Digital Library > Jewish Political Thought > Irving Kristol as a Jewish Thinker

Irving Kristol as a Jewish Thinker

September 12, 2014
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Mosaic has launched Mosaic Books, a new e-book series. The first book in the series collects, for the first time, the essential Jewish writings of one of America’s most perceptive and provocative intellectuals, Irving Kristol. On Jews and Judaism: Selected Essays covers American Jews’ struggle with politics, theology and religious practice, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, and Israel and Zionism. Introducing the e-book is the noted historian, and Kristol’s wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb.

On Jews and Judaism: Selected Essays by Irving Kristol is available in your web browser right now to preview and buy. It’s also available on your iPad and iPhone via iBooks, and on your Kindle and in your Kindle app via Amazon.

As a foretaste, please enjoy this selection from Gertrude Himmelfarb’s rich introduction:

“Is there such a thing as a ‘neo’ gene?” With this query Irving Kristol opens his 1995 essay, “An Autobiographical Memoir.” His life, he recalls, has been a series of such “neo’s”: neo-Marxist, neo-Trotskyite, neo-socialist, neo-liberal, and, finally, neo-conservative. “No ideology or philosophy,” he explains, “has ever been able to encompass all of reality to my satisfaction. There was always a degree of detachment qualifying my commitment.”
 
But there is an exception. One “neo” has been “permanent” throughout his life, Kristol writes, and was “probably at the root of all the others.” In his religious views (although not, he notes parenthetically, in his religious observance), he has always been “neo-orthodox.”
 
This is a remarkable testament by the “godfather of neoconservatism.” The political lineage of neoconservatism is well known, from its beginnings in a dissident Trotskyism and on to its various mutations in the 1970s and 80s and its emergence as a distinctive political and cultural orientation. In Kristol’s case, less well known is the existence of the religious gene, the neo-orthodox gene—which is to say, Judaism—not as an appendage or by-product of the other neo’s but as a permanent feature of his life, indeed at the root of all the others.
 
Kristol’s memoir is an invitation to inquire into that missing gene, and his own writings provide the best avenue into such an inquiry. His many reflections on Jewish religion and theology, the relation of Jews to secular society and culture, the Holocaust and anti-Semitism, and the contemporary situation of Israel are memorable in themselves. They are also memorable for the light they shed on neoconservatism, giving a spiritual and moral dimension to the mundane issues of politics, economics, or foreign affairs. Finally, they remind us of a Kristol who is more than the godfather of neoconservatism in its familiar guise, more far-ranging and spirited, more perceptive and more provocative.
 
Kristol confesses that his neo-orthodoxy is “something of a puzzle” even to him. His Jewish family, he recalls, was Orthodox in the sense common in his Brooklyn neighborhood. His father attended services on the High Holy Days and his mother kept a kosher kitchen but (like many if not most women in that milieu) was rarely seen in the synagogue. As a child, he went to the local Hebrew school two afternoons a week and Sunday mornings, learning to read the prayer book and Bible by translating the Hebrew into Yiddish, although he knew neither language. (At home, his parents spoke Yiddish to each other and English to the children, so his bar-mitzvah speech, delivered in Yiddish, had to be memorized.) In school, the rabbi enforced classroom discipline by a strong slap in the face and taught the children to fear Gentiles and to spit when passing a church. “If ever there was a regimen that might have provoked rebelliousness,” he reflects, “this was it.”
 
Yet he had not the faintest impulse to rebel. On the contrary, he continued with Hebrew school for a few months after his bar mitzvah, although his parents neither required nor encouraged him to do so. After his mother’s death, when he was sixteen, he rose at dawn every day for six months to go to the synagogue, unaccompanied by his father, to recite the memorial prayer for the dead. “There was something in me,” he later observed, “that made it impossible to become antireligious, or even nonreligious.” This was so even in his later years, in spite of the other, political “neo’s” that might be expected to have moved him in a different direction. “I was born theotropic,” he concludes.
 
…
 
[T]hese essays also correct a common misconception of the nature of Kristol’s “basic predisposition” to religion—that it was merely utilitarian, valuable primarily, if not entirely, as a moral and stabilizing force in society. 
 
For Kristol, religion is that as well—but as a by-product of what is essential about it, its metaphysical and spiritual character. Religion, he held, is not just for the good of society; it is good for the individual, and not just for the sake of leading an ethical life but for the sake of a meaningful and soulful life. Nor should Kristol’s neo-orthodoxy be mistaken for New Age religiosity, which is personal, eclectic, ephemeral. His neo-orthodoxy is firmly Jewish, rooted in history and community, in an ancient faith and an enduring people.
 
And so, too, his neoconservatism is firmly rooted in Judaism. In an essay on Michael Oakeshott written many years later, Kristol recalled the day in 1956 when, as an editor of Encounter in London, he found on his desk an unsolicited manuscript by Oakeshott entitled “On Being Conservative.” It was a great coup for the magazine to receive, over the transom, an essay by that eminent philosopher. Kristol read it “with great pleasure and appreciation”—and then politely rejected it. It was, he later explained (although not to Oakeshott at the time), “irredeemably secular, as I—being a Jewish conservative—am not.” Oakeshott’s “conservative disposition,” to enjoy and esteem the present rather than what was in the past or might be in the future, left little room for any religion, still less for Judaism:
 
Judaism especially, being a more this-worldly religion than Christianity, moves us to sanctify the present in our daily lives—but always reminding us that we are capable of doing so only through God’s grace to our distant forefathers. Similarly, it is incumbent upon us to link our children and grandchildren to this “great chain of being,” however suitable or unsuitable their present might be to our conservative disposition. And, of course, the whole purpose of sanctifying the present is to prepare humanity for a redemptive future.
 
Kristol was “born theotropic”—and born Jewish. In a recent essay on evangelicals and Jews, Wilfred McClay recalled a dinner when that subject came up and Kristol, “with casual assurance,” remarked: “Well, after all, religion is what you’re born with.” He was not moved by the reminder that evangelicals are not born with their religion—that, on the contrary, they have to be “born again.” Kristol’s neo-orthodoxy required no such rebirth. In “An Autobiographical Memoir,” he confessed that his “religious observance” was not always commensurate with his “religious views.” But one religious commandment he did faithfully observe: “Honor thy father and thy mother.” And thy forefathers and foremothers, and thy children and grandchildren: the Jewish heritage and the Jewish religion.

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