Jezus i chrześcijaństwo w prasie hebrajskiej i żydowskiej na początku XX wieku. Casus Brennera
Jesus And Christianity In The Hebrew And Jewish Press At The Beginning Of The 20th Century: “The Brenner Case”

Summary/Abstract: The Jewish research about Jesus in the beginning of the 20th century was characterized by the efforts to find some parallels between the Gospel and Rabbinic literature. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century,The Liberal Judaism movement tried to describe Jesus as a person who understood the essence of Judaism putting at its center the prophetic and moral component while it considered the Jewish Law and cult as secondary. This emphatic approach of Liberal Jews towards Jesus was severely criticized by figures of the Orthodox Judaism. Other critics came from the Zionist circles. An article by the renowned Hebrew writer, intellectual and journalist Yossef Haim Brenner published on 24 November 1910 in the Hebrew Labor movement journal of Palestine “Ha-Poel Ha-Tzair”, on the problem of conversions and Jewish relations with Christianity created an unprecedented debate in the Jewish world which lasted not less than three years. Brenner argued that conversion to Christianity does not threat the future of the Jewish people because most of the youth are not addicts of the “nonsense of theology”, Jewish or Christian. But the controversy awaked from his attitude to the New Testament. As an atheist, Brenner denies to the New Testament its sacred status, but he still thinks that “this book is a bone of our bones and flesh of our flesh”. Moreover, he says, that even if he does not tend to idealize the figure of “that Galilean young man” – Jesus – he does not consider him, however, as a” useless, unproductive vagabond, full of pride and laughable” but as a composed, complicated figure: “Anyway, he was not one man, he hesitated very much, was full of controversy and doubts about his role, changed from day to day and concentrated on different aspects, tragic as well as comic …” Brenner was fiercely attacked by the leading Zionist intellectual Ahad Haam, but defended, for instance, by his friend, journalist and future creator and Prime minister of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, the renovator of the Hebrew language Eliezer Ben Yehuda or the Labor movement leader and intellectual A.D. Gordon. “The Brenner Case” debate took place in Hebrew, Yiddish and Russian in about twenty newspapers published in ten countries. As Brenner was denounced by the Jerusalemite Sephardi-rightist ‘Ha-Herut” and the “Committee of Zion Lovers” in Odessa cancelled its financial support to “Ha-Poel Ha-Tzair” and asked to change the editorial staff- the “Brenner Case” turned also into a struggle on freedom of expression and freedom of the press. In the meanwhile Professor Joseph Klausner started to publish his series “Jesus the Christian- his time, his life and his theory” in the journal “He-Atid” edited in Berlin by Sh.Y. Horovitz. His romantic vision of Jesus as national hero and poet, definitively expressed later in his book published in 1922, profoundly influenced the vision of Jesus among the contemporary generation of Hebrew writers. The Brenner Case and other such controversies not only enlighten us as to why positive Jewish appraisals of Jesus and Christianity typically met with so much fierce opposition, they also reveal the wider ideological currents that led to such positive appraisals in the first place. Intellectuals like Brenner, and Hurwitz, or even less radical writers like Klausner, looked upon Jesus and Christianity more sympathetically than traditionally minded Jews largely because of their expanded notions of Jewishness , or their changing views on the nature of the relationship between Judaism, Jewish history and Western history and culture, including Christianity. For radical writers, unlike the Cultural Zionists’ majority, reclaiming Jesus as a Jewish figure with laudable merits of some kind, showed their willingness to challenge and reject traditional attitudes and taboos concerning Jesus as part of their attempt to overthrow several aspects of Jewish tradition more generally. It also helped to serve the goal of presenting Judaism as more universal and in line with Christian European culture. Finally, as radical secularists but also Jewish nationalists, these writers expressed their views on Jesus and Christianity as part of defining a new Jewish national identity not based on traditional religious categories or old boundaries between Jews and Christians.

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