"From Politics to Law: Modern Jewish Thought and the Invention of Jewish Law"
Leora Batnitzky, Princeton University Dept. of Religion
Location:  CMU 226
Description: This paper considers modern Jewish conceptions of law (halakhah) in the context of modern legal theory's attempt to define law as an autonomous realm distinct from politics. In modern legal theory, claims for and against the idea that law is autonomous and independent of political authority have to do with different understandings of the import and limitations of law as it relates to liberal democracy. So too, this paper suggests, modern Jewish arguments about an autonomous sphere of Jewish law tell us much about the political situation and implications of Jewish modernity for liberal and traditionalist Jews alike. While the concept of law in modern Judaism is often used to mark the continuity between the Jewish past and the Jewish present, this paper argues that it is ironically the modern concept of halakhah (again for both Jewish traditionalist and liberals alike) that actually demarcates the difference, or discontinuity, between the pre-modern Jewish past and Jewish modernity. While the aim of this analysis is diagnostic rather than prescriptive, the conclusion of the paper considers briefly a number of historical, theological, political, and philosophical implications of this argument.