“The Kuzari Principle” is Structured like a Conspiracy Theory

When you try to pretend trust isn't necessary...

In the previous two posts, I examined the role of trust in the epistemology of Rav Saadia Gaon and The Kuzari. In this post, I want to briefly consider the relative role of social epistemology is the the claim The Kuzari actually makes and the “Kuzari Principle” claim people make today. This will mean digging into not just the proposals of the Rabbi within the dialogue of The Kuzari, but also to the shifting social and epistemological dynamics of the story which gives The Kuzari its structure.

C Thi Nguyen talks about epistemological environments—the way we inhabit a world which shapes our attempts to know the truth independent of our own best efforts—which can be positive or negative, more or less helpful in trying to know the truth. Some can even be downright hostile to such efforts. If we live in a society which says we can’t trust blue people, for example, then we will—through no fault of our own—have a harder time learning from blue people, even if they’re telling us the truth. This does not exempt us from attempt to overcome our epistemological environments, but is a fact with which we must grapple.

The very beginning of The Kuzari is actually a really good example of this phenomenon. The dialogue begins with the Khazar king searching for the true religion, and we who know how the book goes know that this religion is Judaism. So it’s almost tragic when the king immediately rules out speaking to a Jew about Judaism without ever speaking to a Jew to begin with. He first consults a representative of philosophical religion, and then, after dismissing him, remarks, “I will ask the Christians and Moslims, since one of these persuasions is, no doubt, the God-pleasing one. As regards the Jews, I am satisfied that they are of low station, few in number, and generally despised” (I:4). Or again, a little bit later, “I had not intended to ask any Jew, because I am aware of their reduced condition and narrow-minded views, as their misery left them nothing commendable” (I:12). The king cannot even consider going to speak to a Jew about Judaism because he believes that truth and political-military success are connected. The Jews are the losers of world history, so obviously their religion cannot be the correct one. (Notably, the full Judeo-Arabic title of The Kuzari refers to it as “A Defense of the Despised Faith.)

Presumably, the king (no innovative theologian) did not come up with this idea himself. In fact, there’s a good deal of theological sense to it. Much of what the Torah says about God and God’s relationship to God’s chosen people suggests that being chosen (or having the right religion, in the king’s context) should be reflected in political success. How responsible should the king be for freeing himself from this relatively reasonable theological claim? (Notably, it is exactly this theme that is at issue in the aggada about the Men of the Great Assembly on b. Yoma 69b, which makes clear just how established this claim really is. See my shiur on that text here.) Even if the king had gone to speak to a Jew, what are the odds he would have been open to what the Jew had to say? He was primed to dismiss Judaism because the Jews were powerless, and he connected power with truth, correctness, election, etc.

In some sense, much of The Kuzari is meant to be an argument against this fundamental connection. The most explicit passage, working off a selection from Amos, puts forward the opposite claim: Chosenness actually leads to failure and suffering, not success. Chosenness means being held to a more exacting standard, and hence being more likely to suffer and fail, not less. Similarly, The Kuzari repeatedly argues that the military-political success of Christianity and Islam is not because they are right, chosen, etc., but simply because they are violent and have power. Altogether, The Kuzari functions to pull the theological rug out from under any tight connection between power and truth, etc.

The narrative of The Kuzari’s dialogue pains a shifting picture of the king’s social epistemology. While he started out in an epistemological environment hostile to learning from or trusting Jews, it doesn’t last long. In the course of articulating their own faiths and histories, both the Christian and the Muslim need to talk about the Jews and how their own faiths were born out of Judaism. This is why, when the king dismisses the Christian and the Muslim, he not only can speak to and learn from Jews, but he feels moved to do so. His epistemological environment has been altered to become more positive to Jews. The specific argument that “the whole of Israel… knew these things, first from personal experience, and afterwards through uninterrupted tradition” may still speak only to Jews, but even a non-Jew might now be more open to Judaism being correct. The slow dialogue of the rabbi and the king that spreads out from here is in many ways an exercise in slowly building up trust from that point.

