Shelf Life: God, Man & Sex

THE name of Milton Himmelfarb would deserve immortality if only for his coinage of the famous aphorism that Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans. A new anthology of his writings, Jews and Gentiles (Encounter, 273 pp., $25.95), edited by his sister, Gertrude Himmelfarb, offers a richer portrait of his truly ecumenical mind. Milton Himmelfarb saw Jews and Christians as allies in a struggle against the paganism that was becoming “the de facto established religion” of a putatively secular 20th-century America.

Himmelfarb, who died last year, was an early advocate of the movement to stress common religious values in opposition to the entrenched and narrow-minded secularism of the times. The idea was controversial among Christians and Jews alike-less among those in each group who wanted to stress the differences between the two religions than among those who wanted to downplay the problems of secularism. “Chastising what is left of Christendom, some Christians now tend to be if not pro-neopagan then at least anti-anti-neopagan”; and as for Jews, they remain, on the whole, “conservatively attached to the old modernity of Spinoza.” For Himmelfarb, though, amicus Spinoza, sed magis amica veritas: He could not limit his understanding of the universe to the insights, however great, of that founder of Jewish philosophical modernity.

About the Author

Michael Potemra

Michael Potemra was a literary editor for National Review.

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THE name of Milton Himmelfarb would deserve immortality if only for his coinage of the famous aphorism that Jews earn like Episcopalians but vote like Puerto Ricans. A new anthology of his writings, Jews and Gentiles (Encounter, 273 pp., $25.95), edited by his sister, Gertrude Himmelfarb, offers a richer portrait of his truly ecumenical mind. Milton Himmelfarb saw Jews and Christians as allies in a struggle against the paganism that was becoming “the de facto established religion” of a putatively secular 20th-century America.

Himmelfarb, who died last year, was an early advocate of the movement to stress common religious values in opposition to the entrenched and narrow-minded secularism of the times. The idea was controversial among Christians and Jews alike-less among those in each group who wanted to stress the differences between the two religions than among those who wanted to downplay the problems of secularism. “Chastising what is left of Christendom, some Christians now tend to be if not pro-neopagan then at least anti-anti-neopagan”; and as for Jews, they remain, on the whole, “conservatively attached to the old modernity of Spinoza.” For Himmelfarb, though, amicus Spinoza, sed magis amica veritas: He could not limit his understanding of the universe to the insights, however great, of that founder of Jewish philosophical modernity.