Clémence Boulouque
ANOTHER MODERNITY, ELIA BENAMOZEGH’s JEWISH UNIVERSALISM
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2020, ISBN: 1503612007
Reviewed by Andrea Yaakov Lattes1
The Livornese Rabbi Eliahu Benamozegh (1823-1900) was one of the most interesting scholars of the nineteenth century Italian Jewish scene. He was an original thinker and prolific writer who left many important works, including a Torah commentary, studies on morality, philosophy, and kabbalah; in fact, he was rabbi, printer, kabbalist, and intellectual. A very multifaceted figure, attentive to philosophical thought of his time, as well as to his period’s problems and debates, Benamozegh stood at many crossroads and intellectual networks developed throughout the Mediterranean, some of which are little known, such as Sephardic Enlightenment. Since his family was of Moroccan origin, where the name Benamozegh itself means "son of the Berber," he placed Oriental tradition and culture back at the core of Europe, which according his opinion, had shaped the West before being otherized and effaced, just as Christianity had effaced its Jewish provenance and indebtedness. On the other hand, he was aware of, indeed and also absorbed the Italian and European cultural atmosphere and was a critical observer of the various intellectual and religious debates of his time. The consequence was an attempt to re-evaluate the meaning of Italian humanism as well as the development of a concept of modern and universal Judaism, open to dialogue with other religions, in particular Christianity. This conception is intricately connected with some of the notions which define modernity, such as place of reason, normativity, the autonomy of the subject, as well as the role of nations. In fact, Benamozegh's concept of modernity does not fit into the categories of Jewish Enlightenment, in Hebrew Haskalà, or Counter-Enlightenment. Moreover, he critiques the dualisms between reason and science as well as between tradition and modernity. He rejected it since he considered them to be Western European problems, instead an Oriental nondualistic worldview. This conception would warrant another type of modernity in which reason would not be dismissed and religion would be a convincing and not an imposed proposition.
In Benamozegh's view, a genuine understanding of Judaism implied that it could engage with non-Jewish sources and interlocutors. Consequently, Benamozegh invites us to reconsider the dynamics of Jewish thought in the nineteenth century and to entertain the significance of modernity. In this sense, Clémence Boulouque states, his figure is very modern, and his greatest contribution is to understanding of Jewish modernity meanings. In this context, dialogue with other religions should have led, according to this Livornese rabbi, to a union of different faiths, in which Judaism would have had primacy. Furthermore, Benamozegh also intended to establish a dialogue with modern science, in order to exploit the different doctrines and demonstrate that Judaism is really a modern and universal conception. Judaism’s vision supports justice and democracy, he argued, and as consequence invoked in his writings general political and social trends more than specific events. These partook in his diagnosis of a society in need of justice, freedom, and, more broadly, what Jewish values could offer, thus he developed an Italian patriotism which included universal values.
Benamozegh was also a publisher who exploited his printing press by giving voice to other narratives of the Enlightenment, notably from what he called the Orient, envisioned as a place where the tensions between tradition and reason, as well as between Jews and non-Jews, were irrelevant. In any case, one of the purposes that Benamozegh had set for himself was precisely that of spreading North African Jewish culture, which he considered, according to Boulouque, to be superior and more advanced than the Western one. In fact, he used his publishing activity henceforth to promote authors whose views on modernity mostly aligned with his own and militated for what he envisioned as an Oriental enlightenment. This stance had been met with the anger of the most conservative communities of the Mediterranean, whose extraordinary measure of banning and burning Benamozegh's books reshaped both the Jewish publishing networks of the Mediterranean as well as his career. So it was quite obvious that Benamozegh considered himself an outsider both in Livorno and in the intellectual atmosphere of his time, which prompted him to turn to a more international audience and to write his major work “Israel and the Humanity” in French.2
Thus, Clémence Boulouque’s work indeed tries to draw the arc of his thought, going from an initial historic contextualization to thematic and conceptual explorations. The volume is divided into four parts: the first, examines Benamozegh’s contexts, his education in the port city of Livorno, where he studied with his Moroccan kabbalist uncle, the influence of Italian Risorgimento as well as Italian Catholic thinkers, his activities as Bible exegete, publisher of books, and an essayist in France. The second part analyzes Benamozegh's claim of Jewish universalism, his comparison with modern world and its philosophy, with Christianity as well as with Reform Judaism. Part Three analyzes Benamozegh’s use of Kabbalah as a means of going beyond this dualism between modernity and tradition. Finally, last part of the book focuses on the modes of engagement that can be-or were-derived from his writings by him.
As result of this very broad view, Boulouque work gives a detailed description of Benamozegh character and analyzes various aspects of his thought, from political to kabbalistic, with a very rich bibliography. Clémence Boulouque also compares the different manuscripts and printed works in order to achieve some very interesting conclusions. The book is written smoothly, and succeeds to give a complete vision of Benamozegh's thought, analyzing different perspectives, but above all gives a vast overview of what modernity is and how Benamozegh dealt with it, in a different way from classical models. Thus, the book title is appropriate, and if Benamozegh is certainly known to scholars of Italian Judaism, he is not very well known outside of this environment. This book by Clémence Boulouque, written in English, therefore, fills a large gap.
1 Yaakov Andrea Lattes, PhD, has taught at the Department of Jewish History of Bar Ilan University, Israel; at Gratz College, Philadelphia; and at Yaad Academic College, Tel Aviv. His research deals with the early modern society, in particular regarding Jews in Italy. Furthermore, he studies the social and political developments of Italian Jewry in the present. Lattes, has published four books, as well as about forty papers about Jewish history in Italy, Jewish political tradition, history of Jewish institutions, and a book on the assimilation of Jews in Italy during the last twenty years.
2 Eliahu Benamozegh, Israël et Humanité: Démonstration du cosmopolitisme dans les dogmes, les lois, le cult, la vocation, l’histoire et l’ideal de l’Hebraïsme (Livorno, 1885).