If The Kuzari makes its claim about trust in a largely—if not entirely—positive epistemological environment, “The Kuzari Principle” is an entirely different story. While the epistemological environment of Western modernity is very different from that depicted in The Kuzari, it isn’t exactly congenial to the claims of Mass Reveltation™. To Rosenzweig’s point about “trust in experience and the demand for personal verification for both faith and knowledge,” our popular culture has a very empiricist sense of history. Historical claims are true to the degree that they are concretely experienceable—think of historical artifacts, archaeology, etc.—without any load-bearing layers of trust involved in the epistemological process. To the extent that an event isn’t available for experience by any physical evidence, it should be logically necessary or implied by physical evidence. (This ideological posture toward history misses a lot of how History™ actually works, particularly the mediating roles of genre, written records, historians themselves, etc., but it also has much to commend it. Being critical toward pictures of history once taken to be self-evident has illuminated many dark corners of human history, even if trust can’t ever be done away with entirely.)

In this epistemological enviroment, Mass Revelation™ is essentially dead on arrival. It’s a claim with zero evidence other than the claim that it happened. The claim doesn’t say there should be evidence that the event happened—in which case the lack of evidence would flatly contradict it—but the lack of evidence is itself a deal-breaker for positively affirming a claim in this epistemological environment. This is all the more true for claims which are not merely theoretical. The claim of Mass Revelation™ brings with it a normative claim about how people (Jews?) should live their lives, potentially a quite rigorous and intense claim. The standard of proof demanded for such a normative claim is understandably, perhaps even rightly, much higher than for the claim that a teapot orbits the sun somewhere between earth and mars, for example.

In The Kuzari, obviously, all of this works differently. But in the modern world, this leaves a real gap that needs to be bridged. Enter “The Kuzari Principle,” wherein The Kuzari’s assumptions about the reliability of trustworthy testimony are replaced with arguments about the impossibility of false claims of mass revelation. Essentially, these arguments attempt to fill the space of trust in an epistemological environment where trust is ideological forbidden. In place of trust, we get arguments about how no one in the chain of transmission could possibly have lied about mass revelation even if they had wanted to. As the claim goes, to claim that mass revelation with significant normative implications had taken place when it really hadn’t would be impossible. If anyone made such a claim, it would not be accepted and would not be passed on toward the future. No one in the claim has to be trusted, because their epistemological hands are logically tied.

This isn’t the place to get into why I think “The Kuzari Principle” isn’t compelling. (Who decides what counts as “mass”? Is it really true that no other religions make the same claim? Is the alternative really “Some person or group just one day made up the claim of mass revelation with massive normative implications and started trying to convince people of it,” or is that a strawman?) For our purposes, it’s enough to point out the differences between “The Kuzari Principle” and what The Kuzari actually says, and note that they likely derive from exactly the difference in social-epistemological environments. Trust doesn’t have the same purchasing power it once had, so what was once just an assumption about trust is replaced by complicated, frequently unintuive arguments about how trust isn’t necessary. Ironically, for an argument often framed as pushing back against modernity’s hegemonic institutions (secularism, academia, etc.), this is an argument deeply invested in modernity’s assumptions about truth and how we can know it.

To return to the title of this post, “The Kuzari Principle” has the structure of a conspiracy theory. As noted in the first post in this series, whether or not something is a conspiracy theory is less about the specific claims being made and more about their relations of trust and distrust with the reigning epistemological (informational, educational) institutions. Conspiracy theories are ideas affirmed (only) by marginalized people and institutions, and denied and dismissed by mainstream institutions. “The Kuzari Principle” fits perfectly. It is affirmed by people and institutions whose positions in modern, Western societies are marginalized in more than one way (religious in normatively secular societies, Jewish in culturally Christian societies, etc.). This is in fact the function of the argument: the argument claims that you logically must trust the tradition of mass revelation, which means you must not trust the people who dispute it. Given modern society’s knowledge environment, anyone who disputes it is either ignorant and uninformed or in malicious denial. If it were a matter of trust (as The Kuzari actually intended), then it would be possible for reasonable people to disagree—trust is always a matter of personal experience over time, so it is inescapably particular and never universal. As a matter of reasoned argument, disagreement points either to the failure of reason, or to its capture by interests and desire—when universal knowledge is subverted by particular vices. It’s not about the details of the theory, it’s about trust. Importantly, this doesn’t directly tell us anything about whether or not the claims being made are true—but it does tell us a lot about the claims, the people making them, and the dynamic ways they navigate their modernity.