Koch, Patrick
Senior Fellow: April–August 2023
Research Project: “Faith” and “Doubt” in Kabbalistic, Pietistic, and Hasidic Literature
Individual doubt about one’s faith represents a well-known potential threat to any institutionalised form of religion. Traditionalist authors therefore developed several literary tactics in order to protect their own belief systems from this challenge. Thus, instead of ignoring religious doubt and scepticism altogether, they at times seize upon the opponent’s position and incorporate it into their master narrative as a decidedly negative example. This method may manifest itself on a rather abstract level by means of prosopopoeia, such as identifying the notion of doubt with a personification of evil. In other cases, it may be more concrete, epitomised in the character of a doubting co-religionist, who is at times portrayed as a sinner whose wicked behaviour must be overcome.
This project will deal with some of the elementary coping mechanisms used by Jewish authors with a traditionalist agenda and their strategies aiming to defend and preserve what they consider an integral part of their heritage. It will engage with the question of how traditionalist approaches constitute the very antithesis of what have recently been described as “sceptical strategies.” A thorough analysis of examples from Kabbalistic, Hasidic, and pietistic literature of the (early) modern period will investigate the numerous functions that the image of the sceptic serves in these narratives. On this basis, it will ask what conclusions can be drawn in order to understand the dynamics involved in the formation of new religious trends.
Patrick Koch is a research associate at the Institute for Jewish Philosophy and Religion at Universität Hamburg.