Terms: Is Jewish Studies Devotionist, Relativist, or Transcendentalist?

Can one think about the chasm between the university and the beit midrash in conceptual terms? This chapter offers such thinking in terms of devotion (and its ancient predecessor, dogmatism) versus relativism (and its ancient predecessor, skepticism) and of overcoming the millennium-long conundrum between the two. It draws first on Kant’s universal subjectivity of united humanity in order to then progress to the thought of Jacob Taubes, a professor and a rabbi. Building on Kant and on an early modern tradition of interpreting Talmudic thought as the art and discipline of achieving genuine disagreement, Taubes produces groundbreaking readings in Rabbinic and Christian texts. Taubes’s work allows us to see a way to move forward in the relationship between the academy and the beit midrash toward understanding their true disagreements, rather than remain in the misunderstandings of talking past each other.