Beyond Dualism

Chapter 11 is devoted to Benamozegh’s presentation of Kabbalah as a vehicle for understanding and achieving religious unity and progress. His use of kabbalistic hermeneutics, predicated on the key concepts of coincidence of opposites, of berur (clarification) and of illuy (elevation), aimed (a) to suspend commonly held binaries such as science and faith, East and West, worldliness and transcendence, and (b) to prove Kabbalah’s affinity with nineteenth-century conceptions of assimilation and of progress.

Modes of Interreligious Engagement

Chapter 16 examines the theory and practices of interreligious rapprochement, encounters, and dialogue in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Retracing the stages of such endeavors prior to the Second World War helps refine the categories used to describe these modes of interaction and to consider how they have applied to intellectual efforts and social practices, including the Second Vatican Council in 1965, against the conceptual legacy of Benamozegh. Because Benamozegh’s work aimed to bring about religious unity, and because he found a disciple in Aimé Pallière and a posthumous audience for his calls to promote coexistence, assessing the implementation of this prescriptive and convoluted thought is a necessary conclusion of this study.

The Banned Author and the Oriental Publisher

Chapter 3 examines how the utter disgrace of a rabbinic ban (herem) affected Benamozegh. In a very rare and harsh measure, his Hebrew biblical commentary was banned and burned in 1865 in Aleppo because it contained too many references to sources outside the Jewish tradition. The herem discouraged Benamozegh from any further major enterprise in Hebrew. However, he kept a presence, as a publisher, in the Mediterranean and his endeavors deserve significant attention: it was the largely Hebrew catalogue of his printing press, with a distribution and network of authors spanning the Maghreb and the Mashriq, that functioned as his commitment to an Oriental modernity.

“The Iron Crucible” and Loci of Religious Contact

Chapter 14 focuses on the meaning and loci of religious encounters in the Bible and in the Jewish tradition, and analyzes the concept of “iron crucible,” the metaphor Benamozegh used for the complexity of religious assimilation. This metaphor, which refers to the Israelites’ sojourn in Egypt, designates a place where identities intermingled and where the Jewish religion was refined through its contact with paganism—but also where, paradoxically, this blending did not preclude a sense of hierarchy in this assimilation process. This concept is a crucial aspect of Benamozegh’s system, whereby the greater the proximity, the greater the tension across religious traditions.