The Failures of Jewish Secularism

More than fifty years ago, in a famous lecture entitled "The Non-Jewish Jew," Isaac Deutscher acclaimed the sort of Jewish intellectual who relinquished his or her heritage and proceeded to make vital contributions to the improvement of the world at large. A Polish-born Talmudic prodigy who exchanged Judaism for Marxism in his youth and ultimately attained renown as a biographer of Trotsky and Stalin, Deutscher singled out individual Communists as well as non-Communists as representative figures. Before mentioning any of them, however, he reflected briefly on the significance of the heretic he had known about since his childhood, the 2^nd-century renegade from rabbinic Judaism, Elisha ben Abuyah (the teacher of Rabbi Meir also known as "Akher," or Other):