A Jesus of White Marble or a Jesus in the Flesh?

Despite the early loss of his Christian faith, Renan held onto a lifelong belief in the incommensurability of Christianity with Judaism and Islam. This entailed his perception of an unbridgeable chasm between Christianity and the two “Semitic religions.” Such insistence originated in his understanding of Jesus as a unique figure, one who stood at the very core of the world history of religions. It is in his Life of Jesus that he expressed most clearly his views on the founder of Christianity. First published in 1863, Renan’s Vie de Jésus would swiftly become, in the original as well as in its multiple translations, a nineteenth-century international best seller. The chapter reassess the roots of Renan’s project, as well as its impact. Finally, we compare Renan and the Jewish historian Joseph Salvador on the figure of Jesus.

The Enlightenment’s Paradigm Shift and the Three Impostors

The preceding chapter dealt with the legend of the three rings, which highlighted the close family relationship between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This relationship, which had been an obvious one up through the Middle Ages, began to be seen as less evident in the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment (or perhaps, rather, the Enlightenments) took many different shapes across Europe. The present chapter is devoted to a paradigm shift, one which reflects a new historicization of European cultural life, at least in the approach to religious phenomena. In France, on which this chapter focuses, the historical transformation started earlier than elsewhere, at the very beginning of the eighteenth century.

Cultural Transfers and Philologia Orientalis

In France, the negotiation between religious and national identity had been strongly polarized between religious traditionalists of the Catholic party and secularist inheritors of the revolutionary agenda. Furthermore, unlike in the German lands, which shared no capital city, the new fields of study were mostly concentrated in Parisian scholarly institutions, whereas little of scholarly significance occurred in provincial universities. Finally, the role and status of Jews in the study of religion in France differed strikingly from their parallel role and status in Germany. A prominent reason for this difference, of course, was the non-theological character of most scholarly institutions, even before the final suppression of the Faculty of Theology at the Sorbonne in 1882.

Introduction

This book is a sequel to A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in an Age of Reason, where I analyzed new intellectual approaches to religion in early modernity, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.1 In the present work, I study some major aspects of the scholarly study of religion during the long nineteenth century. More precisely, I seek here to understand the implications, in a secular age, which was also the formative period of the new discipline, of a major paradigm shift. The nineteenth century witnessed the transformation of the taxonomy of religions. According to the traditional model, in place since late antiquity, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam were cognate religions, all stemming from the biblical patriarch Abraham’s discovery of monotheism. This model was largely discarded during the Enlightenment, and would be later replaced by a new one, according to which Christianity, the religion of Europe, essentially belonged to a postulated family of the Aryan, or Indo-European religions, while Judaism and Islam were identified as Semitic religions....

Sacrifice Compared

Although most major social anthropologists came from Britain, the new sensitivity to ritual among students of religion, it appears, was felt more powerfully in France than elsewhere. This chapter considers the conditions in which a new intellectual sensitivity to sacrifice appeared towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the immense implications of this sensitivity on new approaches to religion. Although reflection on sacrifice dates back to antiquity, it is only with the emergence of the science of religion as an academic discipline after the mid-nineteenth century that it became grounded in theoretical approaches to religion. We will see how Durkheim’s most gifted students dealt with sacrifice, and call attention to the broader political context, from the Dreyfus Affair to the First World War.

Semitic Monotheism

Ernest Renan remains the most important figure in the French study of religion. His attitudes to both Judaism and Islam must be understood against the backdrop of his notion of the two main races of humankind, the Semitic and the Indo-European, an idea which he had already developed in his early work on the Semitic languages and which continued to inform his thought throughout his life. In Renan’s view, the Semites represent a lower combination of human nature. They had for him no mythology, no epics, no science, no philosophy, no fiction, no plastic arts, no civil life … In other words, the Semites did not develop any of the fields that the Europeans understand as integral to a true living culture. In religion, the lack of myths (due to the monotony of their native deserts) meant a paucity of gods.

Semitic Religion and Sacrificial Ritual

We now turn to the broader intellectual context during the final three decades of the century, when sociology and anthropology were moving to the fore of the scene, often pushing philology backstage, as the preferred approach to the study of religion. As we shall see, the stakes, which were high, showcase at once ambivalent attitudes towards Judaism and the precarious status of Jewish scholars. The standing of Jewish scholars in the comparative and anthropological tradition reflects the strategy chosen by some among them (not always in a reflexive, conscious way) to overcome this precarious status. Both the comparative and the anthropological method permitted them to circumvent the traces of Christian theology which they correctly detected in more traditional, philological approaches to the study of the monotheist systems. Our three main protagonists here are Max Müller, Julius Wellhausen, and William Robertson Smith.

From the Quarrel of Monotheism to the Babel–Bibel Controversy

The chapter ponders the massive international impact of Renan’s views on Semitic monotheism. This impact, spread across linguistic, religious, and political borders, enduringly echoed the idea of Semitic monotheism. At the same time, it triggered a series of polemical responses that questioned the very legitimacy of the idea. The chapter also reviews new developments among German historians of religion in the last decades of the nineteenth century on the approach of biblical monotheism. In particular, we focus on another major scholarly affair, which took place at turn of the century, around a scholarly school that sought to discredit the idea of the Israelite origins of monotheism. These developments must be understood in the context of the growing racial anti-Semitism. The significant role of Jewish scholars in both affairs, in which the status of ancient Israelite monotheism was questioned, will also be surveyed.

Conclusion

Guided by the leading thread of the idea of Semitic monotheism, we have charted many storylines in the chapters of this book. In order to follow the trajectory of this scholarly idea, it was imperative to consider the historical, cultural, and religious contexts in which it was born, grew, and eventually waned. Rather than seeking to study a whole field, I have focused here on one major theme. No systematic survey of other problems encountered was attempted, nor any review of the methods developed by the modern history of religion in its most dynamic period. My aim was rather more modest: to shed light, from different angles, on the study of the monotheistic religions, in a century which saw the collapse of the old paradigm emphasizing the “family resemblance” ([...

Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars

The awareness of the proximity of Judaism and Islam to Christianity was nearly lost in the secularization process. Christian affinities with Judaism and Islam ceased to be a matter of evidence, immediately recognizable. More and more, literati started perceiving Christianity as a (or rather the) European religion, while its Near Eastern roots were trimmed far back, or even, in some cases, pulled up entirely. In German-speaking lands, in particular, the Romantic movement and the “discovery” of Sanskrit brought to the perception of “Indo-Europeans,” or Aryans and Semite peoples, throughout history, in contradistinction and opposition to one another. Within a climate of growing racist anti-Semitism, Jewish scholars started to develop modern scholarship on Judaism.