On Wednesday, September 16, the Institute welcomed Clemence Boulouque, Carl and Bernice Witten Assistant Professor in Jewish and Israel Studies at Columbia University, to discuss her latest book Another Modernity: Elia Benamozegh’s Jewish Universalism with Shaul Magid, Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College.
Another Modernity is the study of the life and thought of the nineteenth-century rabbi and philosopher Elia Benamozegh of Moroccan descent, a prolific writer and transnational thinker who corresponded widely with prominent religious and intellectual figures in France, the Maghreb, and the Middle East and whose work and legacy needs to be brought out of its relative - but undeserved - obscurity. This idiosyncratic figure, who argued for the universalism of Judaism and for interreligious engagement, came to influence a spectrum of religious thinkers so varied that it includes proponents of the ecumenical Second Vatican Council, American evangelists, and right-wing Zionists in Israel.
What Benamozegh proposed was unprecedented: that the Jewish tradition presented a solution to the religious crisis of modernity. According to Benamozegh, the defining features of Judaism were universalism, a capacity to foster interreligious engagement, and the political power and mythical allure of its theosophical tradition, Kabbalah—all of which made the Jewish tradition uniquely equipped to assuage the post-Enlightenment tensions between religion and reason. In this book, Clémence Boulouque presents a wide-ranging and nuanced investigation of Benamozegh's published and unpublished work and his continuing legacy, considering his impact on Christian-Jewish dialogue as well as on far-right Christians and right-wing religious Zionists.