historically stressed a set of clearly articulated beliefs necessary for a practising religious Jew to believe. As a result, Jewish history has been less concerned with heresy, and the issue of what constitutes heresy is a much more complicated one. Historically speaking, those rabbis who opposed the prosecution of heresy tended to base their argument on the necessity of maintaining communal unity, rather than championing intellectual freedom; there was never a central agency to define or judge and punish heresy. In the medieval and early modern period, a cherem or ban could be placed on an individual by the community, but other communities were free to refuse to recognise it. Certainly, there have been prohibitions on discussion of certain topics (for example, the rabbinic bans on discussions of the maaseh bereshit or ‘work of creation’ are ancient, obscure prohibitions on the secrets of the process of creation and the forces involved), and there have indeed been liturgies and the creed-like Thirteen Principles articulated by Maimonides. But while these have carried authority to the present day, they have been undermined somewhat by a modern sensibility since the time of Moses Mendelssohn and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to distinguish Judaism from Christianity by denying an interest in creeds or theology, especially systematic theology. Consequently, one might argue that there have been fewer theological brakes on any movement away from theistic articulations of Jewish religion. Furthermore, the Enlightenment commitment to science has also played into Jewish polemical interests in the insistence on the greater rationality of Judaism when compared to an allegedly irrational, superstitious Christianity, an ancient trope which can be traced back to the early Christian period and works such as Justin Martyr’s second-century dialogue with Trypho the Jew. Thus the temptation to align the Jewish religion with a commitment to scientific knowledge (as rational knowledge) in contrast to Christianity has been commonplace, regardless of whether it might undermine traditional conceptions of theism.
In fact there are some real difficulties in assuming Judaism to be characterised as theistic, historically speaking. There are questions here for Jewish philosophy, for Jewish mysticism, and for Hasidism, for each of these could be understood to undermine in some ways the Torah-derived traditional theistic conception of the deity. Down through the centuries Jewish philosophy and mysticism have both offered a variety of ostensibly non-theistic presentations of God. One powerful if controversial philosophical example that was explicit, or was usually understood to be explicit, in its challenge to theistic conceptions of God, was the philosophical system of Spinoza. It is remarkable that even for many Jews who abandoned Jewish religion Spinoza figures as an important influence, facilitating a more universalistic vision of humanity’s place in the universe, one in which the deity was no longer recognisable as the God of the Hebrew Bible but as a more abstract conception of deity, equated with Nature. Likewise, Hasidism, a popular pious movement which emerged in the mid-eighteenth century in Eastern Europe and which spread quickly from Europe to America and to the land of Israel, is frequently described as panentheistic in its theology, particularly with regard to Lubavitch acosmic theology, a monist philosophy that claims that all that exists is divine substance, including the natural world. Reinforcing all these approaches that espouse panentheistic tendencies is the Jewish tradition of biblical and rabbinic interpretation that has tended famously to allow for more wrestling, more disagreement, more flexibility and a greater willingness to embrace multiple ways of reading the sacred texts and their commentaries. The reality that many past Jewish thinkers have held simultaneously to such differing systems of thought, so that there was nothing unusual in a rabbi and a legal expert who was also a philosopher or a mystic at the same time, suggests that a lack of theological coherence and the embrace of alternative conceptions of the deity has been relatively unproblematic. Might not such an ability to switch between such differing religious and interpretative modes account for the ability to hold to theistic and non-theistic ways of seeing the world at the same time, or at least in different contexts?
For all these reasons, then, the Jewish observer of science is working within, or emerging from, a rich multivalent set of schools of thought that were often at odds with each other and theologically less constrained, where panentheistic tendencies were more pronounced and where, crucially, theism appeared to be less important as a defining characteristic of one’s Jewishness. Arguably, modern interdisciplinary commentators on science who are Jewish are more aware of this historical reality than any generation before, and are more capable and inclined to draw upon such a broad intellectual heritage. Quite how this will play out in the future dialogue between Judaism and Science is unknown, but it promises to be amongst the most colourful and unpredictable of religious engagements.
Daniel Langton is Professor of Jewish History, Head of the Dept of Religions and Theology, and co-director of the Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester. He is author of the forthcoming Darwin’s Jews, published by Oxford University Press.
Selected reading:
Brown, Jeremy. New Heavens and a New Earth: The Jewish Reception of Copernican Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Cantor, Geoffrey. Quakers, Jews, and Science: Religious Responses to Modernity and the Sciences in Britain, 1650–1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Carmell, Aryeh, and Cyril Domb, eds. Challenge: Torah Views on Science and Its Problems. Jerusalem: Feldheim Publishers, 1976.
Efron, Noah J. Judaism and Science: A Historical Introduction. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2006.
Efron, Noah J. A Chosen Calling: Jews in Science in the Twentieth Century. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014.
Freudenthal, Gad, ed. Science in Medieval Jewish Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Hollinger, David A. Science, Jews, and Secular Culture: Studies in Mid-Twentieth-Century American Intellectual History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.
Jonas, Hans. Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good After Auschwitz. Edited by Lawrence Vogel. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
Langton, Daniel R., Reform Judaism and Darwin: How Engaging with Evolutionary Theory Shaped American Jewish Religion. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019.
Rudavsky, T. M. Jewish Philosophy in the Middle Ages: Science, Rationalism, and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Ruderman, David B. Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.
Sacks, Jonathan. The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning. New York: Schocken Books, 2011.
Samuelson, Norbert M. ‘Judaism and Science’ in Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Samuelson, Norbert M. Jewish Faith and Modern Science: On the Death and Rebirth of Jewish Philosophy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.
Tirosh-Samuelson, Hava. Religion and Environment: The Case of Judaism. Cambridge: Pandora Press, 2020.
