The Doubting Jew: Atheism, Jewish Thought and Interfaith Relations

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The proposed study of Jewish doubt will focus on the encounter between atheism and the religion of Judaism. Along with the related philosophies including scepticism, philosophical materialism and scientific naturalism, atheism is amongst the most influential intellectual trends in Western thought and society. As such, it is too important a phenomenon to ignore in any study of religion that seeks to locate the latter within the modern world. For scholars of Judaism and the Jewish people, the issue is even more pressing in that for Jews, famously, the categories of religion and ethnicity blur so that it makes sense to speak of non-Jewish Jews many of whom have historically been indifferent or even hostile to religion. The intercultural intercourse between non-religious philosophies and religion is of particular interest in the study of the dominant form of Judaism in the US, that of Reform Judaism, which since the early nineteenth-century has presented itself as a response to modernity. Likewise, interfaith encounters between Jew and Christian have in modern times taken place against the backdrop of a largely atheistic, materialist culture; one might even say that they have been accompanied by an ever-present third partner in dialogue, namely, the religious doubter. These observations prompt us to ask:1. Why has no substantial survey of the Jewish engagement with atheism yet been undertaken? Such a survey would fill an important gap in the historical study of atheism and the attendant religion-atheism controversy. It would also enhance an understanding of modern Jewish identity among those who both embraced and those who opposed atheistic arguments.2. Why have no major studies of Reform or Liberal Judaism used doubt as a category of analysis? Such a study would likely revise the historical understanding of the development of progressive forms of Judaism. While the emergence of Reform is usually presented as a response to modernity vis-à-vis Orthodox Jewish tradition and Christianity, one might just as readily focus upon discourses of doubt, specifically around atheism, scepticism and materialistic philosophies. 3. Why has the phenomenon of atheism has been overlooked by historians of Jewish-Christian relations? Such a study would open up a new avenue of research for scholarship of interfaith relations, ignored until now despite the high profile atheism has been given in public Christian theological discourse and the fact that, since the Enlightenment, there has been a strong tendency for Jews to work out their responses to modernity in relation to Christian thought.The proposal here represents a programme to bring together Western Jewish theological responses to atheism and scepticism in the modern period, a number of which are not easily available or in the public domain. Such a body of work would be important not just because the Jewish chapter of the modern history of atheism is missing, but because the primary source materials involved represent an underutilized resource for historians of progressive Judaism and for understanding the complicated interrelationship of modern Jewish and Christian thought. One would have expected such a collection of primary sources to be a familiar and regularly used resource for historians of all three areas, but this is not the case.