Having long been regarded as the godfather of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol is well known for his political writings. Less well known are his essays on religion. And yet, the more one reads of his work, the more apparent it becomes that this is in some sense the wrong way around. Though Kristol was no theologian, matters of religion, morality, and meaning underpin his entire political worldview. This, however, forces a question, and not one without some controversy: If religion was so central to the thought of Irving Kristol, then is this equally the case regarding the political persuasion with which he is so intimately associated? Does neoconservatism actually have some deeply religious roots? This is the question I found myself asking after reading Kristol’s Jewish essays, now conveniently gathered as an e-book and published by Mosaic magazine.
Kristol’s first Jewish essays were penned in the late 1940s, while he was serving as managing editor at Commentary. His work from that period appears tortured by an effort to make sense of the Holocaust, Nazism, and anti-Semitism. The most striking result of this labor was an essay titled “The Myth of the Supra-Human Jew: The Theological Stigma.” In it we find Kristol wrestling with the contrasting currents, philo-semitic and anti-Semitic, that intermingled in Christianity and Western culture. He interprets hostility to the Jews as originally bound up with guilt about the erotic. The effort to rid the world of Jews, he concludes, was also an effort to free man from oppressive biblical prohibitions, so as “to have men’s secret lusts dance unrestrainedly under the open sky.”
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