​Should anthropological categories and tools be applied to Judaism? Seems a narrow and academic question, of interest to maybe ten people on the planet.

It’s one of the many virtues of Howard Eilberg-Schwartz’s 1990 ​The Savage In Judaism to show that the question is a central one in the origins of modernity, more central than Eilberg-Schwartz himself entirely realizes.

The issue arises initially in the age of exploration, when travel reports came back that stressed the similarities between Indian beliefs, rituals, and customs on the one hand and those of ancient Israel on the other. Initially, these commonalities were freely admitted, and explained in various ways.

Enlightenment writers, though, began to use the evidence of comparative religion to undermine Christian claims about special revelation. Christianity was built on Judaism, whose institutions Christians believed were revealed through Moses on Sinai. If Mosaic institutions were common currency among “savages,” when the notion that God revealed them makes little sense.

Judged by reason, Judaism, savage religion, and even Christianity were all cut from the same cloth of superstition. For theistic philosophes, reason supported natural religion, but not the rituals and dogmas of specific religions. That flattening of religion was basic to the Enlightenment view of religion, given classical expression in Kant’s ​Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason.

Believers responded to this relativization of Christian and Jewish claims in various ways, each a strategy to protect Christianity or Judaism against the solvents of comparison.

Eilberg-Schwartz categorizes these strategies under four headings: denial, marginalization, excision, temporization (50). Denial meant denial that Judaism was truly savage; the resemblances of Inca and Jewish institutions was superficial. Marginalization involved claiming that the savage elements of Judaism were not of the essence of Judaism, perhaps divine accommodations or even pagan hangovers.

Excision involved severing the links of Christianity to Judaism: Yes, Judaism is savage, but Christianity is a completely different sort of religion. Eilberg-Schwartz, I think, minimizes the importance of this option. It is, he realizes, Kant’s strategy, but he claims that the Old Testament was too embedded in the New Testament for this strategy to have wide appeal (61). One would have thought so, but in fact this wasn’t the case. Kant had a profound impact on theology; Kant is the granddaddy of liberal theology. Schleiermacher was as uneasy about Christianity’s debt to Judaism as Kant was. He’s correct that “The Christianity that remains after all the ‘Judaical’ elements are removed does not seem to be Christianity anymore” (59), but large parts of modern theology are engaged in just such a purge.

The final, and perhaps most lasting option was “temporization,” the placement of Judaism and Christianity within an evolutionary scheme for the development of religion. Christianity is the purest of religions; Judaism a way station on the path to spiritual religion. Evolutionary accounts of religion thus “neutralized” one of the Enlightenment’s most powerful weapons against orthodoxy.

Virtually all modern theological options emerge out of the problem of relating Judaism to “savage” religion: Liberal theology, along with some byways of evangelicalism; evolutionary accounts became part of the groundwork of biblical criticism; the political effects of the excision of Judaism from Christianity have been terrible. Modern atonement theories have been efforts, in part, to avoid the imputation of “savagery” to Judaism and Christianity. Believers at various places on the spectrum of orthodoxy would have agreed with Lessing: “I want to separate religion from the history of religion” (quoted on 58).

Eilberg-Schwartz’s book is written to counter precisely this tactic: He wants to re-savagize Judaism, to show the continuity between Judaism and other ancient religions and tribal religions. And that is precisely what is needed. The similarities between ancient Israelite institutions and those of ancient cultures are undeniable. The orthodox response should not be to minimize them, but to see them as the clue to the meaning of the gospel. A Christianity separated from the history of religion may be a beautiful and inspiring thing, but it is not orthodox or biblical Christianity.

Eilberg-Schwartz’s genealogy opens up a research program: If the decays of modern theology are to be arrested and reversed, what we need is a re-savaging of Judaism, open to an anthropology of ancient Israel.

Peter J. Leithart is President of Trinity House.