Exile, Suffering, and Chosenness: The Political Theology of the Kuzari, Part II
Expanding on the political theological analysis of Kuzari IV:16 in Part I, I want to anchor it in a larger analysis of political theology in the Kuzari more broadly. For anyone who hasn’t read Part I, I recommend checking it out before reading further:
My broader analysis will have three sections: “A Defense of the Despised Faith,” “The Political-Theology of Jewish Chosenness in the Kuzari,” and “Accepting Exile and the Jewish Return to Power.” The last of these three became quite extensive as I wrote, and so it will be published as Part III.
“A Defense of the Despised Faith”: The Kuzari’s Political-Theological Problem
The association of prophetic-experiential faith with suffering reflects the Kuzari’s broader political theology of the Jewish people and their relationship with God. This manifests in his discussion of chosenness (see below) but also in an underlying claim about the place of the Jewish people in the medieval world, embodied in the Kuzari’s framing narrative. The book’s subtitle is “A Defense of the Despised Faith,” and Judaism and the Jews are indeed despised in the story.
When the Khazar king initially seeks to determine the proper religion, he doesn’t even consider speaking with a representative of Judaism. The Jews are the losers of history, so they obviously cannot be God’s chosen people or the holders of truth. Only when the representatives of the politically powerful religions, Christianity and Islam, cannot explain themselves to the king without making reference to the Jews does the king reluctantly decide that his hand has been forced: he must speak to a Jew.
The Jews in the time of the Kuzari lived as an exiled, oppressed minority, lacking the power to protect themselves or to determine their collective future. One can imagine looking at the fate of the Jews throughout their exile and saying, “Man, they really must have pissed God off”—and many Christians indeed said exactly that. There’s a certain sort of theology—one that is fairly widespread—which says that God reward’s God’s chosen individuals or group, so divine election would be necessarily manifest in material and political success. Working backwards, if an individual or group lacks material/political success, they must also lack divine election. This is the state in which the Kuzari depicts the Jews—no political power, generally downtrodden, appearing to be abandoned or even despised by God—with the addition of being actively despised by the majority groups in whose midst they live.
This is the problem which gets solved over the course of the Kuzari’s narrative (separate from the actual content of the dialogues). By the end of the dialogues with the philosopher, Christian, and Muslim, the king and many of his subjects are Jewish, the Rabbi is traveling to the land of Israel—against the king’s wishes (!). The king who originally despised the Jews now doesn’t want his Jewish teacher to leave him. Jews and Judaism—at least as far as the king and his subjects are concerned—are no longer to be despised. Critically, however, the political situation of the Jews has not actually changed. Exile persists, but with the steady adoption of the proper political-theological perspective, it is no longer seen as a crisis.
This shift takes place over the course of a few narrative scenes, mostly at the beginnings or ends of the 5 sections of the Kuzari. Within the dialogues themselves, there are two points of particular political-theological importance that I want to use to help round out the picture I have painted thus far. This will help us see how the Kuzari attempts to repair the despising of Jews and Judaism while also rejecting the simplistic political theology that identifies power with divine election.
The Political-Theology of Jewish Chosenness in the Kuzari
The Kuzari is somewhat well-known for its radically particularistic conception of what it means to be a Jew. Exploring this conception shows the extent to which the Kuzari goes in rejecting the political theology of power.
First, a caveat. There’s no way around it: the Kuzari thinks Jews and non-Jews are fundamentally different kinds of creatures. The Kuzari wasn’t being racist, but only because the concepts involved in racial thinking weren’t quite what they are today. Anyone who maintains the book’s view today is probably thinking in racial terms.
More critical for our purposes is not the mere fact that the Kuzari thinks Jews and non-Jews are different, but the specific ways in which they are different. One of these he thinks is inherent—if also recessive—in the very bodily existence of the Jews, while the second is a function of divine election itself.
The first is prophecy: Working off an old Greco-Arabic philosophical framework, he divides all things into four categories, each associated with a specific capacity the previous category did not possess: inanimate (existence), plant (growth), animal (movement), human (rational thought). To this taxonomy he adds another level, beings capable of receiving prophecy, a category which since Avraham has been essentially confined to Jews (with some exceptions). The Jews, on his account, are the people inherently capable of receiving prophecy, under the right conditions.
The bit about the conditions is important, because he basically thinks that in exile this cannot happen, so this is a difference without any real content to it. He thinks the Jews are different because they can receive prophecy, and he also thinks that they cannot receive prophecy, for contingent historical reasons. The difference remains theoretically in place but disappears in practice. (There’s really excellent discussion of this dynamic in Yishai Mevorach’s new book, The Word and the Sacrifice [Hebrew: המילה והקרבן], 176–180. I’ve been reading through the chapters on the Kuzari and really enjoying it.)
There is, however, another difference which derives from the Jews being chosen by God, and which ties into the book’s political theology. In II:29–44, the Kuzari tackles the downtrodden state of the Jews in exile by way of a broader discourse about theodicy (the name for discourses about why bad things happen to people if God is good). We needn’t go into his metaphysics and argumentation here. His key point is summed up in the verse he quotes from Amos: “You alone have I singled out of all the families of the earth—that is why I will call you to account for all your iniquities.” (Amos 3:2). Instead of divine chosenness manifesting in power and success, it manifests in increased scrutiny and punishment—which is to say, suffering and lack of political power.
This is the exact opposite of the political theology which sees Jewish suffering and exile as a sign of God abandoning or even despising the Jews. Their benighted political situation is a result not of their abandonment, but of their election.
וַאֲנַחְנוּ כְּשֶׁיִּמְצָא פֶגַע אֶת לִבֵּנוּ אֲשֶׁר הוּא בֵית מִקְדָּשֵׁנוּ – אָבַדְנוּ, וְכַאֲשֶׁר יֵרָפֵא נֵרָפֵא אֲנַחְנוּ, בֵּין שֶׁנִּהְיֶה רַב אוֹ מְעָט וְעַל אֵיזֶה עִנְיָן שֶׁיִּהְיֶה, כִּי מַנְהִיגֵנוּ וּמַלְכֵּנוּ וְהַמּוֹשֵׁל בָּנוּ וְהַמַּחֲזִיק אוֹתָנוּ בָעִנְיָן הַזֶּה שֶׁאֲנַחְנוּ בוֹ מֵהַפִּזּוּר וְהַגָּלוּת, אֵל חָי.
We, however, since our heart, I mean the Holy House, was destroyed, were lost with it. If it be restored, we, too, will be restored, be we few or many, or in whichever way this may happen. For our master is the living God, our King, Who keeps us in this our present condition in dispersion and exile. (II:32)
The Jews material-political conditions are determined not by empirical factors like their numbers and influence but by their relationship with God. This is embodied first and foremost in the temple—the Jews fall with its destruction and will rise with its reconstruction (the Kuzari contrasts this with other nations who it claims rise and fall with the empirical factors, not with the fate of their temples). Beyond the temple, however, lies the direct providential rule of God. The persistence of the Jews exile and dispersion is attributed solely to God. Hence, in a theme to which we will now turn, to reject exile would be in somevery real sense to reject God, or at least God’s providence.
In Part III we will examine how the Kuzari’s political theology as analyzed this far connects to his insistence on the Jews accepting, rather than rejecting, exile.