476 A History of Judaism
the Reform rabbi Abba Hillel Silver was one of the Zionist spokesmen
in the United Nations debate on the creation of a Jewish state, and the
headquarters of the World Union for Progressive Judaism was moved to
Jerusalem in 1973, with a brief to establish schools, synagogues and
settlements in many locations in Israel.^24
In the meantime the Holocaust has engendered intense theological
problems for Reform Jews committed to assumptions about human
progress. During the war in Europe, the Reform rabbi Judah Magnes,
who in 1944 was chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
cited a maxim of the hasidic master Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev address-
ing God: ‘I do not ask why I suffer but only do I suffer for your sake.’
After the war Martin Buber adapted the biblical notion that God hides
himself from the sinner to suggest that God had been temporarily
eclipsed: ‘On that day they will say, “Have not these troubles come upon
us because our God was not in our midst?” On that day I will surely
hide my face on account of all the evil they have done by turning to
other gods.’ But the^ philosopher Emil Fackenheim, who had trained as
a Reform rabbi in Germany before escaping to Canada from a forced-
labour camp shortly before 1939 to teach philosophy at the University
of Toronto and later at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, dedicated
much of his career to a sophisticated theology of the Holocaust, arguing
that the determination of the Jewish people to survive (what he called the
‘614th commandment’) must have its origin in the divine realm.^ Facken-
heim and some other theologians saw the State of Israel as the theological
answer to the Holocaust.^25
After the destruction of German Jewry, the main centre for Jewish
theological reflection in the second half of the twentieth century outside
the United States and Israel was France, where Emmanuel Levinas, who
had come from Lithuania but migrated to France as a teenager in 1923,
saw himself, at least from the 1950s, as part of a coterie of assimilated
francophone Jewish intellectuals. Levinas was a survivor of the Holo-
caust, in which much of his family perished, but his major philosophical
works were influenced by studying the phenomenology of Husserl and
Heidegger in Germany in the late 1920s. Levinas argued strongly that a
proper relation with the world involves accepting and respecting the
ethical claims inherent in the otherness of other people. In his lectures
talmudiques, composed for an annual convention of French Jewish
intellectuals in an attempt to persuade them to take Jewish sources seri-
ously, the ancient rabbinic texts were used as a platform for an exposition
of his philosophical ideas rather than explored in their own right.