Scientific Socialism and Jewish Religious Thought in the Early Soviet Union

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4188616

For Alexandrov, only public condemnation of rabbinic injustices could regain the public’s trust and convince them that Alexandrov and his peers would not manipulate their flock for material gain. Alexandrov put this idea into action in his sermons during Shabbat services, in which he harshly attacked “those impudent dogs, the guardians of practical religion who are far from any sense of true belief. Only because of them has religion deteriorated, as everyone can see how these holy mice strive only to collect their breadcrumbs” (Alexandrov 1932, p. 85).

This kind of criticism of the traditional rabbinate is directly borrowed from the arsenal of Soviet propaganda, as Alexandrov himself noted in another letter to Krasilshchikov:

The more I contemplate the spiritual condition of our people in this day and age, the more I realize that the Marxist perspective is right in explaining historical developments as products of class struggle for their economic wellbeing. That can explain how communal leaders, who have no godliness and love of the Torah in their hearts, are appealing to the masses’ orthodoxy in order to preserve their economic and material condition. (Alexandrov 1932, p. 64)

[…]

Nineteenth‑century thinkers such as Aaron Shmuel Liberman (1845–1880) and Elia Benamozegh (1823–1900) had already tied Kabbalah to Marxist and universalistic aspirations, and twentieth‑century Jewish thought expanded on this trend when thinkers such as Avraham Yitzhak Kook (1865–1935), Yehuda Ashlag (1885–1954), Leon Askenazi (1922–1996), and many others claimed Kabbalah as the centerpiece of their Jewish politics.

Ashlag, in particular, is famous for promoting “altruistic Communism” through a new understanding of the Lurianic corpus,^19^ and like him, it is no accident that Hilewitz likewise used Kabbalistic language to defend historical materialism. For him, historical materialism took the Hasidic worldview of Habad to its logical conclusion: if God is indeed one, if his presence is everywhere and in everything, then there is no difference between stating that “everything is spirit” or “everything is matter”; it is all but one substance which manifests itself in every part of reality.