Studies in Christian-Jewish Relations 

 

             SCJR 10 (2015)                                                 1  www.bc.edu/scjr 

 

REVIEW 

Michael L. Morgan and Steven Weitzman, Eds. 

Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism 
 

(Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,  

2015), softcover, 442 pp. 

 

Samuel Hayim Brody, University of Kansas 
 

 

 

Rethinking the Messianic Idea in Judaism is a collection of es-
says reflecting several years of conversation among scholars 

across several disciplines, loosely organized around the classic 

1959 essay by Gershom Scholem, “Toward an Understanding 

of the Messianic Idea in Judaism.” The book contains 15 es-

says in addition to its introduction, divided into five parts and 

arranged roughly chronologically. They address a spectrum of 

related topics, including: the transformations of messianism in 

late antiquity and its emergence as a trope capable of dividing 

“Judaism” from “Christianity”; the claims of messianic figures 

throughout history; the messianic figure and hopes for a future 

redemption in modern Jewish thought; and contemporary 

controversies over messianic rhetoric as it is deployed by reli-

gious Zionists. 

 

Befitting the volume’s title, intellectual history predominates, 

with the majority of the essays devoted to analyzing “the mes-

sianic idea” in primary texts of the Jewish and also the 

Christian traditions as well as in the scholarship on those texts. 

Outstanding contributions at the beginning and end of the 

volume address important second-order questions about the 

scholarly construction of the subject which need to be reck-

oned with in order for the many other texts in the volume to 

be useful. In “Messianism between Judaism and Christianity,” 

for example, Annette Yoshiko Reed examines the way it has 

often been taken for granted that messianism denotes differ-

ence, specifically the difference between Judaism and 

Christianity, and shows that this wall was laboriously erected 



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by both early church fathers (Justin, Tertullian) as well as by 

modern biblical critics and historians of religion (Baur, 

Graetz). Most important here is that the difference was not 

seen the same way from either side of the wall: initially, the 

construction of messianism-as-difference was a Christian pro-

ject, with Jews looking elsewhere (to halakhic observance, for 

example) for defining differences. Later on, however, as Jews 

came increasingly to participate in a Christian intellectual envi-

ronment, they adopted this view of messianism as a marker of 

difference as well. This is seen elsewhere in the volume, as in 

Emily Kopley’s essay on “Arthur A. Cohen’s Messianic Fic-

tion,” wherein “Cohen insists on the to-his-mind radical and 

necessary opposition between Judaism and Christianity, given 

that the former awaits redemption and the latter regards the 

world as already redeemed by Christ” (p. 375).  

 

One could imagine a theologian dwelling on this trajectory, 

transforming it into yet another anxious project of definition 

and boundary-marking, but a number of the contributions 

point in other directions. Shaul Magid’s “The Divine / Human 

Messiah and Religious Deviance: Rethinking Chabad Messian-

ism” challenges the common idea that the belief of some 

members of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement in the 

messiah-ship of their deceased Rebbe, Menachem Mendel 

Schneersohn, is best conceived of as a Christianizing heresy. 

He suggests that not only does such messianism perhaps bear 

a closer resemblance to the occultation of the twelfth imam in 

Shi’ite Islam than to Christianity, but also that it draws on a 

number of well-known Hasidic sources and may represent a 

tradition stretching back to the Second Temple period. Mi-

chael L. Morgan (in “Levinas and Messianism”) and Martin 

Kavka (in “Reading Messianically with Gershom Scholem”) 

both draw on Emmanuel Levinas to sketch pictures of messi-

anism that emphasize the connection between political critique 

and personal, intimate encounter. Elisheva Carlebach makes a 

truly original contribution in “Seeking the Symmetry of Time: 

The Messianic Age in Medieval Chronology.” She sketches 

out the intellectual history of ordinary people by examining 

the lived sense of time among medieval Jews who used 



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“chronographs” and “chronograms” to date their writings, cre-

ating a community of readers who emplotted themselves 

within distinct messianic chronologies. 

 

Scholem’s worry in his 1959 essay that the Zionist movement 

of which he was a part might succumb to the temptations of 

messianic enthusiasm is clearly a preoccupation of this volume 

as well. Essays from Shai Held (“What Zvi Yehuda Kook 

Wrought: The Theopolitical Radicalization of Religious Zion-

ism”), Motti Inbari (“Messianic Religious Zionism and the 

Reintroduction of Sacrifice: The Case of the Temple Insti-

tute”), David Shatz (“The Muted Messiah: The Aversion to 

Messianic Forms of Zionism in Modern Orthodox Thought”), 

and Menachem Kellner (“‘And the Crooked Shall Be Made 

Straight’: Twisted Messianic Visions, and a Maimonidean 

Corrective”) all confront the contemporary reality of a politi-

cally empowered Jewish messianic settler movement and its 

role in promoting oppression and violence against Palestini-

ans. This emphasis on a settler group such as Gush Emunim 

and its ilk is so common, in fact, that it leaves one wishing for 

an essay that might present the messianic elements of the Zi-

onism that Scholem defended, the purportedly secular and 
non-radical Zionism that prevails inside the Green Line. This, 

in turn, could shed further light on what is in fact the more 

common “Religious Zionist” position, ably described by Shatz 

as having its roots in the thought of Rabbi Joseph B. Solove-

itchik, which sees the creation of the State of Israel as 

“merely” providential and miraculous, rather than as a sign of 

the messianic advent. After all, regardless of one’s political 

stance on the Israel-Palestine issue (and there seems to be a 

range represented here), and beyond the intrinsic interest of 

contemporary messianic activism, it does not seem that messi-

anic convictions are required for fanaticism, racism, hatred, 
occupation, or plain disregard for human life. The topical 

weight of the volume on these more radical forms of messian-

ism is thus both welcome and slightly disappointing. 

 

Several essays in the volume go off the beaten track to high-

light new topics or provide unexpected insights into old ones. 



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Steven Weitzman’s “He That Cometh Out” draws on psy-

chology literature about “coming out” as LGBTQ in order to 

shed light on some puzzling descriptions of messianic claim-

ants, including Jesus and Sabbatai Zvi, while Cosana Eram 

introduces “Isidore Isou’s Messianism Awry,” asking how a 

French-Romanian’s avant-garde autobiography made use of 

messianic figuration. These pieces nicely complement the 

bread-and-butter intellectual-historical work of Kenneth See-

skin (“Maimonides and the Idea of a Deflationary Messiah”) 

and Benjamin Pollock (“To Infinity and Beyond: Cohen and 

Rosenzweig on Comportment toward Redemption”), making 

for a varied volume that should have something for a wide 

range of students of “the messianic idea.”