Non-Transcendental Morality: Judaism, Islam, and Atheism

The scholarly study of Jewish Atheism is still in its nascent stage and as such there is little in the way of peer-reviewed literature about this topic. This makes it challenging to confirm, or even investigate, a popular axiom which holds that Jews exhibit a unique affinity for godlessness.

The purposes of my discussion at the Jewish Museum are broad and programmatic. I will begin by surveying plausible and major “taproots,” or drivers, of Jewish atheism, assuming its presence is as pronounced as some believe. These, sometimes overlapping, taproots are: 1) a peculiar motif in Jewish Rabbinic speculation that permits for intense focus on what is colloquially known as Torah over and against concentration on the metaphysical God of Israel, 2) a rhetorical tendency within early Judaism for playful, verging-on-blasphemous, speculation about the divine, 3) a collective history of suffering, culminating in the Shoah, that elicits a uniquely Jewish “theodicy,” or explanation of suffering in light of God’s alleged beneficence, 4) the widespread embrace by 19th-century Eastern European Jews of Marxist-tinged worldviews which explicitly relegated the divine to the realm of “the superstructural,” “the chimerical,” etc., and, 5) a historical skepticism among a “pariah people” about official God narratives the likes of which were encountered in European Christendom.

Maybe as a cause and effect of the proceeding, Jews can find religious solace in, around, below, and even beyond God, all the while remaining Jews. Which is to say, many Jews can find validation as Jews in a sense of peoplehood, and/or a commitment to Zionism, and/or immersion in Jewish culture. That such a mode of religiosity is uniquely Jewish and uniquely bewildering to traditionalist Christians, Muslims, (and many orthodox Jews) is a key point to be made in this presentation. This paper ends with a plea for researchers and religious figures of all stripes to adopt a less doctrinaire and judgmental view of Jewish atheism and related positions. A willingness to understand the fluid, complex, historically conditioned and culturally creative nature of this form of Judaism is the ideological starting point for the study of Jewish Atheism.